String theory, hight emperature QCD and inflationary cosmology

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In my last grant proposal I summarised my works on two basic areas of research: string cosmology and flux compactifications. I have continued on these two topics, and have also started working on thermal field theories like high temperature QCD etc using tools of string theory. The field of high temperature QCD has recently become very active due to some interesting inputs from string theory. String theory predicts that certain gauge theories could be studied from dual gravity backgrounds where all calculations of these gauge theories have one-to-one correspondences in the gravity theories. This would mean, in particular, that certain non-trivial calculations of gauge theories (that were thought to be rather impossible to do using conventional techniques) could now be easily performed using this new duality. Using these techniques, a year ago it was found that the ratio of the viscosity of any thermal fluid to its entropy cannot be smaller than a certain number. This was a very surprising conclusion that came out directly from applying string theory methods (its difficult to predict this using conventional gauge theory techniques). Question however is whether this "bound" is robust. We have recently found that the predicted bound could be lowered by incorporating string theory corrections. However the analysis is highly involved and would require time and the efforts of few graduate students to work this out completely. It will be really fascinating if we could find a new bound here, as this would be the first concrete prediction of string theory for the real world.