Alcohol and tobacco content in UK video games and their association with alcohol and tobacco use among young people

Aims: To determine the extent to which video games include alcohol and tobacco content and assess the association between playing them and alcohol and smoking behaviours in adolescent players. Design: Assessment of substance in the 32 UK bestselling video games of 2012/2013; online survey of adolescent playing of 17 games with substance content; content analysis of the five most popular games. Setting: Great Britain Participants: 1,094 adolescents aged 11-17 years. Measurements: Reported presence of substance content in the 32 games; estimated numbers of adolescents who had played games; self-reported substance use; semi-quantitative measures of substance content by interval coding of video game cut scenes. Findings: Non-official sources reported substance content in 17 (44%) games but none were reported by the official Pan European Game Information (PEGI) system. Adolescents who had played at least one game were significantly more likely ever to have tried smoking (adjusted OR 2.70, 95% CI 1.75 to 4.17) or consumed alcohol (adjusted OR 2.35, 95% CI 1.70 to 3.23). In the five most popular game episodes of alcohol actual use, implied use and paraphernalia occurred in 31 (14%), 81 (37%) and 41 (19%) intervals, respectively. Tobacco actual use, implied use and paraphernalia occurred in 32 (15%), 27 (12 %) and 53 (24%) intervals, respectively. Conclusions: Alcohol and tobacco content is common in the most popular video games but not reported by the official PEGI system. Content analysis identified substantial substance content in a sample of those games. Adolescents who play these video games are more likely to have experimented with tobacco and alcohol

13C Magic Angle Spinning NMR Analysis and Quantum Chemical Modeling of the Bathochromic Shift of Astaxathin in a-Crustacyanin, the Blue Carotenoprotein Complex in the Carapace of the Lobster Homarus gammarus

Bio-organic Synthesi

Resonance Raman spectroscopy and quantum chemical modeling studies of protein-astaxanthin interactions in alpha-crustacyanin (major blue carotenoprotein complex in carapace of lobster, Homarus gammarus)

Solid state NMR/Biophysical Organic ChemistryBio-organic Synthesi

Testbeam studies of pre-prototype silicon strip sensors for the LHCb UT upgrade project

AbstractThe LHCb experiment is preparing for a major upgrade in 2018–2019. One of the key components in the upgrade is a new silicon tracker situated upstream of the analysis magnet of the experiment. The Upstream Tracker (UT) will consist of four planes of silicon strip detectors, with each plane covering an area of about 2m2. An important consideration of these detectors is their performance after they have been exposed to a large radiation dose. In this paper we present test beam results of pre-prototype n-in-p and p-in-n sensors that have been irradiated with fluences up to 4.0×1014neq/cm2

Carotenoid blues: Structural studies on carotenoproteins

Solid state NMR/Biophysical Organic Chemistr

Supernova Bounds on Majoron-emitting decays of light neutrinos

Neutrino masses arising from the spontaneous violation of ungauged lepton-number are accompanied by a physical Goldstone boson, generically called Majoron. In the high-density supernova medium the effects of Majoron-emitting neutrino decays are important even if they are suppressed in vacuo by small neutrino masses and/or small off-diagonal couplings. We reconsider the influence of these decays on the neutrino signal of supernovae in the light of recent Super-Kamiokande data on solar and atmospheric neutrinos. We find that majoron-neutrino coupling constants in the range 3\times 10^{-7}\lsim g\lsim 2\times 10^{-5} or g \gsim 3 \times 10^{-4} are excluded by the observation of SN1987A. Then we discuss the potential of Superkamiokande and the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory to detect majoron neutrino interactions in the case of a future galactic supernova. We find that these experiments could probe majoron neutrino interactions with improved sensitivity.Comment: 28 pages, 5 figure

A scheme with two large extra dimensions confronted with neutrino physics

We investigate a particle physics model in a six-dimensional spacetime, where two extra dimensions form a torus. Particles with Standard Model charges are confined by interactions with a scalar field to four four-dimensional branes, two vortices accommodating ordinary type fermions and two antivortices accommodating mirror fermions. We investigate the phenomenological implications of this multibrane structure by confronting the model with neutrino physics data.Comment: LATEX, 24 pages, 9 figures, minor changes in the tex

Leptonic and Semileptonic Decays of Charm and Bottom Hadrons

We review the experimental measurements and theoretical descriptions of leptonic and semileptonic decays of particles containing a single heavy quark, either charm or bottom. Measurements of bottom semileptonic decays are used to determine the magnitudes of two fundamental parameters of the standard model, the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix elements $V_{cb}$ and $V_{ub}$. These parameters are connected with the physics of quark flavor and mass, and they have important implications for the breakdown of CP symmetry. To extract precise values of $|V_{cb}|$ and $|V_{ub}|$ from measurements, however, requires a good understanding of the decay dynamics. Measurements of both charm and bottom decay distributions provide information on the interactions governing these processes. The underlying weak transition in each case is relatively simple, but the strong interactions that bind the quarks into hadrons introduce complications. We also discuss new theoretical approaches, especially heavy-quark effective theory and lattice QCD, which are providing insights and predictions now being tested by experiment. An international effort at many laboratories will rapidly advance knowledge of this physics during the next decade.Comment: This review article will be published in Reviews of Modern Physics in the fall, 1995. This file contains only the abstract and the table of contents. The full 168-page document including 47 figures is available at http://charm.physics.ucsb.edu/papers/slrevtex.p

Amygdala responses to emotional faces in twins discordant or concordant for the risk for anxiety and depression.

Background: Functional brain imaging studies have shown deviant amygdala responses to emotional stimuli in subjects suffering from anxiety and depressive disorder, but both hyperactivity and hypoactivity compared to healthy controls have been reported. To account for these discrepant findings, we hypothesize that genetic and environmental risk factors differently impact on amygdala functioning. Methods: To test this hypothesis, we assessed amygdala responses to an emotional faces paradigm during functional magnetic resonance imaging in monozygotic twin pairs discordant for the risk of anxiety and depression (n = 10 pairs) and in monozygotic twin pairs concordant for high (n = 7 pairs) or low (n = 15 pairs) risk for anxiety and depression. Results: Main effects (all faces vs. baseline) revealed robust bilateral amygdala activity across groups. In discordant twins, increased amygdala responses were found for negatively valenced stimuli (angry/anxious faces) in high-risk twins compared to their low-risk co-twins. In contrast, concordant high-risk pairs revealed blunted amygdala reactivity to both positive and negative faces compared with concordant low-risk pairs. Post-hoc analyses showed that these findings were independent of 5-HTTLPR genotype. Conclusions: Our findings indicate amygdala hyperactivity in subjects who are at high risk for anxiety and depression through environmental factors and amygdala hypoactivity in those at risk mainly through genetic factors. We suggest that this result reflects a difference in baseline amygdala activation in these groups. Future imaging studies on anxiety and depression should aim to avoid admixture of subjects who are at genetic risk with those at risk due to environmental factors. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved