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False vacuum decay is a key feature in quantum field theories and exhibits a distinct signature in the early Universe cosmology. It has recently been suggested that the false vacuum decay is catalyzed by a black hole (BH), which might cause the catastrophe of the Standard Model Higgs vacuum if primordial BHs are formed in the early Universe. We investigate vacuum phase transition of a scalar field around a radiating BH with taking into account the effect of Hawking radiation. We find that the vacuum decay rate slightly decreases in the presence of the thermal effect since the scalar potential is stabilized near the horizon. However, the stabilization effect becomes weak at the points sufficiently far from the horizon. Consequently, we find that the decay rate is not significantly changed unless the effective coupling constant of the scalar field to the radiation is extremely large. This implies that the change of the potential from the Hawking radiation does not help prevent the Standard Model Higgs vacuum decay catalyzed by a BH.

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-Short time exposure (STE) test using rabbit corneal cell line (SIRC) cells was developed as an alternative eye irritation test. STE test uses relative viability as the endpoint after cells are exposed to the test material at constant concentrations for 5 min. In this inter-laboratory study with 3 laboratories, 44 chemicals with a wide range of classes were evaluated for the transferability, between-lab reproducibility and predictive capacity of the STE test as an alternative eye irritation test. Globally harmonized sysin vivo data. Transferability was assessed using standard chemicals (sodium lauryl sulfate, calcium thioglycolate, andThe irritation category (Irritant or Non irritant) at each test concentration (5% and 0.05%) in STE test was --el (PM) based on the relative viability at two concentrations (5% and 0.05%) were highly correlated with the GHS ranks of non-irritant, category 1, and category 2, respectively (accuracy was 75.0% at all laboratories). These results suggest that the STE test possessed easy transferability, reproducibility, good predictive performance.

Although linear programming problems can be solved in polynomial time by the ellipsoid method and interior-point algorithms, there still remains a longstanding open problem of devising a strongly polynomial algorithm for linear programming (or of disproving the existence of such an algorithm). The present work is motivated by an attempt toward solving this problem.Linear programming problems can be formulated in terms of a zonotope, a kind of greedy polyhedron, on which linear optimization is made easily. We propose a method, called the LP-Newton method, for linear programming that is based on the zonotope formulation and the minimum-norm-point algorithm of Philip Wolfe. The LP-Newton method is a finite algorithm even for real-number input data with exact arithmetic computations. We show some preliminary computational results to examine the behavior of the LP-Newton method.