New treatment of the chiral SU(3) quark mean field model

We perform a study of infinite hadronic matter, finite nuclei and hypernuclei with an improved method of calculating the effective baryon mass. A detailed study of the predictions of the model is made in comparison with the available data and the level of agreement is generally very good. Comparison with an earlier treatment shows relatively minor differences at or below normal nuclear matter density, while at high density the improved calculation is quite different. In particular, we find no phase transition corresponding to chiral symmetry restoration in high density nuclear matter.Comment: 19 pages, 11 figure

Sport, War and Democracy in Classical Athens

This article concerns the paradox of athletics in classical Athens. Democracy may have opened up politics to every class of Athenian but it had little impact on sporting participation. The city’s athletes continued to drawn predominantly from the upper class. It comes as a surprise then that lower-class Athenians actually esteemed athletes above every other group in the public eye, honoured them very generously when they won, and directed a great deal of public and private money to sporting competitions and facilities. In addition athletics escaped the otherwise persistent criticism of upper-class activities in the popular culture of the democracy. The research of social scientists on sport and aggression suggests this paradox may have been due to the cultural overlap between athletics and war under the Athenian democracy. The article concludes that the practical and ideological democratization of war by classical Athens legitimized and supported upper-class sport

Characteristics of the nuclear (18S, 5.8S, 28S and 5S) and mitochondrial (12S and 16S) rRNA genes of Apis mellifera (Insecta: Hymenoptera): structure, organization, and retrotransposable elements

As an accompanying manuscript to the release of the honey bee genome, we report the entire sequence of the nuclear (18S, 5.8S, 28S and 5S) and mitochondrial (12S and 16S) ribosomal RNA (rRNA)-encoding gene sequences (rDNA) and related internally and externally transcribed spacer regions of Apis mellifera (Insecta: Hymenoptera: Apocrita). Additionally, we predict secondary structures for the mature rRNA molecules based on comparative sequence analyses with other arthropod taxa and reference to recently published crystal structures of the ribosome. In general, the structures of honey bee rRNAs are in agreement with previously predicted rRNA models from other arthropods in core regions of the rRNA, with little additional expansion in non-conserved regions. Our multiple sequence alignments are made available on several public databases and provide a preliminary establishment of a global structural model of all rRNAs from the insects. Additionally, we provide conserved stretches of sequences flanking the rDNA cistrons that comprise the externally transcribed spacer regions (ETS) and part of the intergenic spacer region (IGS), including several repetitive motifs. Finally, we report the occurrence of retrotransposition in the nuclear large subunit rDNA, as R2 elements are present in the usual insertion points found in other arthropods. Interestingly, functional R1 elements usually present in the genomes of insects were not detected in the honey bee rRNA genes. The reverse transcriptase products of the R2 elements are deduced from their putative open reading frames and structurally aligned with those from another hymenopteran insect, the jewel wasp Nasonia (Pteromalidae). Stretches of conserved amino acids shared between Apis and Nasonia are illustrated and serve as potential sites for primer design, as target amplicons within these R2 elements may serve as novel phylogenetic markers for Hymenoptera. Given the impending completion of the sequencing of the Nasonia genome, we expect our report eventually to shed light on the evolution of the hymenopteran genome within higher insects, particularly regarding the relative maintenance of conserved rDNA genes, related variable spacer regions and retrotransposable elements

Search for superfragments and measurement of the production of hyperfragments in neutrino-nucleus interactions

A systematic search for superfragments (charmed nuclei) has been performed in 22 200 neutrino-emulsion interactions obtained with the CHORUS experiment making use of automatic off-line image analysis. The absence of candidates provides an upper limit for the superfragment production rate of 1.9 × 10-4 (90% C.L.) relative to neutrino charged-current interactions at an average neutrino energy of 27 GeV. In the same analysis 28 hyperfragment decays were found. For the first time, a production rate of hyperfragments in neutrino-emulsion interactions was obtained. The value of the hyperfragment production rate relative to the neutrino charged-current cross-section was found to be (2.0 ± 0.4 (stat) ± 0.3 (syst)) × 10-3. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.0SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe