Five-dimensional Superfield Supergravity

We present a projective superspace formulation for matter-coupled simple supergravity in five dimensions. Our starting point is the superspace realization for the minimal supergravity multiplet proposed by Howe in 1981. We introduce various off-shell supermultiplets (i.e. hypermultiplets, tensor and vector multiplets) that describe matter fields coupled to supergravity. A projective-invariant action principle is given, and specific dynamical systems are constructed including supersymmetric nonlinear sigma-models. We believe that this approach can be extended to other supergravity theories with eight supercharges in $D\leq 6$ space-time dimensions, including the important case of 4D N=2 supergravity.Comment: 18 pages, LaTeX; v2: comments added; v3: minor changes, references added; v4: comments, reference added, version to appear in PL

Factors Associated With Readmission Of Patients With Congenital Heart Disease In A Swiss University Hospital

ABSTRACT Background: Congenital heart defects (CHD) are a common congenital anomaly that leads to extensive use of healthcare resources, yet there is little information available on the rates of readmission or the factors that predispose to readmission within 30 days of discharge. We sought to evaluate!the rate of readmission among patients with CHD and to analyse the factors associated with! readmission. Methods: Retrospective study using data concerning all patients with an ICD=10 code from Q20 to Q25 hospitalised between 2002 and 2014 at the University Hospital of Lausanne. Readmission and association with socio-clinical factors were evaluated for all non-humanitarian patients under the age of 18. Results: 996 patients younger than 18 were hospitalised for CHD, 332 undergoing surgery. 96 patients (9.6%) were readmitted within 30 days of discharge, 83 (86.5%) cardiac causes. Median time to readmission was 10 days (interquartile range: 6 - 20) and median length of readmission was 12 days (interquartile range: 6 - 20). Foreign nationality, greater distance to hospital, and length of index hospitalisation < 14 days predisposed to readmission. Patients who underwent surgery were less likely to be readmitted (8.7%). Conclusion: Readmissions were frequent, almost 1 in 10 patients, and associated with several socio- clinical factors. Providing patients who live far from hospital with specialized care closer to home may help reduce the rate of readmission

Magnetomechanical effects in textured polycrystalline Tb76Dy24

Uniaxial stress-strain measurements were performed on polycrystalline Tb76Dy24 alloys which exhibit "giant magnetostriction" at cryogenic temperatures. The Young's moduli were reduced by up to a factor of five at 77 K, in comparison to their values at 300 K. We attribute this reduction to a mechanical compliance from domain rotation. Large mechanical hysteresis is also found in nominally elastic stress-strain curves measured below the Curie temperature. Hysteretic curves from 0 to 25 MPa demonstrate up to 19% dissipation of the applied mechanical energy. The anisotropy of thermal expansion was also measured and used as a parameter for the degree of crystallographic texture. This anisotropy was correlated to bulk magnetostriction and to mechanical hysteresis

Cones, Tri-Sasakian Structures and Superconformal Invariance

In this note we show that rigid N=2 superconformal hypermultiplets must have target manifolds which are cones over tri-Sasakian metrics. We comment on the relation of this work to cone-branes and the AdS/CFT correspondence.Comment: 10 pages, Latex2

Estimates of genetic differentiation measured by FST do not necessarily require large sample sizes when using many SNP markers

Population genetic studies provide insights into the evolutionary processes that influence the distribution of sequence variants within and among wild populations. FST is among the most widely used measures for genetic differentiation and plays a central role in ecological and evolutionary genetic studies. It is commonly thought that large sample sizes are required in order to precisely infer FST and that small sample sizes lead to overestimation of genetic differentiation. Until recently, studies in ecological model organisms incorporated a limited number of genetic markers, but since the emergence of next generation sequencing, the panel size of genetic markers available even in non-reference organisms has rapidly increased. In this study we examine whether a large number of genetic markers can substitute for small sample sizes when estimating FST. We tested the behavior of three different estimators that infer FST and that are commonly used in population genetic studies. By simulating populations, we assessed the effects of sample size and the number of markers on the various estimates of genetic differentiation. Furthermore, we tested the effect of ascertainment bias on these estimates. We show that the population sample size can be significantly reduced (as small as n = 4–6) when using an appropriate estimator and a large number of bi-allelic genetic markers (k.1,000). Therefore, conservation genetic studies can now obtain almost the same statistical power as studies performed on model organisms using markers developed with next-generation sequencing