Explaining and inducing savant skills: privileged access to lower level, less-processed information

I argue that savant skills are latent in us all. My hypothesis is that savants have privileged access to lower level, less-processed information, before it is packaged into holistic concepts and meaningful labels. Owing to a failure in top-down inhibition, they can tap into information that exists in all of our brains, but is normally beyond conscious awareness. This suggests why savant skills might arise spontaneously in otherwise normal people, and why such skills might be artificially induced by low-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation. It also suggests why autistic savants are atypically literal with a tendency to concentrate more on the parts than on the whole and why this offers advantages for particular classes of problem solving, such as those that necessitate breaking cognitive mindsets. A strategy of building from the parts to the whole could form the basis for the so-called autistic genius. Unlike the healthy mind, which has inbuilt expectations of the world (internal order), the autistic mind must simplify the world by adopting strict routines (external order)

Time-Space Noncommutativity in Gravitational Quantum Well scenario

A novel approach to the analysis of the gravitational well problem from a second quantised description has been discussed. The second quantised formalism enables us to study the effect of time space noncommutativity in the gravitational well scenario which is hitherto unavailable in the literature. The corresponding first quantized theory reveals a leading order perturbation term of noncommutative origin. Latest experimental findings are used to estimate an upper bound on the time--space noncommutative parameter. Our results are found to be consistent with the order of magnitude estimations of other NC parameters reported earlier.Comment: 7 pages, revTe

Trade-offs between sociality and gastrointestinal parasite infection in the context of a natural disaster

This work was supported by ANID-Chilean scholarship [number 72190290], the National Institutes of Health Grants [R01AG060931] to N.S-M., L.J.N.B. and J.P.H., [R00AG051764] to N.S-M, [R01MH118203] to M.L.P., M.J.M, L.J.N.B. and N.S-M., [R01MH096875] to M.L.P., L.J.N.B. and M.J.M., [U01MH121260] to N.S-M., M.L.P. and M.J.M., a European Research Council Consolidator Grant to L.J.N.B. [Friend Origins - 864461].Parasites and infectious diseases constitute important challenges particularly for group-living animals. Social contact and shared space can both increase parasite transmission risk, while individual differences in social capital can help prevent infections. For example, high social status individuals and those with more or stronger affiliative partnerships may have better immunity and, thus, lower parasitic burden. To test for health trade-offs in the costs and benefits of sociality, we quantified how parasitic load varied with an individual's social status, as well as with their affiliative relationships with weakly and strongly bonded partners, in a free-ranging population of rhesus macaques, Macaca mulatta. We found that high status was associated with a lower risk of protozoa infection at older ages compared to younger and low-status animals. Social resources can also be protective against infection under environmentally challenging situations, such as natural disasters. Using cross-sectional data, we additionally examined the impact of a major hurricane on the sociality - parasite relationship in this system and found that the hurricane influenced the prevalence of specific parasites independent of sociality. Overall, our study adds to the growing evidence for social status as a strong predictor of infection risk and highlights how extreme environmental events could shape vulnerability and resistance to infection.Peer reviewe

Numerical study of the thermoelectric power factor in ultra-thin Si nanowires

Low dimensional structures have demonstrated improved thermoelectric (TE) performance because of a drastic reduction in their thermal conductivity, {\kappa}l. This has been observed for a variety of materials, even for traditionally poor thermoelectrics such as silicon. Other than the reduction in {\kappa}l, further improvements in the TE figure of merit ZT could potentially originate from the thermoelectric power factor. In this work, we couple the ballistic (Landauer) and diffusive linearized Boltzmann electron transport theory to the atomistic sp3d5s*-spin-orbit-coupled tight-binding (TB) electronic structure model. We calculate the room temperature electrical conductivity, Seebeck coefficient, and power factor of narrow 1D Si nanowires (NWs). We describe the numerical formulation of coupling TB to those transport formalisms, the approximations involved, and explain the differences in the conclusions obtained from each model. We investigate the effects of cross section size, transport orientation and confinement orientation, and the influence of the different scattering mechanisms. We show that such methodology can provide robust results for structures including thousands of atoms in the simulation domain and extending to length scales beyond 10nm, and point towards insightful design directions using the length scale and geometry as a design degree of freedom. We find that the effect of low dimensionality on the thermoelectric power factor of Si NWs can be observed at diameters below ~7nm, and that quantum confinement and different transport orientations offer the possibility for power factor optimization.Comment: 42 pages, 14 figures; Journal of Computational Electronics, 201

Ecological Invasion, Roughened Fronts, and a Competitor's Extreme Advance: Integrating Stochastic Spatial-Growth Models

Both community ecology and conservation biology seek further understanding of factors governing the advance of an invasive species. We model biological invasion as an individual-based, stochastic process on a two-dimensional landscape. An ecologically superior invader and a resident species compete for space preemptively. Our general model includes the basic contact process and a variant of the Eden model as special cases. We employ the concept of a "roughened" front to quantify effects of discreteness and stochasticity on invasion; we emphasize the probability distribution of the front-runner's relative position. That is, we analyze the location of the most advanced invader as the extreme deviation about the front's mean position. We find that a class of models with different assumptions about neighborhood interactions exhibit universal characteristics. That is, key features of the invasion dynamics span a class of models, independently of locally detailed demographic rules. Our results integrate theories of invasive spatial growth and generate novel hypotheses linking habitat or landscape size (length of the invading front) to invasion velocity, and to the relative position of the most advanced invader.Comment: The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com/content/8528v8563r7u2742

Exploring Flavor Structure of Supersymmetry Breaking at B factories

We investigate quark flavor signals in three different supersymmetric models, the minimal supergravity, the SU(5) SUSY GUT with right handed neutrinos, and the minimal supersymmetric standard model with U(2) flavor symmetry, in order to study physics potential of the present and future $B$ factories. We evaluate CP asymmetries in various B decay modes, $\Delta m_{B_s}$, $\Delta m_{B_d}$, and $\epsilon_K$. The allowed regions of the CP asymmetry in $B\to J/\psi K_S$ and $\Delta m_{B_s}/\Delta m_{B_d}$ are different for the three models so that precise determinations of these observables in near future experiments are useful to distinguish the three models. We also investigate possible deviations from the standard model predictions of CP asymmetries in other B decay modes. In particular, a large deviation is possible for the U(2) model. The consistency check of the unitarity triangle including $B\to \pi\pi,\rho\pi,D^{(*)}K^{(*)},D^{(*)}\pi,D^{*}\rho$, and so on, at future high luminosity $e^+e^-$ $B$ factories and hadronic $B$ experiments is therefore important to distinguish flavor structures of different supersymmetric models.Comment: revtex4, 31 pages, 7 figure