Bordism Groups of Immersions and Classes Represented by Self-Intersections

We prove a geometrical version of Herbert's theorem by considering the self-intersection immersions of a self-transverse immersion up to bordism. This generalises Herbert's theorem to additional cohomology theories and gives a commutative diagram in the homotopy of Thom complexes. The proof uses Koschorke and Sanderson's operations and the fact that bordism of immersions gives a functor on the category of smooth manifolds and immersions.Comment: 16 page

Evaluating Detection of an Inhalational Anthrax Outbreak

One-sentence summary for table of contents: When syndromic surveillance detected a substantial proportion of outbreaks before clinical case finding, false-positive results occurred

Sovereignty, sanctions, and data sharing under international law

In September 2021, after inaugurating the Berlin-based World Health Organization (WHO) Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence, German Health Minister Jens Spahn indicated that sanctions might be an appropriate tool to deal with WHO member states that do not cooperate on data sharing during disease outbreaks. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the WHO, affirmed this, stating that "exploring the [idea of ] sanctions may be important" in cases where collaboration fails. Such comments indicate that the WHO Hub has been designed without much consideration of data sovereignty and "access and benefit sharing" (ABS) debates occurring across multiple United Nations (UN) bodies, including the WHO. Threats of sanctions do little to promote the ideals of equity and solidarity often touted as foundational to global health governance. They entrench the idea that pathogen samples and associated data are "bargaining chips" rather than vital inputs to public health research and pandemic response

A technical and legal analysis of triggers for monetary benefit-sharing from digital sequence information on genetic resources : A Report for the European Commission, Joint Research Centre

This study is the result of a response to a policy request submitted by DG ENV to the Knowledge Centre for Biodiversity (KCBD) through the KCBD ticketing system. It provides a technical and legal analysis of six triggers for monetary benefit-sharing from the use of digital sequence information (DSI) on genetic resources, evaluated against the criteria in para. 9 of Decision 15/9 of the 15th Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD/COP/DEC/15/9). This study suggests that a trigger based on commercial activity related to DSI (trigger 5) best meets the Decision’s criteria, with secondary options being commercialisation of DSI products (trigger 4) and a micro-levy (trigger 6). A fee at the point of access (trigger 1) and licences associated with DSI records (trigger 2) were found to restrict open access and innovation, require significant cooperation from database managers and fail to meet several criteria. Licences combined with mandatory cloud service platforms (trigger 3) also raise privacy and competition concerns. The commercialisation of DSI products (trigger 4) avoids impacting research but requires clear definitions and reliable payment collection. A micro-levy on DSI-related products or services (trigger 6) is feasible but may not effectively link to DSI use. The study finds that trigger 5, potentially combined with some elements from triggers 2 and/or 6, could support the development of a DSI multilateral mechanism (MLM) that meets the criteria of para. 9 of Decision 15/9

'Equity' in the pandemic treaty : the false hope of 'access and benefit-sharing'

During COVID-19 the international community repeatedly called for the equitable distribution of vaccines and other medical countermeasures. However, there was a substantial gap between this rhetoric and state action. High-income countries secured significantly more doses than they required, leaving many low-income countries unable to vaccinate their populations. Current negotiations for the new Pandemic Treaty under the World Health Organization (WHO) attempt to narrow the gap between rhetoric and behaviour by building the concept of equity into the Treaty's substantive content. But equity is difficult to define, much less to operationalize. Presently, WHO member states appear to have chosen "access and benefit sharing" (ABS) as the sole mechanism for operationalizing equity in the Treaty. This paper examines ABS as a mechanism, its use in public health, and argues that ABS is fundamentally flawed, unable to achieve equity. It proposes other options for an equitable international response to future pandemic threats

Comments on Article 12: Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS) of the REVISED Draft of the negotiating text of the World Health Organization's Pandemic Agreement, 13th March 2024

The comments in this working paper are our reflections on the current draft text (doc: A/INB/9/3 dated 13 March 2024) of the Pandemic Agreement currently being negotiated at the World Health Organization (WHO). Our comments mostly focus on Article 12 of the draft text on pathogen access and benefit-sharing. Some of our reflections are in the form of questions, but this is not to suggest that there are easy answers (or any answers at all) to these questions. The pathogen access and benefit-sharing (PABS) system set out in the draft Article 12 is supposed to (1.) ensure rapid access to pathogen samples and associated genetic sequence data (GSD), and (2.) ensure fair and equitable distribution of vaccines, diagnostics and treatments in the event of a pandemic. We point readers to our previous publications where we analyse the various problems of using an access and benefit-sharing (ABS) mechanism in the public health space, and have advocated for the above public health issues to be addressed separately (e.g. Hampton, Eccleston-Turner, Rourke and Switzer, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020589323000350). Linking these two public health issues using ABS creates more problems than it solves and we are concerned that it will not result in anything resembling fair or equitable for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs

Development of a Space-Flight ADR Providing Continuous Cooling at 50 Mk with Heat Rejection at 10 K

Future astronomical instruments will require sub-Kelvin detector temperatures to obtain high sensitivity. In many cases large arrays of detectors will be used, and the associated cooling systems will need performance surpassing the limits of present technologies. NASA is developing a compact cooling system that will lift heat continuously at temperatures below 50 mK and reject it at over 10 K. Based on Adiabatic Demagnetization Refrigerators (ADRs), it will have high thermodynamic efficiency and vibration-free operation with no moving parts. It will provide more than 10 times the current flight ADR cooling power at 50 mK and will also continuously cool a 4 K stage for instruments and optics. In addition, it will include an advanced magnetic shield resulting in external field variations below 5 T. We describe the cooling system here and report on the progress in its development

Precision Epoch of Reionization studies with next-generation CMB experiments

Future arcminute resolution polarization data from ground-based Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) observations can be used to estimate the contribution to the temperature power spectrum from the primary anisotropies and to uncover the signature of reionization near $\ell=1500$ in the small angular-scale temperature measurements. Our projections are based on combining expected small-scale E-mode polarization measurements from Advanced ACTPol in the range $300<\ell<3000$ with simulated temperature data from the full Planck mission in the low and intermediate $\ell$ region, $2<\ell<2000$. We show that the six basic cosmological parameters determined from this combination of data will predict the underlying primordial temperature spectrum at high multipoles to better than $1\%$ accuracy. Assuming an efficient cleaning from multi-frequency channels of most foregrounds in the temperature data, we investigate the sensitivity to the only residual secondary component, the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) term. The CMB polarization is used to break degeneracies between primordial and secondary terms present in temperature and, in effect, to remove from the temperature data all but the residual kSZ term. We estimate a $15 \sigma$ detection of the diffuse homogeneous kSZ signal from expected AdvACT temperature data at $\ell>1500$, leading to a measurement of the amplitude of matter density fluctuations, $\sigma_8$, at $1\%$ precision. Alternatively, by exploring the reionization signal encoded in the patchy kSZ measurements, we bound the time and duration of the reionization with $\sigma(z_{\rm re})=1.1$ and $\sigma(\Delta z_{\rm re})=0.2$. We find that these constraints degrade rapidly with large beam sizes, which highlights the importance of arcminute-scale resolution for future CMB surveys.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figure

Cosmological Parameters from Pre-Planck CMB Measurements

Recent data from the WMAP, ACT and SPT experiments provide precise measurements of the cosmic microwave background temperature power spectrum over a wide range of angular scales. The combination of these observations is well fit by the standard, spatially flat LCDM cosmological model, constraining six free parameters to within a few percent. The scalar spectral index, n_s = 0.9690 +/- 0.0089, is less than unity at the 3.6 sigma level, consistent with simple models of inflation. The damping tail of the power spectrum at high resolution, combined with the amplitude of gravitational lensing measured by ACT and SPT, constrains the effective number of relativistic species to be N_eff = 3.28 +/- 0.40, in agreement with the standard model's three species of light neutrinos.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure