The production of muons from heavy-flavour hadron decays in p–Pb collisions at sNN=5.02 TeV was studied for 2<pT<16 GeV/c with the ALICE detector at the CERN LHC. The measurement was performed at ...forward (p-going direction) and backward (Pb-going direction) rapidity, in the ranges of rapidity in the centre-of-mass system (cms) 2.03<ycms<3.53 and −4.46<ycms<−2.96, respectively. The production cross sections and nuclear modification factors are presented as a function of transverse momentum (pT). At forward rapidity, the nuclear modification factor is compatible with unity while at backward rapidity, in the interval 2.5<pT<3.5 GeV/c, it is above unity by more than 2σ. The ratio of the forward-to-backward production cross sections is also measured in the overlapping interval 2.96<|ycms|<3.53 and is smaller than unity by 3.7σ in 2.5<pT<3.5 GeV/c. The data are described by model calculations including cold nuclear matter effects.
Abstract
Background
Ustekinumab (UST) is an interleukin-12/interleukin-23 receptor antagonist recently approved for treating ulcerative colitis (UC), but with limited real-world data. We assessed ...therefore the effectiveness and safety of UST in UC patients in a real-world setting
Methods
This is a multicentre, retrospective, observational cohort study. The primary endpoint was the clinical remission rate (partial Mayo score, PMS, ≤1). Other endpoints were corticosteroid-free remission (CSFR) rate, clinical response rate (PMS reduction of at least 2 points), and faecal calprotectin (FC) reduction at week 24.
Results
We included 256 consecutive UC patients (M/F 139/117, median age 52). The clinical remission and clinical response rates at 8 weeks were 18.7% (44/235) and 53.2% (125/235), respectively, and 27.6% (42/152) and 61.8% (94/152) at 24 weeks, respectively. At 24 weeks, CSFR was 20.3% (31/152), and FC significantly dropped at week 12 (p=0.0004) and 24 (p=0.038). At 8 weeks, patients naïve or with one previous biologic treatment, showed higher remission (p=0.002) and clinical response rates (p=0.018) than patients previously treated with ≥2 biologics (finding not confirmed at week 24). Adverse events occurred in six patients (2.3%), whereas four patients (1.6%) underwent colectomy.
Conclusion
This large real-world study shows that UST effectively and safely treats UC patients.
The production of
ϕ
mesons has been studied in pp collisions at LHC energies with the ALICE detector via the dimuon decay channel in the rapidity region
2.5
<
y
<
4
. Measurements of the differential ...cross section
d
2
σ
/
d
y
d
p
T
are presented as a function of the transverse momentum (
p
T
) at the center-of-mass energies
s
=
5.02
, 8 and 13 TeV and compared with the ALICE results at midrapidity. The differential cross sections at
s
=
5.02
and 13 TeV are also studied in several rapidity intervals as a function of
p
T
, and as a function of rapidity in three
p
T
intervals. A hardening of the
p
T
-differential cross section with the collision energy is observed, while, for a given energy,
p
T
spectra soften with increasing rapidity and, conversely, rapidity distributions get slightly narrower at increasing
p
T
. The new results, complementing the published measurements at
s
=
2.76
and 7 TeV, allow one to establish the energy dependence of
ϕ
meson production and to compare the measured cross sections with phenomenological models. None of the considered models manages to describe the evolution of the cross section with
p
T
and rapidity at all the energies.
Two-particle angular correlations between unidentified charged trigger and associated particles are measured by the ALICE detector in p–Pb collisions at a nucleon–nucleon centre-of-mass energy of ...5.02 TeV. The transverse-momentum range 0.7<pT,assoc<pT,trig<5.0 GeV/c is examined, to include correlations induced by jets originating from low momentum-transfer scatterings (minijets). The correlations expressed as associated yield per trigger particle are obtained in the pseudorapidity range |η|<0.9. The near-side long-range pseudorapidity correlations observed in high-multiplicity p–Pb collisions are subtracted from both near-side short-range and away-side correlations in order to remove the non-jet-like components. The yields in the jet-like peaks are found to be invariant with event multiplicity with the exception of events with low multiplicity. This invariance is consistent with the particles being produced via the incoherent fragmentation of multiple parton–parton scatterings, while the yield related to the previously observed ridge structures is not jet-related. The number of uncorrelated sources of particle production is found to increase linearly with multiplicity, suggesting no saturation of the number of multi-parton interactions even in the highest multiplicity p–Pb collisions. Further, the number scales only in the intermediate multiplicity region with the number of binary nucleon–nucleon collisions estimated with a Glauber Monte-Carlo simulation.
We present measurements of two-particle correlations with neutral pion trigger particles of transverse momenta 8<pTtrig<16 GeV/c and associated charged particles of 0.5<pTassoc<10 GeV/c versus the ...azimuthal angle difference Δφ at midrapidity in pp and central Pb–Pb collisions at sNN=2.76 TeV with ALICE. The new measurements exploit associated charged hadrons down to 0.5 GeV/c, which significantly extends our previous measurement that only used charged hadrons above 3 GeV/c. After subtracting the contributions of the flow background, v2 to v5, the per-trigger yields are extracted for |Δφ|<0.7 on the near and for |Δφ−π|<1.1 on the away side. The ratio of per-trigger yields in Pb–Pb to those in pp collisions, IAA, is measured on the near and away side for the 0–10% most central Pb–Pb collisions. On the away side, the per-trigger yields in Pb–Pb are strongly suppressed to the level of IAA≈0.6 for pTassoc>3 GeV/c, while with decreasing momenta an enhancement develops reaching about 5 at low pTassoc. On the near side, an enhancement of IAA between 1.2 at the highest to 1.8 at the lowest pTassoc is observed. The data are compared to parton-energy-loss predictions of the JEWEL and AMPT event generators, as well as to a perturbative QCD calculation with medium-modified fragmentation functions. All calculations qualitatively describe the away-side suppression at high pTassoc. Only AMPT captures the enhancement at low pTassoc, both on the near and away side. However, it also underpredicts IAA above 5 GeV/c, in particular on the near-side.
Sponges (phylum Porifera) are the phylogenetically oldest metazoan animals, their evolution dating back to 600 million years ago. Here we demonstrate that sponges express ADP-ribosyl cyclase ...activity, which converts NAD+into cyclic ADP-ribose, a potent and universal intracellular Ca2+mobilizer. In Axinella polypoides (Demospongiae, Axinellidae), ADP-ribosyl cyclase was activated by temperature increases by means of an abscisic acid-induced, protein kinase A-dependent mechanism. The thermosensor triggering this signaling cascade was a heat-activated cation channel. Elucidation of the complete thermosensing pathway in sponges highlights a number of features conserved in higher organisms: (i) the cation channel thermoreceptor, sensitive to heat, mechanical stress, phosphorylation, and anesthetics, shares all of the functional characteristics of the mammalian heat-activated background K+channel responsible for central and peripheral thermosensing; (ii) involvement of the phytohormone abscisic acid and cyclic ADP-ribose as its second messenger is reminiscent of the drought stress signaling pathway in plants. These results suggest an ancient evolutionary origin of this stress-signaling cascade in a common precursor of modern Metazoa and Metaphyta.
At the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, atomic nuclei are collided at ultra-relativistic energies. Many final-state particles are produced in each collision and their properties ...are measured by the ALICE detector. The detector signals induced by the produced particles are digitized leading to data rates that are in excess of 48GB/s. The ALICE High Level Trigger (HLT) system pioneered the use of FPGA- and GPU-based algorithms to reconstruct charged-particle trajectories and reduce the data size in real time. The results of the reconstruction of the collision events, available online, are used for high level data quality and detector-performance monitoring and real-time time-dependent detector calibration. The online data compression techniques developed and used in the ALICE HLT have more than quadrupled the amount of data that can be stored for offline event processing.
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