Healing Bodies: the ancient origins of massages and Roman practices

The practice of body manipulation with therapeutic aims has been used in the Western world since the origins of Hippocratic medicine. By retracing the therapeutic use of massage as a therapeutic, preventive and educational practice, the authors attempt to highlight the concepts, techniques and methods of massage and the manipulation of the body in order to offer a valuable and useful historical reconstruction concerning ancient medicine. The study on the relationship between culture, diseases and medicine constitute a significant part of the historical medical research carried out within the Research Project of National Interest PRIN entitled ‘Disease, health and lifestyles in Rome: from the Empire to the early Middle Ages’ funded by the Ministry of Education, MIUR University Research in 201

Super-ASTROD: Probing primordial gravitational waves and mapping the outer solar system

Super-ASTROD (Super Astrodynamical Space Test of Relativity using Optical Devices or ASTROD III) is a mission concept with 3-5 spacecraft in 5 AU orbits together with an Earth-Sun L1/L2 spacecraft ranging optically with one another to probe primordial gravitational-waves with frequencies 0.1 microHz - 1 mHz, to test fundamental laws of spacetime and to map the outer solar system. In this paper we address to its scientific goals, orbit and payload selection, and sensitivity to gravitational waves.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, presented to 7th International LISA Symposium, 16-20 June 2008, Barcelona; submitted to Classical and Quantum Gravity; presentation improve

Sample-to-sample fluctuations of power spectrum of a random motion in a periodic Sinai model

The Sinai model of a tracer diffusing in a quenched Brownian potential is a much studied problem exhibiting a logarithmically slow anomalous diffusion due to the growth of energy barriers with the system size. However, if the potential is random but periodic, the regime of anomalous diffusion crosses over to one of normal diffusion once a tracer has diffused over a few periods of the system. Here we consider a system in which the potential is given by a Brownian Bridge on a finite interval $(0,L)$ and then periodically repeated over the whole real line, and study the power spectrum $S(f)$ of the diffusive process $x(t)$ in such a potential. We show that for most of realizations of $x(t)$ in a given realization of the potential, the low-frequency behavior is $S(f) \sim {\cal A}/f^2$, i.e., the same as for standard Brownian motion, and the amplitude ${\cal A}$ is a disorder-dependent random variable with a finite support. Focusing on the statistical properties of this random variable, we determine the moments of ${\cal A}$ of arbitrary, negative or positive order $k$, and demonstrate that they exhibit a multi-fractal dependence on $k$, and a rather unusual dependence on the temperature and on the periodicity $L$, which are supported by atypical realizations of the periodic disorder. We finally show that the distribution of ${\cal A}$ has a log-normal left tail, and exhibits an essential singularity close to the right edge of the support, which is related to the Lifshitz singularity. Our findings are based both on analytic results and on extensive numerical simulations of the process $x(t)$.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

Effects of standard and modified gravity on interplanetary ranges

We numerically investigate the impact on the two-body range by several Newtonian and non-Newtonian dynamical effects for some Earth-planet (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) pairs in view of the expected cm-level accuracy in some future planned or proposed interplanetary ranging operations (abridged).Comment: LaTex, World Scientific style, 46 pages, 55 figures, 1 table, 57 references. Version in press in International Journal of Modern Physics D (IJMPD

Supersymmetric Noether Currents and Seiberg-Witten Theory

The purpose of this paper is twofold. The first purpose is to review a systematic construction of Noether currents for supersymmetric theories, especially effective supersymmetric theories. The second purpose is to use these currents to derive the mass-formula for the quantized Seiberg-Witten model from the supersymmetric algebra. We check that the mass-formula of the low-energy theory agrees with that of the full theory (in the broken phase).Comment: 30 pages, LaTe

A uniform treatment of the orbital effects due to a violation of the Strong Equivalence Principle in the gravitational Stark-like limit

We analytically work out several effects which a violation of the Strong Equivalence Principle (SEP) induces on the orbital motion of a binary system constituted of self-gravitating bodies immersed in a constant and uniform external field. We do not restrict to the small eccentricity limit. Moreover, we do not select any specific spatial orientation of the external polarizing field. We explicitly calculate the SEP-induced mean rates of change of all the osculating Keplerian orbital elements of the binary, the perturbation of the projection of the binary orbit onto the line-of-sight, the shift of the radial velocity, and the range and range-rate signatures and as well. We find that the ratio of the SEP precessions of the node and the inclination of the binary depends only on and the pericenter of the binary itself, being independent on both the magnitude and the orientation of the polarizing field, and on the semimajor axis, the eccentricity and the node of the binary. Our results, which do not depend on any particular SEP-violating theoretical scheme, can be applied to quite general astronomical and astrophysical scenarios. They can be used to better interpret present and future SEP experiments, especially when several theoretical SEP mechanisms may be involved, and to suitably design new dedicated tests.Comment: LaTex2e, 14 pages, no figures, no tables, 42 references. To appear in Classical and Quantum Gravity (CQG

Caught in the Bulimic Trap? Persistence and State Dependence of Bulimia Among Young Women

Eating disorders are an important and growing health concern, and bulimia nervosa (BN) accounts for the largest fraction of eating disorders. Health consequences of BN are substantial and especially serious given the increasingly compulsive nature of the disorder. However, remarkably little is known about the mechanisms underlying the persistent nature of BN. Using a unique panel data set on young women and instrumental variable techniques, we document that unobserved heterogeneity plays a role in the persistence of BN, but strikingly up to two thirds is due to true state dependence. Our results, together with support from the medical literature, provide evidence that bulimia should be considered an addiction. Our findings have important implications for public policy since they suggest that the timing of the policy is crucial: preventive educational programs should be coupled with more intense (rehabilitation) treatment at the early stages of bingeing and purging behaviors. Our results are robust to different model specifications and identifying assumptions.bulimia nervosa, demographics, state dependence, instrumental variables, dynamic panel data estimation, addiction

Weyl Symmetry and the Liouville Theory

Flat-space conformal invariance and curved-space Weyl invariance are simply related in dimensions greater than two. In two dimensions the Liouville theory presents an exceptional situation, which we here examine.Comment: 8 pages, no figure