Adolescents care but don't feel responsible for farm animal welfare

Adolescents are the next generation of consumers with the potential to raise standards of farm animal welfare—to theirsatisfaction—if their preferences and concerns are translated into accurate market drivers and signals. There are no published data about adolescent views of farm animal welfare to allow meaningful design, implementation, and evaluation of educational strategies to improve consideration of—and behavior toward—farm animals. Knowledge of farm animal welfare, as well as beliefs and attitudes about farm animal welfare and behavioral intention relevant to it were determined in a sample of ukadolescents, using a survey incorporating an extended version of the theory of planned behavior and novel assessment tools. Our results indicate that adolescents have only a limited knowledge of welfare problems for farm animals and welfare-relevant product labels. Intentions to identify welfare standards for the animals from whom their food was derived were weak. Although they cared about farm animal welfare and agreed with fundamental principles—for example, the provision of space and the absence of pain and suffering—like adults they held limited belief in the power and responsibility that they possess through their choices as consumers; responsibility was often shifted to others, such as the government and farmers

Optimal eigenvalue estimate for the Dirac-Witten operator on bounded domains with smooth boundary

Eigenvalue estimate for the Dirac-Witten operator is given on bounded domains (with smooth boundary) of spacelike hypersurfaces satisfying the dominant energy condition, under four natural boundary conditions (MIT, APS, modified APS, and chiral conditions). This result is a generalisation of Friedrich's inequality for the usual Dirac operator. The limiting cases are also investigated.Comment: 2007, 18 pages, submitted 02 June 200

Hole density dependence of effective mass, mobility and transport time in strained Ge channel modulation-doped heterostructures

We performed systematic low-temperature (T = 350 mK–15 K) magnetotransport measurements on the two-dimensional hole gas with various sheet carrier densities Ps = (0.57–2.1)×1012 cm–2 formed in the strained Ge channel modulation-doped (MOD) SiGe heterostructures grown on Si substrates. It was found that the effective hole mass deduced by temperature dependent Shubnikov–de Hass oscillations increased monotonically from (0.087±0.05)m0 to (0.19±0.01)m0 with the increase of Ps, showing large band nonparabolicity in strained Ge. In contrast to this result, the increase of the mobility with increasing Ps (up to 29 000 cm2/V s) was observed, suggesting that Coulomb scattering played a dominant role in the transport of the Ge channel at low temperatures. In addition, the Dingle ratio of the transport time to the quantum lifetime was found to increase with increasing Ps, which was attributed to the increase of remote impurity scattering with the increase of the doping concentration in MOD SiGe layers

Wave function-dependent mobility and suppression of interface roughness scattering in a strained SiGe p-channel field-effect structure

The 4 K Hall mobility has been measured in a top-gated, inverted, modulation-doped Si/Si0.8Ge0.2 structure having a Si:B doping layer beneath the alloy. From comparisons with theoretical calculations, we argue that, unlike an ordinary enhancement-mode SiGe p-channel metal–oxide–semiconductor structure, this configuration leads to a decrease of interface roughness scattering with increasing sheet carrier density. We also speculate on the nature of the interface charge observed in these structures at low temperature

Particle production from nonlocal gravitational effective action

In this paper we show how the nonlocal effective action for gravity, obtained after integrating out the matter fields, can be used to compute particle production and spectra for different space-time metrics. Applying this technique to several examples, we find that the perturbative calculation of the effective action up to second order in curvatures yields exactly the same results for the total number of particles as the Bogolyubov transformations method, in the case of masless scalar fields propagating in a Robertson-Walker space-time. Using an adiabatic approximation we also obtain the corresponding spectra and compare the results with the traditional WKB approximation.Comment: 22 pages, LaTeX, no figures. Corrected version with new comments and results. To appear in Phys. Rev.

Extremely high room-temperature two-dimensional hole gas mobility in Ge/Si0.33Ge0.67/Si(001) p-type modulation-doped heterostructures

To extract the room-temperature drift mobility and sheet carrier density of two-dimensional hole gas (2DHG) that form in Ge strained channels of various thicknesses in Ge/Si0.33Ge0.67/Si(001) p-type modulation-doped heterostructures, the magnetic field dependences of the magnetoresistance and Hall resistance at temperature of 295 K were measured and the technique of maximum entropy mobility spectrum analysis was applied. This technique allows a unique determination of mobility and sheet carrier density of each group of carriers present in parallel conducting multilayers semiconductor heterostructures. Extremely high room-temperature drift mobility (at sheet carrier density) of 2DHG 2940 cm2 V–1 s–1 (5.11×1011 cm–2) was obtained in a sample with a 20 nm thick Ge strained channel

Advances in targeted Alpha therapy for prostate cancer

BACKGROUND: Amongst therapeutic radiopharmaceuticals, targeted alpha therapy (TαT) can deliver potent and local radiation selectively to cancer cells as well as the tumor microenvironment and thereby control cancer while minimizing toxicity. DESIGN: In this review, we discuss the history, progress, and future potential of TαT in the treatment of prostate cancer, including dosimetry-individualized treatment planning, combinations with small-molecule therapies, and conjugation to molecules directed against antigens expressed by prostate cancer cells, such as prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) or components of the tumor microenvironment. RESULTS: A clinical proof of concept that TαT is efficacious in treating bone-metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer has been demonstrated by radium-223 via improved overall survival and long-term safety/tolerability in the phase III ALSYMPCA trial. Dosimetry calculation and pharmacokinetic measurements of TαT provide the potential for optimization and individualized treatment planning for a precision medicine-based cancer management paradigm. The ability to combine TαTs with other agents, including chemotherapy, androgen receptor (AR)-targeting agents, DNA repair inhibitors, and immuno-oncology agents, is under investigation. Currently, TαTs that specifically target prostate cancer cells expressing PSMA represents a promising therapeutic approach. Both PSMA-targeted actinium-225 and thorium-227 conjugates are under investigation. CONCLUSIONS: The described clinical benefit, safety and tolerability of radium-223 and the recent progress in TαT trial development suggest that TαT occupies an important new role in prostate cancer treatment. Ongoing studies with newer dosimetry methods, PSMA targeting, and novel approaches to combination therapies should expand the utility of TαT in prostate cancer treatment

Extinction in Lotka-Volterra model

Competitive birth-death processes often exhibit an oscillatory behavior. We investigate a particular case where the oscillation cycles are marginally stable on the mean-field level. An iconic example of such a system is the Lotka-Volterra model of predator-prey competition. Fluctuation effects due to discreteness of the populations destroy the mean-field stability and eventually drive the system toward extinction of one or both species. We show that the corresponding extinction time scales as a certain power-law of the population sizes. This behavior should be contrasted with the extinction of models stable in the mean-field approximation. In the latter case the extinction time scales exponentially with size.Comment: 11 pages, 17 figure