Early Social Stress Promotes Inflammation and Disease Risk in Rhesus Monkeys.

Early social stress has potent lifelong health effects. We examined the association of early stress in the attachment relationship (low maternal sensitivity, low MS), lower maternal social hierarchy rank, and greater frequency of group-level social conflict, with biomarkers of inflammatory stress response in plasma (IL-8, MCP-1 and CRP collected two hours after temporary separation from mothers and social groups) and risk for developing a common macaques disease outcome (infectious colitis) in 170 socially-housed rhesus monkeys. We controlled for gene-environment correlations by comparing cross-fostered subjects with infants reared by their biological mothers. Low MS predicted higher levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines and proteins at 3-4 months of age (F(3, 162) = 3.508, p = 0.002, partial eta2 = 0.061) and higher lifetime risk for developing colitis for up to twelve years of age (chi square = 5.919, p = 0.026). Lower maternal social rank (F (3, 162) = 3.789, p = 0.012, partial eta2 = 0.06) and higher rates of social conflict (F (3, 162) = 4.264, p = 0.006, partial eta2 = 0.074) each also predicted greater inflammation in infancy, but not lifetime colitis risk (both p > 0.05). The effects of low MS, lower social rank, and higher social conflict were significant in infants reared by biological mothers and cross-fostered infants, suggesting that our results did not arise from gene-environment correlations, but environmental stressors alone. We conclude that several types of early social stress confer risk for inflammation in infancy, but that stress in the mother-infant relationship may confer the longest-term risk for adverse health outcomes

A Transactional Analysis of Interaction Free Measurements

The transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics is applied to the "interaction-free" measurement scenario of Elitzur and Vaidman and to the Quantum Zeno Effect version of the measurement scenario by Kwiat, et al. It is shown that the non-classical information provided by the measurement scheme is supplied by the probing of the intervening object by incomplete offer and confirmation waves that do not form complete transactions or lead to real interactions.Comment: Accepted for publication in Foundations of Physics Letter

Dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates with dipole-dependent scattering length

We consider a Bose-Einstein condensate of polar molecules in a harmonic trap, where the effective dipole may be tuned by an external field. We demonstrate that taking into account the dependence of the scattering length on the dipole moment is essential to reproducing the correct energies and for predicting the stability of the condensate. We do this by comparing Gross-Pitaevskii calculations with diffusion Monte Carlo calculations. We find very good agreement between the results obtained by these two approaches once the dipole dependence of the scattering length is taken into account. We also examine the behavior of the condensate in non-isotropic traps

Fully-Coupled Simulation of Cosmic Reionization. I: Numerical Methods and Tests

We describe an extension of the Enzo code to enable fully-coupled radiation hydrodynamical simulation of inhomogeneous reionization in large $\sim (100 Mpc)^3$ cosmological volumes with thousands to millions of point sources. We solve all dynamical, radiative transfer, thermal, and ionization processes self-consistently on the same mesh, as opposed to a postprocessing approach which coarse-grains the radiative transfer. We do, however, employ a simple subgrid model for star formation which we calibrate to observations. Radiation transport is done in the grey flux-limited diffusion (FLD) approximation, which is solved by implicit time integration split off from the gas energy and ionization equations, which are solved separately. This results in a faster and more robust scheme for cosmological applications compared to the earlier method. The FLD equation is solved using the hypre optimally scalable geometric multigrid solver from LLNL. By treating the ionizing radiation as a grid field as opposed to rays, our method is scalable with respect to the number of ionizing sources, limited only by the parallel scaling properties of the radiation solver. We test the speed and accuracy of our approach on a number of standard verification and validation tests. We show by direct comparison with Enzo's adaptive ray tracing method Moray that the well-known inability of FLD to cast a shadow behind opaque clouds has a minor effect on the evolution of ionized volume and mass fractions in a reionization simulation validation test. We illustrate an application of our method to the problem of inhomogeneous reionization in a 80 Mpc comoving box resolved with $3200^3$ Eulerian grid cells and dark matter particles.Comment: 32 pages, 23 figures. ApJ Supp accepted. New title and substantial revisions re. v

A laser probe ⁴⁰Ar /³⁹Ar and INAA investigation of four Apollo granulitic breccias

Infrared laser probe 40Ar/39Ar geochronology, instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) and analytical electron microscopy have been performed on four 0.5 x 1.0 x 0.3 cm polished rock tiles of Apollo 16 and 17 granulitic breccias (60035, 77017, 78155, and 79215). Pyroxene thermometry indicates that these samples were re-equilibrated and underwent peak metamorphic sub-solidus recrystallization at 1000 – 1100°C, which resulted in homogeneous mineral compositions and granoblastic textures. 40Ar/39Ar data from this study reveal that three samples (60035, 77017, and 78155) have peak metamorphic ages of ~4.1 Ga. Sample 79215 has a peak metamorphic age of 3.9 Ga, which may be related to Serenitatis basin formation. All four samples contain moderately high concentrations of meteoritic siderophiles. Enhanced siderophile contents in three of the samples provide evidence for projectile contamination of their target lithologies occurring prior to peak metamorphism. Post-peak metamorphism, low-temperature (<300ºC) events caused the partial resetting of argon in the two finer-grained granulites (60035 and 77017). These later events did not alter the mineralogy or texture of the rocks, but caused minor brecciation and the partial release of argon from plagioclase. Interpretation of the low-temperature data indicates partial resetting of the argon systematics to as young as 3.2 Ga for 60035 and 2.3 Ga for 77017. Cosmic ray exposure ages range from 6.4 to ~339 Ma. Our results increase the amount of high-precision data available for the granulitic breccias and lunar highlands crustal samples. The results demonstrate the survival of pre-Nectarian material on the lunar surface and document the effects of contact metamorphic and impact processes during the pre-Nectarian Epoch, as well as the low-temperature partial resetting of ages by smaller impact events after 3.9 Ga. The mineralogy and chemical composition of these rocks, as well as exhumation constraints, indicate that the source of heat for metamorphism was within kilometres of the surface via burial beneath impact melt sheets or hot ejecta blankets

The Ubiquitous 'c': from the Stefan-Boltzmann Law to Quantum Information

I discuss various aspects of the role of the conformal anomaly number c in 2- and 1+1-dimensional critical behaviour: its appearance as the analogue of Stefan's constant, its fundamental role in conformal field theory, in the classification of 2d universality classes, and as a measure of quantum entanglement, among other topics.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures. Boltzmann Medal Lecture, Statphys24, Cairns 2010. v3: minor revision