Regular supplementation with resveratrol improves bone mineral density in postmenopausal women: a randomised, placebo-controlled trial

Abstract not available.Rachel HX Wong, Jay Jay Thaung Zaw, Cory J Xian, and Peter RC How

Neutrinos in Non-linear Structure Formation - The Effect on Halo Properties

We use N-body simulations to find the effect of neutrino masses on halo properties, and investigate how the density profiles of both the neutrino and the dark matter components change as a function of the neutrino mass. We compare our neutrino density profiles with results from the N-one-body method and find good agreement. We also show and explain why the Tremaine-Gunn bound for the neutrinos is not saturated. Finally we study how the halo mass function changes as a function of the neutrino mass and compare our results with the Sheth-Tormen semi-analytic formulae. Our results are important for surveys which aim at probing cosmological parameters using clusters, as well as future experiments aiming at measuring the cosmic neutrino background directly.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figure

Rapid optimization of drug combinations for the optimal angiostatic treatment of cancer.

Drug combinations can improve angiostatic cancer treatment efficacy and enable the reduction of side effects and drug resistance. Combining drugs is non-trivial due to the high number of possibilities. We applied a feedback system control (FSC) technique with a population-based stochastic search algorithm to navigate through the large parametric space of nine angiostatic drugs at four concentrations to identify optimal low-dose drug combinations. This implied an iterative approach of in vitro testing of endothelial cell viability and algorithm-based analysis. The optimal synergistic drug combination, containing erlotinib, BEZ-235 and RAPTA-C, was reached in a small number of iterations. Final drug combinations showed enhanced endothelial cell specificity and synergistically inhibited proliferation (p < 0.001), but not migration of endothelial cells, and forced enhanced numbers of endothelial cells to undergo apoptosis (p < 0.01). Successful translation of this drug combination was achieved in two preclinical in vivo tumor models. Tumor growth was inhibited synergistically and significantly (p < 0.05 and p < 0.01, respectively) using reduced drug doses as compared to optimal single-drug concentrations. At the applied conditions, single-drug monotherapies had no or negligible activity in these models. We suggest that FSC can be used for rapid identification of effective, reduced dose, multi-drug combinations for the treatment of cancer and other diseases

Vertical Confinement and Evolution of Reentrant Insulating Transition in the Fractional Quantum Hall Regime

We have observed an anomalous shift of the high field reentrant insulating phases in a two-dimensional electron system (2DES) tightly confined within a narrow GaAs/AlGaAs quantum well. Instead of the well-known transitions into the high field insulating states centered around $\nu = 1/5$, the 2DES confined within an 80\AA-wide quantum well exhibits the transition at $\nu = 1/3$. Comparably large quantum lifetime of the 2DES in narrow well discounts the effect of disorder and points to confinement as the primary driving force behind the evolution of the reentrant transition.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Sterile neutrinos with eV masses in cosmology -- how disfavoured exactly?

We study cosmological models that contain sterile neutrinos with eV-range masses as suggested by reactor and short-baseline oscillation data. We confront these models with both precision cosmological data (probing the CMB decoupling epoch) and light-element abundances (probing the BBN epoch). In the minimal LambdaCDM model, such sterile neutrinos are strongly disfavoured by current data because they contribute too much hot dark matter. However, if the cosmological framework is extended to include also additional relativistic degrees of freedom -- beyond the three standard neutrinos and the putative sterile neutrinos, then the hot dark matter constraint on the sterile states is considerably relaxed. A further improvement is achieved by allowing a dark energy equation of state parameter w<-1. While BBN strongly disfavours extra radiation beyond the assumed eV-mass sterile neutrino, this constraint can be circumvented by a small nu_e degeneracy. Any model containing eV-mass sterile neutrinos implies also strong modifications of other cosmological parameters. Notably, the inferred cold dark matter density can shift up by 20 to 75% relative to the standard LambdaCDM value.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures, v2: minor changes, matches version accepted for publication in JCA

Current cosmological bounds on neutrino masses and relativistic relics

We combine the most recent observations of large-scale structure (2dF and SDSS galaxy surveys) and cosmic microwave anisotropies (WMAP and ACBAR) to put constraints on flat cosmological models where the number of massive neutrinos and of massless relativistic relics are both left arbitrary. We discuss the impact of each dataset and of various priors on our bounds. For the standard case of three thermalized neutrinos, we find an upper bound on the total neutrino mass sum m_nu < 1.0 (resp. 0.6) eV (at 2sigma), using only CMB and LSS data (resp. including priors from supernovae data and the HST Key Project), a bound that is quite insensitive to the splitting of the total mass between the three species. When the total number of neutrinos or relativistic relics N_eff is left free, the upper bound on sum m_nu (at 2sigma, including all priors) ranges from 1.0 to 1.5 eV depending on the mass splitting. We provide an explanation of the parameter degeneracy that allows larger values of the masses when N_eff increases. Finally, we show that the limit on the total neutrino mass is not significantly modified in the presence of primordial gravitational waves, because current data provide a clear distinction between the corresponding effects.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figure

Elliptic flow in Pb+Pb collisions at sqrt{s_{NN}} = 2.76 TeV: hybrid model assessment of the first data

We analyze the elliptic flow parameter v_2 in Pb+Pb collisions at sqrt{s_{NN}} = 2.76 TeV and in Au+Au collisions at sqrt{s_{NN}} =200 GeV using a hybrid model in which the evolution of the quark gluon plasma is described by ideal hydrodynamics with a state-of-the-art lattice QCD equation of state, and the subsequent hadronic stage by a hadron cascade model. For initial conditions, we employ Monte-Carlo versions of the Glauber and the Kharzeev-Levin-Nardi models and compare results with each other. We demonstrate that the differential elliptic flow v_2(p_T) hardly changes when the collision energy increases, whereas the integrated v_2 increases due to the enhancement of mean transverse momentum. The amount of increase of both v_2 and mean p_T depends significantly on the model of initialization.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

Spontaneous baryogenesis in flat directions

We discuss a spontaneous baryogenesis mechanism in flat directions. After identifying the Nambu-Goldstone mode which derivatively couples to the associated $U$(1) current and rotates due to the A-term, we show that spontaneous baryogenesis can be naturally realized in the context of the flat direction. As applications, we discuss two scenarios of baryogenesis in detail. One is baryogenesis in a flat direction with a vanishing $B-L$ charge, especially, with neither baryon nor lepton charge, which was recently proposed by Chiba and the present authors. The other is a baryogenesis scenario compatible with a large lepton asymmetry.Comment: 10 pages, no figure, the version accepted to Phys. Rev. D; a few explanatory comments are adde

Stringent Constraints on Cosmological Neutrino-Antineutrino Asymmetries from Synchronized Flavor Transformation

We assess a mechanism which can transform neutrino-antineutrino asymmetries between flavors in the early universe, and confirm that such transformation is unavoidable in the near bi-maximal framework emerging for the neutrino mixing matrix. We show that the process is a standard Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein flavor transformation dictated by a synchronization of momentum states. We also show that flavor ``equilibration'' is a special feature of maximal mixing, and carefully examine new constraints placed on neutrino asymmetries. In particular, the big bang nucleosynthesis limit on electron neutrino degeneracy xi_e < 0.04 does not apply directly to all flavors, yet confirmation of the large-mixing-angle solution to the solar neutrino problem will eliminate the possibility of degenerate big bang nucleosynthesis.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures; minor changes to match PRD versio