Physical theories that depend on many parameters or are tested against data from many different experiments pose unique challenges to statistical inference. Many models in particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology fall into one or both of these categories. These issues are often sidestepped with statistically unsound ad hoc methods, involving intersection of parameter intervals estimated by multiple experiments, and random or grid sampling of model parameters.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEuclid is a European Space Agency medium-class mission selected for launch in 2019 within the Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 program. The main goal of Euclid is to understand the origin of the accelerated expansion of the universe. Euclid will explore the expansion history of the universe and the evolution of cosmic structures by measuring shapes and red-shifts of galaxies as well as the distribution of clusters of galaxies over a large fraction of the sky.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe revisit anthropic arguments purporting to explain the measured value of the cosmological constant. We argue that different ways of assigning probabilities to candidate universes lead to totally different anthropic predictions. As an explicit example, we show that weighting different universes by the total number of possible observations leads to an extremely small probability for observing a value of Lambda equal to or greater than what we now measure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe demonstrate that combining cosmic microwave background anisotropy measurements from the 1st year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe observations with clustering data from the Sloan galaxy redshift survey yields an indication for primordial anisotropies in the cosmological neutrino background.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWith the recent rapid increase in scientific understanding of the human genome it is becoming possible to identify the extent to which genetic variations influence drug response. The emergence of pharmacogenetics heralds a new era in which drug therapies will be selected on the basis of differences in individuals' genotypes, enhancing drug safety and efficacy. The major focus of this review is pharmacogenetics of antihypertensive drugs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Objectives: The pro-inflammatory cytokine interleukin (IL)-1 has been suggested to play a role in atherosclerosis. Several genetic polymorphisms have been described in the genes of the IL-1 cluster and associations with coronary artery disease (CAD) have been reported, although with contrasting results.
Design And Methods: The associations of a variable number tandem repeat (86 bp) polymorphism in intron 2 of interleukin-1 receptor antagonist (IL1-RA) and of the 511 C/T polymorphism of IL-1b with the risk of CAD were studied.