169 research outputs found
Ivermectin, ‘Wonder drug’ from Japan: the human use perspective
Discovered in the late-1970s, the pioneering drug ivermectin, a dihydro derivative of avermectin—originating solely from a single microorganism isolated at the Kitasato Intitute, Tokyo, Japan from Japanese soil—has had an immeasurably beneficial impact in improving the lives and welfare of billions of people throughout the world. Originally introduced as a veterinary drug, it kills a wide range of internal and external parasites in commercial livestock and companion animals. It was quickly discovered to be ideal in combating two of the world’s most devastating and disfiguring diseases which have plagued the world’s poor throughout the tropics for centuries. It is now being used free-of-charge as the sole tool in campaigns to eliminate both diseases globally. It has also been used to successfully overcome several other human diseases and new uses for it are continually being found. This paper looks in depth at the events surrounding ivermectin’s passage from being a huge success in Animal Health into its widespread use in humans, a development which has led many to describe it as a “wonder” drug
Determination of the Strange Quark Content of the Nucleon from a Next-to-Leading-Order QCD Analysis of Neutrino Charm Production
We present the first next-to-leading-order QCD analysis of neutrino charm
production, using a sample of 6090 - and -induced
opposite-sign dimuon events observed in the CCFR detector at the Fermilab
Tevatron. We find that the nucleon strange quark content is suppressed with
respect to the non-strange sea quarks by a factor \kappa = 0.477 \:
^{+\:0.063}_{-\:0.053}, where the error includes statistical, systematic and
QCD scale uncertainties. In contrast to previous leading order analyses, we
find that the strange sea -dependence is similar to that of the non-strange
sea, and that the measured charm quark mass, , is larger and consistent with that determined in other processes.
Further analysis finds that the difference in -distributions between
and is small. A measurement of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa
matrix element is also presented.
uufile containing compressed postscript files of five Figures is appended at
the end of the LaTeX source.Comment: Nevis R#150
Ab initio atomistic thermodynamics and statistical mechanics of surface properties and functions
Previous and present "academic" research aiming at atomic scale understanding
is mainly concerned with the study of individual molecular processes possibly
underlying materials science applications. Appealing properties of an
individual process are then frequently discussed in terms of their direct
importance for the envisioned material function, or reciprocally, the function
of materials is somehow believed to be understandable by essentially one
prominent elementary process only. What is often overlooked in this approach is
that in macroscopic systems of technological relevance typically a large number
of distinct atomic scale processes take place. Which of them are decisive for
observable system properties and functions is then not only determined by the
detailed individual properties of each process alone, but in many, if not most
cases also the interplay of all processes, i.e. how they act together, plays a
crucial role. For a "predictive materials science modeling with microscopic
understanding", a description that treats the statistical interplay of a large
number of microscopically well-described elementary processes must therefore be
applied. Modern electronic structure theory methods such as DFT have become a
standard tool for the accurate description of individual molecular processes.
Here, we discuss the present status of emerging methodologies which attempt to
achieve a (hopefully seamless) match of DFT with concepts from statistical
mechanics or thermodynamics, in order to also address the interplay of the
various molecular processes. The new quality of, and the novel insights that
can be gained by, such techniques is illustrated by how they allow the
description of crystal surfaces in contact with realistic gas-phase
environments.Comment: 24 pages including 17 figures, related publications can be found at
http://www.fhi-berlin.mpg.de/th/paper.htm
Transformação genética e aplicação de glifosato na microbiota do solo, fixação biológica de nitrogênio, qualidade e segurança de grãos de soja geneticamente modificada
How To Find Charm in Nuclear Collisions at RHIC and LHC
Measurements of dilepton production from charm decay and Drell-Yan processes
respectively probe the gluon and sea quark distributions in hadronic
collisions. In nucleus-nucleus collisions, these hard scattering processes
constitute a `background' to thermal contributions from the hot matter produced
by the collision. To determine the magnitude and behavior of this background,
we calculate the hard scattering contribution to dilepton production in nuclear
collisions at RHIC and LHC at next to leading order in perturbative QCD.
Invariant mass, rapidity and transverse momentum distributions are presented.
We compare these results to optimistic hydrodynamic estimates of the thermal
dilepton production. We find that charm production from hard scattering is by
far the dominant contribution. Experiments therefore can measure the gluon
distribution in the nuclear target and projectile and, consequently, can
provide new information on gluon shadowing. We then illustrate how experimental
cuts on the rapidity gap between the leptons can aid in reducing the charm
background, thereby enhancing thermal information.Comment: 32 pages, latex, 19 figure
Aspectos morfológicos de frutos e sementes e caracterização citogenética de Crotalaria lanceolata E. Mey. (Papilionoideae - Fabaceae)
Morphology of fruits, seeds, seedlings and saplings of three species of Macrolobium Schreb. (Leguminosae, Caesalpinioideae) in the Brazilian Amazon floodplain
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