Why do people (not) engage in social distancing? Proximate and ultimate analyses of Norm-Following during the COVID-19 pandemic

COVID-19 has had a profound negative effect on many aspects of human life. While pharmacological solutions are being developed and implemented, the onus of mitigating the impact of the virus falls, in part, on individual citizens and their adherence to public health guidelines. However, promoting adherence to these guidelines has proven challenging. There is a pressing need to understand the factors that influence people’s adherence to these guidelines in order to improve public compliance. To this end, the current study investigated whether people’s perceptions of others’ adherence predict their own adherence. We also investigated whether any influence of perceived social norms was mediated by perceptions of the moral wrongness of non-adherence, anticipated shame for non-adherence, or perceptions of disease severity. One hundred fifty-two Australians participated in our study between June 6, 2020 and August 21, 2020. Findings from this preliminary investigation suggest that (1) people match their behavior to perceived social norms, and (2) this is driven, at least in part, by people using others’ behavior as a cue to the severity of disease threat. Such findings provide insight into the proximate and ultimate bases of norm-following behavior, and shed preliminary light on public health-related behavior in the context of a pandemic. Although further research is needed, the results of this study—which suggest that people use others’ behavior as a cue to how serious the pandemic is and as a guide for their own behavior—could have important implications for public health organizations, social movements, and political leaders and the role they play in the fight against epidemics and pandemics

Boron Fullerenes: A First-Principles Study

A family of unusually stable boron cages was identified and examined using first-principles local density functional method. The structure of the fullerenes is similar to that of the B12 icosahedron and consists of six crossing double-rings. The energetically most stable fullerene is made up of 180 boron atoms. A connection between the fullerene family and its precursors, boron sheets, is made. We show that the most stable boron sheets are not necessarily precursors of very stable boron cages. Our finding is a step forward in the understanding of the structure of the recently produced boron nanotubes.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, 1 tabl

Identity of the imaginary-time and real-time thermal propagators for scalar bound states in a one-generation Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model

By rigorous reanalysis of the results, we have proven that the propagators at finite temperature for scalar bound states in one-generation fermion condensate scheme of electroweak symmetry breaking are in fact identical in the imaginary-time and the real-time formalism. This dismisses the doubt about possible discrepancy between the two formalisms in this problem. Identity of the derived thermal transformation matrices of the real-time matrix propagators for scalar bound states without and with chemical potential and the ones for corresponding elementary scalar particles shows similarity of thermodynamic property between the two types of particles. Only one former inference is modified, i.e. when the two flavors of fermions have unequal nonzero masses, the amplitude of the composite Higgs particle will decay instead grow in time.Comment: 5 pages, revtex4, no figure

Microlensing as a probe of the Galactic structure; 20 years of microlensing optical depth studies

Microlensing is now a very popular observational astronomical technique. The investigations accessible through this effect range from the dark matter problem to the search for extra-solar planets. In this review, the techniques to search for microlensing effects and to determine optical depths through the monitoring of large samples of stars will be described. The consequences of the published results on the knowledge of the Milky-Way structure and its dark matter component will be discussed. The difficulties and limitations of the ongoing programs and the perspectives of the microlensing optical depth technique as a probe of the Galaxy structure will also be detailed.Comment: Accepted for publication in General Relativity and Gravitation. General Relativity and Gravitation in press (2010) 0

Large-scale pharmacogenomic study of sulfonylureas and the QT, JT and QRS intervals: CHARGE Pharmacogenomics Working Group

Sulfonylureas, a commonly used class of medication used to treat type 2 diabetes, have been associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. Their effects on QT interval duration and related electrocardiographic phenotypes are potential mechanisms for this adverse effect. In 11 ethnically diverse cohorts that included 71 857 European, African-American and Hispanic/Latino ancestry individuals with repeated measures of medication use and electrocardiogram (ECG) measurements, we conducted a pharmacogenomic genome-wide association study of sulfonylurea use and three ECG phenotypes: QT, JT and QRS intervals. In ancestry-specific meta-analyses, eight novel pharmacogenomic loci met the threshold for genome-wide significance (P<5 × 10−8), and a pharmacokinetic variant in CYP2C9 (rs1057910) that has been associated with sulfonylurea-related treatment effects and other adverse drug reactions in previous studies was replicated. Additional research is needed to replicate the novel findings and to understand their biological basis

Exact Hypersurface-Homogeneous Solutions in Cosmology and Astrophysics

A framework is introduced which explains the existence and similarities of most exact solutions of the Einstein equations with a wide range of sources for the class of hypersurface-homogeneous spacetimes which admit a Hamiltonian formulation. This class includes the spatially homogeneous cosmological models and the astrophysically interesting static spherically symmetric models as well as the stationary cylindrically symmetric models. The framework involves methods for finding and exploiting hidden symmetries and invariant submanifolds of the Hamiltonian formulation of the field equations. It unifies, simplifies and extends most known work on hypersurface-homogeneous exact solutions. It is shown that the same framework is also relevant to gravitational theories with a similar structure, like Brans-Dicke or higher-dimensional theories.Comment: 41 pages, REVTEX/LaTeX 2.09 file (don't use LaTeX2e !!!) Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Evidence of Color Coherence Effects in W+jets Events from ppbar Collisions at sqrt(s) = 1.8 TeV

We report the results of a study of color coherence effects in ppbar collisions based on data collected by the D0 detector during the 1994-1995 run of the Fermilab Tevatron Collider, at a center of mass energy sqrt(s) = 1.8 TeV. Initial-to-final state color interference effects are studied by examining particle distribution patterns in events with a W boson and at least one jet. The data are compared to Monte Carlo simulations with different color coherence implementations and to an analytic modified-leading-logarithm perturbative calculation based on the local parton-hadron duality hypothesis.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures. Submitted to Physics Letters

Measurement of the polarisation of W bosons produced with large transverse momentum in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV with the ATLAS experiment

This paper describes an analysis of the angular distribution of W->enu and W->munu decays, using data from pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV recorded with the ATLAS detector at the LHC in 2010, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of about 35 pb^-1. Using the decay lepton transverse momentum and the missing transverse energy, the W decay angular distribution projected onto the transverse plane is obtained and analysed in terms of helicity fractions f0, fL and fR over two ranges of W transverse momentum (ptw): 35 < ptw < 50 GeV and ptw > 50 GeV. Good agreement is found with theoretical predictions. For ptw > 50 GeV, the values of f0 and fL-fR, averaged over charge and lepton flavour, are measured to be : f0 = 0.127 +/- 0.030 +/- 0.108 and fL-fR = 0.252 +/- 0.017 +/- 0.030, where the first uncertainties are statistical, and the second include all systematic effects.Comment: 19 pages plus author list (34 pages total), 9 figures, 11 tables, revised author list, matches European Journal of Physics C versio

Observation of a new chi_b state in radiative transitions to Upsilon(1S) and Upsilon(2S) at ATLAS

The chi_b(nP) quarkonium states are produced in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV and recorded by the ATLAS detector. Using a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 4.4 fb^-1, these states are reconstructed through their radiative decays to Upsilon(1S,2S) with Upsilon->mu+mu-. In addition to the mass peaks corresponding to the decay modes chi_b(1P,2P)->Upsilon(1S)gamma, a new structure centered at a mass of 10.530+/-0.005 (stat.)+/-0.009 (syst.) GeV is also observed, in both the Upsilon(1S)gamma and Upsilon(2S)gamma decay modes. This is interpreted as the chi_b(3P) system.Comment: 5 pages plus author list (18 pages total), 2 figures, 1 table, corrected author list, matches final version in Physical Review Letter

Search for displaced vertices arising from decays of new heavy particles in 7 TeV pp collisions at ATLAS

We present the results of a search for new, heavy particles that decay at a significant distance from their production point into a final state containing charged hadrons in association with a high-momentum muon. The search is conducted in a pp-collision data sample with a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 33 pb^-1 collected in 2010 by the ATLAS detector operating at the Large Hadron Collider. Production of such particles is expected in various scenarios of physics beyond the standard model. We observe no signal and place limits on the production cross-section of supersymmetric particles in an R-parity-violating scenario as a function of the neutralino lifetime. Limits are presented for different squark and neutralino masses, enabling extension of the limits to a variety of other models.Comment: 8 pages plus author list (20 pages total), 8 figures, 1 table, final version to appear in Physics Letters