A study of stress-free living bone and its application to space flight

Observations of animals and human subjects in weightless space flight (Skylab and COSMOS) document altered bone metabolism. Bone metabolism is affected by a number of local and systemic factors. The calcification and growth of transplanted bone is independent of local muscle, nervous, and mechanical forces; therefore, transplanted bone would provide data on the role of local vs. systematic factors. Bone metabolism in living transplanted bone, devoid of stress, was investigated as a possible tool for the investigation of countermeasures against disuse bone loss. An animal model using Sprague-Dawley rats was developed for transplantation of femur bone tissue on a nutrient vascular pedicel. The long term course of these implants was assessed through the measure of regional and total bone mineral, blood flow, and methylene diphosphonate (MDP) uptake. Clomid, an estrogen agonist/antagonist, was shown to protect bone from disuse loss of minerals by retarding trabecular and cortical resorption

Monolithic InP-Based Grating Spectrometer for Wavelength-Division Multiplexed Systems at 1.5 μm

A monolithic InP-based grating spectrometer for use in wavelength-division multiplexed systems at 1.5 μm is reported. The spectrometer uses a single etched reflective focusing diffraction grating and resolves >50 channels at 1 nm spacing with a ~0.3nm channel width and at least 19dB channel isolation. Operation is essentially of the state of the input polarisation

Infinite Kinematic Self-Similarity and Perfect Fluid Spacetimes

Perfect fluid spacetimes admitting a kinematic self-similarity of infinite type are investigated. In the case of plane, spherically or hyperbolically symmetric space-times the field equations reduce to a system of autonomous ordinary differential equations. The qualitative properties of solutions of this system of equations, and in particular their asymptotic behavior, are studied. Special cases, including some of the invariant sets and the geodesic case, are examined in detail and the exact solutions are provided. The class of solutions exhibiting physical self-similarity are found to play an important role in describing the asymptotic behavior of the infinite kinematic self-similar models.Comment: 38 pages, 6 figures. Accepted for publication in General Relativity & Gravitatio

Topologically Massive Non-Abelian Gauge Theories: Constraints and Deformations

We study the relationship between three non-Abelian topologically massive gauge theories, viz. the naive non-Abelian generalization of the Abelian model, Freedman-Townsend model and the dynamical 2-form theory, in the canonical framework. Hamiltonian formulation of the naive non-Abelian theory is presented first. The other two non-Abelian models are obtained by deforming the constraints of this model. We study the role of the auxiliary vector field in the dynamical 2-form theory in the canonical framework and show that the dynamical 2-form theory cannot be considered as the embedded version of naive non-Abelian model. The reducibility aspect and gauge algebra of the latter models are also discussed.Comment: ReVTeX, 17 pp; one reference added, version published in Phys. Rev.