Unraveling the Complexity of Parkinson's Disease: Insights into Pathogenesis and Precision Interventions.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by dopaminergic neuron loss, leading to motor and non-motor symptoms. Early detection before symptom onset is crucial but challenging. This study presents a framework integrating circuit modeling, non-equilibrium dynamics, and optimization to understand PD pathogenesis and enable precision interventions.

"Hot-spotting" to improve vaccine allocation by harnessing digital contact tracing technology: An application of percolation theory.

Vaccinating individuals with more exposure to others can be disproportionately effective, in theory, but identifying these individuals is difficult and has long prevented implementation of such strategies. Here, we propose how the technology underlying digital contact tracing could be harnessed to boost vaccine coverage among these individuals. In order to assess the impact of this "hot-spotting" proposal we model the spread of disease using percolation theory, a collection of analytical techniques from statistical physics.

Interaction-Free Effects Between Distant Atoms.

A Gedanken experiment is presented where an excited and a ground-state atom are positioned such that, within the former's half-life time, they exchange a photon with 50% probability. A measurement of their energy state will therefore indicate in 50% of the cases that no photon was exchanged. Yet other measurements would reveal that, by the mere possibility of exchange, the two atoms have become entangled.

Anomalous cosmic-microwave-background polarization and gravitational chirality.

We consider the possibility that gravity breaks parity, with left and right-handed gravitons coupling to matter with a different Newton's constant and show that this would affect their zero-point vacuum fluctuations during inflation. Should there be a cosmic background of gravity waves, the effect would translate into anomalous cosmic microwave background polarization. Nonvanishing temperature-magnetic (TB) mode [and electric-magnetic mode] components emerge, revealing interesting experimental targets.

The assessment of diabetes knowledge and self-efficacy in a diverse population using Rasch measurement.

The purpose of this research was to develop survey instruments to evaluate diabetes knowledge and self-efficacy in a diverse population, and investigate the psychometric properties of data obtained with these instruments using Rasch measurement. Two-hundred and fifty-five urban-dwelling participants with diabetes were recruited to complete surveys through independent interviews. To evaluate the association of health literacy on metabolic control, formal literacy and hemoglobin A1c fingerstick testing were performed.