Single Top Production as a Window to Physics Beyond the Standard Model

Production of single top quarks at a high energy hadron collider is studied as a means to identify physics beyond the standard model related to the electroweak symmetry breaking. The sensitivity of the $s$-channel $W^*$ mode, the $t$-channel $W$-gluon fusion mode, and the \tw mode to various possible forms of new physics is assessed, and it is found that the three modes are sensitive to different forms of new physics, indicating that they provide complimentary information about the properties of the top quark. Polarization observables are also considered, and found to provide potentially useful information about the structure of the interactions of top.Comment: References added and minor discussion improvements; results unchanged; Version to be published in PR

The multifunctional solute carrier 3A2 (SLC3A2) confers a poor prognosis in the highly proliferative breast cancer subtypes

Background: Breast cancer (BC) is a heterogeneous disease characterised by variant biology, metabolic activity and patient outcome. This study aimed to evaluate the biological and prognostic value of the membrane solute carrier, SLC3A2 in BC with emphasis on the intrinsic molecular subtypes. Methods: SLC3A2 was assessed at the genomic level, using METABRIC data (n=1,980), and proteomic level, using immunohistochemistry on TMA sections constructed from a large well-characterised primary BC cohort (n=2,500). SLC3A2 expression was correlated with clinicopathological parameters, molecular subtypes, and patient outcome. Results: SLC3A2 mRNA and protein expression were strongly correlated with higher tumour grade and poor Nottingham prognostic index (NPI). High expression of SLC3A2 was observed in triple negative (TN), HER2+, and ER+ high proliferation subtypes. SLC3A2 mRNA and protein expression were significantly associated with the expression of c-MYC in all BC subtypes (p<0.001). High expression of SLC3A2 protein was associated with poor patient outcome (p<0.001)), but only in the ER+ high proliferation (p=0.01) and triple negative (p=0.04) subtypes. In multivariate analysis SLC3A2 protein was an independent risk factor for shorter breast cancer specific survival (p<0.001). Conclusions: SLC3A2 appears to play a role in the aggressive BC subtypes driven by MYC and could act as a potential prognostic marker. Functional assessment is necessary to reveal its potential therapeutic value in the different BC subtypes

Species identification of adult African blowflies (Diptera: Calliphoridae) of forensic importance:

Necrophagous blowflies can provide an excellent source of evidence for forensic entomologists and are also relevant to problems in public health, medicine, and animal health. However, access to useful information about these blowflies is constrained by the need to correctly identify the flies, and the poor availability of reliable, accessible identification tools is a serious obstacle to the development of forensic entomology in the majority of African countries. In response to this need, a high-quality key to the adults of all species of forensically relevant blowflies of Africa has been prepared, drawing on high-quality entomological materials and modern focus-stacking photomicroscopy. This new key can be easily applied by investigators inexperienced in the taxonomy of blowflies and is made available through a highly accessible online platform. Problematic diagnostic characters used in previous keys are discussed

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Nurses' perceptions of aids and obstacles to the provision of optimal end of life care in ICU

Contains fulltext : 172380.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access

A new weighted Gompertz distribution with applications to reliability data

summary:A new weighted version of the Gompertz distribution is introduced. It is noted that the model represents a mixture of classical Gompertz and second upper record value of Gompertz densities, and using a certain transformation it gives a new version of the two-parameter Lindley distribution. The model can be also regarded as a dual member of the log-Lindley-$X$ family. Various properties of the model are obtained, including hazard rate function, moments, moment generating function, quantile function, skewness, kurtosis, conditional moments, mean deviations, some types of entropy, mean residual lifetime and stochastic orderings. Estimation of the model parameters is justified by the method of maximum likelihood. Two real data sets are used to assess the performance of the model among some classical and recent distributions based on some evaluation goodness-of-fit statistics. As a result, the variance-covariance matrix and the confidence interval of the parameters, and some theoretical measures have been calculated for such data for the proposed model with discussions

Analytical and Semi-Analytical Treatment of the Satellite Motion in a Resisting Medium

The orbital dynamics of an artificial satellite in the Earth's atmosphere is considered. An analytic first-order atmospheric drag theory is developed using Lagrange's planetary equations. The short periodic perturbations due to the geopotential of all orbital elements are evaluated. And to construct a second-order analytical theory, the equations of motion become very complicated to be integrated analytically; thus we are forced to integrate them numerically using the method of Runge-Kutta of fourth order. The validity of the theory is checked on the already decayed Indian satellite ROHINI where its data are available

A stereoscopic study of the mouthparts of the marine isopod, Cirolana bovina (Isopoda: Flabellifera)

The three-dimensional study of the mouthparts of the isopod crustacean Cirolana bovina is carried out for specimens collected from the Mediterranean Sea, Alexandria, Egypt, to reveal their morphology and related cuticular microstructures, especially setal types. The mouthparts consist of a labrum, paragnaths, paired mandibles, maxillules, maxillae and maxillipeds. The labrum and the paragnaths are the least developed but peculiarly the mandibles are asymmetrical, large, stout and highly modified. The possible functions of the mouthparts, especially in feeding are discussed in light of their structure. KEY WORDS: Crustacea, isopods, SEM, mouthparts, cuticular microstructures. Egyptian Journal of Biology Vol.3(2) 2001: 20-2