Renormalization group scale-setting from the action - a road to modified gravity theories

The renormalization group (RG) corrected gravitational action in Einstein-Hilbert and other truncations is considered. The running scale of the renormalization group is treated as a scalar field at the level of the action and determined in a scale-setting procedure recently introduced by Koch and Ramirez for the Einstein-Hilbert truncation. The scale-setting procedure is elaborated for other truncations of the gravitational action and applied to several phenomenologically interesting cases. It is shown how the logarithmic dependence of the Newton's coupling on the RG scale leads to exponentially suppressed effective cosmological constant and how the scale-setting in particular RG corrected gravitational theories yields the effective $f(R)$ modified gravity theories with negative powers of the Ricci scalar $R$. The scale-setting at the level of the action at the non-gaussian fixed point in Einstein-Hilbert and more general truncations is shown to lead to universal effective action quadratic in Ricci tensor.Comment: v1: 15 pages; v2: shortened to 10 pages, main results unchanged, published in Class. Quant. Gra

Cosmological constant in scale-invariant theories

The incorporation of a small cosmological constant within radiatively-broken scale-invariant models is discussed. We show that phenomenologically consistent scale-invariant models can be constructed which allow a small positive cosmological constant, providing certain relation between the particle masses is satisfied. As a result, the mass of the dilaton is generated at two-loop level. Another interesting consequence is that the electroweak symmetry-breaking vacuum in such models is necessarily a metastable `false' vacuum which, fortunately, is not expected to decay on cosmological time scales.Comment: 10 pages; v2: clarifying remarks added, to appear in Physical Review

On analytical solutions of f(R) modified gravity theories in FLRW cosmologies

A novel analytical method for f(R) modified theories without matter in Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker spacetimes is introduced. The equation of motion for the scale factor in terms of cosmic time is reduced to the equation for the evolution of the Ricci scalar R with the Hubble parameter H. The solution of equation of motion for actions of the form of power law in Ricci scalar R, is presented with a detailed elaboration of the action quadratic in R. The reverse use of the introduced method is exemplified in finding functional forms f(R) which lead to specified scale factor functions. The analytical solutions are corroborated by numerical calculations with excellent agreement. Possible further applications to the phases of inflationary expansion and late-time acceleration as well as f(R) theories with radiation are outlined.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures. v2: minor changes, references added. v3: minor changes, more references added. v4: version to appear in IJMPD. v5: DOI and journal reference adde

Children's data and privacy online: Growing up in a digital age

Adolescents in the age of technology face a variety of security issues, but one of the most significant ones, that needs to be addressed by legislators, is privacy and data protection. Research has shown that children's rights, especially children's privacy, are regulated by a large number of international regulations. At the European level, both the European Union and the Council of Europe guarantee the rights to privacy and data protection. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act is the relevant act in the US. The most common violations of children's data and privacy have been found to be online data sharing and mobile application data collection practices. Children's privacy on the Internet can be improved by better communication between parents and children regarding Internet use, educating children about cyber security and online threats, using parental control software, installing antivirus programs on devices used by children and the like

Phylostratigraphic tracking of cancer genes suggests a link to the emergence of multicellularity in metazoa

Background: Phylostratigraphy is a method used to correlate the evolutionary origin of founder genes (that is, functional founder protein domains) of gene families with particular macroevolutionary transitions. It is based on a model of genome evolution that suggests that the origin of complex phenotypic innovations will be accompanied by the emergence of such founder genes, the descendants of which can still be traced in extant organisms. The origin of multicellularity can be considered to be a macroevolutionary transition, for which new gene functions would have been required. Cancer should be tightly connected to multicellular life since it can be viewed as a malfunction of interaction between cells in a multicellular organism. A phylostratigraphic tracking of the origin of cancer genes should, therefore, also provide insights into the origin of multicellularity. Results: We find two strong peaks of the emergence of cancer related protein domains, one at the time of the origin of the first cell and the other around the time of the evolution of the multicellular metazoan organisms. These peaks correlate with two major classes of cancer genes, the 'caretakers', which are involved in general functions that support genome stability and the 'gatekeepers', which are involved in cellular signalling and growth processes. Interestingly, this phylogenetic succession mirrors the ontogenetic succession of tumour progression, where mutations in caretakers are thought to precede mutations in gatekeepers. Conclusions: A link between multicellularity and formation of cancer has often been predicted. However, this has not so far been explicitly tested. Although we find that a significant number of protein domains involved in cancer predate the origin of multicellularity, the second peak of cancer protein domain emergence is, indeed, connected to a phylogenetic level where multicellular animals have emerged. The fact that we can find a strong and consistent signal for this second peak in the phylostratigraphic map implies that a complex multi-level selection process has driven the transition to multicellularity

ProteinHistorian: Tools for the Comparative Analysis of Eukaryote Protein Origin

The evolutionary history of a protein reflects the functional history of its ancestors. Recent phylogenetic studies identified distinct evolutionary signatures that characterize proteins involved in cancer, Mendelian disease, and different ontogenic stages. Despite the potential to yield insight into the cellular functions and interactions of proteins, such comparative phylogenetic analyses are rarely performed, because they require custom algorithms. We developed ProteinHistorian to make tools for performing analyses of protein origins widely available. Given a list of proteins of interest, ProteinHistorian estimates the phylogenetic age of each protein, quantifies enrichment for proteins of specific ages, and compares variation in protein age with other protein attributes. ProteinHistorian allows flexibility in the definition of protein age by including several algorithms for estimating ages from different databases of evolutionary relationships. We illustrate the use of ProteinHistorian with three example analyses. First, we demonstrate that proteins with high expression in human, compared to chimpanzee and rhesus macaque, are significantly younger than those with human-specific low expression. Next, we show that human proteins with annotated regulatory functions are significantly younger than proteins with catalytic functions. Finally, we compare protein length and age in many eukaryotic species and, as expected from previous studies, find a positive, though often weak, correlation between protein age and length. ProteinHistorian is available through a web server with an intuitive interface and as a set of command line tools; this allows biologists and bioinformaticians alike to integrate these approaches into their analysis pipelines. ProteinHistorian's modular, extensible design facilitates the integration of new datasets and algorithms. The ProteinHistorian web server, source code, and pre-computed ages for 32 eukaryotic genomes are freely available under the GNU public license at http://lighthouse.ucsf.edu/ProteinHistorian/

Hubble expansion and structure formation in the "running FLRW model" of the cosmic evolution

A new class of FLRW cosmological models with time-evolving fundamental parameters should emerge naturally from a description of the expansion of the universe based on the first principles of quantum field theory and string theory. Within this general paradigm, one expects that both the gravitational Newton's coupling, G, and the cosmological term, Lambda, should not be strictly constant but appear rather as smooth functions of the Hubble rate. This scenario ("running FLRW model") predicts, in a natural way, the existence of dynamical dark energy without invoking the participation of extraneous scalar fields. In this paper, we perform a detailed study of these models in the light of the latest cosmological data, which serves to illustrate the phenomenological viability of the new dark energy paradigm as a serious alternative to the traditional scalar field approaches. By performing a joint likelihood analysis of the recent SNIa data, the CMB shift parameter, and the BAOs traced by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we put tight constraints on the main cosmological parameters. Furthermore, we derive the theoretically predicted dark-matter halo mass function and the corresponding redshift distribution of cluster-size halos for the "running" models studied. Despite the fact that these models closely reproduce the standard LCDM Hubble expansion, their normalization of the perturbation's power-spectrum varies, imposing, in many cases, a significantly different cluster-size halo redshift distribution. This fact indicates that it should be relatively easy to distinguish between the "running" models and the LCDM cosmology using realistic future X-ray and Sunyaev-Zeldovich cluster surveys.Comment: Version published in JCAP 08 (2011) 007: 1+41 pages, 6 Figures, 1 Table. Typos corrected. Extended discussion on the computation of the linearly extrapolated density threshold above which structures collapse in time-varying vacuum models. One appendix, a few references and one figure adde

Directed transport of CRP across in vitro models of the blood-saliva barrier strengthens the feasibility of salivary CRP as biomarker for neonatal sepsis

C-reactive protein (CRP) is a commonly used serum biomarker for detecting sepsis in neonates. After the onset of sepsis, serial measurements are necessary to monitor disease progression; therefore, a non-invasive detection method is beneficial for neonatal well-being. While some studies have shown a correlation between serum and salivary CRP levels in septic neonates, the causal link behind this correlation remains unclear. To investigate this relationship, CRP was examined in serum and saliva samples from 18 septic neonates and compared with saliva samples from 22 healthy neonates. While the measured blood and saliva concentrations of the septic neonates varied individually, a correlation of CRP levels between serum and saliva samples was observed over time. To clarify the presence of active transport of CRP across the blood–salivary barrier (BSB), transport studies were performed with CRP using in vitro models of oral mucosa and submandibular salivary gland epithelium. The results showed enhanced transport toward saliva in both models, supporting the clinical relevance for salivary CRP as a biomarker. Furthermore, CRP regulated the expression of the receptor for advanced glycation end products (RAGE) and the addition of soluble RAGE during the transport studies indicated a RAGE-dependent transport process for CRP from blood to saliva