255 research outputs found
Simplifying instanton corrections to N=4 SYM correlators
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits any use, distribution and reproduction in
any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited
Comparative investigation of MLOs associated with Caribbean and African coconut lethal decline diseases by DNA hybridization and PCR assays
Mycoplasmalike organisms (MLOs) associated with lethal decline diseases of the coconut palm (Cocos nuciferd) in eastern and western Africa were detected by dot hybridizations using (32P)dATP-labeled cloned DNA probes. Two probes, each consisting of a genomic DNA fragment of the palm lethal yellowing (LY) MLO from Florida, hybridized at moderate stringency to DNAs from four coconut cultivars with lethal disease (LD) in Tanzania and from a solitary West African Tall coconut palm with symptoms of Awka disease in Nigeria. Neither probe hybridized to DNA of the LD-affected hybrid coconut PBI2I or to DNA of symptomless palms. Conserved, mollicute-specific oligonucleotide sequences used for polymerase chain reactions (PCR) primed the amplification of near full-length MLO I6S rRNA genes from all decline-affected palms. No restriction fragment length polymorphisms were observed when rDNA amplified from both LY- and LD-affected coconut palms were singly digested with the restriction endonucieases Alul, BamHI, Oral, EcoRI, Hpal, Hpall, Rsal, and Scal. Polymorphisms were evident after digestion of MLO rDNA with Taql. These data establish the existence of genetic relationships between MLOs associated with coconut lethal decline diseases in the western Caribbean region and in Africa and provide further evidence indicating that the LY and LD MLOs, although very similar, are not genetically identical pathogens
The Lore of Low Methane Livestock:Co-Producing Technology and Animals for Reduced Climate Change Impact
Methane emissions from sheep and cattle production have gained increasing profile in the context of climate change. Policy and scientific research communities have suggested a number of technological approaches to mitigate these emissions. This paper uses the concept of co-production as an analytical framework to understand farmers’ evaluation of a 'good animal’. It examines how technology and sheep and beef cattle are co-produced in the context of concerns about the climate change impact of methane. Drawing on 42 semi-structured interviews, this paper demonstrates that methane emissions are viewed as a natural and integral part of sheep and beef cattle by farmers, rather than as a pollutant. Sheep and beef cattle farmers in the UK are found to be an extremely heterogeneous group that need to be understood in their specific social, environmental and consumer contexts. Some are more amenable to appropriating methane reducing measures than others, but largely because animals are already co-constructed from the natural and the technical for reasons of increased production efficiency
The Soft-Collinear Bootstrap: N=4 Yang-Mills Amplitudes at Six and Seven Loops
Infrared divergences in scattering amplitudes arise when a loop momentum
becomes collinear with a massless external momentum . In gauge
theories, it is known that the L-loop logarithm of a planar amplitude has much
softer infrared singularities than the L-loop amplitude itself. We argue that
planar amplitudes in N=4 super-Yang-Mills theory enjoy softer than expected
behavior as already at the level of the integrand. Moreover,
we conjecture that the four-point integrand can be uniquely determined, to any
loop-order, by imposing the correct soft-behavior of the logarithm together
with dual conformal invariance and dihedral symmetry. We use these simple
criteria to determine explicit formulae for the four-point integrand through
seven-loops, finding perfect agreement with previously known results through
five-loops. As an input to this calculation we enumerate all four-point dual
conformally invariant (DCI) integrands through seven-loops, an analysis which
is aided by several graph-theoretic theorems we prove about general DCI
integrands at arbitrary loop-order. The six- and seven-loop amplitudes receive
non-zero contributions from 229 and 1873 individual DCI diagrams respectively.Comment: 27 pages, 48 figures, detailed results including PDF and Mathematica
files available at http://goo.gl/qIKe8 v2: minor corrections v3: figure 7
corrected, Lemma 2 remove
The almost ubiquitous association of 6.7 GHz methanol masers with dust
We report the results of 870-m continuum observations, using the Large
APEX Bolometer Camera (LABOCA), towards 77 class-II, 6.7-GHz methanol masers
identified by the Methanol Multibeam (MMB) survey to map the thermal emission
from cool dust towards these objects. These data complement a study of 630
methanol masers associated with compact dense clumps identified from the
ATLASGAL survey. Compact dust emission is detected towards 70 sources, which
implies a dust-association rate of 99% for the full MMB catalogue. Evaluation
of the derived dust and maser properties leads us to conclude that the combined
sample represents a single population tracing the same phenomenon. We find
median clump masses of a few 10 M and that all but a handful of
sources satisfy the mass-size criterion required for massive star formation.
This study provides the strongest evidence of the almost ubiquitous association
of methanol masers with massive, star-forming clumps. The fraction of
methanol-maser associated clumps is a factor of ~2 lower in the outer Galaxy
than the inner Galaxy, possibly a result of the lower metallicity environment
of the former. We find no difference in the clump-mass and maser-luminosity
distributions of the inner and outer Galaxy. The maser-pumping and
clump-formation mechanisms are therefore likely to be relatively invariant to
Galactic location. Finally, we use the ratio of maser luminosity and clump mass
to investigate the hypothesis that the maser luminosity is a good indicator of
the evolutionary stage of the embedded source, however, we find no evidence to
support this.Comment: Accepted by MNRAS. 17 pages, 17 figures and 5 tables. The full
version of Figs. 3 and 5 are only available in electronic form of the journal
while the full versions of Tables 1, 2 and 4 will only be available through
CDS. A complete version of the paper is available on reques
On the spectrum of AdS/CFT beyond supergravity
We test the spectrum of string theory on AdS_5 x S^5 derived in
hep-th/0305052 against that of single-trace gauge invariant operators in free
N=4 super Yang-Mills theory. Masses of string excitations at critical tension
are derived by extrapolating plane-wave frequencies at g_{YM}=0 down to finite
J. On the SYM side, we present a systematic description of the spectrum of
single-trace operators and its reduction to PSU(2,2|4) superconformal primaries
via a refined Eratostenes' supersieve. We perform the comparison of the
resulting SYM/string spectra of charges and multiplicities order by order in
the conformal dimension \Delta up to \Delta=10 and find perfect agreement.
Interestingly, the SYM/string massive spectrum exhibits a hidden symmetry
structure larger than expected, with bosonic subgroup SO(10,2) and thirty-two
supercharges.Comment: 28 pages, LaTeX2
Ralstonia syzygii, the Blood Disease Bacterium and Some Asian R. solanacearum Strains Form a Single Genomic Species Despite Divergent Lifestyles
The Ralstonia solanacearum species complex includes R. solanacearum, R. syzygii, and the Blood Disease Bacterium (BDB). All colonize plant xylem vessels and cause wilt diseases, but with significant biological differences. R. solanacearum is a soilborne bacterium that infects the roots of a broad range of plants. R. syzygii causes Sumatra disease of clove trees and is actively transmitted by cercopoid insects. BDB is also pathogenic to a single host, banana, and is transmitted by pollinating insects. Sequencing and DNA-DNA hybridization studies indicated that despite their phenotypic differences, these three plant pathogens are actually very closely related, falling into the Phylotype IV subgroup of the R. solanacearum species complex. To better understand the relationships among these bacteria, we sequenced and annotated the genomes of R. syzygii strain R24 and BDB strain R229. These genomes were compared to strain PSI07, a closely related Phylotype IV tomato isolate of R. solanacearum, and to five additional R. solanacearum genomes. Whole-genome comparisons confirmed previous phylogenetic results: the three phylotype IV strains share more and larger syntenic regions with each other than with other R. solanacearum strains. Furthermore, the genetic distances between strains, assessed by an in-silico equivalent of DNA-DNA hybridization, unambiguously showed that phylotype IV strains of BDB, R. syzygii and R. solanacearum form one genomic species. Based on these comprehensive data we propose a revision of the taxonomy of the R. solanacearum species complex. The BDB and R. syzygii genomes encoded no obvious unique metabolic capacities and contained no evidence of horizontal gene transfer from bacteria occupying similar niches. Genes specific to R. syzygii and BDB were almost all of unknown function or extrachromosomal origin. Thus, the pathogenic life-styles of these organisms are more probably due to ecological adaptation and genomic convergence during vertical evolution than to the acquisition of DNA by horizontal transfer
Precision Physics at LEP
1 - Introduction
2 - Small-Angle Bhabha Scattering and the Luminosity Measurement
3 - Z^0 Physics
4 - Fits to Precision Data
5 - Physics at LEP2
6 - ConclusionsComment: Review paper to appear in the RIVISTA DEL NUOVO CIMENTO; 160 pages,
LateX, 70 eps figures include
Cancer incidence patterns by region and socioeconomic deprivation in teenagers and young adults in England
Data on 35 291 individuals with cancer, aged 13–24 years, in England from 1979 to 2001 were analysed by region and socio-economic deprivation of census ward of residence, as measured by the Townsend deprivation index. The incidence of leukaemia, lymphoma, central nervous system tumours, soft tissue sarcomas, gonadal germ cell tumours, melanoma and carcinomas varied by region (P<0.01, all groups) but bone tumour incidence did not. Lymphomas, central nervous system tumours and gonadal germ cell tumours all had higher incidence in less deprived census wards (P<0.01), while chronic myeloid leukaemia and carcinoma of the cervix had higher incidence in more deprived wards (P<0.01). In the least deprived wards, melanoma incidence was nearly twice that in the most deprived, but this trend varied between regions (P<0.001). These cancer incidence patterns differ from those seen in both children and older adults and have implications for aetiology and prevention
Higher-Spin Interactions: four-point functions and beyond
In this work we construct an infinite class of four-point functions for
massless higher-spin fields in flat space that are consistent with the gauge
symmetry. In the Lagrangian picture, these reflect themselves in a peculiar
non-local nature of the corresponding non-abelian higher-spin couplings implied
by the Noether procedure that starts from the fourth order. We also comment on
the nature of the colored spin-2 excitation present both in the open string
spectrum and in the Vasiliev system, highlighting how some aspects of String
Theory appear to reflect key properties of Field Theory that go beyond its low
energy limit. A generalization of these results to n-point functions, fermions
and mixed-symmetry fields is also addressed.Comment: 66 pages, 10 figures, 1 table, LaTex. Several statements clarified.
Final version to appear in JHE
- …