Ginzburg-Landau vortex dynamics with pinning and strong applied currents

We study a mixed heat and Schr\"odinger Ginzburg-Landau evolution equation on a bounded two-dimensional domain with an electric current applied on the boundary and a pinning potential term. This is meant to model a superconductor subjected to an applied electric current and electromagnetic field and containing impurities. Such a current is expected to set the vortices in motion, while the pinning term drives them toward minima of the pinning potential and "pins" them there. We derive the limiting dynamics of a finite number of vortices in the limit of a large Ginzburg-Landau parameter, or \ep \to 0, when the intensity of the electric current and applied magnetic field on the boundary scale like \lep. We show that the limiting velocity of the vortices is the sum of a Lorentz force, due to the current, and a pinning force. We state an analogous result for a model Ginzburg-Landau equation without magnetic field but with forcing terms. Our proof provides a unified approach to various proofs of dynamics of Ginzburg-Landau vortices.Comment: 48 pages; v2: minor errors and typos correcte

Measurement of total cross sections on hydrogen and deuterium

Total cross sections of {pi}{sup {+-}}, K{sup {+-}}, p and {bar p} on hydrogen and deuterium are to be measured at about eight energies between 20 GeV and the maximum available energy. An accuracy of about one part in one thousand will yield the energy dependence of cross sections, comparisons of cross sections within SU(3) supermultiplets, and stringent tests of high energy limiting theorems

Pure adaptive search in monte carlo optimization

Pure adaptive search constructs a sequence of points uniformly distributed within a corresponding sequence of nested regions of the feasible space. At any stage, the next point in the sequence is chosen uniformly distributed over the region of feasible space containing all points that are equal or superior in value to the previous points in the sequence. We show that for convex programs the number of iterations required to achieve a given accuracy of solution increases at most linearly in the dimension of the problem. This compares to exponential growth in iterations required for pure random search.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/47920/1/10107_2005_Article_BF01582296.pd

Transitions of cardio-metabolic risk factors in the Americas between 1980 and 2014

Describing the prevalence and trends of cardiometabolic risk factors that are associated with non-communicable diseases (NCDs) is crucial for monitoring progress, planning prevention, and providing evidence to support policy efforts. We aimed to analyse the transition in body-mass index (BMI), obesity, blood pressure, raised blood pressure, and diabetes in the Americas, between 1980 and 2014

A century of trends in adult human height

Being taller is associated with enhanced longevity, and higher education and earnings. We reanalysed 1472 population-based studies, with measurement of height on more than 18.6 million participants to estimate mean height for people born between 1896 and 1996 in 200 countries. The largest gain in adult height over the past century has occurred in South Korean women and Iranian men, who became 20.2 cm (95% credible interval 17.5-22.7) and 16.5 cm (13.3-19.7) taller, respectively. In contrast, there was little change in adult height in some sub-Saharan African countries and in South Asia over the century of analysis. The tallest people over these 100 years are men born in the Netherlands in the last quarter of 20th century, whose average heights surpassed 182.5 cm, and the shortest were women born in Guatemala in 1896 (140.3 cm; 135.8-144.8). The height differential between the tallest and shortest populations was 19-20 cm a century ago, and has remained the same for women and increased for men a century later despite substantial changes in the ranking of countries

Rising rural body-mass index is the main driver of the global obesity epidemic in adults

Body-mass index (BMI) has increased steadily in most countries in parallel with a rise in the proportion of the population who live in cities 1,2 . This has led to a widely reported view that urbanization is one of the most important drivers of the global rise in obesity 3�6 . Here we use 2,009 population-based studies, with measurements of height and weight in more than 112 million adults, to report national, regional and global trends in mean BMI segregated by place of residence (a rural or urban area) from 1985 to 2017. We show that, contrary to the dominant paradigm, more than 55 of the global rise in mean BMI from 1985 to 2017�and more than 80 in some low- and middle-income regions�was due to increases in BMI in rural areas. This large contribution stems from the fact that, with the exception of women in sub-Saharan Africa, BMI is increasing at the same rate or faster in rural areas than in cities in low- and middle-income regions. These trends have in turn resulted in a closing�and in some countries reversal�of the gap in BMI between urban and rural areas in low- and middle-income countries, especially for women. In high-income and industrialized countries, we noted a persistently higher rural BMI, especially for women. There is an urgent need for an integrated approach to rural nutrition that enhances financial and physical access to healthy foods, to avoid replacing the rural undernutrition disadvantage in poor countries with a more general malnutrition disadvantage that entails excessive consumption of low-quality calories. © 2019, The Author(s)

Existence and uniqueness of measure solutions for a system of continuity equations with non-local flow

In this paper, we prove existence and uniqueness of measure solutions for the Cauchy problem associated to the (vectorial) continuity equation with a non-local ow. We also give a stability result with respect to various parameters

Nuclear knowledge and nuclear anxiety: A cross-cultural investigation

Based on survey responses of 1,115 male and female secondary school, college, and university students in North Carolina, California, England, and Western Australia, this study explored the relationship between the students' knowledge of nuclear weapons (“nuclear knowledge”) and (a) anxiety about nuclear war, (b) expectations about conditions in the aftermath of a nuclear attack, and (c) various attitudes about nuclear weapons. No consistent relationship was found between nuclear knowledge and nuclear anxiety for any of the samples. A consistent relationship existed between nuclear knowledge and expectations about the aftermath of a nuclear attack: In each group, those who knew more were more likely to be pessimistic about the conditions in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. Although there were significant relationships between nuclear knowledge and various attitudes about nuclear weapons, the magnitude and the direction of these relationships varied from group to group