838 research outputs found
Sudden death associated with QT interval prolongation and KCNQ1 gene mutation in a family of English Springer Spaniels
Background:
A 5-year-old, healthy English Springer Spaniel died suddenly 4 months after delivering a litter of 7 puppies. Within 4 months of the dam's death, 3 offspring also died suddenly.
Hypothesis:
Abnormal cardiac repolarization, caused by an inherited long QT syndrome, is thought to be responsible for arrhythmias leading to sudden death in this family.
Animals:
Four remaining dogs from the affected litter and 11 related dogs.
Methods:
Physical examination and resting ECG were done on the littermates and 9 related dogs. Additional tests on some or all littermates included echocardiogram with Doppler, Holter monitoring, and routine serum biochemistry. Blood for DNA sequencing was obtained from all 15 dogs.
Results:
Three of 4 littermates examined, but no other dogs, had prolonged QT intervals with unique T-wave morphology. DNA sequencing of the KCNQ1 gene identified a heterozygous single base pair mutation, unique to these 3 dogs, which changes a conserved amino acid from threonine to lysine and is predicted to change protein structure.
Conclusions and Clinical Importance:
This family represents the first documentation in dogs of spontaneous familial QT prolongation, which was associated with a KCNQ1 gene mutation and sudden death. Although the final rhythm could not be documented in these dogs, their phenotypic manifestations of QT interval prolongation and abnormal ECG restitution suggested increased risk for sudden arrhythmic death. The KCNQ1 gene mutation identified is speculated to impair the cardiac repolarizing current IKs, similar to KCNQ1 mutations causing long QT syndrome 1 in humans
Time variation of fundamental couplings and dynamical dark energy
Scalar field dynamics may give rise to a nonzero cosmological variation of
fundamental constants. Within different scenarios based on the unification of
gauge couplings, the various claimed observations and bounds may be combined in
order to trace or restrict the time history of the couplings and masses. If the
scalar field is responsible for a dynamical dark energy or quintessence,
cosmological information becomes available for its time evolution. Combining
this information with the time variation of couplings, one can determine the
interaction strength between the scalar and atoms, which may be observed by
tests of the Weak Equivalence Principle. We compute bounds on the present rate
of coupling variation from experiments testing the differential accelerations
for bodies with equal mass and different composition and compare the
sensitivity of various methods. In particular, we discuss two specific models
of scalar evolution: crossover quintessence and growing neutrino models.Comment: 26 pages, 2 figures; minor typos & added references, to be published
in JCA
Inter-layer Hall effect in double quantum wells subject to in-plane magnetic fields
We report on a theoretical study of the transport properties of two coupled
two-dimensional electron systems subject to in-plane magnetic fields. The
charge redistribution in double wells induced by the Lorenz force in crossed
electric and magnetic fields has been studied. We have found that the
redistribution of the charge and the related inter-layer Hall effect originate
in the chirality of diamagnetic currents and give a substantial contribution to
the conductivity.Comment: 7 RevTex pages, 4 figures, appendix added and misprint in Eq. (11)
correcte
A new window on Strange Quark Matter as the ground state of strongly interacting matter
If strange quark matter is the true ground state of matter, it must have
lower energy than nuclear matter. Simultaneously, two-flavour quark matter must
have higher energy than nuclear matter, for otherwise the latter would convert
to the former. We show, using an effective chiral lagrangian, that the
existence of a new lower energy ground state for two-flavour quark matter, the
pion condensate, shrinks the window for strange quark matter to be the ground
state of matter and sets new limits on the current strange quark mass
Classification and one loop renormalization of dimension six and eight operators in quantum gluodynamics
We determine the complete set of independent dimension six and eight Lorentz
scalar operators in Yang-Mills theory for an arbitrary colour group. The
anomalous dimension mixing matrix is determined at one loop.Comment: 16 latex pages, 1 postscript figur
The Herschel view of the environment of the radio galaxy 4C+41.17 at z = 3.8
We present Herschel observations at 70, 160, 250, 350 and 500 μm of the environment of the radio galaxy 4C+41.17 at z = 3.792. About 65 per cent of the extracted sources are securely identified with mid-infrared sources observed with the Spitzer Space Telescope at 3.6, 4.5, 5.8, 8 and 24 μm. We derive simple photometric redshifts, also including existing 850 and 1200 μm data, using templates of active galactic nuclei, starburst-dominated systems and evolved stellar populations. We find that most of the Herschel sources are foreground to the radio galaxy and therefore do not belong to a structure associated with 4C+41.17. We do, however, find that the spectral energy distribution (SED) of the closest (∼25 arcsec offset) source to the radio galaxy is fully consistent with being at the same redshift as 4C+41.17. We show that finding such a bright source that close to the radio galaxy at the same redshift is a very unlikely event, making the environment of 4C+41.17 a special case. We demonstrate that multiwavelength data, in particular on the Rayleigh–Jeans side of the SED, allow us to confirm or rule out the presence of protocluster candidates that were previously selected by single wavelength data setsPeer reviewe
Gauge dependence and renormalization of in the MSSM
Well-known and newly developed renormalization schemes for are
analyzed in view of three desirable properties: gauge independence, process
independence, and numerical stability in perturbation theory. Arguments are
provided that no scheme can meet all three requirements, and as an
illustration, a ``No-Go-Theorem'' for the renormalization of is
established. Nevertheless, two particularly attractive schemes emerge. A
discussion about which scheme might be the best compromise in practice is
given.Comment: 20 pages, improved version that was published in PRD D66 (2002
Cosmic Chronometers: Constraining the Equation of State of Dark Energy. I: H(z) Measurements
We present new determinations of the cosmic expansion history from
red-envelope galaxies. We have obtained for this purpose high-quality spectra
with the Keck-LRIS spectrograph of red-envelope galaxies in 24 galaxy clusters
in the redshift range 0.2 < z < 1.0. We complement these Keck spectra with
high-quality, publicly available archival spectra from the SPICES and VVDS
surveys. We improve over our previous expansion history measurements in Simon
et al. (2005) by providing two new determinations of the expansion history:
H(z) = 97 +- 62 km/sec/Mpc at z = 0.5 and H(z) = 90 +- 40 km/sec/Mpc at z =
0.8. We discuss the uncertainty in the expansion history determination that
arises from uncertainties in the synthetic stellar-population models. We then
use these new measurements in concert with cosmic-microwave-background (CMB)
measurements to constrain cosmological parameters, with a special emphasis on
dark-energy parameters and constraints to the curvature. In particular, we
demonstrate the usefulness of direct H(z) measurements by constraining the
dark- energy equation of state parameterized by w0 and wa and allowing for
arbitrary curvature. Further, we also constrain, using only CMB and H(z) data,
the number of relativistic degrees of freedom to be 4 +- 0.5 and their total
mass to be < 0.2 eV, both at 1-sigma.Comment: Submitted to JCA
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