Impact of the lipid-based nutrient supplements on prevention and treatment of childhood moderate undernutrition

Purpose: This review aims at assessing the effectiveness of LNS interventions for prevention and/or treatment of moderate acute malnutrition (MAM), stunting and other anthropometric indicators for undernutrition in children younger than 5 years. Methodology: Eighteen clinical trials on LNS (soybased or milk-based) supplementation in children were compared with habitual diet/control or corn-soy blend (CSB). Mean changes in height for age (HAZ), weight for age (WAZ) and weight for height z-scores (WHZ) were assessed as primary outcomes. The secondary outcomes included: weight gain, height, mid upper arm circumference (MUAC), recovery from MAM, occurrence of fever, diarrhoea and cough. Findings: The pooled estimate revealed a statistically significant increase in WAZ (weighted mean difference [WMD] =0.09; 95%CI= 0.02, 0.15; p=0.01), WHZ (WMD=0.14; 95%CI= 0.01, 0.26; p=0.000) and improved recovery from MAM (Risk Ratio [RR] = 1.37; 95%CI= 1.14, 1.65; p=0.000) in children receiving LNS compared with control or CBS. No significant effect was observed in HAZ (WMD=0.00;95%CI=-0.02,0.03: p=0.578). Children fed with milk-based LNS (RR=1.68; 95%CI=1.17, 2.39; p=0.005) were more likely to recover significantly from MAM when compared with CSB. Conclusion: Although there is evidence that LNS yield better nutritional outcomes than CSB and control, it is impossible to conclude that the milk-based LNS are superior to soy-based LNS and whether age and duration of intervention significantly affect the effectiveness of LNS on childhood undernutrition. Further research is required before these products can be recommended at scale

Remarks on Time-Space Noncommutative Field Theories

We propose a physical interpretation of the perturbative breakdown of unitarity in time-like noncommutative field theories in terms of production of tachyonic particles. These particles may be viewed as a remnant of a continuous spectrum of undecoupled closed-string modes. In this way, we give a unified view of the string-theoretical and the field-theoretical no-go arguments against time-like noncommutative theories. We also perform a quantitative study of various locality and causality properties of noncommutative field theories at the quantum level.Comment: 19 pages, LaTe

A cosmotopological relation for a unified field theory

I present an argument, based on the topology of the universe, why there are three generations of fermions. The argument implies a preferred unified gauge group of SU(5), but with SO(10) representations of the fermions. The breaking pattern $SU(5) \to SU(3) \times SU(2) \times U(1)$ is preferred over the pattern $SU(5) \to SU(4) \times U(1)$. On the basis of the argument one expects an asymmetry in the microwave data, which might have been detected already.Comment: 6 page

Ratchet effect on a relativistic particle driven by external forces

We study the ratchet effect of a damped relativistic particle driven by both asymmetric temporal bi-harmonic and time-periodic piecewise constant forces. This system can be formally solved for any external force, providing the ratchet velocity as a non-linear functional of the driving force. This allows us to explicitly illustrate the functional Taylor expansion formalism recently proposed for this kind of systems. The Taylor expansion reveals particularly useful to obtain the shape of the current when the force is periodic, piecewise constant. We also illustrate the somewhat counterintuitive effect that introducing damping may induce a ratchet effect. When the force is symmetric under time-reversal and the system is undamped, under symmetry principles no ratchet effect is possible. In this situation increasing damping generates a ratchet current which, upon increasing the damping coefficient eventually reaches a maximum and decreases toward zero. We argue that this effect is not specific of this example and should appear in any ratchet system with tunable damping driven by a time-reversible external force.Comment: 1 figur

Short-Range Ordered Phase of the Double-Exchange Model in Infinite Dimensions

Using dynamical mean-field theory, we have evaluated the magnetic instabilities and T=0 phase diagram of the double-exchange model on a Bethe lattice in infinite dimensions. In addition to ferromagnetic (FM) and antiferromagnetic (AF) phases, we also study a class of disordered phases with magnetic short-range order (SRO). In the weak-coupling limit, a SRO phase has a higher transition temperature than the AF phase for all fillings p below 1 and can even have a higher transition temperature than the FM phase. At T=0 and for small Hund's coupling J_H, a SRO state has lower energy than either the FM or AF phases for 0.26\le p 0 limit but appears for any non-zero value of J_H.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, published versio