Associations Between Dietary Fiber and Inflammation, Hepatic Function, and Risk of Type 2 Diabetes in Older Men Potential mechanisms for the benefits of fiber on diabetes risk

OBJECTIVE - To examine the relationship between dietary fiber and the risk of type 2 diabetes in older men and the role of hepatic and inflammatory markers.RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS - The study was performed prospectively and included 3,428 nondiabetic men (age 60-79 years) followed up for 7 years, during which there were 162 incident cases of type 2 diabetes.RESULTS - Low total dietary fiber (lowest quartile <= 20 g/day) was associated With increased risk of diabetes after adjustment for total caloric intake and potential confounders (relative risk - 1.47 [95% CI 1.03-2.11]). This increased risk was seen separately for both low cereal and low vegetable fiber intake. Dietary fiber was inversely associated with inflammatory markers (C-reactive protein, interleukin-6) and with tissue plasminogen activator and gamma-glutamyl transferase. Adjustment for these markers attenuated the increased risk (1.28 [0.88-1.86]).CONCLUSIONS - Dietary fiber is associated with reduced diabetes risk, which may be partly explained by inflammatory markers and hepatic fat deposition

Continuous Variable Quantum State Sharing via Quantum Disentanglement

Quantum state sharing is a protocol where perfect reconstruction of quantum states is achieved with incomplete or partial information in a multi-partite quantum networks. Quantum state sharing allows for secure communication in a quantum network where partial information is lost or acquired by malicious parties. This protocol utilizes entanglement for the secret state distribution, and a class of "quantum disentangling" protocols for the state reconstruction. We demonstrate a quantum state sharing protocol in which a tripartite entangled state is used to encode and distribute a secret state to three players. Any two of these players can collaborate to reconstruct the secret state, whilst individual players obtain no information. We investigate a number of quantum disentangling processes and experimentally demonstrate quantum state reconstruction using two of these protocols. We experimentally measure a fidelity, averaged over all reconstruction permutations, of F = 0.73. A result achievable only by using quantum resources.Comment: Published, Phys. Rev. A 71, 033814 (2005) (7 figures, 11 pages

Birthweight and risk markers for type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease in childhood: the Child Heart and Health Study in England (CHASE).

AIMS/HYPOTHESIS: Lower birthweight (a marker of fetal undernutrition) is associated with higher risks of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease (CVD) and could explain ethnic differences in these diseases. We examined associations between birthweight and risk markers for diabetes and CVD in UK-resident white European, South Asian and black African-Caribbean children. METHODS: In a cross-sectional study of risk markers for diabetes and CVD in 9- to 10-year-old children of different ethnic origins, birthweight was obtained from health records and/or parental recall. Associations between birthweight and risk markers were estimated using multilevel linear regression to account for clustering in children from the same school. RESULTS: Key data were available for 3,744 (66%) singleton study participants. In analyses adjusted for age, sex and ethnicity, birthweight was inversely associated with serum urate and positively associated with systolic BP. After additional height adjustment, lower birthweight (per 100 g) was associated with higher serum urate (0.52%; 95% CI 0.38, 0.66), fasting serum insulin (0.41%; 95% CI 0.08, 0.74), HbA1c (0.04%; 95% CI 0.00, 0.08), plasma glucose (0.06%; 95% CI 0.02, 0.10) and serum triacylglycerol (0.30%; 95% CI 0.09, 0.51) but not with BP or blood cholesterol. Birthweight was lower among children of South Asian (231 g lower; 95% CI 183, 280) and black African-Caribbean origin (81 g lower; 95% CI 30, 132). However, adjustment for birthweight had no effect on ethnic differences in risk markers. CONCLUSIONS/INTERPRETATION: Birthweight was inversely associated with urate and with insulin and glycaemia after adjustment for current height. Lower birthweight does not appear to explain emerging ethnic difference in risk markers for diabetes

Spin structure of the nucleon: QCD evolution, lattice results and models

The question how the spin of the nucleon is distributed among its quark and gluon constituents is still a subject of intense investigations. Lattice QCD has progressed to provide information about spin fractions and orbital angular momentum contributions for up- and down-quarks in the proton, at a typical scale \mu^2~4 GeV^2. On the other hand, chiral quark models have traditionally been used for orientation at low momentum scales. In the comparison of such model calculations with experiment or lattice QCD, fixing the model scale and the treatment of scale evolution are essential. In this paper, we present a refined model calculation and a QCD evolution of lattice results up to next-to-next-to-leading order. We compare this approach with the Myhrer-Thomas scenario for resolving the proton spin puzzle.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, equation (9) has been corrected leading to a revised figure 1b. Revision matches published versio

Properties of low-lying states in a diffusive quantum dot and Fock-space localization

Motivated by an experiment by Sivan et al. (Europhys. Lett. 25, 605 (1994)) and by subsequent theoretical work on localization in Fock space, we study numerically a hierarchical model for a finite many-body system of Fermions moving in a disordered potential and coupled by a two-body interaction. We focus attention on the low-lying states close to the Fermi energy. Both the spreading width and the participation number depend smoothly on excitation energy. This behavior is in keeping with naive expectations and does not display Anderson localization. We show that the model reproduces essential features of the experiment by Sivan et al.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Let

Cooling Flow Star Formation and the Apparent Stellar Ages of Elliptical Galaxies

Observational constraints and theoretical arguments indicate that cooled interstellar gas in bright elliptical galaxies forms into a young stellar population throughout the region within the half-light radius. The young population has a bottom-heavy, but optically luminous IMF extending to 1 - 2 M_sun. When the colors and spectral features of this young population are combined with those of the underlying old stellar population, the apparent ages are significantly reduced, similar to the relatively young apparent ages observed in many ellipticals. Galactic mergers are not required to resupply young stars. The sensitivity of continuous star formation to L_B and L_x/L_B is likely to account for the observed spread in apparent ages among elliptical galaxies. Local star formation is accompanied by enhanced stellar H_beta equivalent widths, stronger optical emission lines, enhanced thermal X-ray emission and lower apparent temperatures in the hot gas. The young stars should cause M/L to vary with galactic radius, perturbing the fundamental plane occupied by the old stars.Comment: 6 pages with 2 figures; accepted by Astrophysical Journal Letter

Generalized parton distributions and structure functions from full lattice QCD

We present here the latest results from the QCDSF collaboration for (moments of) structure functions and generalized form factors in full QCD with Nf=2 O(a)-improved Wilson fermions based on simulations closer to the chiral and continuum limit.Comment: Talks presented by D.Pleiter and J.Zanotti at Lattice2004(weak), Fermilab, June 21-26, 2004, 6 pages, 9 figure

Lexical evolution rates by automated stability measure

Phylogenetic trees can be reconstructed from the matrix which contains the distances between all pairs of languages in a family. Recently, we proposed a new method which uses normalized Levenshtein distances among words with same meaning and averages on all the items of a given list. Decisions about the number of items in the input lists for language comparison have been debated since the beginning of glottochronology. The point is that words associated to some of the meanings have a rapid lexical evolution. Therefore, a large vocabulary comparison is only apparently more accurate then a smaller one since many of the words do not carry any useful information. In principle, one should find the optimal length of the input lists studying the stability of the different items. In this paper we tackle the problem with an automated methodology only based on our normalized Levenshtein distance. With this approach, the program of an automated reconstruction of languages relationships is completed

VUV frequency combs from below-threshold harmonics

Recent demonstrations of high-harmonic generation (HHG) at very high repetition frequencies (~100 MHz) may allow for the revolutionary transfer of frequency combs to the vacuum ultraviolet (VUV). This advance necessitates unifying optical frequency comb technology with strong-field atomic physics. While strong-field studies of HHG have often focused on above-threshold harmonic generation (photon energy above the ionization potential), for VUV frequency combs an understanding of below-threshold harmonic orders and their generation process is crucial. Here we present a new and quantitative study of the harmonics 7-13 generated below and near the ionization threshold in xenon gas. We show multiple generation pathways for these harmonics that are manifested as on-axis interference in the harmonic yield. This discovery provides a new understanding of the strong-field, below-threshold dynamics under the influence of an atomic potential and allows us to quantitatively assess the achievable coherence of a VUV frequency comb generated through below threshold harmonics. We find that under reasonable experimental conditions temporal coherence is maintained. As evidence we present the first explicit VUV frequency comb structure beyond the 3rd harmonic.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures, 1 tabl