The simplest interpretation of the microlensing events observed towards the Large Magellanic Clouds is that approximately half of the mass of the Milky Way halo is in the form of MAssive Compact Halo Objects with M ∼ 0.5M⊙. It is not possible, due to limits from star counts and chemical abundance arguments, for faint stars or white dwarves to comprise such a large fraction of the halo mass. Thi...

The most primitive germ cells in adult mammalian testis are the spermatogonial stem cells (SSCs) whereas primordial follicles (PFs) are considered the fundamental functional unit in ovary. However, this central dogma has recently been modified with the identification of a novel population of very small embryonic-like stem cells (VSELs) in the adult mammalian gonads. These stem cells are more pr...

Mammalian females are born with a finite number of nonrenewing primordial follicles, the majority of which remain in a quiescent state for many years. Because of their nonrenewing nature, these "resting" oocytes are particularly vulnerable to xenobiotic insult, resulting in premature ovarian senescence and the formation of dysfunctional oocytes. In this study, we characterized the mechanisms of...

In the mammalian ovary, progressive activation of primordial follicles serves as the source of fertilizable ova, and disorders in the development of primordial follicles lead to various ovarian diseases. However, very little is known about the developmental dynamics of primordial follicles under physiological conditions, and the fates of distinct populations of primordial follicles also remain ...

Information about the physical processes that generate the primordial fluctuations in the early universe can be gained by testing the Gaussian nature of the fluctuations through cosmic microwave background radiation (CBR) temperature anisotropy experiments. One of the crucial aspects of density perturbations that are produced by the standard inflation scenario is that they are Gaussian, whereas...

In a sexually mature female, primordial follicles continuously leave the arrested pool and undergo the primordial to primary follicle transition. The oocytes increase in size and the surrounding squamous pre-granulosa cells become cuboidal and proliferate to form a layer of cuboidal cells around the growing oocyte. This development of the primordial follicle commits the follicle to undergo the ...

The primordial mass density fluctuations may have arisen from quantum fluctuations in a (massless) scalar field that occurred during an inflationary era. We show that it is possible for primordial mass density fluctuations, which arose in this way, to be highly non-Gaussian. We also show that the “bad” infrared properties of the propagator for a massless scalar field in de Sitter space can tran...

Dark matter direct and indirect detection signals depend crucially on the dark matter distribution. While the formation of large scale structure is independent of the nature of the cold dark matter (CDM), the fate of inhomogeneities on sub-galactic scales, and hence the present day CDM distribution on these scales, depends on the micro-physics of the CDM particles. We study the density contrast...