Effects of High Protein/low Carbohydrate Swine Diets During the Final Finishing Phase on Pork Muscle Quality

Pork color and water-holding capacity defects (pale, soft and exudative, or PSE pork) are functions of muscle pH and cost of the U.S. pork industry $60 million per year (Morgan et al., 1994). Pork with a low ultimate hP (pH\u3c5.5) has a paler color and lower water-holding capacity. Lactic acid build-up is responsible for lowering pH from 7.0, at the time of death, to 5.2-6.0 at 24h postmortem. Postmortem glycolysis produces lactic acid and can only occur in the presence of the substrate glycogen. Therefore, more glycogen in the muscle at slaughter will result in more lactic acid build up and a lower ultimate pH, which will result in a paler color and a lower water-holding capacity (Ellis et al, 1997) Consumption of carbohydrates is the main source of glucose in the blood (Guyton and Hall, 1996). In human studies conducted by Snitker et al., (1997) eight adult males were given one of two isoenergetic diets: a high-carbohydrate diet (75% of energy as carbohydrate, 15% as protein, and 10% as fat), or a low-carbohydrate diet (10% of energy as carbohydrate, 15% as protein, and 75% as fat) for three days. After the three day dietary maniuplation, glycogen content in the vastus lateralis muscle was significatnly lower for the low-carbohydrate subjects; 296 vs 426 mmol glucose/kg dry muscle, respectively (P\u3c0.001) (Snitker et al., 1997). Therefore, this study was conducted to determine if feeding ultra-high protein/low carbohydrate swine diets during the final finishing phase could reduce muscle glycogen and thereby imporve pork muscle quality

Little Technicolor

Inspired by the AdS/CFT correspondence, we show that any G/H symmetry breaking pattern can be described by a simple two-site moose diagram. This construction trivially reproduces the CCWZ prescription in the context of Hidden Local Symmetry. We interpret this moose in a novel way to show that many little Higgs theories can emerge from ordinary chiral symmetry breaking in scaled-up QCD. We apply this reasoning to the simple group little Higgs to see that the same low energy degrees of freedom can arise from a variety of UV complete theories. We also show how models of holographic composite Higgs bosons can turn into brane-localized little technicolor theories by "integrating in" the IR brane.Comment: 26 pages, 2 figures; v2: references added; v3: added section on vacuum alignment to match JHEP versio

The Littlest Higgs in Anti-de Sitter Space

We implement the SU(5)/SO(5) littlest Higgs theory in a slice of 5D Anti-de Sitter space bounded by a UV brane and an IR brane. In this model, there is a bulk SU(5) gauge symmetry that is broken to SO(5) on the IR brane, and the Higgs boson is contained in the Goldstones from this breaking. All of the interactions on the IR brane preserve the global symmetries that protect the Higgs mass, but a radiative potential is generated through loops that stretch to the UV brane where there are explicit SU(5) violating boundary conditions. Like the original littlest Higgs, this model exhibits collective breaking in that two interactions must be turned on in order to generate a Higgs potential. In AdS space, however, collective breaking does not appear in coupling constants directly but rather in the choice of UV brane boundary conditions. We match this AdS construction to the known low energy structure of the littlest Higgs and comment on some of the tensions inherent in the AdS construction. We calculate the 5D Coleman-Weinberg effective potential for the Higgs and find that collective breaking is manifest. In a simplified model with only the SU(2) gauge structure and the top quark, the physical Higgs mass can be of order 200 GeV with no considerable fine tuning (25%). We sketch a more realistic model involving the entire gauge and fermion structure that also implements T-parity, and we comment on the tension between T-parity and flavor structure.Comment: 42 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables; v2: minor rewording, JHEP format; v3: to match JHEP versio

The Intermediate Higgs

Two paradigms for the origin of electroweak superconductivity are a weakly coupled scalar condensate, and a strongly coupled fermion condensate. The former suffers from a finetuning problem unless there are cancelations to radiative corrections, while the latter presents potential discrepancies with precision electroweak physics. Here we present a framework for electroweak symmetry breaking which interpolates between these two paradigms, and mitigates their faults. As in Little Higgs theories, the Higgs is a pseudo-Nambu Goldstone boson, potentially composite. The cutoff sensitivity of the one loop top quark contribution to the effective potential is canceled by contributions from additional vector-like quarks, and the cutoff can naturally be higher than in the minimal Standard Model. Unlike the Little Higgs models, the cutoff sensitivity from one loop gauge contributions is not canceled. However, such gauge contributions are naturally small as long as the cutoff is below 6 TeV. Precision electroweak corrections are suppressed relative to those of Technicolor or generic Little Higgs theories. In some versions of the intermediate scenario, the Higgs mass is computable in terms of the masses of these additional fermions and the Nambu-Goldstone Boson decay constant. In addition to the Higgs, new scalar and pseudoscalar particles are typically present at the weak scale

Structure of Fat Jets at the Tevatron and Beyond

Boosted resonances is a highly probable and enthusiastic scenario in any process probing the electroweak scale. Such objects when decaying into jets can easily blend with the cornucopia of jets from hard relative light QCD states. We review jet observables and algorithms that can contribute to the identification of highly boosted heavy jets and the possible searches that can make use of such substructure information. We also review previous studies by CDF on boosted jets and its measurements on specific jet shapes.Comment: invited review for a special "Top and flavour physics in the LHC era" issue of The European Physical Journal C, we invite comments regarding contents of the review; v2 added references and institutional preprint number

Supersymmetry and the LHC Inverse Problem

Given experimental evidence at the LHC for physics beyond the standard model, how can we determine the nature of the underlying theory? We initiate an approach to studying the "inverse map" from the space of LHC signatures to the parameter space of theoretical models within the context of low-energy supersymmetry, using 1808 LHC observables including essentially all those suggested in the literature and a 15 dimensional parametrization of the supersymmetric standard model. We show that the inverse map of a point in signature space consists of a number of isolated islands in parameter space, indicating the existence of "degeneracies"--qualitatively different models with the same LHC signatures. The degeneracies have simple physical characterizations, largely reflecting discrete ambiguities in electroweak-ino spectrum, accompanied by small adjustments for the remaining soft parameters. The number of degeneracies falls in the range 1<d<100, depending on whether or not sleptons are copiously produced in cascade decays. This number is large enough to represent a clear challenge but small enough to encourage looking for new observables that can further break the degeneracies and determine at the LHC most of the SUSY physics we care about. Degeneracies occur because signatures are not independent, and our approach allows testing of any new signature for its independence. Our methods can also be applied to any other theory of physics beyond the standard model, allowing one to study how model footprints differ in signature space and to test ways of distinguishing qualitatively different possibilities for new physics at the LHC.Comment: 55 pages, 30 figure

Quasi-Particle Description of Strongly Interacting Matter: Towards a Foundation

We confront our quasi-particle model for the equation of state of strongly interacting matter with recent first-principle QCD calculations. In particular, we test its applicability at finite baryon densities by comparing with Taylor expansion coefficients of the pressure for two quark flavours. We outline a chain of approximations starting from the Phi-functional approach to QCD which motivates the quasi-particle picture.Comment: Aug 2006. 6 pp. Invited Talk given at Hot Quarks 2006, Villasimius, Sardinia, Italy, 15-20 May 200

Venous thromboembolism in critically Ill patients with COVID-19: Results of a screening study for deep vein thrombosis.

The rapid spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), has caused more than 3.9 million cases worldwide. Currently, there is great interest to assess venous thrombosis prevalence, diagnosis, prevention, and management in patients with COVID-19. To determine the prevalence of venous thromboembolism (VTE) in critically ill patients with COVID-19, using lower limbs venous ultrasonography screening. Beginning March 8, we enrolled 25 patients who were admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infections. The presence of lower extremity deep vein thrombosis (DVT) was systematically assessed by ultrasonography between day 5 and 10 after admission. The data reported here are those available up to May 9, 2020. The mean (± standard deviation) age of the patients was 68 ± 11 years, and 64% were men. No patients had a history of VTE. During the ICU stay, 8 patients (32%) had a VTE; 6 (24%) a proximal DVT, and 5 (20%) a pulmonary embolism. The rate of symptomatic VTE was 24%, while 8% of patients had screen-detected DVT. Only those patients with a documented VTE received a therapeutic anticoagulant regimen. As of May 9, 2020, 5 patients had died (20%), 2 remained in the ICU (8%), and 18 were discharged (72%). In critically ill patients with SARS-CoV-2 infections, DVT screening at days 5-10 of admission yielded a 32% prevalence of VTE. Seventy-five percent of events occurred before screening. Earlier screening might be effective in optimizing care in ICU patients with COVID-19

Lifetime Differences, direct CP Violation and Partial Widths in D0 Meson Decays to K+K- and pi+pi-

We describe several measurements using the decays D0->K+K- and pi+pi-. We find the ratio of partial widths, Gamma(D0->K+K-)/Gamma(D0->pi+pi-), to be 2.96+/-0.16+/-0.15, where the first error is statistical and the second is systematic. We observe no evidence for direct CP violation, obtaining A_CP(KK) = (0.0+/-2.2+/-0.8)% and A_CP(pipi = (1.9+/-3.2+/-0.8)%. In the limit of no CP violation we measure the mixing parameter y_CP = -0.012+/-0.025+/-0.014 by measuring the lifetime difference between D0->K+ K- or pi+pi- and the CP neutral state, D0->K-pi+. We see no evidence for mixing.Comment: 14 pages postscript, also available through http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/public/CLNS, submitted to PRD, Rapid Communicatio

Crises and collective socio-economic phenomena: simple models and challenges

Financial and economic history is strewn with bubbles and crashes, booms and busts, crises and upheavals of all sorts. Understanding the origin of these events is arguably one of the most important problems in economic theory. In this paper, we review recent efforts to include heterogeneities and interactions in models of decision. We argue that the Random Field Ising model (RFIM) indeed provides a unifying framework to account for many collective socio-economic phenomena that lead to sudden ruptures and crises. We discuss different models that can capture potentially destabilising self-referential feedback loops, induced either by herding, i.e. reference to peers, or trending, i.e. reference to the past, and account for some of the phenomenology missing in the standard models. We discuss some empirically testable predictions of these models, for example robust signatures of RFIM-like herding effects, or the logarithmic decay of spatial correlations of voting patterns. One of the most striking result, inspired by statistical physics methods, is that Adam Smith's invisible hand can badly fail at solving simple coordination problems. We also insist on the issue of time-scales, that can be extremely long in some cases, and prevent socially optimal equilibria to be reached. As a theoretical challenge, the study of so-called "detailed-balance" violating decision rules is needed to decide whether conclusions based on current models (that all assume detailed-balance) are indeed robust and generic.Comment: Review paper accepted for a special issue of J Stat Phys; several minor improvements along reviewers' comment