Socio-Economic support for good health in rural Malawi

Objective: To study the socio-economic support for good health among subsistence farmers in rural Malawi.Design: A cross-sectional survey.Setting: Lungwena, a rural area with 17000 inhabitants in southern Malawi.Participants: Seven hundred and ninety five pregnant women who attended the antenatal clinic at Lungwena Health Centre between June 1995 and September 1996. Interventions: Interviews about socio-economic conditions. Measurements of cultivated land areas and distances between home and the local health centre. Main outcome measures: Proportion of households lacking literate adults, adequate water source and sanitation, easy access to modern health care or food security.Results: Only 14% of the interviewed women could read and write and half of the households had no literate members. Every fifth household was lacking both an access to safe drinking water and a proper sanitary facility. The distance to the health centre was more than 5 kmamong half of the households and only 37% had enough land to grow food for all family members. When other potential means of obtaining food were taken into account, 27% of the households had no food security. Numerous households were lacking more than one socioeconomic prerequisites of good health: three or more were missing from a quarter of the families.Conclusions: Socio-economic prerequisites of health were commonly missing in Lungwena. Subsequent health interventions should strengthen the investments into general poverty alleviation

MEMPHYS:A large scale water Cerenkov detector at Fr\'ejus

A water \v{C}erenkov detector project, of megaton scale, to be installed in the Fr\'ejus underground site and dedicated to nucleon decay, neutrinos from supernovae, solar and atmospheric neutrinos, as well as neutrinos from a super-beam and/or a beta-beam coming from CERN, is presented and compared with competitor projects in Japan and in the USA. The performances of the European project are discussed, including the possibility to measure the mixing angle $\theta_{13}$ and the CP-violating phase $\delta$.Comment: 1+33 pages, 14 figures, Expression of Interest of MEMPHYS projec

Nonlinear interaction of charged particles with a free electron gas beyond the random-phase approximation

A nonlinear description of the interaction of charged particles penetrating a solid has become of basic importance in the interpretation of a variety of physical phenomena. Here we develop a many-body theoretical approach to the quadratic decay rate, energy loss, and wake potential of charged particles moving in an interacting free electron gas. Explicit expressions for these quantities are obtained either within the random-phase approximation (RPA) or with full inclusion of short-range exchange and correlation effects. The Z^3 correction to the energy loss of ions is evaluated beyond RPA, in the limit of low velocities.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures To appear in Phys. Rev.

Yukawa potentials in systems with partial periodic boundary conditions I : Ewald sums for quasi-two dimensional systems

Yukawa potentials are often used as effective potentials for systems as colloids, plasmas, etc. When the Debye screening length is large, the Yukawa potential tends to the non-screened Coulomb potential ; in this small screening limit, or Coulomb limit, the potential is long ranged. As it is well known in computer simulation, a simple truncation of the long ranged potential and the minimum image convention are insufficient to obtain accurate numerical data on systems. The Ewald method for bulk systems, i.e. with periodic boundary conditions in all three directions of the space, has already been derived for Yukawa potential [cf. Y., Rosenfeld, {\it Mol. Phys.}, \bm{88}, 1357, (1996) and G., Salin and J.-M., Caillol, {\it J. Chem. Phys.}, \bm{113}, 10459, (2000)], but for systems with partial periodic boundary conditions, the Ewald sums have only recently been obtained [M., Mazars, {\it J. Chem. Phys.}, {\bf 126}, 056101 (2007)]. In this paper, we provide a closed derivation of the Ewald sums for Yukawa potentials in systems with periodic boundary conditions in only two directions and for any value of the Debye length. A special attention is paid to the Coulomb limit and its relation with the electroneutrality of systems.Comment: 40 pages, 5 figures and 4 table

Inter-areal coordination of columnar architectures during visual cortical development

The occurrence of a critical period of plasticity in the visual cortex has long been established, yet its function in normal development is not fully understood. Here we show that as the late phase of the critical period unfolds, different areas of cat visual cortex develop in a coordinated manner. Orientation columns in areas V1 and V2 become matched in size in regions that are mutually connected. The same age trend is found for such regions in the left and right brain hemisphere. Our results indicate that a function of critical period plasticity is to progressively coordinate the functional architectures of different cortical areas - even across hemispheres.Comment: 30 pages, 1 table, 6 figure

The Mitochondrial Contribution to Animal Performance, Adaptation, and Life-History Variation

We thank the National Science Foundation (grant IOS1738378 to W.R.H. and K.S.), SICB’s division of Comparative Physiology and Biochemistry and Comparative Endocrinology, the Company of Biologists, the Society of Experimental Biology, and the Canadian Society of Zoology for funding the symposium.  Peer reviewedPostprin

Resonance production by neutrinos: I. J=3/2 Resonances

The article contains general formulas for the production of J=3/2 resonances by neutrinos and antineutrinos. It specializes to the P_{33}(1232) resonance whose form factors are determined by theory and experiment and then are compared with experimental results at low and high energies. It is shown that the minimum in the low Q^2 region is a consequence of a combined effect from the vanishing of the vector form factors, the muon mass and Pauli blocking. Several improvements for the future investigations are suggested.Comment: 10 pages, LaTeX, misprints corrected, 1 reference adde

Nucleon to Delta Weak Excitation Amplitudes in the Non-relativistic Quark Model

We investigate the nucleon to Delta(1232) vector and axial vector amplitudes in the non-relativistic quark model of the Isgur-Karl variety. A particular interest is to investigate the SU(6) symmetry breaking, due to color hyperfine interaction. We compare the theoretical estimates to recent experimental investigation of the Adler amplitudes by neutrino scattering.Comment: \documentstyle[aps]{revtex}, 21pages; 11 postscript figures. Accepted for publication by Phys. Rev.