In experimental animals, maternal diet during the periconceptional period influences the establishment of DNA methylation at metastable epialleles in the offspring, with permanent phenotypic consequences. Pronounced naturally occurring seasonal differences in the diet of rural Gambian women allowed us to test this in humans. We show that significant seasonal variations in methyl-donor nutrient ...

The metastable defects of a-Si:H samples annealed at temperatures in the 300-550°C range have been studied by photothermal deflection spectroscopy (PDS). The light-soaked samples show an increase in optical absorption in the 0.8 to 1.5 eV range. The metastable defect density decreases when the annealing temperature increases, while the defect density increases. This decrease in the metastable d...

Accurate quantum mechanical calculations of the ðJ 1⁄4 0Þ energies and lifetimes of the metastable states of ozone on a new, accurate potential energy surface are reported. These are very relevant to a famous anomalous isotope effect in the reaction that forms ozone because of their role in the energy transfer mechanism, in which metastable ro-vibrational states of ozone are formed and then sta...

Metastability and long-range interactions of Mg, Ca, and Sr in the lowest-energy metastable P2 state are investigated. The calculated lifetimes are 38 min for Mg , 118 min for Ca , and 17 min for Sr , supporting feasibility of cooling and trapping experiments. The quadrupole-quadrupole long-range interactions of two metastable atoms are evaluated for various molecular symmetries. Hund’s case (c...

In systems characterized by a rough potential-energy landscape, local energetic minima and saddles define a network of metastable states whose topology strongly influences the dynamics. Changes in temperature, causing the merging and splitting of metastable states, have nontrivial effects on such networks and must be taken into account. We do this by means of a recently proposed renormalization...

A graviton of a nonzero mass and decay width propagates five physical polarizations. The question of interactions of these polarizations is crucial for viability of models of massive/metastable gravity. This question is addressed in the context of the DGP model of a metastable graviton. First, I argue that the well-known breakdown of a naive perturbative expansion at a low scale is an artifact ...

Metastability is a ubiquitous phenomenon in nature, with examples coming from physics, chemistry, biology, climatology and economics. The objects of interest are systems that make transitions between “metastable states”, i.e., quasi-equilibria that appear to be equilibria, but are not, and the stable state. Metastable behavior is characterized by a long period of apparent equilibrium of a pure ...

Traditional studies of memristive devices have mainly focused on their applications in nonvolatile information storage and information processing. Here, we demonstrate that the third fundamental component of information technologies-the transfer of information-can also be employed with memristive devices. For this purpose, we introduce a metastable memristive circuit. Combining metastable memri...

We consider the lifetimes of metastable states in bistable evolutionary games (coordination games), and examine how they are affected by spatial structure. A semiclassical approximation based on a path integral method is applied to stochastic evolutionary game dynamics with and without spatial structure, and the lifetimes of the metastable states are evaluated. It is shown that the population d...

We study the scenario that conformal dynamics leads to metastable supersymmetry breaking vacua. At a high energy scale, the superpotential is not R-symmetric, and has a supersymmetric minimum. However, conformal dynamics suppresses several operators along renormalization group flow toward the infrared fixed point. Then we can find an approximately R-symmetric superpotential, which has a metasta...