Iodine deficiency disorders among the pregnant women in a rural hospital of West Bengal.

Background & Objectives: Iodine deficiency disorder (IDD) is a major nutritional problem in India. The pregnant women and their neonates have been important target groups for study of the prevalence of IDD in a community. No such study was available to assess the prevalence of IDD among the pregnant women and neonates in the state of West Bengal.

Does a randall-sundrum scenario create the illusion of a torsion-free universe?

We consider spacetime with torsion in a Randall-Sundrum scenario where torsion, identified with the rank-2 Kalb-Ramond field, exists in the bulk together with gravity. While the interactions of both graviton and torsion in the bulk are controlled by the Planck mass, an additional exponential suppression comes for the torsion zero-mode on the visible brane. This may serve as a natural explanation of why the effect of torsion is so much weaker than that of curvature on the brane.

Invisible charginos and neutralinos from gauge boson fusion: a way to explore anomaly mediation.

We point out that vector boson fusion at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can lead to useful signals for charginos and neutralinos in supersymmetric scenarios where these particles are almost invisible. The proposed signals are just two forward jets with missing transverse energy. It is shown that, in this way, one can put by far the strongest constraint on the parameter space of a theory with anomaly mediated supersymmetry breaking at the LHC.

Are messages of R-parity violating supersymmetry hidden within top quark signals?

In an R-parity nonconserving supersymmetric theory, the lighter stop can dominantly decay into b&mgr; and btau if R-parity breaking has to explain the neutrino mass and mixing pattern suggested by the data on atmospheric muon neutrinos. This should give rise to dilepton + dijet and single - lepton + jets, signals identical with those of the top quark at the Fermilab Tevatron. One can thus constrain the stop parameter space using the current top search data and can similarly look for the first signals of supersymmetry at the upgraded runs of the Tevatron.