Family memories in the home: contrasting physical and digital mementos

We carried out fieldwork to characterise and compare physical and digital mementos in the home. Physical mementos are highly valued, heterogeneous and support different types of recollection. Contrary to expectations, we found physical mementos are not purely representational, and can involve appropriating common objects and more idiosyncratic forms. In contrast, digital mementos were initially perceived as less valuable, although participants later reconsidered this. Digital mementos were somewhat limited in function and expression, largely involving representational photos and videos, and infrequently accessed. We explain these digital limitations and conclude with design guidelines for digital mementos, including better techniques for accessing and integrating these into everyday life, allowing them to acquire the symbolic associations and lasting value that characterise their physical counterparts

Top and Bottom Seesaw from Supersymmetric Strong Dynamics

We propose a top and bottom seesaw model with partial composite top and bottom quarks. Such composite quarks and topcolor gauge bosons are bound states from supersymmetric strong dynamics by Seiberg duality. Supersymmetry breaking also induces the breaking of topcolor into the QCD gauge coupling. The low energy description of our model reduces to a complete non-minimal extension of the top seesaw model with bottom seesaw. The non-minimal nature is crucial for Higgs mixings and the appearance of light Higgs fields. The Higgs fields are bound states of partial composite particles with the lightest one compatible with a 125 GeV Higgs field which was discovered at the LHC.Comment: Minor changes, Published Versio

Measuring indirect transmission-reducing effects in tuberculosis vaccine efficacy trials: why and how?

Tuberculosis is the leading bacterial cause of death globally. In 2021, 10·6 million people developed symptomatic tuberculosis and 1·6 million died. Seven promising vaccine candidates that aim to prevent tuberculosis disease in adolescents and adults are currently in late-stage clinical trials. Conventional phase 3 trials provide information on the direct protection conferred against infection or disease in vaccinated individuals, but they tell us little about possible indirect (ie, transmission-reducing) effects that afford protection to unvaccinated individuals. As a result, proposed phase 3 trial designs will not provide key information about the overall effect of introducing a vaccine programme. Information on the potential for indirect effects can be crucial for policy makers deciding whether and how to introduce tuberculosis vaccines into immunisation programmes. We describe the rationale for measuring indirect effects, in addition to direct effects, of tuberculosis vaccine candidates in pivotal trials and lay out several options for incorporating their measurement into phase 3 trial designs

Chiral Polymerization in Open Systems From Chiral-Selective Reaction Rates

We investigate the possibility that prebiotic homochirality can be achieved exclusively through chiral-selective reaction rate parameters without any other explicit mechanism for chiral bias. Specifically, we examine an open network of polymerization reactions, where the reaction rates can have chiral-selective values. The reactions are neither autocatalytic nor do they contain explicit enantiomeric cross-inhibition terms. We are thus investigating how rare a set of chiral-selective reaction rates needs to be in order to generate a reasonable amount of chiral bias. We quantify our results adopting a statistical approach: varying both the mean value and the rms dispersion of the relevant reaction rates, we show that moderate to high levels of chiral excess can be achieved with fairly small chiral bias, below 10%. Considering the various unknowns related to prebiotic chemical networks in early Earth and the dependence of reaction rates to environmental properties such as temperature and pressure variations, we argue that homochirality could have been achieved from moderate amounts of chiral selectivity in the reaction rates.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in Origins of Life and Evolution of Biosphere

Global Methylation in Exposure Biology and Translational Medical Science

Background: Many groups are actively investigating how the epigenetic state relates to environmental exposures and development of disease, including cancer. There are myriad choices for capturing and measuring the epigenetic state of a tissue, ranging from assessing the total methyl-CpG content to array-based platforms that simultaneously probe hundreds of thousands of CpG loci. There is an emerging literature that uses CpG methylation at repetitive sequences, including LINE-1 (long interspersed nuclear element-1) elements, to capture the epigenomic state

Empowerment or Engagement? Digital Health Technologies for Mental Healthcare

We argue that while digital health technologies (e.g. artificial intelligence, smartphones, and virtual reality) present significant opportunities for improving the delivery of healthcare, key concepts that are used to evaluate and understand their impact can obscure significant ethical issues related to patient engagement and experience. Specifically, we focus on the concept of empowerment and ask whether it is adequate for addressing some significant ethical concerns that relate to digital health technologies for mental healthcare. We frame these concerns using five key ethical principles for AI ethics (i.e. autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice, and explicability), which have their roots in the bioethical literature, in order to critically evaluate the role that digital health technologies will have in the future of digital healthcare

The Microbial Communities in Male First Catch Urine Are Highly Similar to Those in Paired Urethral Swab Specimens

Urine is the CDC-recommended specimen for STI testing. It was unknown if the bacterial communities (microbiomes) in urine reflected those in the distal male urethra. We compared microbiomes of 32 paired urine and urethral swab specimens obtained from adult men attending an STD clinic, by 16S rRNA PCR and deep pyrosequencing. Microbiomes of urine and swabs were remarkably similar, regardless of STI status of the subjects. Thus, urine can be used to characterize urethral microbiomes when swabs are undesirable, such as in population-based studies of the urethral microbiome or where multiple sampling of participants is required

Anti-müllerian hormone is not associated with cardiometabolic risk factors in adolescent females

<p>Objectives: Epidemiological evidence for associations of Anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) with cardiometabolic risk factors is lacking. Existing evidence comes from small studies in select adult populations, and findings are conflicting. We aimed to assess whether AMH is associated with cardiometabolic risk factors in a general population of adolescent females.</p> <p>Methods: AMH, fasting insulin, glucose, HDLc, LDLc, triglycerides and C-reactive protein (CRP) were measured at a mean age 15.5 years in 1,308 female participants in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). Multivariable linear regression was used to examine associations of AMH with these cardiometabolic outcomes.</p> <p>Results: AMH values ranged from 0.16–35.84 ng/ml and median AMH was 3.57 ng/ml (IQR: 2.41, 5.49). For females classified as post-pubertal (n = 848) at the time of assessment median (IQR) AMH was 3.81 ng/ml (2.55, 5.82) compared with 3.25 ng/ml (2.23, 5.05) in those classed as early pubertal (n = 460, P≤0.001). After adjusting for birth weight, gestational age, pubertal stage, age, ethnicity, socioeconomic position, adiposity and use of hormonal contraceptives, there were no associations with any of the cardiometabolic outcomes. For example fasting insulin changed by 0% per doubling of AMH (95%CI: −3%,+2%) p = 0.70, with identical results if HOMA-IR was used. Results were similar after additional adjustment for smoking, physical activity and age at menarche, after exclusion of 3% of females with the highest AMH values, after excluding those that had not started menarche and after excluding those using hormonal contraceptives.</p> <p>Conclusion: Our results suggest that in healthy adolescent females, AMH is not associated with cardiometabolic risk factors.</p&gt

QCD axion and quintessential axion

The axion solution of the strong CP problem is reviewed together with the other strong CP solutions. We also point out the quintessential axion(quintaxion) whose potential can be extremely flat due to the tiny ratio of the hidden sector quark mass and the intermediate hidden sector scale. The quintaxion candidates are supposed to be the string theory axions, the model independent or the model dependent axions.Comment: 15 pages. Talk presented at Castle Ringberg, June 9-14, 200