10,001 research outputs found
Taxonomic Features and Comparison of the Gut Microbiome from Two Edible Fungus-Farming Termites (Macrotermes falciger, M. natalensis) Harvested in the Vhembe District of Limpopo, South Africa
Background Termites are an important food resource for many human populations around the world, and are a good supply of nutrients. The fungus-farming âhigherâ termite members of Macrotermitinae are also consumed by modern great apes and are implicated as critical dietary resources for early hominins. While the chemical nutritional composition of edible termites is well known, their microbiomes are unexplored in the context of human health. Here we sequenced the V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene of gut microbiota extracted from the whole intestinal tract of two Macrotermes sp. soldiers collected from the Limpopo region of South Africa. Results Major and minor soldier subcastes of M. falciger exhibit consistent differences in taxonomic representation, and are variable in microbial presence and abundance patterns when compared to another edible but less preferred species, M. natalensis. Subcaste differences include alternate patterns in sulfate-reducing bacteria and methanogenic Euryarchaeota abundance, and differences in abundance between Alistipes and Ruminococcaceae. M. falciger minor soldiers and M. natalensissoldiers have similar microbial profiles, likely from close proximity to the termite worker castes, particularly during foraging and fungus garden cultivation. Compared with previously published termite and cockroach gut microbiome data, the taxonomic representation was generally split between termites that directly digest lignocellulose and humic substrates and those that consume a more distilled form of nutrition as with the omnivorous cockroaches and fungus-farming termites. Lastly, to determine if edible termites may point to a shared reservoir for rare bacterial taxa found in the gut microbiome of humans, we focused on the genus Treponema. The majority of Treponemasequences from edible termite gut microbiota most closely relate to species recovered from other termites or from environmental samples, except for one novel OTU strain, which clustered separately with Treponema found in hunter-gatherer human groups. Conclusions Macrotermes consumed by humans display special gut microbial arrangements that are atypical for a lignocellulose digesting invertebrate, but are instead suited to the simplified nutrition in the fungus-farmer diet. Our work brings to light the particular termite microbiome features that should be explored further as avenues in human health, agricultural sustainability, and evolutionary research
Fission Hindrance in hot 216Th: Evaporation Residue Measurements
The fusion evaporation-residue cross section for 32S+184W has been measured
at beam energies of E_beam = 165, 174, 185, 196, 205, 215, 225, 236, 246,and
257 MeV using the ATLAS Fragment Mass Analyzer. The data are compared with
Statistical Model calculations and it is found that a nuclear dissipation
strength, which increases with excitation energy, is required to reproduce the
excitation function. A comparison with previously published data show that the
dissipation strength depends strongly on the shell structure of the nuclear
system.Comment: 15 pages 9 figure
Small world yields the most effective information spreading
Spreading dynamics of information and diseases are usually analyzed by using
a unified framework and analogous models. In this paper, we propose a model to
emphasize the essential difference between information spreading and epidemic
spreading, where the memory effects, the social reinforcement and the
non-redundancy of contacts are taken into account. Under certain conditions,
the information spreads faster and broader in regular networks than in random
networks, which to some extent supports the recent experimental observation of
spreading in online society [D. Centola, Science {\bf 329}, 1194 (2010)]. At
the same time, simulation result indicates that the random networks tend to be
favorable for effective spreading when the network size increases. This
challenges the validity of the above-mentioned experiment for large-scale
systems. More significantly, we show that the spreading effectiveness can be
sharply enhanced by introducing a little randomness into the regular structure,
namely the small-world networks yield the most effective information spreading.
Our work provides insights to the understanding of the role of local clustering
in information spreading.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, accepted by New J. Phy
Circular Microstructural Volume Elements With Periodic Boundary Conditions for Localization Problems
Circadian pattern and burstiness in mobile phone communication
The temporal communication patterns of human individuals are known to be
inhomogeneous or bursty, which is reflected as the heavy tail behavior in the
inter-event time distribution. As the cause of such bursty behavior two main
mechanisms have been suggested: a) Inhomogeneities due to the circadian and
weekly activity patterns and b) inhomogeneities rooted in human task execution
behavior. Here we investigate the roles of these mechanisms by developing and
then applying systematic de-seasoning methods to remove the circadian and
weekly patterns from the time-series of mobile phone communication events of
individuals. We find that the heavy tails in the inter-event time distributions
remain robustly with respect to this procedure, which clearly indicates that
the human task execution based mechanism is a possible cause for the remaining
burstiness in temporal mobile phone communication patterns.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figure
Depth concentrations of deuterium ions implanted into some pure metals and alloys
Pure metals (Cu, Ti, Zr, V, Pd) and diluted Pd-alloys (Pd-Ag, Pd-Pt, Pd-Ru,
Pd-Rh) were implanted by 25 keV deuterium ions at fluences in the range
(1.2{\div}2.3)x1022 D+/m2. The post-treatment depth distributions of deuterium
ions were measured 10 days and three months after the implantation using
Elastic Recoil Detection Analysis (ERDA) and Rutherford Backscattering (RBS).
Comparison of the obtained results allowed to make conclusions about relative
stability of deuterium and hydrogen gases in pure metals and diluted Pd alloys.
Very high diffusion rates of implanted deuterium ions from V and Pd pure metals
and Pd alloys were observed. Small-angle X-ray scattering revealed formation of
nanosized defects in implanted corundum and titanium.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figure
Dissipative quantum mechanics and Kondo-like impurities on noncommutative two-tori
In a recent paper, by exploiting the notion of Morita equivalence for field
theories on noncommutative tori and choosing rational values of the
noncommutativity parameter (in appropriate units), a general
one-to-one correspondence between the -reduced conformal field theory (CFT)
describing a quantum Hall fluid (QHF) at paired states fillings and an Abelian noncommutative field theory (NCFT) has been
established . That allowed us to add new evidence to the relationship between
noncommutativity and quantum Hall fluids\cite% {ncmanybody}. On the other hand,
the -reduced CFT is equivalent to a system of two massless scalar bosons
with a magnetic boundary interaction as introduced by Callan et al., at the so
called ``magic''\ points. We are then able to describe, within such a
framework, the dissipative quantum mechanics of a particle confined to a plane
and subject to an external magnetic field normal to it. Here we develop such a
point of view by focusing on the case which corresponds to a quantum Hall
bilayer. The key role of a localized impurity which couples the two layers is
emphasized and the effect of noncommutativity in terms of generalized magnetic
translations (GMT) is fully exploited. As a result, general GMT operators are
introduced, in the form of a tensor product, which act on the QHF and defect
space respectively, and a comprehensive study of their rich structure is
performed.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figure, accepted for publication in International Journal
of Modern Physics
Synchrotron radiation from a charge moving along a helical orbit inside a dielectric cylinder
The radiation emitted by a charged particle moving along a helical orbit
inside a dielectric cylinder immersed into a homogeneous medium is
investigated. Expressions are derived for the electromagnetic potentials,
electric and magnetic fields, and for the spectral-angular distribution of
radiation in the exterior medium. It is shown that under the Cherenkov
condition for dielectric permittivity of the cylinder and the velocity of the
particle image on the cylinder surface, strong narrow peaks are present in the
angular distribution for the number of radiated quanta. At these peaks the
radiated energy exceeds the corresponding quantity for a homogeneous medium by
some orders of magnitude. The results of numerical calculations for the angular
distribution of radiated quanta are presented and they are compared with the
corresponding quantities for radiation in a homogeneous medium. The special
case of relativistic charged particle motion along the direction of the
cylinder axis with non-relativistic transverse velocity (helical undulator) is
considered in detail. Various regimes for the undulator parameter are
discussed. It is shown that the presence of the cylinder can increase
essentially the radiation intensity.Comment: 18 pages, 8 EPS figure
Strengthening health technology assessment systems in the global south: a comparative analysis of the HTA journeys of China, India and South Africa.
BACKGROUND: Resource allocation in health is universally challenging, but especially so in resource-constrained contexts in the Global South. Pursuing a strategy of evidence-based decision-making and using tools such as Health Technology Assessment (HTA), can help address issues relating to both affordability and equity when allocating resources. Three BRICS and Global South countries, China, India and South Africa have committed to strengthening HTA capacity and developing their domestic HTA systems, with the goal of getting evidence translated into policy. Through assessing and comparing the HTA journey of each country it may be possible to identify common problems and shareable insights. OBJECTIVES: This collaborative paper aimed to share knowledge on strengthening HTA systems to enable enhanced evidence-based decision-making in the Global South by: Identifying common barriers and enablers in three BRICS countries in the Global South; and Exploring how South-South collaboration can strengthen HTA capacity and utilisation for better healthcare decision-making. METHODS: A descriptive and explorative comparative analysis was conducted comprising a Within-Case analysis to produce a narrative of the HTA journey in each country and an Across-Case analysis to explore both knowledge that could be shared and any potential knowledge gaps. RESULTS: Analyses revealed that China, India and South Africa share many barriers to strengthening and developing HTA systems such as: (1) Minimal HTA expertise; (2) Weak health data infrastructure; (3) Rising healthcare costs; (4) Fragmented healthcare systems; and (5) Significant growth in non-communicable diseases. Stakeholder engagement and institutionalisation of HTA were identified as two conducive factors for strengthening HTA systems. CONCLUSION: China, India and South Africa have all committed to establishing robust HTA systems to inform evidence-based priority setting and have experienced similar challenges. Engagement among countries of the Global South can provide a supportive platform to share knowledge that is more applicable and pragmatic
Effective Conformal Theory and the Flat-Space Limit of AdS
We develop the idea of an effective conformal theory describing the low-lying
spectrum of the dilatation operator in a CFT. Such an effective theory is
useful when the spectrum contains a hierarchy in the dimension of operators,
and a small parameter whose role is similar to that of 1/N in a large N gauge
theory. These criteria insure that there is a regime where the dilatation
operator is modified perturbatively. Global AdS is the natural framework for
perturbations of the dilatation operator respecting conformal invariance, much
as Minkowski space naturally describes Lorentz invariant perturbations of the
Hamiltonian. Assuming that the lowest-dimension single-trace operator is a
scalar, O, we consider the anomalous dimensions, gamma(n,l), of the
double-trace operators of the form O (del^2)^n (del)^l O. Purely from the CFT
we find that perturbative unitarity places a bound on these dimensions of
|gamma(n,l)|<4. Non-renormalizable AdS interactions lead to violations of the
bound at large values of n. We also consider the case that these interactions
are generated by integrating out a heavy scalar field in AdS. We show that the
presence of the heavy field "unitarizes" the growth in the anomalous
dimensions, and leads to a resonance-like behavior in gamma(n,l) when n is
close to the dimension of the CFT operator dual to the heavy field. Finally, we
demonstrate that bulk flat-space S-matrix elements can be extracted from the
large n behavior of the anomalous dimensions. This leads to a direct connection
between the spectrum of anomalous dimensions in d-dimensional CFTs and
flat-space S-matrix elements in d+1 dimensions. We comment on the emergence of
flat-space locality from the CFT perspective.Comment: 46 pages, 2 figures. v2: JHEP published versio
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