Social tenants’ health: evaluating the effectiveness of landlord interventions

Objectives: To test whether a social landlord can improve health outcomes for older tenants and reduce their NHS usage by simple interventions. Design: Randomised controlled trial. Setting: Social housing in five London Boroughs. Participants: 547 individuals over 50 years of age. Intervention: Baseline and two follow-up assessments of individual’s health and use of medical services undertaken by health professionals. In the treated groups, individuals were given health care and support at two different levels. 25 individuals had to be removed from the trial because early assessments revealed critical and untreated health issues. Main outcome measures: Self-reported health and wellbeing ratings and NHS usage. Conclusions: Even simple interventions to a targeted group (older and poorer people), can produce significant reductions in NHS usage. Significant reductions were found for 1) planned hospital usage; 2) nights in hospital; and 3) for emergency GP usage. Well-being scores improved in the most strongly treated group but these were not statistically significant. Perhaps the single most important finding was that the early health evaluations revealed that 4.5% of the total sample – not in the most deprived section of the population – had such severe health problems that significant and immediate intervention was require

Black Hole Entropy from Quantum Mechanics

We provide evidence for a holographic duality between superconformal quantum mechanics on the moduli space of Yang-Mills instantons and M-theory in certain asymptotically $AdS_{7}\times S^{4}$ backgrounds with a plane-wave boundary metric. We show that the gravitational background admits a supersymmetric black hole solution whose entropy is precisely reproduced by the superconformal index of the dual quantum mechanics

Five-dimensional non-Lorentzian conformal field theories and their relation to six-dimensions

We study correlation functions in five-dimensional non-Lorentzian theories with an SU(1, 3) conformal symmetry. Examples of such theories have recently been obtained as Ω-deformed Yang-Mills Lagrangians arising from a null reduction of six-dimensional superconformal field theories on a conformally compactified Minkowski space. The correlators exhibit a rich structure with many novel properties compared to conventional correlators in Lorentzian conformal field theories. Moreover, identifying the instanton number with the Fourier mode number of the dimensional reduction offers a hope to formulate six-dimensional conformal field theories in terms of five-dimensional Lagrangian theories. To this end we show that the Fourier decompositions of six-dimensional correlation functions solve the Ward identities of the SU(1, 3) symmetry, although more general solutions are possible. Conversely we illustrate how one can reconstruct six-dimensional correlation functions from those of a five-dimensional theory, and do so explicitly at 2- and 3-points. We also show that, in a suitable decompactification limit Ω → 0, the correlation functions become those of the DLCQ description

AdS7_7 Black Holes from Rotating M5-branes

We construct a general asymptotically locally AdS$_7$ stationary black hole solution of 7d maximal gauged supergravity with three angular momenta and two electric charges. When embedded in 11d supergravity the black hole describes the backreaction of $N$ coincident rotating M5-branes. We study the thermodynamic properties of the black hole and present explicit expressions for its entropy, energy, electric charges, and angular momenta. We show that in the supersymmetric limit of the solution its entropy and on-shell action precisely agree with the result for the path integral of the holographically dual 6d $\mathcal{N}=(2,0)$ SCFT on $S^1\times S^5$ to leading order in the large $N$ limit.Comment: 32 page

The host protein Staufen1 interacts with the Pr55Gag zinc fingers and regulates HIV-1 assembly via its N-terminus

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licens

Role of capsid sequence and immature nucleocapsid proteins p9 and p15 in Human Immunodeficiency Virus type 1 genomic RNA dimerization

AbstractHIV-1 genomic RNA (gRNA) dimerization is important for viral infectivity and is regulated by proteolytic processing of the Gag precursor protein (Pr55gag) under the direction of the viral protease. The processing occurs in successive steps and, to date, the step associated with formation of a wild-type (WT) level of gRNA dimers has not been identified. The primary cleavage divides Pr55gag into two proteins. The C-terminal polypeptide is termed NCp15 (NCp7–p1–p6) because it contains the nucleocapsid protein (NC), a key determinant of gRNA dimerization and packaging. To examine the importance of precursor polypeptides NCp15 and NCp9 (NCp7–p1), we introduced mutations that prevented the proteolytic cleavages responsible for the appearance of NCp9 or NCp7. Using native Northern blot analysis, we show that gRNA dimerization was impaired when both the secondary (p1–p6) and tertiary (p7–p1) cleavage sites of NCp15 were abolished, but unaffected when only one or the other site was abolished. Though processing to NCp9 therefore suffices for a WT level of gRNA dimerization, we also show that preventing cleavage at the p7–p1 site abolished HIV-1 replication. To identify the minimum level of protease activity compatible with a WT level of gRNA dimers, we introduced mutations Thr26Ser and Ala28Ser in the viral protease to partially inactivate it, and we prepared composite HIV-1 resulting from the cotransfection of various ratios of WT and protease-inactive proviral DNAs. The results reveal that a 30% processing of Pr55gag into mature capsid proteins (CA/CA-p2) yielded a WT level of gRNA dimers, while a 10% Pr55gag processing hardly increased gRNA dimerization above the level seen in protease-inactive virions. We found that full gRNA dimerization required less than 50% WT NC in complementation asssays. Finally, we show that if we destroy alpha helix 1 of the capsid protein (CA), gRNA dimerization is impaired to the same extent as when the viral protease is inactivated. Cotransfection studies show that this CA mutation, in contrast to the NC-disabling mutations, has a dominant negative effect on HIV-1 RNA dimerization, viral core formation, and viral replication. This represents the first evidence that a capsid mutation can affect HIV-1 RNA dimerization