8,960 research outputs found
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 and then periodically repeated
over the whole real line, and study the power spectrum of the diffusive
process in such a potential. We show that for most of realizations of
in a given realization of the potential, the low-frequency behavior is
, i.e., the same as for standard Brownian motion, and
the amplitude is a disorder-dependent random variable with a finite
support. Focusing on the statistical properties of this random variable, we
determine the moments of of arbitrary, negative or positive order
, and demonstrate that they exhibit a multi-fractal dependence on , and a
rather unusual dependence on the temperature and on the periodicity , which
are supported by atypical realizations of the periodic disorder. We finally
show that the distribution of 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 .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
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