1,409 research outputs found
The controversy in the process: potential scattering or resonance ?
The reaction shows a broad peak at 1.5
GeV in the channel which has no counterpart in the
channel. This "resonance" is considered as a candidate for a
state in the "s-channel". We show, however, that it can also
be explained by potential scattering of via the -
exchange in the "t-channel".Comment: 12 pages, latex, 3 postscript figures, to appear in Zeitschrift fur
Physi
Increased EMRSA-15 health-care worker colonization demonstrated in retrospective review of EMRSA hospital outbreaks
Background:Health care worker (HCW) colonization with methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a documented cause of hospital outbreaks and contributes to ongoing transmission. At Royal Perth Hospital (RPH) it had been anecdotally noted that the increasing prevalence of EMRSA-15 appeared to be associated with increased HCW colonization compared with Aus2/3-EMRSA. Hence we compared HCW colonization rates during outbreaks of EMRSA-15 and Aus2/3-EMRSA at a single institution.Methods:We performed a retrospective review of EMRSA-15 and Aus2/3-EMRSA outbreaks from 2000 –2009 at RPH, a quaternary hospital in Western Australia. Outbreak files were reviewed and relevant data extracted. Results:Ten EMRSA-15 outbreaks were compared with seven Aus2/3 outbreaks. The number of patients colonized was similar between EMRSA-15 and Aus2/ 3-EMRSA outbreaks (median 7 [range 3 – 20] and 11 [5 – 26], respectively; P = 0.07) but the number of HCWs colonized was significantl y higher in EMRSA-15 outbreaks compared to Aus2/3-EMRSA outbreaks (median 4 [range 0 – 15] and 2 [1-3], respectively; P = 0.013). The percentage of HCWs colonized was also higher in EMRSA-15 outbreaks versus Aus2/3-EMRSA outbreaks (median 3.4% [range 0 – 5.5%] and 0.81% [0.56 – 2.2%], respectively; P= 0.013).Conclusions:This study demonstrates a higher level of HCW colonization during EMRSA-15 outbreaks compared with Aus2/3-EMRSA outbreaks. This finding suggests that MRSA vary in their ability to colonize HCWs and contribute to outbreaks. MRSA type should be determined during outbreaks and future research should investigate the mechanisms by which EMRSA-15 contributes to increased HCW colonization
A new concept for the combination of optical interferometers and high-resolution spectrographs
The combination of high spatial and spectral resolution in optical astronomy
enables new observational approaches to many open problems in stellar and
circumstellar astrophysics. However, constructing a high-resolution
spectrograph for an interferometer is a costly and time-intensive undertaking.
Our aim is to show that, by coupling existing high-resolution spectrographs to
existing interferometers, one could observe in the domain of high spectral and
spatial resolution, and avoid the construction of a new complex and expensive
instrument. We investigate in this article the different challenges which arise
from combining an interferometer with a high-resolution spectrograph. The
requirements for the different sub-systems are determined, with special
attention given to the problems of fringe tracking and dispersion. A concept
study for the combination of the VLTI (Very Large Telescope Interferometer)
with UVES (UV-Visual Echelle Spectrograph) is carried out, and several other
specific instrument pairings are discussed. We show that the proposed
combination of an interferometer with a high-resolution spectrograph is indeed
feasible with current technology, for a fraction of the cost of building a
whole new spectrograph. The impact on the existing instruments and their
ongoing programs would be minimal.Comment: 27 pages, 9 figures, Experimental Astronomy; v2: accepted versio
A road to reality with topological superconductors
Topological states of matter are a source of low-energy quasiparticles, bound
to a defect or propagating along the surface. In a superconductor these are
Majorana fermions, described by a real rather than a complex wave function. The
absence of complex phase factors promises protection against decoherence in
quantum computations based on topological superconductivity. This is a tutorial
style introduction written for a Nature Physics focus issue on topological
matter.Comment: pre-copy-editing, author-produced version of the published paper: 4
pages, 2 figure
Direct Integration and Non-Perturbative Effects in Matrix Models
We show how direct integration can be used to solve the closed amplitudes of
multi-cut matrix models with polynomial potentials. In the case of the cubic
matrix model, we give explicit expressions for the ring of non-holomorphic
modular objects that are needed to express all closed matrix model amplitudes.
This allows us to integrate the holomorphic anomaly equation up to holomorphic
modular terms that we fix by the gap condition up to genus four. There is an
one-dimensional submanifold of the moduli space in which the spectral curve
becomes the Seiberg--Witten curve and the ring reduces to the non-holomorphic
modular ring of the group . On that submanifold, the gap conditions
completely fix the holomorphic ambiguity and the model can be solved explicitly
to very high genus. We use these results to make precision tests of the
connection between the large order behavior of the 1/N expansion and
non-perturbative effects due to instantons. Finally, we argue that a full
understanding of the large genus asymptotics in the multi-cut case requires a
new class of non-perturbative sectors in the matrix model.Comment: 51 pages, 8 figure
Adaptive Filtering Enhances Information Transmission in Visual Cortex
Sensory neuroscience seeks to understand how the brain encodes natural
environments. However, neural coding has largely been studied using simplified
stimuli. In order to assess whether the brain's coding strategy depend on the
stimulus ensemble, we apply a new information-theoretic method that allows
unbiased calculation of neural filters (receptive fields) from responses to
natural scenes or other complex signals with strong multipoint correlations. In
the cat primary visual cortex we compare responses to natural inputs with those
to noise inputs matched for luminance and contrast. We find that neural filters
adaptively change with the input ensemble so as to increase the information
carried by the neural response about the filtered stimulus. Adaptation affects
the spatial frequency composition of the filter, enhancing sensitivity to
under-represented frequencies in agreement with optimal encoding arguments.
Adaptation occurs over 40 s to many minutes, longer than most previously
reported forms of adaptation.Comment: 20 pages, 11 figures, includes supplementary informatio
Interactions of polymorphisms in different clock genes associated with circadian phenotypes in humans
Several studies have shown that mutations and polymorphisms in clock genes are associated with abnormal circadian parameters in humans and also with more subtle non-pathological phenotypes like chronotypes. However, there have been conflicting results, and none of these studies analyzed the combined effects of more than one clock gene. Up to date, association studies in humans have focused on the analysis of only one clock gene per study. Since these genes encode proteins that physically interact with each other, combinations of polymorphisms in different clock genes could have a synergistic or an inhibitory effect upon circadian phenotypes. In the present study, we analyzed the combined effects of four polymorphisms in four clock genes (Per2, Per3, Clock and Bmal1) in people with extreme diurnal preferences (morning or evening). We found that a specific combination of polymorphisms in these genes is more frequent in people who have a morning preference for activity and there is a different combination in individuals with an evening preference for activity. Taken together, these results show that it is possible to detect clock gene interactions associated with human circadian phenotypes and bring an innovative idea of building a clock gene variation map that may be applied to human circadian biology
The Cosmological Constant
This is a review of the physics and cosmology of the cosmological constant.
Focusing on recent developments, I present a pedagogical overview of cosmology
in the presence of a cosmological constant, observational constraints on its
magnitude, and the physics of a small (and potentially nonzero) vacuum energy.Comment: 50 pages. Submitted to Living Reviews in Relativity
(http://www.livingreviews.org/), December 199
Potential conservation of circadian clock proteins in the phylum Nematoda as revealed by bioinformatic searches
Although several circadian rhythms have been described in C. elegans, its molecular clock remains elusive. In this work we employed a novel bioinformatic approach, applying probabilistic methodologies, to search for circadian clock proteins of several of the best studied circadian model organisms of different taxa (Mus musculus, Drosophila melanogaster, Neurospora crassa, Arabidopsis thaliana and Synechoccocus elongatus) in the proteomes of C. elegans and other members of the phylum Nematoda. With this approach we found that the Nematoda contain proteins most related to the core and accessory proteins of the insect and mammalian clocks, which provide new insights into the nematode clock and the evolution of the circadian system.Fil: Romanowski, Andrés. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires. Fundación Instituto Leloir. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. Departamento de Ciencia y Tecnología. Laboratorio de Cronobiología; ArgentinaFil: Garavaglia, Matías Javier. Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. Departamento de Ciencia y Tecnología. Laboratorio de Ing.genética y Biolog.molecular y Celular. Area Virus de Insectos; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Goya, María Eugenia. Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. Departamento de Ciencia y Tecnología. Laboratorio de Cronobiología; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Ghiringhelli, Pablo Daniel. Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. Departamento de Ciencia y Tecnología. Laboratorio de Ing.genética y Biolog.molecular y Celular. Area Virus de Insectos; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Golombek, Diego Andres. Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. Departamento de Ciencia y Tecnología. Laboratorio de Cronobiología; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin
Genome sequencing of the extinct Eurasian wild aurochs, Bos primigenius, illuminates the phylogeography and evolution of cattle
Background
Domestication of the now-extinct wild aurochs, Bos primigenius, gave rise to the two major domestic extant cattle taxa, B. taurus and B. indicus. While previous genetic studies have shed some light on the evolutionary relationships between European aurochs and modern cattle, important questions remain unanswered, including the phylogenetic status of aurochs, whether gene flow from aurochs into early domestic populations occurred, and which genomic regions were subject to selection processes during and after domestication. Here, we address these questions using whole-genome sequencing data generated from an approximately 6,750-year-old British aurochs bone and genome sequence data from 81 additional cattle plus genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism data from a diverse panel of 1,225 modern animals.
Results
Phylogenomic analyses place the aurochs as a distinct outgroup to the domestic B. taurus lineage, supporting the predominant Near Eastern origin of European cattle. Conversely, traditional British and Irish breeds share more genetic variants with this aurochs specimen than other European populations, supporting localized gene flow from aurochs into the ancestors of modern British and Irish cattle, perhaps through purposeful restocking by early herders in Britain. Finally, the functions of genes showing evidence for positive selection in B. taurus are enriched for neurobiology, growth, metabolism and immunobiology, suggesting that these biological processes have been important in the domestication of cattle.
Conclusions
This work provides important new information regarding the origins and functional evolution of modern cattle, revealing that the interface between early European domestic populations and wild aurochs was significantly more complex than previously thought
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