Challenges and Inconsistencies Facing the Posthumously Conceived Child

This Note will discuss the problems with the Supreme Court of the United States’ decision, the inconsistencies that exist in state intestacy law, and the solutions that are necessary to remedy these challenges. Part II gives a brief background of the facts and circumstances surrounding Astrue. Part III discusses the history of the Social Security Administration and in vitro fertilization and points out the conflicting results from various jurisdictions that have death with this issue. Part IV delves into the Supreme Court\u27s reasoning behind its decision in Astrue. Finally, Part V comments on the reasons Astrue was poorly decided, the difficulties that will result from the decision, and the methods to resolve these complications

Newtonian and Relativistic Cosmologies

Cosmological N-body simulations are now being performed using Newtonian gravity on scales larger than the Hubble radius. It is well known that a uniformly expanding, homogeneous ball of dust in Newtonian gravity satisfies the same equations as arise in relativistic FLRW cosmology, and it also is known that a correspondence between Newtonian and relativistic dust cosmologies continues to hold in linearized perturbation theory in the marginally bound/spatially flat case. Nevertheless, it is far from obvious that Newtonian gravity can provide a good global description of an inhomogeneous cosmology when there is significant nonlinear dynamical behavior at small scales. We investigate this issue in the light of a perturbative framework that we have recently developed, which allows for such nonlinearity at small scales. We propose a relatively straightforward "dictionary"---which is exact at the linearized level---that maps Newtonian dust cosmologies into general relativistic dust cosmologies, and we use our "ordering scheme" to determine the degree to which the resulting metric and matter distribution solve Einstein's equation. We find that Einstein's equation fails to hold at "order 1" at small scales and at "order $\epsilon$" at large scales. We then find the additional corrections to the metric and matter distribution needed to satisfy Einstein's equation to these orders. While these corrections are of some interest in their own right, our main purpose in calculating them is that their smallness should provide a criterion for the validity of the original dictionary (as well as simplified versions of this dictionary). We expect that, in realistic Newtonian cosmologies, these additional corrections will be very small; if so, this should provide strong justification for the use of Newtonian simulations to describe relativistic cosmologies, even on scales larger than the Hubble radius.Comment: 35 pages; minor change

Challenges and Inconsistencies Facing the Posthumously Conceived Child

This Note will discuss the problems with the Supreme Court of the United States’ decision, the inconsistencies that exist in state intestacy law, and the solutions that are necessary to remedy these challenges. Part II gives a brief background of the facts and circumstances surrounding Astrue. Part III discusses the history of the Social Security Administration and in vitro fertilization and points out the conflicting results from various jurisdictions that have death with this issue. Part IV delves into the Supreme Court\u27s reasoning behind its decision in Astrue. Finally, Part V comments on the reasons Astrue was poorly decided, the difficulties that will result from the decision, and the methods to resolve these complications

The Role of PPARgamma in the Cyclooxygenase Pathway in Lung Cancer.

Decreased expression of peroxisome proliferator activated receptor-gamma (PPARgamma) and high levels of the proinflammatory enzyme cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) have been observed in many tumor types. Both reduced (PPARgamma) expression and elevated COX-2 within the tumor are associated with poor prognosis in lung cancer patients, and recent work has indicated that these signaling pathways may be interrelated. Synthetic (PPARgamma) agonists such as the thiazolidinedione (TZD) class of anti-diabetic drugs can decrease COX-2 levels, inhibit growth of non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) cells in vitro, and block tumor progression in xenograft models. TZDs alter the expression of COX-2 and consequent production of the protumorigenic inflammatory molecule prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) through both (PPARgamma) dependent and independent mechanisms. Certain TZDs also reduce expression of PGE2 receptors or upregulate the PGE2 catabolic enzyme 15-prostaglandin dehydrogenase. As several COX-2 enzymatic products have antitumor properties and specific COX-2 inhibition has been associated with increased risk of adverse cardiac events, directly reducing the effects or concentration of PGE2 may provide a more safe and effective strategy for lung cancer treatment. Understanding the mechanisms underlying these effects may be helpful for designing anticancer therapies. This article summarizes recent research on the relationship between (PPARgamma), TZDs, and the COX-2/PGE2 pathways in lung cancer

Evidence for a new light spin-zero boson from cosmological gamma-ray propagation?

Recent findings by Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes indicate a large transparency of the Universe to gamma rays, which can be hardly explained within the current models of extragalactic background light. We show that the observed transparency is naturally produced by an oscillation mechanism -- which can occur inside intergalactic magnetic fields -- whereby a photon can become a new spin-zero boson with mass m << 10^(-10) eV. Because the latter particle travels unimpeded throughout the Universe, photons can reach the observer even if the distance from the source considerably exceeds their mean free path. We compute the expected flux of gamma rays from blazar 3C279 at different energies. Our predictions can be tested in the near future by the gamma-ray telescopes H.E.S.S., MAGIC, CANGAROO and VERITAS. Moreover, our result provides an important observational test for models of dark energy wherein quintessence is coupled to the photon through an effective dimension-five operator.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur

Noninteracting dark matter

Since an acceptable dark matter candidate may interact only weakly with ordinary matter and radiation, it is of interest to consider the limiting case where the dark matter interacts only with gravity and itself, the matter originating by the gravitational particle production at the end of inflation. We use the bounds on the present dark mass density and the measured large-scale fluctuations in the thermal cosmic background radiation to constrain the two parameters in a self-interaction potential that is a sum of quadratic and quartic terms in a single scalar dark matter field that is minimally coupled to gravity. In quintessential inflation, where the temperature at the end of inflation is relatively low, the field starts acting like cold dark matter relatively late, shortly before the epoch of equal mass densities in matter and radiation. This could have observable consequences for galaxy formation. We respond to recent criticisms of the quintessential inflation scenario, since these issues also apply to elements of the noninteracting dark matter picture.Comment: 37 pages, 3 figure

Cosmological Origin of the Stellar Velocity Dispersions in Massive Early-Type Galaxies

We show that the observed upper bound on the line-of-sight velocity dispersion of the stars in an early-type galaxy, sigma<400km/s, may have a simple dynamical origin within the LCDM cosmological model, under two main hypotheses. The first is that most of the stars now in the luminous parts of a giant elliptical formed at redshift z>6. Subsequently, the stars behaved dynamically just as an additional component of the dark matter. The second hypothesis is that the mass distribution characteristic of a newly formed dark matter halo forgets such details of the initial conditions as the stellar "collisionless matter" that was added to the dense parts of earlier generations of halos. We also assume that the stellar velocity dispersion does not evolve much at z<6, because a massive host halo grows mainly by the addition of material at large radii well away from the stellar core of the galaxy. These assumptions lead to a predicted number density of ellipticals as a function of stellar velocity dispersion that is in promising agreement with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey data.Comment: ApJ, in press (2003); matches published versio

Primordial fractal density perturbations and structure formation in the Universe: 1-Dimensional collisionless sheet model

Two-point correlation function of galaxy distribution shows that the structure in the present Universe is scale-free up to a certain scale (at least several tens Mpc), which suggests that a fractal structure may exist. If small primordial density fluctuations have a fractal structure, the present fractal-like nonlinear structure below the horizon scale could be naturally explained. We analyze the time evolution of fractal density perturbations in Einstein-de Sitter universe, and study how the perturbation evolves and what kind of nonlinear structure will come out. We assume a one-dimensional collisionless sheet model with initial Cantor-type fractal perturbations. The nonlinear structure seems to approach some attractor with a unique fractal dimension, which is independent of the fractal dimensions of initial perturbations. A discrete self-similarity in the phase space is also found when the universal nonlinear fractal structure is reached.Comment: 17 pages, 19 jpeg figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ. Figures are also available from http://www.phys.waseda.ac.jp/gravity/~tatekawa/0003124/figs.tar.g

1-d gravity in infinite point distributions

The dynamics of infinite, asymptotically uniform, distributions of self-gravitating particles in one spatial dimension provides a simple toy model for the analogous three dimensional problem. We focus here on a limitation of such models as treated so far in the literature: the force, as it has been specified, is well defined in infinite point distributions only if there is a centre of symmetry (i.e. the definition requires explicitly the breaking of statistical translational invariance). The problem arises because naive background subtraction (due to expansion, or by "Jeans' swindle" for the static case), applied as in three dimensions, leaves an unregulated contribution to the force due to surface mass fluctuations. Following a discussion by Kiessling, we show that the problem may be resolved by defining the force in infinite point distributions as the limit of an exponentially screened pair interaction. We show that this prescription gives a well defined (finite) force acting on particles in a class of perturbed infinite lattices, which are the point processes relevant to cosmological N-body simulations. For identical particles the dynamics of the simplest toy model is equivalent to that of an infinite set of points with inverted harmonic oscillator potentials which bounce elastically when they collide. We discuss previous results in the literature, and present new results for the specific case of this simplest (static) model starting from "shuffled lattice" initial conditions. These show qualitative properties (notably its "self-similarity") of the evolution very similar to those in the analogous simulations in three dimensions, which in turn resemble those in the expanding universe.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figures, small changes (section II shortened, added discussion in section IV), matches final version to appear in PR