196 research outputs found
Heavy Flavour Production at Tevatron and Parton Shower Effects
We present hadron-level predictions from the Monte Carlo generator Cascade
and numerical calculations of charm and beauty production at the Fermilab
Tevatron within the framework of the -factorization QCD approach. Our
consideration is based on the CCFM-evolved unintegrated gluon densities in a
proton. The performed analysis covers the total and differential cross sections
of open charm and beauty quarks, and mesons (or rather muons from their
semileptonic decays) and the total and differential cross sections of di-jet hadroproduction. We study the theoretical uncertainties of our
calculations and investigate the effects coming from parton showers in initial
and final states. Our predictions are compared with the recent experimental
data taken by the D0 and CDF collaborations. Special attention is put on the
specific angular correlations between the final-state particles. We demonstrate
that the final state parton shower plays a crucial role in the description of
such observables. The decorrelated part of angular separations can be fully
described, if the process is included.Comment: Fig 8,9 10 replaced, small corrections in text A discussion of the
delta phi results is adde
A review of the methodological features of systematic reviews in maternal medicine
Background
In maternal medicine, research evidence is scattered making it difficult to access information for clinical decision making. Systematic reviews of good methodological quality are essential to provide valid inferences and to produce usable evidence summaries to guide management. This review assesses the methodological features of existing systematic reviews in maternal medicine, comparing Cochrane and non-Cochrane reviews in maternal medicine.
Methods
Medline, Embase, Database of Reviews of Effectiveness (DARE) and Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR) were searched for relevant reviews published between 2001 and 2006. We selected those reviews in which a minimum of two databases were searched and the primary outcome was related to the maternal condition. The selected reviews were assessed for information on framing of question, literature search and methods of review.
Results
Out of 2846 citations, 68 reviews were selected. Among these, 39 (57%) were Cochrane reviews. Most of the reviews (50/68, 74%) evaluated therapeutic interventions. Overall, 54/68 (79%) addressed a focussed question. Although 64/68 (94%) reviews had a detailed search description, only 17/68 (25%) searched without language restriction. 32/68 (47%) attempted to include unpublished data and 11/68 (16%) assessed for the risk of missing studies quantitatively. The reviews had deficiencies in the assessment of validity of studies and exploration for heterogeneity. When compared to Cochrane reviews, other reviews were significantly inferior in specifying questions (OR 20.3, 95% CI 1.1–381.3, p = 0.04), framing focussed questions (OR 30.9, 95% CI 3.7- 256.2, p = 0.001), use of unpublished data (OR 5.6, 95% CI 1.9–16.4, p = 0.002), assessment for heterogeneity (OR 38.1, 95%CI 2.1, 688.2, p = 0.01) and use of meta-analyses (OR 3.7, 95% CI 1.3–10.8, p = 0.02).
Conclusion
This study identifies areas which have a strong influence on maternal morbidity and mortality but lack good quality systematic reviews. Overall quality of the existing systematic reviews was variable. Cochrane reviews were of better quality as compared to other reviews. There is a need for good quality systematic reviews to inform practice in maternal medicine
Inclusive double-quarkonium production at the Large Hadron Collider
Based on the nonrelativistic QCD (NRQCD) factorization formalism, we
investigate inclusive productions of two spin-triplet S-wave quarkonia
pp->2J/psi+X, 2Upsilon+X, and J/psi+Upsilon+X at the CERN Large Hadron
Collider. The total production rates integrated over the rapidity (y) and
transverse-momentum (p_T) ranges |y|<2.4 and p_T<50 GGeV are predicted to be
sigma[pp->2J/psi+X] = 22 (35) nb, sigma[pp->2Upsilon+X] = 24 (49) pb, and
sigma[pp->J/psi+Upsilon+X] = 7 (13) pb at the center-of-momentum energy sqrt{s}
= 7 (14) TeV. In order to provide predictions that can be useful in both small-
and large-p_T regions, we do not employ the fragmentation approximation and we
include the spin-triplet S-wave color-singlet and color-octet channels for each
quarkonium final state at leading order in the strong coupling. The p_T
distributions of pp->2J/psi+X and 2Upsilon+X in the low-p_T region are
dominated by the color-singlet contributions. At leading order in the strong
coupling, the color-singlet channel is absent for pp->J/psi+Upsilon+X.
Therefore, the process pp->J/psi+Upsilon+X may provide a useful probe to the
color-octet mechanism of NRQCD.Comment: 26 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables, version published in JHE
The Spin Structure of the Nucleon
We present an overview of recent experimental and theoretical advances in our
understanding of the spin structure of protons and neutrons.Comment: 84 pages, 29 figure
Norepinephrine Controls Both Torpor Initiation and Emergence via Distinct Mechanisms in the Mouse
Some mammals, including laboratory mice, enter torpor in response to food deprivation, and leptin can attenuate these bouts of torpor. We previously showed that dopamine β-hydroxylase knockout (Dbh −/−) mice, which lack norepinephrine (NE), do not reduce circulating leptin upon fasting nor do they enter torpor. To test whether the onset of torpor in mice during a fast requires a NE-mediated reduction in circulating leptin, double mutant mice deficient in both leptin (ob/ob) and DBH (DBL MUT) were generated. Upon fasting, control and ob/ob mice entered torpor as assessed by telemetric core Tb acquisition. While fasting failed to induce torpor in Dbh −/− mice, leptin deficiency bypassed the requirement for NE, as DBL MUT mice readily entered torpor upon fasting. These data indicate that sympathetic activation of white fat and suppression of leptin is required for the onset of torpor in the mouse. Emergence from torpor was severely retarded in DBL MUT mice, revealing a novel, leptin-independent role for NE in torpor recovery. This phenotype was mimicked by administration of a β3 adrenergic receptor antagonist to control mice during a torpor bout. Hence, NE signaling via β3 adrenergic receptors presumably in brown fat is the first neurotransmitter-receptor system identified that is required for normal recovery from torpor
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Effects of degree and timing of social housing on reversal learning and response to novel objects in dairy calves
Rodents and primates deprived of early social contact exhibit deficits in learning and behavioural
flexibility. They often also exhibit apparent signs of elevated anxiety, although the relationship between these effects has not been studied. To investigate whether dairy calves are similarly affected, we first compared calves housed in standard individual pens
(n = 7) to those housed in a dynamic group with access to their mothers (n = 8). All calves learned to approach the correct stimulus in a visual discrimination task. Only one individually housed calf was able to re-learn the task when the stimuli were reversed, compared to all but one calf from the group. A second experiment investigated whether this effect might be explained by anxiety in individually housed animals interfering with their learning, and tested varying degrees of social contact in addition to the complex group: pair housing beginning early (approximately 6 days old) and late (6 weeks old). Again, fewer individually reared calves learned the reversal task (2 of 10 or 20%) compared to early paired and grouped calves (16 of 21 or 76% of calves). Late paired calves had intermediate success. Individually housed calves were slower to touch novel objects, but the magnitude of the fear response did not correlate with reversal performance. We conclude that individually housed calves have learning deficits, but these deficits were not likely associated with increased
anxiety
Silencing α-Synuclein Gene Expression Enhances Tyrosine Hydroxylase Activity in MN9D Cells
α-Synuclein has been implicated in the pathogenesis of Parkinson’s disease (PD). Previous studies have shown that α-synuclein is involved in the regulation of dopamine (DA) metabolism, possibly by down-regulating the expression of tyrosine hydroxylase (TH), the rate-limiting enzyme in DA biosynthesis. In this study, we constructed α-synuclein stably silenced MN9D/α-SYN− cells by vector mediated RNA interference and examined its effects on DA metabolism. We found that there were no significant differences in TH protein and mRNA levels between MN9D, MN9D/α-SYN− and MN9D/CON cells, suggesting that silencing α-synuclein expression does not affect TH gene expression. However, significant increases in phosphorylated TH, cytosolic 3, 4-dihydroxyphenylalanine (l-DOPA) and DA levels were observed in MN9D/α-SYN− cells. Our data show that TH activity and DA biosynthesis were enhanced by down-regulation of α-synuclein, suggesting that α-synuclein may act as a negative regulator of cytosolic DA. With respect to PD pathology, a loss of functional α-synuclein may result in increased DA levels in neurons that may lead to cell injury or even death
Computational Models of Timing Mechanisms in the Cerebellar Granular Layer
A long-standing question in neuroscience is how the brain controls movement that requires precisely timed muscle activations. Studies using Pavlovian delay eyeblink conditioning provide good insight into this question. In delay eyeblink conditioning, which is believed to involve the cerebellum, a subject learns an interstimulus interval (ISI) between the onsets of a conditioned stimulus (CS) such as a tone and an unconditioned stimulus such as an airpuff to the eye. After a conditioning phase, the subject’s eyes automatically close or blink when the ISI time has passed after CS onset. This timing information is thought to be represented in some way in the cerebellum. Several computational models of the cerebellum have been proposed to explain the mechanisms of time representation, and they commonly point to the granular layer network. This article will review these computational models and discuss the possible computational power of the cerebellum
Parton distributions with small-x resummation:evidence for BFKL dynamics in HERA data
We present a determination of the parton distribution functions of the proton
in which NLO and NNLO fixed-order calculations are supplemented by NLLx small-x
resummation. Deep inelastic structure functions are computed consistently at
NLO+NLLx or NNLO+NLLx, while for hadronic processes small-x resummation is
included only in the PDF evolution, with kinematic cuts introduced to ensure
the fitted data lie in a region where the fixed-order calculation of the hard
cross-sections is reliable. In all other respects, the fits use the same
methodology and are based on the same global dataset as the recent NNPDF3.1
analysis. We demonstrate that the inclusion of small-x resummation leads to a
quantitative improvement in the perturbative description of the HERA inclusive
and charm-production reduced cross-sections in the small x region. The impact
of the resummation in our fits is greater at NNLO than at NLO, because
fixed-order calculations have a perturbative instability at small x due to
large logarithms that can be cured by resummation. We explore the
phenomenological implications of PDF sets with small-x resummation for the
longitudinal structure function at HERA, for parton luminosities and LHC
benchmark cross-sections, for ultra-high energy neutrino-nucleus
cross-sections, and for future high-energy lepton-proton colliders such as the
LHeC.Comment: 70 pages, many figures. Discussion on uncertainties due to subleading
logarithmic contributions. Discussion on fits with pseudodata from future
high-energy lepton-proton colliders. Updated references. Version to be
published in EPJ
A Computational Mechanism for Unified Gain and Timing Control in the Cerebellum
Precise gain and timing control is the goal of cerebellar motor learning. Because the basic neural circuitry of the cerebellum is homogeneous throughout the cerebellar cortex, a single computational mechanism may be used for simultaneous gain and timing control. Although many computational models of the cerebellum have been proposed for either gain or timing control, few models have aimed to unify them. In this paper, we hypothesize that gain and timing control can be unified by learning of the complete waveform of the desired movement profile instructed by climbing fiber signals. To justify our hypothesis, we adopted a large-scale spiking network model of the cerebellum, which was originally developed for cerebellar timing mechanisms to explain the experimental data of Pavlovian delay eyeblink conditioning, to the gain adaptation of optokinetic response (OKR) eye movements. By conducting large-scale computer simulations, we could reproduce some features of OKR adaptation, such as the learning-related change of simple spike firing of model Purkinje cells and vestibular nuclear neurons, simulated gain increase, and frequency-dependent gain increase. These results suggest that the cerebellum may use a single computational mechanism to control gain and timing simultaneously
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