AdS Black Hole Solutions in the Extended New Massive Gravity

We have obtained (warped) AdS black hole solutions in the three dimensional extended new massive gravity. We investigate some properties of black holes and obtain central charges of the two dimensional dual CFT. To obtain the central charges, we use the relation between entropy and temperature according to the AdS/CFT dictionary. For AdS black holes, one can also use the central charge function formalism which leads to the same results.Comment: 24pages, some organization corrected, minor corrections, references added, final published versio

Warped black holes in 3D general massive gravity

We study regular spacelike warped black holes in the three dimensional general massive gravity model, which contains both the gravitational Chern-Simons term and the linear combination of curvature squared terms characterizing the new massive gravity besides the Einstein-Hilbert term. The parameters of the metric are found by solving a quartic equation constrained by an inequality that imposes the absence of closed timelike curves. Explicit expressions for the central charges are suggested by exploiting the fact that these black holes are discrete quotients of spacelike warped AdS(3) and a known formula for the entropy. Previous results obtained separately in topological massive gravity and in new massive gravity are recovered as special cases.Comment: 38 pages, 7 figures. v2: minor changes, added refs and an appendix on self-dual and null z-warped black hole

A case of inflammatory pseudotumour of the gallbladder presenting as a big mass of uncertain behavior

Background: Inflammatory pseudotumour has been used to describe an inflammatory or fibrosing tumoral process of an undetermined cause that may involve a variety of organ systems, including the lungs, spleen, liver, lymph nodes, pancreas and extrahepatic bile duct with potential for recurrence and persistent local growth. In this article, we report a patient with a big mass of uncertain nature and behavior.Case presentationA 60-year-old woman presented with a 1-week history of abdominal pain, fever and jaundice. Six months before she had had right upper quadrant pain that was interpreted as biliary colic. A contrast-enhanced CT scan showed a big mass of soft tissue with diffuse infiltration of the gallbladder, displacement of the transverse colon, hepatic flexure and duodenum. For diagnostic distinction between a chronic inflammatory disease or a neoplasm, exploratory laparotomy was required. Intraoperative exploration disclosed a big mass of hard texture involving the gallbladder, with multiple concrements, hepatoduodenal ligament, right and transverse mesocolon, stomach and duodenum.Cholecystectomy was performed, preserving adjacent organs with macroscopic desmoplastic reaction. Histopathologic examination of the gallbladder showed a spindle cell proliferation with diffuse chronic inflammatory infiltrate of lymphocytes, plasma cells and hyalinized fibrous stroma. No vascular invasion or cellular atypia were evident.ConclusionInflammatory pseudotumour is a rare condition and diagnostic distinction from a chronic inflammatory disease or other neoplasm is only possible by histopathologic examination. There is a limited number of case reports in the literature indicating tumor location in the gallbladder

Holographic Renormalization and Stress Tensors in New Massive Gravity

We obtain holographically renormalized boundary stress tensors with the emphasis on a special point in the parameter space of three dimensional new massive gravity, using the so-called Fefferman-Graham coordinates with relevant counter terms. Through the linearized equations of motion with a standard prescription, we also obtain correlators among these stress tensors. We argue that the self-consistency of holographic renormalization determines counter terms up to unphysical ambiguities. Using these renormalized stress tensors in Fefferman-Graham coordinates, we obtain the central charges of dual CFT, and mass and angular momentum of some $AdS$ black hole solutions. These results are consistent with the previous ones obtained by other methods. In this study on the Fefferman-Graham expansion of new massive gravity, some aspects of higher curvature gravity are revealed.Comment: Version accepted for publication in JHEP, conclusion revised, references adde

Multidisciplinary teams, and parents, negotiating common ground in shared-care of children with long-term conditions: A mixed methods study

Background: Limited negotiation around care decisions is believed to undermine collaborative working between parents of children with long-term conditions and professionals, but there is little evidence of how they actually negotiate their respective roles. Using chronic kidney disease as an exemplar this paper reports on a multi-method study of social interaction between multidisciplinary teams and parents as they shared clinical care. Methods. Phases 1 and 2: a telephone survey mapping multidisciplinary teams' parent-educative activities, and qualitative interviews with 112 professionals (Clinical-psychologists, Dietitians, Doctors, Nurses, Play-specialists, Pharmacists, Therapists and Social-workers) exploring their accounts of parent-teaching in the 12 British children's kidney units. Phase 3: six ethnographic case studies in two units involving observations of professional/parent interactions during shared-care, and individual interviews. We used an analytical framework based on concepts drawn from Communities of Practice and Activity Theory. Results: Professionals spoke of the challenge of explaining to each other how they are aware of parents' understanding of clinical knowledge, and described three patterns of parent-educative activity that were common across MDTs: Engaging parents in shared practice; Knowledge exchange and role negotiation, and Promoting common ground. Over time, professionals had developed a shared repertoire of tools to support their negotiations with parents that helped them accomplish common ground during the practice of shared-care. We observed mutual engagement between professionals and parents where a common understanding of the joint enterprise of clinical caring was negotiated. Conclusions: For professionals, making implicit knowledge explicit is important as it can provide them with a language through which to articulate more clearly to each other what is the basis of their intuition-based hunches about parents' support needs, and may help them to negotiate with parents and accelerate parents' learning about shared caring. Our methodology and results are potentially transferrable to shared management of other conditions. © 2013 Swallow et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd

MIR376A is a regulator of starvation-induced autophagy

Background: Autophagy is a vesicular trafficking process responsible for the degradation of long-lived, misfolded or abnormal proteins, as well as damaged or surplus organelles. Abnormalities of the autophagic activity may result in the accumulation of protein aggregates, organelle dysfunction, and autophagy disorders were associated with various diseases. Hence, mechanisms of autophagy regulation are under exploration. Methods: Over-expression of hsa-miR-376a1 (shortly MIR376A) was performed to evaluate its effects on autophagy. Autophagy-related targets of the miRNA were predicted using Microcosm Targets and MIRanda bioinformatics tools and experimentally validated. Endogenous miRNA was blocked using antagomirs and the effects on target expression and autophagy were analyzed. Luciferase tests were performed to confirm that 3’ UTR sequences in target genes were functional. Differential expression of MIR376A and the related MIR376B was compared using TaqMan quantitative PCR. Results: Here, we demonstrated that, a microRNA (miRNA) from the DlkI/Gtl2 gene cluster, MIR376A, played an important role in autophagy regulation. We showed that, amino acid and serum starvation-induced autophagy was blocked by MIR376A overexpression in MCF-7 and Huh-7 cells. MIR376A shared the same seed sequence and had overlapping targets with MIR376B, and similarly blocked the expression of key autophagy proteins ATG4C and BECN1 (Beclin 1). Indeed, 3’ UTR sequences in the mRNA of these autophagy proteins were responsive to MIR376A in luciferase assays. Antagomir tests showed that, endogenous MIR376A was participating to the control of ATG4C and BECN1 transcript and protein levels. Moreover, blockage of endogenous MIR376A accelerated starvation-induced autophagic activity. Interestingly, MIR376A and MIR376B levels were increased with different kinetics in response to starvation stress and tissue-specific level differences were also observed, pointing out to an overlapping but miRNA-specific biological role. Conclusions: Our findings underline the importance of miRNAs encoded by the DlkI/Gtl2 gene cluster in stress-response control mechanisms, and introduce MIR376A as a new regulator of autophagy

Cinteny: flexible analysis and visualization of synteny and genome rearrangements in multiple organisms

BACKGROUND: Identifying syntenic regions, i.e., blocks of genes or other markers with evolutionary conserved order, and quantifying evolutionary relatedness between genomes in terms of chromosomal rearrangements is one of the central goals in comparative genomics. However, the analysis of synteny and the resulting assessment of genome rearrangements are sensitive to the choice of a number of arbitrary parameters that affect the detection of synteny blocks. In particular, the choice of a set of markers and the effect of different aggregation strategies, which enable coarse graining of synteny blocks and exclusion of micro-rearrangements, need to be assessed. Therefore, existing tools and resources that facilitate identification, visualization and analysis of synteny need to be further improved to provide a flexible platform for such analysis, especially in the context of multiple genomes. RESULTS: We present a new tool, Cinteny, for fast identification and analysis of synteny with different sets of markers and various levels of coarse graining of syntenic blocks. Using Hannenhalli-Pevzner approach and its extensions, Cinteny also enables interactive determination of evolutionary relationships between genomes in terms of the number of rearrangements (the reversal distance). In particular, Cinteny provides: i) integration of synteny browsing with assessment of evolutionary distances for multiple genomes; ii) flexibility to adjust the parameters and re-compute the results on-the-fly; iii) ability to work with user provided data, such as orthologous genes, sequence tags or other conserved markers. In addition, Cinteny provides many annotated mammalian, invertebrate and fungal genomes that are pre-loaded and available for analysis at . CONCLUSION: Cinteny allows one to automatically compare multiple genomes and perform sensitivity analysis for synteny block detection and for the subsequent computation of reversal distances. Cinteny can also be used to interactively browse syntenic blocks conserved in multiple genomes, to facilitate genome annotation and validation of assemblies for newly sequenced genomes, and to construct and assess phylogenomic trees

Comments on Holographic Entanglement Entropy and RG Flows

Using holographic entanglement entropy for strip geometry, we construct a candidate for a c-function in arbitrary dimensions. For holographic theories dual to Einstein gravity, this c-function is shown to decrease monotonically along RG flows. A sufficient condition required for this monotonic flow is that the stress tensor of the matter fields driving the holographic RG flow must satisfy the null energy condition over the holographic surface used to calculate the entanglement entropy. In the case where the bulk theory is described by Gauss-Bonnet gravity, the latter condition alone is not sufficient to establish the monotonic flow of the c-function. We also observe that for certain holographic RG flows, the entanglement entropy undergoes a 'phase transition' as the size of the system grows and as a result, evolution of the c-function may exhibit a discontinuous drop.Comment: References adde

Holographic c-theorems in arbitrary dimensions

We re-examine holographic versions of the c-theorem and entanglement entropy in the context of higher curvature gravity and the AdS/CFT correspondence. We select the gravity theories by tuning the gravitational couplings to eliminate non-unitary operators in the boundary theory and demonstrate that all of these theories obey a holographic c-theorem. In cases where the dual CFT is even-dimensional, we show that the quantity that flows is the central charge associated with the A-type trace anomaly. Here, unlike in conventional holographic constructions with Einstein gravity, we are able to distinguish this quantity from other central charges or the leading coefficient in the entropy density of a thermal bath. In general, we are also able to identify this quantity with the coefficient of a universal contribution to the entanglement entropy in a particular construction. Our results suggest that these coefficients appearing in entanglement entropy play the role of central charges in odd-dimensional CFT's. We conjecture a new c-theorem on the space of odd-dimensional field theories, which extends Cardy's proposal for even dimensions. Beyond holography, we were able to show that for any even-dimensional CFT, the universal coefficient appearing the entanglement entropy which we calculate is precisely the A-type central charge.Comment: 62 pages, 4 figures, few typo's correcte