1,291 research outputs found
A 12,000 Year Record of Explosive Volcanism in the Siple Dome Ice Core, West Antarctica
Air mass trajectories in the Southern Hemisphere provide a mechanism for transport to and deposition of volcanic products on the Antarctic ice sheet from local volcanoes and from tropical and subtropical volcanic centers. This study extends the detailed record of Antarctic, South American, and equatorial volcanism over the last 12,000 years using continuous glaciochemical series developed from the Siple Dome A (SDMA) ice core, West Antarctica. The largest volcanic sulfate spike ( 280 mu g/L) occurs at 5881 B. C. E. Other large signals with unknown sources are observed around 325 B. C. E. ( 270 mu g/L) and 2818 B. C. E. ( 191 mu g/L). Ages of several large equatorial or Southern Hemisphere volcanic eruptions are synchronous with many sulfate peaks detected in the SDMA volcanic ice chemistry record. The microprobe fingerprinting\u27\u27 of glass shards in the SDMA core points to the following Antarctic volcanic centers as sources of tephra found in the SDMA core: Balenny Island, Pleiades, Mount Berlin, Mount Takahe, and Mount Melbourne as well as Mount Hudson and possibly Mount Burney volcanoes of South America. Identified volcanic sources provide an insight into the poorly resolved transport history of volcanic products from source volcanoes to the West Antarctic ice sheet
Infinities within graviton scattering amplitudes
We present unitarity as a method for determining the infinities present in
graviton scattering amplitudes. The infinities are a combination of IR and UV.
By understanding the soft singularities we may extract the UV infinities and
relate these to counter-terms in the effective action. As an demonstration of
this method we rederive the UV infinities present at one-loop when gravity is
coupled to matter.Comment: revised versio
Multiloop Calculations in the String-Inspired Formalism: The Single Spinor-Loop in QED
We use the worldline path-integral approach to the Bern-Kosower formalism for
developing a new algorithm for calculation of the sum of all diagrams with one
spinor loop and fixed numbers of external and internal photons. The method is
based on worldline supersymmetry, and on the construction of generalized
worldline Green functions. The two-loop QED -- function is calculated
as an example.Comment: uuencoded ps-file, 20 pages, 2 figures, final revised version to
appear in Phys. Rev.
Results of a randomized, double-blind phase II clinical trial of NY-ESO-1 vaccine with ISCOMATRIX adjuvant versus ISCOMATRIX alone in participants with high-risk resected melanoma.
BACKGROUND: To compare the clinical efficacy of New York Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma-1 (NY-ESO-1) vaccine with ISCOMATRIX adjuvant versus ISCOMATRIX alone in a randomized, double-blind phase II study in participants with fully resected melanoma at high risk of recurrence. METHODS: Participants with resected stage IIc, IIIb, IIIc and IV melanoma expressing NY-ESO-1 were randomized to treatment with three doses of NY-ESO-1/ISCOMATRIX or ISCOMATRIX adjuvant administered intramuscularly at 4-week intervals, followed by a further dose at 6 months. Primary endpoint was the proportion free of relapse at 18 months in the intention-to-treat (ITT) population and two per-protocol populations. Secondary endpoints included relapse-free survival (RFS) and overall survival (OS), safety and NY-ESO-1 immunity. RESULTS: The ITT population comprised 110 participants, with 56 randomized to NY-ESO-1/ISCOMATRIX and 54 to ISCOMATRIX alone. No significant toxicities were observed. There were no differences between the study arms in relapses at 18 months or for median time to relapse; 139 vs 176 days (p=0.296), or relapse rate, 27 (48.2%) vs 26 (48.1%) (HR 0.913; 95% CI 0.402 to 2.231), respectively. RFS and OS were similar between the study arms. Vaccine recipients developed strong positive antibody responses to NY-ESO-1 (p≤0.0001) and NY-ESO-1-specific CD4+ and CD8+ responses. Biopsies following relapse did not demonstrate differences in NY-ESO-1 expression between the study populations although an exploratory study demonstrated reduced (NY-ESO-1)+/Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) class I+ double-positive cells in biopsies from vaccine recipients performed on relapse in 19 participants. CONCLUSIONS: The vaccine was well tolerated, however, despite inducing antigen-specific immunity, it did not affect survival endpoints. Immune escape through the downregulation of NY-ESO-1 and/or HLA class I molecules on tumor may have contributed to relapse
Attention on Weak Ties in Social and Communication Networks
Granovetter's weak tie theory of social networks is built around two central
hypotheses. The first states that strong social ties carry the large majority
of interaction events; the second maintains that weak social ties, although
less active, are often relevant for the exchange of especially important
information (e.g., about potential new jobs in Granovetter's work). While
several empirical studies have provided support for the first hypothesis, the
second has been the object of far less scrutiny. A possible reason is that it
involves notions relative to the nature and importance of the information that
are hard to quantify and measure, especially in large scale studies. Here, we
search for empirical validation of both Granovetter's hypotheses. We find clear
empirical support for the first. We also provide empirical evidence and a
quantitative interpretation for the second. We show that attention, measured as
the fraction of interactions devoted to a particular social connection, is high
on weak ties --- possibly reflecting the postulated informational purposes of
such ties --- but also on very strong ties. Data from online social media and
mobile communication reveal network-dependent mixtures of these two effects on
the basis of a platform's typical usage. Our results establish a clear
relationships between attention, importance, and strength of social links, and
could lead to improved algorithms to prioritize social media content
Collisional activation of ions in RF ion traps and ion guides: The effective ion temperature treatment
State space modelling and data analysis exercises in LISA Pathfinder
LISA Pathfinder is a mission planned by the European Space Agency to test the
key technologies that will allow the detection of gravitational waves in space.
The instrument on-board, the LISA Technology package, will undergo an
exhaustive campaign of calibrations and noise characterisation campaigns in
order to fully describe the noise model. Data analysis plays an important role
in the mission and for that reason the data analysis team has been developing a
toolbox which contains all the functionalities required during operations. In
this contribution we give an overview of recent activities, focusing on the
improvements in the modelling of the instrument and in the data analysis
campaigns performed both with real and simulated data.Comment: Plenary talk presented at the 9th International LISA Symposium, 21-25
May 2012, Pari
On the renormalization of multiparton webs
We consider the recently developed diagrammatic approach to soft-gluon
exponentiation in multiparton scattering amplitudes, where the exponent is
written as a sum of webs - closed sets of diagrams whose colour and kinematic
parts are entangled via mixing matrices. A complementary approach to
exponentiation is based on the multiplicative renormalizability of intersecting
Wilson lines, and their subsequent finite anomalous dimension. Relating this
framework to that of webs, we derive renormalization constraints expressing all
multiple poles of any given web in terms of lower-order webs. We examine these
constraints explicitly up to four loops, and find that they are realised
through the action of the web mixing matrices in conjunction with the fact that
multiple pole terms in each diagram reduce to sums of products of lower-loop
integrals. Relevant singularities of multi-eikonal amplitudes up to three loops
are calculated in dimensional regularization using an exponential infrared
regulator. Finally, we formulate a new conjecture for web mixing matrices,
involving a weighted sum over column entries. Our results form an important
step in understanding non-Abelian exponentiation in multiparton amplitudes, and
pave the way for higher-loop computations of the soft anomalous dimension.Comment: 60 pages, 15 figure
Lectures on conformal field theory and Kac-Moody algebras
This is an introduction to the basic ideas and to a few further selected
topics in conformal quantum field theory and in the theory of Kac-Moody
algebras.Comment: 59 pages, LaTeX2e, extended version of lectures given at the Graduate
Course on Conformal Field Theory and Integrable Models (Budapest, August
1996), to appear in Springer Lecture Notes in Physic
social laughter is correlated with an elevated pain threshold
Although laughter forms an important part of human non-verbal communication, it has received rather less attention than it deserves in both the experimental and the observational literatures. Relaxed social (Duchenne) laughter is associated with feelings of wellbeing and heightened affect, a proximate explanation for which might be the release of endorphins. We tested this hypothesis in a series of six experimental studies in both the laboratory (watching videos) and naturalistic contexts (watching stage performances), using change in pain threshold as an assay for endorphin release. The results show that pain thresholds are significantly higher after laughter than in the control condition. This pain-tolerance effect is due to laughter itself and not simply due to a change in positive affect. We suggest that laughter, through an endorphin-mediated opiate effect, may play a crucial role in social bonding
- …