Microbicides 2008 conference: From discovery to advocacy

Recently revised statistics show the number of individuals living with HIV at over 33 million worldwide, with 68% being in sub-Saharan Africa. Current HIV prevention methods, such as condom use, monogamy and abstinence, are not always feasible. The need for improved HIV preventative technologies remains urgent. Of these, microbicides represent a promising female-initiated preventative method. Microbicides are designed to be applied vaginally to prevent HIV and STI acquisition. Research is also being undertaken to assess the safety of the product during rectal application

Refinement of locality data for FitzSimons’ Garter Snake Elapsoidea sundevallii fitzsimonsi Loveridge, 1948 provides a better estimation of its distribution

Foundational data on species taxonomy, distribution and ecology forms the basis of assessing species for their conservation status. For African reptiles, distributional data are sorely lacking for many taxa, sometimes resulting in inadequate conservation assessments (Tolley et al., 2016). In South Africa, some geographic areas are poorly sampled with gaps exceeding 15,000 km2 in which there are no locality records (see Branch, 2014) and the implications of this could be considerable in terms of assessing species for extinction risk. To address these information gaps, we surveyed in the poorly sampled arid western Kalahari region of North West Province, South Africa during 2019

Dynamical Behavior of dilaton in de Sitter space

We study the dynamical behavior of the dilaton in the background of three-dimensional Kerr-de Sitter space which is inspired from the low-energy string effective action. The perturbation analysis around the cosmological horizon of Kerr-de Sitter space reveals a mixing between the dilaton and other fields. Introducing a gauge (dilaton gauge), we can disentangle this mixing completely and obtain one decoupled dilaton equation. However it turns out that this belongs to the tachyon. The stability of de Sitter solution with J=0 is discussed. Finally we compute the dilaton absorption cross section to extract information on the cosmological horizon of de Sitter space.Comment: 11 pages, reference added and a version to appear in PL

Colliding Branes and Formation of Spacetime Singularities

We construct a class of analytic solutions with two free parameters to the five-dimensional Einstein field equations, which represents the collision of two timelike 3-branes. We study the local and global properties of the spacetime, and find that spacelike singularities generically develop after the collision, due to the mutual focus of the two branes. Non-singular spacetime can be constructed only in the case where both of the two branes violate the energy conditions.Comment: four figure

Cardy-Verlinde Formula and Asymptotically de Sitter Spaces

In this paper we discuss the question of whether the entropy of cosmological horizon in some asymptotically de Sitter spaces can be described by the Cardy-Verlinde formula, which is supposed to be an entropy formula of conformal field theory in any dimension. For the Schwarzschild-de Sitter solution, although the gravitational mass is always negative (in the sense of the prescription in hep-th/0110108 to calculate the conserved charges of asymptotically de Sitter spaces), we find that indeed the entropy of cosmological horizon can be given by using naively the Cardy-Verlinde formula. The entropy of pure de Sitter spaces can also be expressed by the Cardy-Verlinde formula. For the topological de Sitter solutions, which have a cosmological horizon and a naked singularity, the Cardy-Verlinde formula also works well. Our result is in favour of the dS/CFT correspondence.Comment: Latex, 12 pages, v2: references correcte

Subsample ignorable likelihood for regression analysis with missing data

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/86948/1/j.1467-9876.2011.00763.x.pd

No absorption in de Sitter space

We study the wave equation for a minimally coupled massive scalar in D-dimensional de Sitter space. We compute the absorption cross section to investigate its cosmological horizon in the southern diamond. By analogy of the quantum mechanics, it is found that there is no absorption in de Sitter space. This means that de Sitter space is usually in thermal equilibrium, like the black hole in anti de Sitter space. It confirms that the cosmological horizon not only emits radiation but also absorbs that previously emitted by itself at the same rate, keeping the curvature radius of de Sitter space fixed.Comment: 11 pages, REVTE

Time-dependent Orbifolds and String Cosmology

In these lectures, we review the physics of time-dependent orbifolds of string theory, with particular attention to orbifolds of three-dimensional Minkowski space. We discuss the propagation of free particles in the orbifold geometries, together with their interactions. We address the issue of stability of these string vacua and the difficulties in defining a consistent perturbation theory, pointing to possible solutions. In particular, it is shown that resumming part of the perturbative expansion gives finite amplitudes. Finally we discuss the duality of some orbifold models with the physics of orientifold planes, and we describe cosmological models based on the dynamics of these orientifolds.Comment: 74 pages, 20 figures. Updated version of lectures at RTN Winter School on Strings, Supergravity and Gauge Theory - Torino, January 2003. Contains many new results. Minor correction