Gender Identity: Challenges to Accessing Social and Health Care Services for Lesbians in Nepal

Literature about same-sex love and sexuality in Nepal is rare. However, limited anecdotal evidence on these issues signals that the health and social care needs of lesbians in Nepal are high. This qualitative study explores the challenges faced by lesbians in Nepal in accessing health and social services. In-depth interviews carried out with fifteen lesbians found that Nepalese lesbians face many challenges from families and society which result in a stressful life, homelessness and forced and unwanted relationships and marriage, including self-harming behaviours. They often face discrimination and harassment when coming out at public administration and social institutions. Hence, most lesbians of Nepal prefer not to disclose their sexual identity due to the fear of becoming isolated and not getting quality health care services

Artificial Incoherent Speckles Enable Precision Astrometry and Photometry in High-Contrast Imaging

State-of-the-art coronagraphs employed on extreme adaptive optics enabled instruments are constantly improving the contrast detection limit for companions at ever-closer separations from the host star. In order to constrain their properties and, ultimately, compositions, it is important to precisely determine orbital parameters and contrasts with respect to the stars they orbit. This can be difficult in the post-coronagraphic image plane, as by definition the central star has been occulted by the coronagraph. We demonstrate the flexibility of utilizing the deformable mirror in the adaptive optics system of the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics system to generate a field of speckles for the purposes of calibration. Speckles can be placed up to 22.5 λ/D from the star, with any position angle, brightness, and abundance required. Most importantly, we show that a fast modulation of the added speckle phase, between 0 and π, during a long science integration renders these speckles effectively incoherent with the underlying halo. We quantitatively show for the first time that this incoherence, in turn, increases the robustness and stability of the adaptive speckles, which will improve the precision of astrometric and photometric calibration procedures. This technique will be valuable for high-contrast imaging observations with imagers and integral field spectrographs alike

Possible common central pathway for resistin and insulin in regulating food intake.

Aim: Adipose tissue has been the object of intense research in the field of obesity and diabetes diseases in the last decade. Examination of adipocyte-secreted peptides led to the identification of a unique polypeptide, resistin (RSTN), which has been suggested as a link between obesity and diabetes. RSTN plays a clearly documented role in blocking insulin (INS)-induced hypoglycaemia. As brain injection of INS affects feeding behaviour, we studied the possible interaction between INS and RSTN in food-deprived rats, measuring effects on food intake. In addition, we examined how RSTN might affect neuropeptide Y (NPY)-induced feeding, as studies have shown that rat RSTN can interfere with the NPY system. Methods: Overnight food-deprived rats were injected into the third brain ventricle (3V) with either INS (10 or 20 mUI), RSTN (0.1–0.4 nmol/rat), or saline before access to food. Another group of rats was injected into the 3V with RSTN alone, NPY alone or RSTN plus NPY. Their food intake and body weight were measured. Results: Our results confirm the hypophagic effect of RSTN on food deprivation-induced food intake, and more importantly, show that RSTN neither potentiates nor blocks the effects of INS on food intake, but does reduce the hyperphagic effect of NPY. Conclusion:  The observation that RSTN does not modify feeding INS-induced hypophagia, but does influence NPY-induced feeding, points to the possibility that RSTN may be involved in control of food intake through an NPY-ergic mechanism as INS

Bounded Model Checking for Probabilistic Programs

In this paper we investigate the applicability of standard model checking approaches to verifying properties in probabilistic programming. As the operational model for a standard probabilistic program is a potentially infinite parametric Markov decision process, no direct adaption of existing techniques is possible. Therefore, we propose an on-the-fly approach where the operational model is successively created and verified via a step-wise execution of the program. This approach enables to take key features of many probabilistic programs into account: nondeterminism and conditioning. We discuss the restrictions and demonstrate the scalability on several benchmarks

Network model of immune responses reveals key effectors to single and co-infection dynamics by a respiratory bacterium and a gastrointestinal helminth

Co-infections alter the host immune response but how the systemic and local processes at the site of infection interact is still unclear. The majority of studies on co-infections concentrate on one of the infecting species, an immune function or group of cells and often focus on the initial phase of the infection. Here, we used a combination of experiments and mathematical modelling to investigate the network of immune responses against single and co-infections with the respiratory bacterium Bordetella bronchiseptica and the gastrointestinal helminth Trichostrongylus retortaeformis. Our goal was to identify representative mediators and functions that could capture the essence of the host immune response as a whole, and to assess how their relative contribution dynamically changed over time and between single and co-infected individuals. Network-based discrete dynamic models of single infections were built using current knowledge of bacterial and helminth immunology; the two single infection models were combined into a co-infection model that was then verified by our empirical findings. Simulations showed that a T helper cell mediated antibody and neutrophil response led to phagocytosis and clearance of B. bronchiseptica from the lungs. This was consistent in single and co-infection with no significant delay induced by the helminth. In contrast, T. retortaeformis intensity decreased faster when co-infected with the bacterium. Simulations suggested that the robust recruitment of neutrophils in the co-infection, added to the activation of IgG and eosinophil driven reduction of larvae, which also played an important role in single infection, contributed to this fast clearance. Perturbation analysis of the models, through the knockout of individual nodes (immune cells), identified the cells critical to parasite persistence and clearance both in single and co-infections. Our integrated approach captured the within-host immuno-dynamics of bacteria-helminth infection and identified key components that can be crucial for explaining individual variability between single and co-infections in natural populations

Compton scattering beyond the impulse approximation

We treat the non-relativistic Compton scattering process in which an incoming photon scatters from an N-electron many-body state to yield an outgoing photon and a recoil electron, without invoking the commonly used frameworks of either the impulse approximation (IA) or the independent particle model (IPM). An expression for the associated triple differential scattering cross section is obtained in terms of Dyson orbitals, which give the overlap amplitudes between the N-electron initial state and the (N-1) electron singly ionized quantum states of the target. We show how in the high energy transfer regime, one can recover from our general formalism the standard IA based formula for the cross section which involves the ground state electron momentum density (EMD) of the initial state. Our formalism will permit the analysis and interpretation of electronic transitions in correlated electron systems via inelastic x-ray scattering (IXS) spectroscopy beyond the constraints of the IA and the IPM.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figur

Studies on charge production from Cs2Te photocathodes in the PITZ L-band normal conducting radio frequency photo injector

This paper discusses the behavior of electron bunch charge produced in an L-band normal conducting radio frequency cavity (RF gun) from Cs2Te photocathodes illuminated with ps-long UV laser pulses when the laser transverse distribution consists of a flat-top core with Gaussian-like decaying halo. The produced charge shows a linear dependence at low laser pulse energies as expected in the quantum efficiency limited emission regime, while its dependence on laser pulse energy is observed to be much weaker for higher values, due to space charge limited emission. However, direct plug-in of experimental parameters into the space charge tracking code ASTRA yields lower output charge in the space charge limited regime compared to measured values. The rate of increase of the produced charge at high laser pulse energies close to the space charge limited emission regime seems to be proportional to the amount of halo present in the radial laser profile since the charge from the core has saturated already. By utilizing core + halo particle distributions based on measured radial laser profiles, ASTRA simulations and semi-analytical emission models reproduce the behavior of the measured charge for a wide range of RF gun and laser operational parameters within the measurement uncertainties.Comment: 15 pages, 16 figures, 2 table

Positron and positronium affinities in the work-formalism Hartree-Fock approximation

Positron binding to anions is investigated within the work formalism proposed by Harbola and Sahni for the halide anions and the systems Li^- through O^- excluding Be^- and N^-. The toal ground-state energies of the anion-positron bound systems are empirically found to be an upper bound to the Hartree-Fock energies. The computed expectation values as well as positron and positronium affinities are in good agreement with their restricted Hartree-Fock counterparts. Binding of a positron to neutral species is also investigated using an iterative method.Comment: 12 pages, to appear in Physical Review