Immunotoxicity of Ochratoxin and Citrinin in New Zealand White rabbits

In the present study, the effects of ochratoxin A (OTA), citrinin (CIT) and their combination on the immunological parameters were studied in 6-8 weeks old New Zealand White rabbits at 60 d post-intoxication. Thirty two rabbits were divided into four groups of eight. OTA, CIT and a combination of the two were given at 0.75 mg/kg, 15 mg/kg and 0.75 plus 15 mg/kg, in feed respectively for up to 60 d of the trial. Other fourth group was used as a control, being fed standard toxin free feed. The toxin treated animals showed a signifi cant decline in antibody titres to sheep red blood cells. The reduction in the cell mediated immune response was more signifi cant in the OTA and combination groups as observed in the skin hypersensitivity test and the lymphocyte proliferation assay. The citrinin-treated rabbits failed to show any signifi cant changes following the lymphocyte transformation assay and the delayed type hypersensitivity test. Histologically, the cellular (mononuclear cells) reaction in the skin in the treated groups was comparatively lesser than that of the control group. Thus, the present study in rabbits indicated signifi cantly lower humoral and cellular immune responses in the OTA and combination groupsThe authors would like to acknowledge the help extended by the Director of the IVRI and the Head of the Division of Pathology in the execution of this research. This study was financially supported in part by the NATP-CGP (ICAR) Project No. II/221.Kumar, M.; Dwivedi, P.; Sharma, A.; Telang, A.; Patil, R.; Singh, N. (2010). Immunotoxicity of Ochratoxin and Citrinin in New Zealand White rabbits. World Rabbit Science. 16(1). http://hdl.handle.net/10251/851416

Parity and Time Reversal in the Spin-Rotation Interaction

A recently reported discrepancy between experimental and theoretical values of the muon's g-2 factor is interpreted as due to small violations of the conservation of P and T in the spin-rotation coupling. The experiments place an upper limit on these violations and on the weight change of spinning gyroscopes.Comment: 3 page

Is There an Observable Limit to Lorentz Invariance at the Compton Wavelength Scale?

The possibility of a frame-induced violation of Lorentz invariance due to non-inertial spin-1/2 particle motion is explored in detail for muon decay while in orbit near the event horizon of a microscopic Kerr black hole. It is explicitly shown that kinematic and curvature contributions to the muon's decay spectrum--in the absence of any unforeseen processes due to quantum gravity--lead to its stabilization at the muon's Compton wavelength scale. This example is emblematic of the search for unambiguous indicators to critically assess current and future approaches to quantum gravity research.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figure; 2009 Gravity Research Foundation essay competition submission; accepted for publication in General Relativity and Gravitatio

Bringing PLOS Genetics Editors to Preprint Servers

What's the first thing you do after making a cool new discovery? If you're like us, you run up and down the hallway, propelled by excitement, eager to show your latest result to your colleagues. But the hallway is a pretty limited audience, so we soon turn to publishing our work in a peer-reviewed journal to show it to the whole world (assuming it is an open-access journal). That's when the fun of discovery can come to a screeching halt and turn into dreary hours of formatting and online form submission only to wait weeks, if not months, for your manuscript to wend its way through the peer-review system. Preprint servers (PPS) can short-circuit those cheerless steps, at least for a time, and allow the fruits of your labor to be seen immediately by all who are interested. In addition to increasing the visibility of authors' work, PPS provide opportunities for journals to identify manuscripts that are good fit for their audience. In that vein, PLOS Genetics is pleased to announce a new initiative to use PPS for identifying and soliciting manuscripts, as part of PLOS' overall mission to improve the efficiency and accessibility of science communication (and, of course, to make the process less cheerless for authors). As part of that effort, we now have a dedicated team of editors who will focus on identifying manuscripts on PPS that are potentially suitable for publication in PLOS Genetics

Gravitational Atom in Compactified Extra Dimensions

We consider quantum mechanical effects of the modified Newtonian potential in the presence of extra compactified dimensions. We develop a method to solve the resulting Schroedinger equation and determine the energy shifts caused by the Yukawa-type corrections of the potential. We comment on the possibility of detecting the modified gravitational bound state Energy spectrum by present day and future experiments.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure

Spin-gravity coupling and gravity-induced quantum phases

External gravitational fields induce phase factors in the wave functions of particles. The phases are exact to first order in the background gravitational field, are manifestly covariant and gauge invariant and provide a useful tool for the study of spin-gravity coupling and of the optics of particles in gravitational or inertial fields. We discuss the role that spin-gravity coupling plays in particular problems.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figur

Quantum Locality

It is argued that while quantum mechanics contains nonlocal or entangled states, the instantaneous or nonlocal influences sometimes thought to be present due to violations of Bell inequalities in fact arise from mistaken attempts to apply classical concepts and introduce probabilities in a manner inconsistent with the Hilbert space structure of standard quantum mechanics. Instead, Einstein locality is a valid quantum principle: objective properties of individual quantum systems do not change when something is done to another noninteracting system. There is no reason to suspect any conflict between quantum theory and special relativity.Comment: Introduction has been revised, references added, minor corrections elsewhere. To appear in Foundations of Physic

Crossing w=-1 in Gauss-Bonnet Brane World with Induced Gravity

Recent type Ia supernovas data seemingly favor a dark energy model whose equation of state $w(z)$ crosses -1 very recently, which is a much more amazing problem than the acceleration of the universe. In this paper we show that it is possible to realize such a crossing without introducing any phantom component in a Gauss-Bonnet brane world with induced gravity, where a four dimensional curvature scalar on the brane and a five dimensional Gauss-Bonnet term in the bulk are present. In this realization, the Gauss-Bonnet term and the mass parameter in the bulk play a crucial role.Comment: Revtex 16 pages including 10 eps files, references added, to appear in Comm. Theor. Phy

Point-contact Andreev-reflection spectroscopy in ReFeAsO_{1-x}F_x (Re = La, Sm): Possible evidence for two nodeless gaps

A deep understanding of the character of superconductivity in the recently discovered Fe-based oxypnictides ReFeAsO1-xFx (Re = rare-earth) necessarily requires the determination of the number of the gaps and their symmetry in k space, which are fundamental ingredients of any model for the pairing mechanism in these new superconductors. In the present paper, we show that point-contact Andreev-reflection experiments performed on LaFeAsO1-xFx (La-1111) polycrystals with Tc ~ 27 K and SmFeAsO0.8F0.2 (Sm-1111) ones with Tc ~ 53 K gave differential conductance curves exhibiting two peaks at low bias and two additional structures (peaks or shoulders) at higher bias, an experimental situation quite similar to that observed by the same technique in pure and doped MgB2. The single-band Blonder-Tinkham-Klapwijk model is totally unable to properly fit the conductance curves, while the two-gap one accounts remarkably well for the shape of the whole experimental dI/dV vs. V curves. These results give direct evidence of two nodeless gaps in the superconducting state of ReFeAsO1-xFx (Re = La, Sm): a small gap, Delta1, smaller than the BCS value (2Delta1/kBTc ~ 2.2 - 3.2) and a much larger gap Delta2 which gives a ratio 2Delta2/kBTc ~ 6.5 - 9. In Sm-1111 both gaps close at the same temperature, very similar to the bulk Tc, and follow a BCS-like behaviour, while in La-1111 the situation is more complex, the temperature dependence of the gaps showing remarkable deviations from the BCS behaviour at T close to Tc. The normal-state conductance reproducibly shows an unusual, but different, shape in La-1111 and Sm-1111 with a depression or a hump at zero bias, respectively. These structures survive up to T* ~ 140 K, close to the temperatures at which structural and magnetic transitions occur in the parent, undoped compound.Comment: 10 pages, 7 color figures, Special Issue of Physica C on Superconducting Pnictide