Noncommutative causality in algebraic quantum field theory

In the paper it will be argued that embracing noncommuting common causes in the causal explanation of quantum correlations in algebraic quantum field theory has the following two beneficial consequences: it helps (i) to maintain the validity of Reichenbach's Common Causal Principle and (ii) to provide a local common causal explanation for a set of correlations violating the Bell inequality

Parasitic helminth infections and the control of human allergic and autoimmune disorders

The profile of global health today presents a striking reciprocal distribution between parasitic diseases in many of the world’s lower-income countries, and ever-increasing levels of inflammatory disorders such as allergy, autoimmunity and inflammatory bowel diseases in the more affluent societies. Attention is particularly focused on helminth worm parasites, which are associated with protection from allergy and inflammation in both epidemiological and laboratory settings. One mechanistic explanation of this is that helminths drive the regulatory arm of the immune system, abrogating the ability of the host to expel the parasites, while also dampening reactivity to many “bystander” specificities. Interest has therefore heightened into whether helminth parasites, or their products, hold therapeutic potential for immunological disorders of the developed world. In this narrative review, progress across a range of trials is discussed, together with prospects for isolating individual molecular mediators from helminths that may offer defined new therapies for inflammatory conditions

Doing gender locally: The importance of ‘place’ in understanding marginalised masculinities and young men’s transitions to ‘safe’ and successful futures

Observable anxieties have been developing about the position of boys and young men in contemporary society in recent years. This is expressed as a crisis of masculinity, in which place is often implicitly implicated, but is rarely considered for its role in the shaping of young men’s practices, trajectories and aspirations. Drawing on research conducted with young people who accessed a range of social care support services, this article argues that transition means different things for young men in different locales and that local definitions of masculinity are required to better understand young men’s lives and the opportunities available to them. The authors argue that home life, street life, individual neighbourhoods, regions and nations all shaped the young men’s identities and the practices they (and the staff working with them) drew on in order to create successful futures and ‘safe’ forms of masculinity. It is suggested that this place-based approach has the potential to re-shape the ‘crisis’ discourse surrounding masculinity and the anxieties associated with young men

Bondi-Metzner-Sachs symmetry, holography on null-surfaces and area proportionality of "light-slice" entropy

It is shown that certain kinds of behavior, which hitherto were expected to be characteristic for classical gravity and quantum field theory in curved spacetime, as the infinite dimensional Bondi-Metzner-Sachs symmetry, holography on event horizons and an area proportionality of entropy, have in fact an unnoticed presence in Minkowski QFT. This casts new light on the fundamental question whether the volume propotionality of heat bath entropy and the (logarithmically corrected) dimensionless area law obeyed by localization-induced thermal behavior are different geometric parametrizations which share a common primordeal algebraic origin. Strong arguments are presented that these two different thermal manifestations can be directly related, this is in fact the main aim of this paper. It will be demonstrated that QFT beyond the Lagrangian quantization setting receives crucial new impulses from holography onto horizons. The present paper is part of a project aimed at elucidating the enormous physical range of "modular localization". The latter does not only extend from standard Hamitonian heat bath thermal states to thermal aspects of causal- or event- horizons addressed in this paper. It also includes the recent understanding of the crossing property of formfactors whose intriguing similarity with thermal properties was, although sometimes noticed, only sufficiently understood in the modular llocalization setting.Comment: 42 pages, changes, addition of new results and new references, in this form the paper will appear in Foundations of Physic

Exploring rumen microbe-derived fibre-degrading activities for improving feed digestibility

Ruminal fibre degradation is mediated by a complex community of rumen microbes, and its efficiency is crucial for optimal dairy productivity. Enzymes produced by rumen microbes are primarily responsible for degrading the complex structural polysaccharides that comprise fibre in the plant cell walls of feed materials. Because rumen microbes have evolved with their ruminant hosts over millions of years to perform this task, their enzymes are hypothesised to be optimally suited for activity at the temperature, pH range, and anaerobic environment of the rumen. However, fibre-rich diets are not fully digested, which represents a loss in potential animal productivity. Thus, there is opportunity to improve fibre utilisation through treating feeds with rumen microbe-derived fibrolytic enzymes and associated activities that enhance fibre degradation. This research aims to gain a better understanding of the key rumen microbes involved in fibre degradation and the mechanisms they employ to degrade fibre, by applying cultivation-based and culture-independent genomics approaches to rumen microbial communities of New Zealand dairy cattle. Using this knowledge, we aim to identify new opportunities for improving fibre degradation to enhance dairy productivity. Rumen content samples were taken over the course of a year from a Waikato dairy production herd. Over 1,000 rumen bacterial cultures were obtained from the plant-adherent fraction of the rumen contents. Among these cultures, two, 59 and 103 potentially new families, genera and species of rumen bacteria were identified, respectively. Many of the novel strains are being genome sequenced within the Hungate 1000 rumen microbial reference genome programme, which is providing deeper insights into the range of mechanisms used by the individual strains for fibre degradation. This information has been used to guide the selection of rumen bacterial strains with considerable potential as fibrolytic enzyme producers in vitro, with the intent of developing the strains so that their enzymes may be used as feed pre-treatments for use on farm. Culture-independent metagenomic approaches were also used to explore the activities involved in fibre degradation from the rumen microbial communities. Functional screening has revealed a range of novel enzymes and a novel fibre disrupting activity. Enrichment for the cell-secreted proteins from the community revealed evidence of a diverse range of cellulosomes, which are cell-surface associated multi-enzyme complexes that efficiently degrade plant cell wall polysaccharides. Biochemical and structural characterisation of these proteins has been conducted. In conclusion, cultivation and culture-independent genomic approaches have been applied to New Zealand bovine rumen microbial communities, and have provided considerable new insights into ruminal fibre degradation processes. Novel activities and bacterial species that display desirable activities on fibrous substrates in vitro are now being explored for their potential to improve ruminal fibre degradation, to allow the development of new technologies that will enhance dairy productivity

Leveraging Mid-Level Semantic Boundary Cues for Automated Lymph Node Detection

Abstract. Histograms of oriented gradients (HOG) are widely employed image descriptors in modern computer-aided diagnosis systems. Built upon a set of local, robust statistics of low-level image gradients, HOG features are usually computed on raw intensity images. In this paper, we explore a learned image transformation scheme for producing higher-level inputs to HOG. Leveraging semantic object boundary cues, our methods compute data-driven image feature maps via a supervised boundary detector. Compared with the raw image map, boundary cues offer mid-level, more object-specific visual responses that can be suited for subsequent HOG encoding. We validate integrations of several image transformation maps with an application of computer-aided detection of lymph nodes on thoracoabdominal CT images. Our experiments demonstrate that semantic boundary cues based HOG descriptors complement and enrich the raw intensity alone. We observe an overall system with substantially improved results (∼78 % versus 60 % recall at 3 FP/volume for two target regions). The proposed system also moderately outperforms the state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural network (CNN) system in the mediastinum region, without relying on data augmentation and requiring significantly fewer training samples.

Time-integrated luminosity recorded by the BABAR detector at the PEP-II e+e- collider

This article is the Preprint version of the final published artcile which can be accessed at the link below.We describe a measurement of the time-integrated luminosity of the data collected by the BABAR experiment at the PEP-II asymmetric-energy e+e- collider at the ϒ(4S), ϒ(3S), and ϒ(2S) resonances and in a continuum region below each resonance. We measure the time-integrated luminosity by counting e+e-→e+e- and (for the ϒ(4S) only) e+e-→μ+μ- candidate events, allowing additional photons in the final state. We use data-corrected simulation to determine the cross-sections and reconstruction efficiencies for these processes, as well as the major backgrounds. Due to the large cross-sections of e+e-→e+e- and e+e-→μ+μ-, the statistical uncertainties of the measurement are substantially smaller than the systematic uncertainties. The dominant systematic uncertainties are due to observed differences between data and simulation, as well as uncertainties on the cross-sections. For data collected on the ϒ(3S) and ϒ(2S) resonances, an additional uncertainty arises due to ϒ→e+e-X background. For data collected off the ϒ resonances, we estimate an additional uncertainty due to time dependent efficiency variations, which can affect the short off-resonance runs. The relative uncertainties on the luminosities of the on-resonance (off-resonance) samples are 0.43% (0.43%) for the ϒ(4S), 0.58% (0.72%) for the ϒ(3S), and 0.68% (0.88%) for the ϒ(2S).This work is supported by the US Department of Energy and National Science Foundation, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Canada), the Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique and Institut National de Physique Nucléaire et de Physiquedes Particules (France), the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Germany), the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (Italy), the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (The Netherlands), the Research Council of Norway, the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (Spain), and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (United Kingdom). Individuals have received support from the Marie-Curie IEF program (European Union) and the A.P. Sloan Foundation (USA)

Measurement of the B0-anti-B0-Oscillation Frequency with Inclusive Dilepton Events

The $B^0$-$\bar B^0$ oscillation frequency has been measured with a sample of 23 million \B\bar B pairs collected with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II asymmetric B Factory at SLAC. In this sample, we select events in which both B mesons decay semileptonically and use the charge of the leptons to identify the flavor of each B meson. A simultaneous fit to the decay time difference distributions for opposite- and same-sign dilepton events gives $\Delta m_d = 0.493 \pm 0.012{(stat)}\pm 0.009{(syst)}$ ps$^{-1}$.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, submitted to Physical Review Letter

A competitive scheme for storing sparse representation of X-Ray medical images

A competitive scheme for economic storage of the informational content of an X-Ray image, as it can be used for further processing, is presented. It is demonstrated that sparse representation of that type of data can be encapsulated in a small file without affecting the quality of the recovered image. The proposed representation, which is inscribed within the context of data reduction, provides a format for saving the image information in a way that could assist methodologies for analysis and classification. The competitiveness of the resulting file is compared against the compression standards JPEG and JPEG200

Search for the standard model Higgs boson decaying into two photons in pp collisions at sqrt(s)=7 TeV

A search for a Higgs boson decaying into two photons is described. The analysis is performed using a dataset recorded by the CMS experiment at the LHC from pp collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV, which corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 4.8 inverse femtobarns. Limits are set on the cross section of the standard model Higgs boson decaying to two photons. The expected exclusion limit at 95% confidence level is between 1.4 and 2.4 times the standard model cross section in the mass range between 110 and 150 GeV. The analysis of the data excludes, at 95% confidence level, the standard model Higgs boson decaying into two photons in the mass range 128 to 132 GeV. The largest excess of events above the expected standard model background is observed for a Higgs boson mass hypothesis of 124 GeV with a local significance of 3.1 sigma. The global significance of observing an excess with a local significance greater than 3.1 sigma anywhere in the search range 110-150 GeV is estimated to be 1.8 sigma. More data are required to ascertain the origin of this excess.Comment: Submitted to Physics Letters