In view of the known effect of zinc on the crystalline nature of insulin, we have investigated whether zinc alters the biologic potency of this hormone. Using the rate of lipogenesis by rat epididymal adipocytes as an index of the biologic potency of insulin, we have shown that zinc exerts a potent stimulatory effect upon lipogenesis in vitro similar to, but quite independently of, insulin and ...

We investigate experimentally a Casimir-like effect in a three-dimensional pile of rice, which has a power-law avalanche size distribution. We observe the change in distance between two Plexiglas sheets placed on the pile parallel to each other and parallel to the mean avalanche flow direction, while rice grains are continuously and uniformly falling on top of the pile. The resulting avalanches...

Water droplets condensing on solidified phase change materials such as benzene and cyclohexane near their melting point show in-plane jumping and continuous "crawling" motion. The jumping drop motion has been tentatively explained as an outcome of melting and refreezing of the materials surface beneath the droplets and can be thus considered as an inverted Leidenfrost-like effect (in the classi...

Sodium vanadate has several insulin-like effects. To determine whether vanadate acts via the insulin receptor, I investigated the effect of vanadate on glucose transport (2-deoxyglucose uptake) in adipocytes that had been treated to decrease the number of insulin receptors. (1) Trypsin (100 ,tg/ml) caused > 95% loss of 1251-insulin binding and rendered glucose transport resistant to both insuli...

Certain fractional quantum Hall states, including the experimentally observed ν = 5/2 state, and, possibly, the ν = 12/5 state, may have a sufficiently rich form of topological order (i.e. they may be nonabelian) to be used for topological quantum computation, an intrinsically fault tolerant form of quantum computation which is carried out by braiding the world lines of quasiparticle excitation...

We show in the context of Einstein gravity that the removal of a spatial region leads to the appearance of an infinite set of observables and their associated edge states localized at its boundary. Such a boundary occurs in certain approaches to the physics of black holes like the one based on the membrane paradigm. The edge states can contribute to black hole entropy in these models. A “comple...

We discuss the ordinary quantum Hall effect and a higher-dimensional cousin. We consider the dimensional reduction of these effects to 1+1 and 3 + 1 space-time dimensions, respectively. After dimensional reduction, an axion field appears, which plays the rôle of a space-time dependent difference of chemical potentials of chiral modes. As applications, we sketch a theory of quantum pumps and a m...

We derive a generalized set of Ward identities that captures the effects of topological charge on Hall transport. The Ward identities follow from the 2+1 dimensional momentum algebra, which includes a central extension proportional to the topological charge density. In the presence of topological objects like Skyrmions, we observe that the central term leads to a direct relation between the the...

which have been observed later in an experiment [2] with thermal activation of quasiparticle–quasihole pairs in extremely high mobility samples. The exact quantization of the Hall conductance σH = ν(e /h) for filling factors ν = 5/2 and 8/3 (k = 2 and 4) was obvious while at ν = 13/5 and 19/7, (k = 3 and 5) there were only well-expressed nonzero minimums of the resistance. The two-dimensional c...