12,859 research outputs found
Adolescent reproductive health and awareness of HIV among rural high school students, North Western Ethiopia.
Ethiopia is faced with an increasing problem from HIV infection, and the vulnerability of adolescents is a key concern. There is little information on the knowledge, attitudes and practices of this age group with respect to HIV, sexually transmitted diseases and preventive measures. We conducted a cross-sectional study among 260 students from two rural high schools in North Western Ethiopia. We found that although the general awareness of HIV was high, correct knowledge of the virus and its modes of transmission was shown in only 44% of adolescent boys and 41% of adolescent girls. Knowledge of HIV and condoms was lower among students whose parents were farmers, significant so among girls (p=0.02). Use of condoms among sexually active single male students (49%) was insufficient but was higher than among adolescents in many other African settings. Knowledge of STDs was generally low: 82% of adolescent males and 37% of adolescent females had some awareness of STDs. Almost 20% of sexually active males in the study had previously experienced an STD, almost all of whom had visited a commercial sex worker. Targeted interventions are warranted among adolescents and sex workers in Ethiopia complemented by STD treatment services
Reply to the correspondence: "On the fracture toughness of bioinspired ceramic materials"
This is a reply to the correspondence of Prof. Robert Ritchie: "On the
fracture toughness of bioinspired ceramic materials", submitted to Nature
Materials, which discusses the fracture toughness values of the following
papers: Bouville, F., Maire, E., Meille, S., Van de Moort\`ele, B., Stevenson,
A. J., & Deville, S. (2014). Strong, tough and stiff bioinspired ceramics from
brittle constituents. Nature Materials, 13(5), 508-514 and Le Ferrand, H.,
Bouville, F., Niebel, T. P., & Studart, A. R. (2015). Magnetically assisted
slip casting of bioinspired heterogeneous composites. Nature Materials, 14(11),
1172-1172.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure
Photonic band-structure effects in the reflectivity of periodically patterned waveguides
We report sharp resonant features in the reflectivity spectra of semiconductor waveguides patterned with periodic lattices of deep holes. The resonances arise from coupling of incident light to the photonic bands of the lattice. By varying the reflection geometry, large parts of the photonic band structure are determined. A scattering matrix treatment is used to obtain theoretical spectra which agree well with experiment. The waveguide is shown to have an important influence on the band structure, including marked polarization mixing and significant energy up-shifts
Dependence of Variational Perturbation Expansions on Strong-Coupling Behavior. Inapplicability of delta-Expansion to Field Theory
We show that in applications of variational theory to quantum field theory it
is essential to account for the correct Wegner exponent omega governing the
approach to the strong-coupling, or scaling limit. Otherwise the procedure
either does not converge at all or to the wrong limit. This invalidates all
papers applying the so-called delta-expansion to quantum field theory.Comment: Author Information under
http://www.physik.fu-berlin.de/~kleinert/institution.html . Latest update of
paper (including all PS fonts) at
http://www.physik.fu-berlin.de/~kleinert/34
Formation of the first three gravitational-wave observations through isolated binary evolution
During its first 4 months of taking data, Advanced LIGO has detected
gravitational waves from two binary black hole mergers, GW150914 and GW151226,
along with the statistically less significant binary black hole merger
candidate LVT151012. We use our rapid binary population synthesis code COMPAS
to show that all three events can be explained by a single evolutionary channel
-- classical isolated binary evolution via mass transfer including a common
envelope phase. We show all three events could have formed in low-metallicity
environments (Z = 0.001) from progenitor binaries with typical total masses
, and , for
GW150914, GW151226, and LVT151012, respectively.Comment: Published in Nature Communication
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Dynamics of a molecular glass former: Energy landscapes for diffusion in ortho-terphenyl.
Relaxation times and transport processes of many glass-forming supercooled liquids exhibit a super-Arrhenius temperature dependence. We examine this phenomenon by computer simulation of the Lewis-Wahnström model for ortho-terphenyl. We propose a microscopic definition for a single-molecule cage-breaking transition and show that, when correlation behaviour is taken into account, these rearrangements are sufficient to reproduce the correct translational diffusion constants over an intermediate temperature range in the supercooled regime. We show that super-Arrhenius behaviour can be attributed to increasing negative correlation in particle movement at lower temperatures and relate this to the cage-breaking description. Finally, we sample the potential energy landscape of the model and show that it displays hierarchical ordering. Substructures in the landscape, which may correspond to metabasins, have boundaries defined by cage-breaking transitions. The cage-breaking formulation provides a direct link between the potential energy landscape and macroscopic diffusion behaviour.This work was supported by the University of Cambridge through a CHSS studentship to S.P.N., and by the European Research Council.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4954324
STROOPWAFEL: Simulating rare outcomes from astrophysical populations, with application to gravitational-wave sources
Gravitational-wave observations of double compact object (DCO) mergers are
providing new insights into the physics of massive stars and the evolution of
binary systems. Making the most of expected near-future observations for
understanding stellar physics will rely on comparisons with binary population
synthesis models. However, the vast majority of simulated binaries never
produce DCOs, which makes calculating such populations computationally
inefficient. We present an importance sampling algorithm, STROOPWAFEL, that
improves the computational efficiency of population studies of rare events, by
focusing the simulation around regions of the initial parameter space found to
produce outputs of interest. We implement the algorithm in the binary
population synthesis code COMPAS, and compare the efficiency of our
implementation to the standard method of Monte Carlo sampling from the birth
probability distributions. STROOPWAFEL finds 25-200 times more DCO
mergers than the standard sampling method with the same simulation size, and so
speeds up simulations by up to two orders of magnitude. Finding more DCO
mergers automatically maps the parameter space with far higher resolution than
when using the traditional sampling. This increase in efficiency also leads to
a decrease of a factor 3-10 in statistical sampling uncertainty for the
predictions from the simulations. This is particularly notable for the
distribution functions of observable quantities such as the black hole and
neutron star chirp mass distribution, including in the tails of the
distribution functions where predictions using standard sampling can be
dominated by sampling noise.Comment: Accepted. Data and scripts to reproduce main results is publicly
available. The code for the STROOPWAFEL algorithm will be made publicly
available. Early inquiries can be addressed to the lead autho
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