erators (RTGs) are deployed along the Russian Federation’s Arctic coast to power remote lighthouses and navigation beacons. Similar RTGs were also used as power sources in other remote locations in the Russian Federation and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. All Russian RTG’s have out-lived their lifespan and are in need of decommissioning. Radioactive incidents involving such sources, such...

Quantum gravitational corrections to the effective potential, at one-loop level and in the leading-log approximation, for scalar quantum electrodynamics with higher-derivative gravity —which is taken as an effective theory for quantum gravity (QG)— are calculated. We point out the appearence of relevant phenomena caused by quantum gravity, like dimensional transmutation, QG-driven instabilities...

Sergey I. Bozhko,1,2 Sergey A. Krasnikov,1 Olaf Lübben,1 Barry E. Murphy,1 Kevin Radican,1 Valery N. Semenov,2 Han Chun Wu,1 Brendan Bulfin,1 and Igor V. Shvets1,* 1Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices, School of Physics, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland 2Institute of Solid State Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Chernogolovka 142432, Russian Federation (R...

BACKGROUND International variation in homicide rates may be attributable to cultural differences in acceptance of moral justifications for killing. The aim of this study is to investigate the relationships between measures of attitudes towards the justification of killing and homicide rates in diverse international populations. METHODS Four studies assessed variations in acceptance of killing...

The bent functions are the Boolean functions of an even number of variables which are at the maximum possible distance from the set of all affine functions. In this paper, it is shown that each isometric mapping of the set of Boolean functions of n variables to itself preserving the class of bent functions is a combination of an affine transformation of coordinates and a shift by an affine func...

We develop a general formalism to study the renormalization group (RG) improved effective potential for renormalizable gauge theories —including matter-R-gravity— in curved spacetime. The result is given up to quadratic terms in curvature, and one-loop effective potentials may be easiliy obtained from it. As an example, we consider scalar QED, where dimensional transmutation in curved space and...

Highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N8) viruses were detected in waterfowl at 2 zoos in India in October 2016. Both viruses were different 7:1 reassortants of H5N8 viruses isolated in May 2016 from wild birds in the Russian Federation and China, suggesting virus spread during southward winter migration of birds.