The 10 most recently published documents
Our paper analyzes whether a planner should design a taxonomy for sustainable investment products when conventional tools for environmental regulation can also be used to address externalities arising from firm production. We first show that the private market provision of ESG funds marketed to retail investors involves greenwashing, so that a mandatory taxonomy is necessary to generate real effects of sustainable finance. However, the introduction of such a taxonomy can only improve welfare, on top of optimally chosen environmental regulation, if financial frictions constrain socially valuable economic activity. Otherwise, environmental policy alone is sufficient to optimally address externalities.
We introduce a mean curvature flow with global term of convex hypersurfaces in the sphere, for which the global term can be chosen to keep any quermassintegral fixed. Then, starting from a strictly convex initial hypersurface, we prove that the flow exists for all times and converges smoothly to a geodesic sphere. This provides a workaround to an issue present in the volume-preserving mean curvature flow in the sphere introduced by Huisken (1987). We also classify solutions for some constant curvature-type equations in space forms, as well as solitons in the sphere and in the upper branch of the De Sitter space.
An important set of theorems in geometric analysis consists of constant rank theorems for a wide variety of curvature problems. In this paper, for geometric curvature problems in compact and non-compact settings, we provide new proofs which are both elementary and short. Moreover, we employ our method to obtain constant rank theorems for homogeneous and non-homogeneous curvature equations in new geometric settings. One of the essential ingredients for our method is a generalization of a differential inequality in a viscosity sense satisfied by the smallest eigenvalue of a linear map Brendle et al. (Acta Math 219:1–16, 2017) to the one for the subtrace. The viscosity approach provides a concise way to work around the well known technical hurdle that eigenvalues are only Lipschitz in general. This paves the way for a simple induction argument.
For the quermassintegral inequalities of horospherically convex hypersurfaces in the (n + 1)-dimensional hyperbolic space, where n ≥ 2, we prove a stability estimate relating the Hausdorff distance to a geodesic sphere by the deficit in the quermassintegral inequality. The exponent of the deficit is explicitly given and does not depend on the dimension. The estimate is valid in the class of domains with upper and lower bound on the inradius and an upper bound on a curvature quotient. This is achieved by some new initial value-independent curvature estimates for locally constrained flows of inverse type.
For a function f which foliates a one-sided neighborhood of a closed hypersurface M, we give an estimate of the distance of M to a Wulff shape in terms of the Lp-norm of the traceless F-Hessian of f, where F is the support function of the Wulff shape. This theorem is applied to prove quantitative stability results for the anisotropic Heintze-Karcher inequality, the anisotropic Alexandrov problem, as well as for the anisotropic overdetermined boundary value problem of Serrin-type.
Background: Zapnometinib is an oral, non-ATP-competitive, small-molecule inhibitor of MEK1/MEK2 with immunomodulatory and antiviral properties. We aimed to investigate the safety and efficacy of zapnometinib in patients with COVID-19.
Methods: In this randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, multicentre, proof-of-concept, phase 2 trial, we recruited hospitalised adults with moderate or severe COVID-19 from 18 hospitals in Germany, India, Romania, South Africa, and Spain. Those requiring ICU admission or ventilator support at screening or randomisation were excluded. Patients were randomly assigned (1:1) to receive oral zapnometinib (900 mg on Day 1; 600 mg on Days 2–6) or matching placebo, on top of standard of care. Randomisation, stratified by baseline clinical severity status (CSS 3 or 4, measured on a 7-point ordinal scale), was done using Interactive Response Technology. Patients, investigators, and the sponsor were masked to treatment allocation. The primary endpoint was CSS at Day 15 and was conducted on the full analysis set (FAS: all patients who were randomised to the study, received at least one dose of study medication and had at least one post-dose assessment of CSS, as randomised). Safety analyses were conducted on the safety analysis set (all study participants who received at least one dose of study medication, as treated). This study is registered at ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT04776044) and EudraCT (2020-004206-59).
Findings: The trial was terminated early as the emergence of the Omicron variant impacted recruitment. Between 12th April 2021 and 9th August 2022, 104 of the planned 220 patients were enrolled and randomly assigned, 103 were treated, and 101 were included in the FAS (zapnometinib: n = 50; placebo: n = 51). The primary outcome was not significantly different between the two groups, but patients on zapnometinib had higher odds of improved CSS versus placebo (odds ratio [OR] 1.54 [95% CI 0.72–3.33]; p = 0.26). Predefined subgroup analyses identified trends for improved CSS in patients with severe disease at baseline (OR 2.57 [0.76–8.88]; p = 0.13) and non-Omicron variants (OR 2.36 [0.85–6.71]; p = 0.10); the p value of the CSS subgroup by Treatment interaction term in the model was p = 0.28. The frequency and intensity of adverse events was low and similar between arms. Twenty (39.2%) patients treated with zapnometinib experienced adverse events compared with eighteen (34.6%) patients treated with placebo. One patient receiving zapnometinib and two patients receiving placebo died during the study. None of the deaths were considered related to study medication.
Interpretation: These results provide proof-of-concept for the innovative approach of targeting the Raf/MEK/ERK pathway in patients with hospitalised moderate/severe COVID-19. Further clinical studies will be required to evaluate the clinical benefit of zapnometinib in this and other indications.
Background: Emotion regulation skills are linked to corticolimbic brain activity (e.g., dorsolateral prefrontal cortex [dlPFC] and limbic regions) and enable an individual to control their emotional experiences, thus allowing healthy social functioning. Disruptions in emotion regulation skills are reported in neuropsychiatric disorders, including conduct disorder or oppositional defiant disorder (CD/ODD). Clinically recognized means to ameliorate emotion regulation deficits observed in CD/ODD include cognitive or dialectical behavioral skills therapy as implemented in the START NOW program. However, the role of emotion regulation and its neural substrates in symptom severity and prognosis following treatment of adolescent CD/ODD has not been investigated.
Methods: Cross-sectional data including functional magnetic resonance imaging responses during emotion regulation (N = 114; average age = 15 years), repeated-measures assessments of symptom severity (pretreatment, posttreatment, long-term follow-up), and functional magnetic resonance imaging data collected prior to and following the START NOW randomized controlled trial (n = 44) for female adolescents with CD/ODD were analyzed using group comparisons and multiple regression.
Results: First, behavioral and neural correlates of emotion regulation were disrupted in female adolescents with CD/ODD. Second, ODD symptom severity was negatively associated with dlPFC/precentral gyrus activity during regulation. Third, treatment-related symptom changes were predicted by pretreatment ODD symptom severity and regulatory dlPFC/precentral activity. Additionally, pretreatment dlPFC/precentral activity and ODD symptom severity predicted long-term reductions in symptom severity following treatment for participants who received the START NOW treatment.
Conclusions: Our findings demonstrate the important role that emotion regulation skills play in the characteristics of CD/ODD and show that regulatory dlPFC/precentral activity is positively associated with treatment response in female adolescents with CD/ODD.
The STAR Collaboration reports precise measurements of the longitudinal double-spin asymmetry, ALL, for dijet production with at least one jet at intermediate pseudorapidity 0.8<ηjet<1.8 in polarized proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 200 GeV. This study explores partons scattered with a longitudinal momentum fraction (x) from 0.01 to 0.5, which are predominantly characterized by interactions between high-x valence quarks and low-x gluons. The results are in good agreement with previous measurements at 200 GeV with improved precision and are found to be consistent with the predictions of global analyses that find the gluon polarization to be positive. In contrast, the negative gluon polarization solution from the JAM Collaboration is found to be strongly disfavored.
The correlation between the mean transverse momentum, [pT], and the squared anisotropic flow, v2n, on an event-by-event basis has been suggested to be influenced by the initial conditions in heavy-ion collisions. We present measurements of the variances and covariance of [pT] and v2n, along with their dimensionless ratio, for Au+Au collisions at various beam energies: sNN−−−−√ = 14.6, 19.6, 27, 54.4, and 200 GeV. Our measurements reveal a distinct energy-dependent behavior in the variances and covariance. In addition, the dimensionless ratio displays a similar behavior across different beam energies. We compare our measurements with hydrodynamic models and similar measurements from Pb+Pb collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). These findings provide valuable insights into the beam energy dependence of the specific shear viscosity (η/s) and initial-state effects, allowing for differentiating between different initial-state models.