A role for whey-derived lactoferrin and immunoglobulins in the attenuation of obesity-related inflammation and disease

Obesity is a strong predictive factor in the development of chronic disease and has now superseded undernutrition as a major public health issue. Chronic inflammation is one mechanism thought to link excess body weight with disease. Increasingly, the gut and its extensive population of commensal microflora are recognized as playing an important role in the development of obesity-related chronic inflammation. Obesity and a high fat diet are associated with altered commensal microbial communities and increased intestinal permeability which contributes to systemic inflammation as a result of the translocation of lipopolysaccharide into the circulation and metabolic endotoxemia. Various milk proteins are showing promise in the prevention and treatment of obesity and chronic low-grade inflammation via reductions in visceral fat, neutralization of bacteria at the mucosa and reduced intestinal permeability. In this review, we focus on evidence supporting the potential antiobesogenic and anti-inflammatory effects of bovine whey-derived lactoferrin and immunoglobulins.     

First-Principles Calculation of the Third Virial Coefficient of Helium

Knowledge of the pair and three-body potential-energy surfaces of helium is now sufficient to allow calculation of the third density virial coefficient, C(T), with significantly smaller uncertainty than that of existing experimental data. In this work, we employ the best available pair and three-body potentials for helium and calculate C(T) with path-integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) calculations supplemented by semiclassical calculations. The values of C(T) presented extend from 24.5561 K to 10 000 K. In the important metrological range of temperatures near 273.16 K, our uncertainties are smaller than the best experimental results by approximately an order of magnitude, and the reduction in uncertainty at other temperatures is at least as great. For convenience in calculation of C(T) and its derivatives, a simple correlating equation is presented.     

Properties of purified direct steam grown silicon thermal oxides

Thermal silicon oxides are known to very effectively passivate silicon surfaces. Choosing a water vapor ambient instead of a dry oxygen atmosphere increases the oxidation rate by about one order of magnitude and considerably reduces process time and costs. State of the art pyrox systems produce steam by pyrolysis of hydrogen and oxygen gas. A new approach is the purification of vaporized deionized (DI) water. In this work we present a direct comparison of both steam generation systems, which are connected to the same quartz tube of an industrial high quality tube furnace. The higher steam saturation of the direct steam process enhances the growth rate by about 20% compared to a pyrolytic steam based process. On low-resistivity p-type substrates, excellent surface recombination velocities of around 25 cm/s are found for both systems after a forming gas anneal. Detailed characterization shows similar physical properties of the oxide layers grown by either steam from pyrolysis or purified steam. Moreover, thermal oxide rear surface passivated silicon solar cells show similar high efficiencies exceeding 18.0% irrespective of the applied steam generation technology.     

Wallace E. Lambert (1922–2009).

On August 23, 2009, psychology lost an innovative researcher with the passing, at 86, of Wallace E. Lambert. A professor of psychology at McGill University from 1954 until 1990, Wallace (“Wally”) Lambert was among the founders of psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. His highly productive career included contributions to social and cross-cultural psychology (intergroup attitudes, child-rearing values, and psychological consequences of living in multicultural societies), language education (the French immersion program), and bilingualism (measurement of language dominance, attitudes and motivation in second-language learning, and social, cognitive, and neuropsychological consequences of bilingualism). Indeed, because of the scope and influence of his work, Wally Lambert is widely considered the father of the psychological study of bilingualism. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Pheromone-based trapping of West Indian sugarcane weevil in a sugarcane plantation

Attraction of Metamasius hemipterus (Oliver) to gallon and bamboo traps baited with insecticide-treated sugarcane, the male-produced pheromone, 4-methyl-5-nonanol, and 2-methyl-4-heptanol is more efficient if ethyl acetate is added. The optimal traps are ground-level gallon traps baited with insecticide-laced sugarcane, pheromone, and ethyl acetate. Capture rates of ground-level gallon traps are doubled by placing an insecticide-laced pad under the trap, but significantly decreased by placing the trap on a stick above ground. The efficiency of ground-level gallon traps is the same as ground level ramp traps. Mass-trapping M. hemipterus in newly planted sugarcane using ground level bamboo traps baited with insecticide-laced sugarcane and pheromone over six months revealed populations were low for the first two months, became maximum at five months, and declined thereafter. Capture rates of traps bordering newly planted and mature sugarcane were not significantly different from capture rates of traps in the interior of the plots. Capture rates of bamboo traps containing only insecticide-laced sugarcane and deployed at 30 traps/ha averaged 6 weevils/trap/week compared with 66 weevils/trap/week for traps additionally containing pheromone lures and deployed at 5 traps/ha. Capture rates for bamboo traps baited with insecticide-laced sugarcane and pheromone and deployed at 10 and 15 traps/ha were 43 and 38 weevils/trap/week, respectively. Total captures were higher in those plots with a higher density of insecticide-laden sugarcane and pheromone baited traps, and the differences were approximately proportional to trap density in the range of 5–15 traps/ha. Capture rates of traps containing insecticide-laced sugarcane and pheromone were always higher than of traps containing only insecticide-laced sugarcane, but in the first two months after planting the differences were much greater than in months 3–6 after planting.     

Mission Impossible? Planning and Preparing for Crisis1

Crisis management logic suggests that planning and preparing for crisis should be a vital part of institutional and policy toolkits. This paper explores the difficulties in translating this ideal into practice. It focuses on four key difficulties. First, crises and disasters are low probability events but they place large demands on resources and have to compete against front‐line service provision. Second, contingency planning requires ordering and coherence of possible threats, yet crisis is not amenable to being packaged in such a predictable way. Third, planning for crisis requires integration and synergy across institutional networks, yet the modern world is characterised by fragmentation across public, private and voluntary sectors. Fourth, robust planning requires active preparation through training and exercises, but such costly activities often produced a level of symbolic readiness which does not reflect operational realities. Finally the paper reflects on whether crisis preparedness is a ‘mission impossible’, even in the post‐9/11 period when contingency planning seems to be an issue of high political salience.     

On the power of non-local boxes

A non-local box is a virtual device that has the following property: given that Alice inputs a bit at her end of the device and that Bob does likewise, it produces two bits, one at Alice's end and one at Bob's end, such that the XOR of the outputs is equal to the AND of the inputs. This box, inspired from the CHSH inequality, was first proposed by Popescu and Rohrlich to examine the question: given that a maximally entangled pair of qubits is non-local, why is it not maximally non-local? We believe that understanding the power of this box will yield insight into the non-locality of quantum mechanics. It was shown recently by Cerf, Gisin, Massar and Popescu, that this imaginary device is able to simulate correlations from any measurement on a singlet state. Here, we show that the non-local box can in fact do much more: through the simulation of the magic square pseudo-telepathy game and the Mermin-GHZ pseudo-telepathy game, we show that the non-local box can simulate quantum correlations that no entangled pair of qubits can, in a bipartite scenario and even in a multi-party scenario. Finally we show that a single non-local box cannot simulate all quantum correlations and propose a generalization for a multi-party non-local box. In particular, we show quantum correlations whose simulation requires an exponential amount of non-local boxes, in the number of maximally entangled qubit pairs.     

Synthesis and Structures of A Series of Novel Rare Earth Transition Metal Sulfates

Seven new rare earth transition metal sulfates were synthesized by hydrothermal reactions under conditions slightly above the critical point of water. Their crystal structures were determined from single crystal X-ray data. The compositions of the new compounds can be represented by two general formulae ： REM （OH） 3 （SO4） and RE2M （OH） 3 （SO4） 2F （H2O） with RE = Gd, Tb, Dy ; M = Ni, Cu. Three different crystal structure types were found for the formula REM （OH） 3 （SO4）. The structures of the new compounds all feature infinite chains of REOn coordination polyhedra, which are connected to chains of CuO6 or NiO6 octabedra. The limited size range of the rare earth cations observed in these compounds is most likely because of interactions between the octabedral chains and the chains of REOn polyhedra. The new compounds are closely related to the known yttrium transition metal sulfates.