Motives for Mergers in Food Manufacturing

This paper reviews theories that identify motives for mergers, reviews recent empirical research, specifies a model that incorporates alternative motives, and tests the model with data from food manufacturing mergers between 1979 and 1986. Results suggest that capital markets are not efficient, and that mergers are not to redress agency problems. Acquirers paid higher premiums for target firms that have recently had low profitability, and paid higher premiums when the stock market was low. The model explains at best 30 percent of the variation in premiums, suggesting that major explanations for mergers remain as yet unidentified.Agribusiness, Industrial Organization,

Annealing of defects in Fe after MeV Heavy ion irradiation

We report study of recovery dynamics, followed by in-situ resistivity measurement after 100 MeV oxygen ion irradiation, in cold rolled Fe at 300K. Scaling behavior with microstructural density and temperature of sample have been used to establish stress induced defects formed during irradiation as a new type of sink. The dynamics after irradiation has been shown to be due to migration of defects to two types of sinks i.e. stress induced defect as variable sinks and internal surfaces as fixed sinks. Experimental data obtained under various experimental conditions have been fitted to theoretical curves. Parameters thus obtained from fitting are employed to establish effect of electronic energy loss and temperature on recovery dynamics and stress associated with variable sinks.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures. Europhysics Letter (in press

The effects of arthritis gloves on hand pain in people with rheumatoid or inflammatory arthritis : a randomised controlled trial (A-GLOVES TRIAL)

Background: Arthritis (compression) gloves are commonly provided to people with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and undifferentiated inflammatory arthritis (IA) in the UK health service. These apply pressure and warmth to relieve hand pain, stiffness and improve hand function. A systematic review identified little evidence to support their use.[1] Objectives: This randomised controlled trial tested effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of mid-finger length compression (intervention) gloves (20% Lycra: commonest glove model provided) with control gloves (i.e. oedema gloves: 11% Lycra: fitted at least one size too big) in people with RA and IA. Methods: Both gloves, which had similar thermal qualities although the control gloves did not provide compression, were provided by rheumatology occupational therapists, following training.[2] Participants were also given brief advice on hand exercise and joint protection. Adults with RA/IA and persistent hand pain were randomised 1:1 to the two glove types, stratified by disease modifying anti-rheumatic drug (DMARD) change in previous 12 weeks. The primary outcome was dominant hand pain on activity Visual Analogue Scale (VAS:0–10); other outcomes included night hand pain, hand stiffness (both 0–10 VAS); Measure of Activity Performance Hand (MAP-HAND: 0–3). Multiple linear regression was undertaken to estimate the effect of group allocation on hand pain during activity, adjusting for the stratification variable and baseline values. Cost-effectiveness used individual patient level costs (intervention plus healthcare utilisation) and health benefit data (EQ-5D) to calculate costs and QALYs. Results: 206 participants were randomised (103 to each glove type): median age 59 years [IQR 51,67]; women:166 (81%); mean disease duration: 8.2 (SD 9.5) years; employed:76 (37%); right hand dominant:185 (90%). Of these, 163 (79%) completed 12 week follow-up questionnaires. Both groups reported similar adherence to glove wear (mean 5.2 days/week). At 12 w, hand pain scores in both groups similarly improved: the between-groups mean difference of 0.1 was not statistically significant (95% CI: −0.47 to 0.67; p=0.72). There were no significant differences between groups on any measures, with both groups improving similarly between baseline and 12 w. 73% in both groups considered gloves beneficial. Intervention gloves had higher costs (£552 (SD £464); control £391 (SD £543) but comparable benefits to control gloves. Intervention gloves would cost £83 700 to gain one QALY and were not likely to be cost-effective. Conclusions: Compression (intervention) and loose-fitting arthritis (control) gloves had similar effects on hand pain, stiffness and function. Therefore, compression is not the ‘active ingredient’ in arthritis gloves. Loose fitting gloves providing warmth were perceived as equally effective by participants. We do not know if the therapist effect is important or whether ordinary gloves providing warmth would provide similar results. References: Hammond, et al. Clin Rehabil 2016 30:213–24. Prior, et al. Rheumatology 2017. www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/4205 Acknowledgements: This project was funded by the NIHR Research for Patient Benefit Programme (PB-PG-0214–33010). The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR or the Department of Health

IODP expedition 347: Baltic Sea basin paleoenvironment and biosphere

The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) expedition 347 cored sediments from different settings of the Baltic Sea covering the last glacial–interglacial cycle. The main aim was to study the geological development of the Baltic Sea in relation to the extreme climate variability of the region with changing ice cover and major shifts in temperature, salinity, and biological communities. Using the Greatship Manisha as a European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling (ECORD) mission-specific platform, we recovered 1.6 km of core from nine sites of which four were additionally cored for microbiology. The sites covered the gateway to the North Sea and Atlantic Ocean, several sub-basins in the southern Baltic Sea, a deep basin in the central Baltic Sea, and a river estuary in the north. The waxing and waning of the Scandinavian ice sheet has profoundly affected the Baltic Sea sediments. During the Weichselian, progressing glaciers reshaped the submarine landscape and displaced sedimentary deposits from earlier Quaternary time. As the glaciers retreated they left a complex pattern of till, sand, and lacustrine clay, which in the basins has since been covered by a thick deposit of Holocene, organic-rich clay. Due to the stratified water column of the brackish Baltic Sea and the recurrent and widespread anoxia, the deeper basins harbor laminated sediments that provide a unique opportunity for high-resolution chronological studies. The Baltic Sea is a eutrophic intra-continental sea that is strongly impacted by terrestrial runoff and nutrient fluxes. The Holocene deposits are recorded today to be up to 50 m deep and geochemically affected by diagenetic alterations driven by organic matter degradation. Many of the cored sequences were highly supersaturated with respect to methane, which caused strong degassing upon core recovery. The depth distributions of conservative sea water ions still reflected the transition at the end of the last glaciation from fresh-water clays to Holocene brackish mud. High-resolution sampling and analyses of interstitial water chemistry revealed the intensive mineralization and zonation of the predominant biogeochemical processes. Quantification of microbial cells in the sediments yielded some of the highest cell densities yet recorded by scientific drilling

Melting as a String-Mediated Phase Transition

We present a theory of the melting of elemental solids as a dislocation-mediated phase transition. We model dislocations near melt as non-interacting closed strings on a lattice. In this framework we derive simple expressions for the melting temperature and latent heat of fusion that depend on the dislocation density at melt. We use experimental data for more than half the elements in the Periodic Table to determine the dislocation density from both relations. Melting temperatures yield a dislocation density of (0.61\pm 0.20) b^{-2}, in good agreement with the density obtained from latent heats, (0.66\pm 0.11) b^{-2}, where b is the length of the smallest perfect-dislocation Burgers vector. Melting corresponds to the situation where, on average, half of the atoms are within a dislocation core.Comment: 18 pages, LaTeX, 3 eps figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.

An Interaction Network Predicted from Public Data as a Discovery Tool: Application to the Hsp90 Molecular Chaperone Machine

Understanding the functions of proteins requires information about their protein-protein interactions (PPI). The collective effort of the scientific community generates far more data on any given protein than individual experimental approaches. The latter are often too limited to reveal an interactome comprehensively. We developed a workflow for parallel mining of all major PPI databases, containing data from several model organisms, and to integrate data from the literature for a protein of interest. We applied this novel approach to build the PPI network of the human Hsp90 molecular chaperone machine (Hsp90Int) for which previous efforts have yielded limited and poorly overlapping sets of interactors. We demonstrate the power of the Hsp90Int database as a discovery tool by validating the prediction that the Hsp90 co-chaperone Aha1 is involved in nucleocytoplasmic transport. Thus, we both describe how to build a custom database and introduce a powerful new resource for the scientific community

From repeating routes to planning novel routes: the impact of landmarks and ageing on route integration and cognitive mapping.

The integration of intersecting routes is an important process for the formation of cognitive maps and thus successful navigation. Here we present a novel task to study route integration and the effects that landmark information and cognitive ageing have on this process. We created two virtual environments, each comprising five places and one central intersection but with different landmark settings: in the Identical Landmark environment, the intersection contained visually monotonic features whereas the intersection contained visually distinctive features in the Different Landmarks environment. In both environments young and older participants were presented with two short routes that both traversed through the shared intersection. To test route integration, participants were asked to either repeat the learning routes, to navigate the routes from the destination to the starting place or to plan novel routes. As expected, results demonstrate better performance when repeating or retracing routes than when planning novel routes. Performance was better in younger than older participants and in the Different Landmark environment which does not require detailed knowledge of the spatial configuration of all places in the environment. A subgroup of the older participants who performed lower on a screening test for cognitive impairments could not successfully complete the experiment or did not reach the required performance criterion. These results demonstrate that strategically placed landmarks support the integration of route knowledge into spatial representations that allow for goal-dependent flexible navigation behaviour and that earliest signs of atypical cognitive ageing affect this process of route integration