Evidence for muon neutrino oscillation in an accelerator-based experiment

We present results for muon neutrino oscillation in the KEK to Kamioka (K2K) long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment. K2K uses an accelerator-produced muon neutrino beam with a mean energy of 1.3 GeV directed at the Super-Kamiokande detector. We observed the energy dependent disappearance of muon neutrino, which we presume have oscillated to tau neutrino. The probability that we would observe these results if there is no neutrino oscillation is 0.0050% (4.0 sigma).Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Exploring biographical fictions: the role of imagination in writing and reading narrative

The creation of a literary biography requires an awareness both of how we construct what we believe we ‘know’ about a writer, and how the stories we adopt change our reading of their works. Research into the sources used to construct Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s biographies supports the conclusion that when writers can no longer create their own stories, those created about them are necessarily fictions, even if delivered under the supposedly more ‘factual’ genre of biography. Historical biographers construct narrative by imaginative interpretation of evidence. Writers’ biographies are commonly written not by historians but by literary critics, who draw extra biographical ‘evidence’ from interpreting the author’s works. But interpreting the works is a highly subjective exercise, and the story we find there may depend upon the story we are looking for. In the process of researching and writing a novel in verse based on Marlovian Theory - the idea that Christopher Marlowe faked his own death, fled to Northern Italy and wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare - the utilisation of Shakespeare’s Sonnets to create a new narrative exposes the inherently deceptive nature of poetry. By switching between literal and figurative readings, and emphasising previously overlooked phrases, it is possible to interpret the Sonnets in such a way that they support Marlovian Theory more easily than they support the orthodox narrative

Para-infectious brain injury in COVID-19 persists at follow-up despite attenuated cytokine and autoantibody responses

To understand neurological complications of COVID-19 better both acutely and for recovery, we measured markers of brain injury, inflammatory mediators, and autoantibodies in 203 hospitalised participants; 111 with acute sera (1–11 days post-admission) and 92 convalescent sera (56 with COVID-19-associated neurological diagnoses). Here we show that compared to 60 uninfected controls, tTau, GFAP, NfL, and UCH-L1 are increased with COVID-19 infection at acute timepoints and NfL and GFAP are significantly higher in participants with neurological complications. Inflammatory mediators (IL-6, IL-12p40, HGF, M-CSF, CCL2, and IL-1RA) are associated with both altered consciousness and markers of brain injury. Autoantibodies are more common in COVID-19 than controls and some (including against MYL7, UCH-L1, and GRIN3B) are more frequent with altered consciousness. Additionally, convalescent participants with neurological complications show elevated GFAP and NfL, unrelated to attenuated systemic inflammatory mediators and to autoantibody responses. Overall, neurological complications of COVID-19 are associated with evidence of neuroglial injury in both acute and late disease and these correlate with dysregulated innate and adaptive immune responses acutely