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In terms of their energetics, cosmic ray protons are an insignificant by-product of star formation and super-massive black hole growth. However, due to their small mean free path, their coupling with the interstellar medium is absolute. In fact, they are most likely, the dominant source of momentum, and therefore kinetic force on galactic scales. By defining an Eddington Limit in Cosmic Rays, we show that the maximum photon luminosity of bright galaxies and quasars are capped by the production and subsequent expulsion of cosmic ray protons. Such simple arguments may explain why bright galaxies are faint in comparison to quasars and why super-massive black holes are relatively mass-less in comparison to galaxies.

How many interacting quantum (field) theories of four-dimensional geometry are there which have General Relativity as their classical limit? Some of us still harbour hopes that a quantum theory of gravity is "reasonably unique", i.e. characterized by a finite number of free parameters. One framework in which such universality may manifest itself is that of "Quantum Gravity from Causal Dynamical Triangulations (CDT)". I will summarize the rationale behind this nonperturbative formulation and CDT's main achievements in trying to explain the micro- and macro-structure of spacetime from first principles. This includes the remarkable property of "dynamical reduction" of the spacetime dimension from four to two at the Planck scale.

A new force mediated by a new vector boson with mass in the MeV to GeV range and with very weak coupling to ordinary matter appears naturally in many theoretical models and could also explain a variety of observed anomalies. Such anomalies include the discrepancy between the predicted and the experimentally observed value for the muon anomalous magnetic moment, and recent cosmic-ray data that can be explained by dark matter interacting through this force with ordinary matter. This talk will review the motivation for such a force and present a broad array of probes of this physics. These probes include high-luminosity e+e- colliders, such as BaBar and BELLE, whose existing data sets may contain thousands of spectacular events; new high-intensity fixed-target experiments at electron accelerators such as Jefferson Laboratory; and indirect astrophysical probes such as gamma-ray observations of Milky-Way dwarf satellite galaxies, which constitute some of the least luminous and most dark matter dominated galaxies known.

ABJM theory is a world-volume theory for an arbitrary number of M2-branes. One of the unique features of ABJM theory is its characteristic scaling behaviour, exhibited for example by the free energy and correlation functions of chiral primary operators. In more detail, ABJM theory has a holographic dual where thermodynamics at strong coupling is determined by a system of black M2-branes. The zero-coupling (black-body radiation) free energy disagrees with the strong coupling result. Even the scaling in the 't Hooft coupling is different (strongly suppressed at strong coupling). It is therefore important to check that the weak and strong coupling results converge as loop corrections are taken into account. The leading order computation indeed confirms that the first correction goes in the right direction.