The spectral dimension of random brushes

We consider a class of random graphs, called random brushes, which are constructed by adding linear graphs of random lengths to the vertices of Z^d viewed as a graph. We prove that for d=2 all random brushes have spectral dimension d_s=2. For d=3 we have {5\over 2}\leq d_s\leq 3 and for d\geq 4 we have 3\leq d_s\leq d.Comment: 15 pages, 1 figur

Iron Behaving Badly: Inappropriate Iron Chelation as a Major Contributor to the Aetiology of Vascular and Other Progressive Inflammatory and Degenerative Diseases

The production of peroxide and superoxide is an inevitable consequence of aerobic metabolism, and while these particular "reactive oxygen species" (ROSs) can exhibit a number of biological effects, they are not of themselves excessively reactive and thus they are not especially damaging at physiological concentrations. However, their reactions with poorly liganded iron species can lead to the catalytic production of the very reactive and dangerous hydroxyl radical, which is exceptionally damaging, and a major cause of chronic inflammation. We review the considerable and wide-ranging evidence for the involvement of this combination of (su)peroxide and poorly liganded iron in a large number of physiological and indeed pathological processes and inflammatory disorders, especially those involving the progressive degradation of cellular and organismal performance. These diseases share a great many similarities and thus might be considered to have a common cause (i.e. iron-catalysed free radical and especially hydroxyl radical generation). The studies reviewed include those focused on a series of cardiovascular, metabolic and neurological diseases, where iron can be found at the sites of plaques and lesions, as well as studies showing the significance of iron to aging and longevity. The effective chelation of iron by natural or synthetic ligands is thus of major physiological (and potentially therapeutic) importance. As systems properties, we need to recognise that physiological observables have multiple molecular causes, and studying them in isolation leads to inconsistent patterns of apparent causality when it is the simultaneous combination of multiple factors that is responsible. This explains, for instance, the decidedly mixed effects of antioxidants that have been observed, etc...Comment: 159 pages, including 9 Figs and 2184 reference

Understanding the stiffness of macromolecules: From linear chains to bottle-brushes

The intrinsic local stiffness of a polymer is characterized by its persistence length. However, its traditional definition in terms of the exponential decay of bond orientational correlations along the chain backbone is accurate only for Gaussian phantom-chain-like polymers. Also care is needed to clarify the conditions when the Kratky-Porod wormlike chain model is applicable. These problems are elucidated by Monte Carlo simulations of simple lattice models for polymers in both d = 2 and d = 3 dimensions. While the asymptotic decay of the bond orientational correlations for real polymers always is of power law form, the Kratky-Porod model is found to be applicable for rather stiff (but not too long) thin polymers in d = 3 (but not in d = 2). However, it does not describe thick chains, e.g., bottle-brush polymers, where stiffness is due to grafted flexible side-chains, and the persistence length grows proportional to the effective thickness of the bottle-brush. A scaling description of bottle-brushes is validated by simulations using the bond fluctuation model