From Immortality to Borrowed Time: Correlates and Challenges

The history of the human race is marked by the entrance of corruption, which also represents the loss of immortality. After the Fall, humans, and animals experienced death. By contrast, unfeeling organisms/cells may have several design functions. Plants, for example, photosynthesize and then are eaten and digested; unsuccessful sperm and ova are discarded and decay. These examples were in God’s original plan. Following the entrance of sin, adverse events such as environmental, genetic, and ecological changes, alterations in human attitudes, and manipulation of germplasm occurred. The image of God found in humans at the beginning was marred by the Fall and accounts for the adverse human attitude changes noted today. Despite this, God offers all individuals a make-over in their physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual/moral domains. Acceptance of the offer in its fullness would result in focused attention to health and efforts to repair and restore the environment, among other valuable outcomes. Keywords: Immortality, corruption, aging, design function, environmental change

Mississippi\u27s Colleges are Living on Borrowed Time!

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/ms_educ/1104/thumbnail.jp

Britain's borrowed time

Great Britain ; Inflation (Finance) - Great Britain ; Purchasing power parity

Crop Productivity in the Ag Belt on Borrowed Time

Most people by now have heard the terms “climate change” and global warming. Many acknowledge that it’s a problem, but they may not know how it can impact them directly. This is especially true for those living in the middle of the country, because most of the media attention goes to the coastal impacts of climate change. While putting adequate focus on the coastal impacts is a good start, since the most widespread and severe impacts will be coastal, but there needs to be more talk and discussion about the future impacts over the middle of the country. One big reason that the plains and Midwest regions get less attention than the coasts is because of the lack of population in the heartland in comparison to the massive metropolitan areas that line our coasts, and odds are they will be impacted most severely. Another barrier that should be assessed is the idea that since weather in the plains and Midwest is already so variable that a change in weather conditions from climate change wouldn’t be noticeable and/or that it won’t really change the local weather at all. I’ve heard this argument from people that have grown up and live in the Midwest and from those that live on the coasts. The reality is that the effects in the Midwest and plains will be very real and noticeable. One could argue that the Midwest is just as vulnerable or even more so because of one big reason, and that is agriculture. Our ag belt sits right in the middle the plains and Midwest, and serves as a major food source for many in the US and the world. Climate change has the potential to disrupt all of it. What do climate scientists and models have to say about the plains and climate change? According to the “Climate Change Implications for Nebraska” report, conducted by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, precipitation events will become far more sporadic and extreme. This means that there may not be precipitation for weeks or months at a time before one large event brings a significant amount of precipitation all at once. These torrential rainfall events result in excessive runoff which can lead to flash flooding and severe erosion of topsoil. During intense rains, especially directly after a time of drought, the rain water is unable to penetrate deep into the soil so the water runs off into streams, rivers, and drainage systems. The report also predicts that temperatures across the region will continue to increase over the remainder of the century. The number of 100 degree days for the state of Nebraska alone will increase to an average of 13-25 days per summer by 2100. The number of overnight lows above 70 degrees are forecasted to increase by an astounding 20-40 days, also by 2100. These temperatures, especially the warm overnight lows, will create serious heat stress issues for corn leading to decreasing yields. This type of pattern is not at all conducive for growing a good, consistent crop. Irrigation systems may prevent significant loss during dry cycles, until the Ogallala aquifer becomes too depleted. The losses in ag from these volatile precipitation, and temperature, extremes will cause billions in crop losses in the Midwest alone. Such an event would create major economic and financial turmoil for millions across multiple states in the ag belt. Grain and meat production would reel, biofuel production would slow and become more expensive, and those that have jobs in these fields would likely suffer directly due to layoffs. The risk for the ag belt to see these extremes continues to grow and several events over the past few years have already given us a glance at what our future may look like. Climate change is here, it’s happening now right in front of our eyes. Pretending that it isn’t happening or that it won’t impact you personally is a dangerous way to go about things

On Borrowed Time -- Preventing Static Power Side-Channel Analysis

In recent years, static power side-channel analysis attacks have emerged as a serious threat to cryptographic implementations, overcoming state-of-the-art countermeasures against side-channel attacks. The continued down-scaling of semiconductor process technology, which results in an increase of the relative weight of static power in the total power budget of circuits, will only improve the viability of static power side-channel analysis attacks. Yet, despite the threat posed, limited work has been invested into mitigating this class of attack. In this work we address this gap. We observe that static power side-channel analysis relies on stopping the target circuit's clock over a prolonged period, during which the circuit holds secret information in its registers. We propose Borrowed Time, a countermeasure that hinders an attacker's ability to leverage such clock control. Borrowed Time detects a stopped clock and triggers a reset that wipes any registers containing sensitive intermediates, whose leakages would otherwise be exploitable. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our countermeasure by performing practical Correlation Power Analysis attacks under optimal conditions against an AES implementation on an FPGA target with and without our countermeasure in place. In the unprotected case, we can recover the entire secret key using traces from 1,500 encryptions. Under the same conditions, the protected implementation successfully prevents key recovery even with traces from 1,000,000 encryptions

Living on borrowed time – Amazonian trees use decade‐old storage carbon to survive for months after complete stem girdling

Nonstructural carbon (NSC) reserves act as buffers to sustain tree activity during periods when carbon (C) assimilation does not meet C demand, but little is known about their age and accessibility; we designed a controlled girdling experiment in the Amazon to study tree survival on NSC reserves. We used bomb-radiocarbon (14C) to monitor the time elapsed between C fixation and release (‘age’ of substrates). We simultaneously monitored how the mobilization of reserve C affected δ13CO2. Six ungirdled control trees relied almost exclusively on recent assimilates throughout the 17 months of measurement. The Δ14C of CO2 emitted from the six girdled stems increased significantly over time after girdling, indicating substantial remobilization of storage NSC fixed up to 13–14 yr previously. This remobilization was not accompanied by a consistent change in observed δ13CO2. These trees have access to storage pools integrating C accumulated over more than a decade. Remobilization follows a very clear reverse chronological mobilization with younger reserve pools being mobilized first. The lack of a shift in the δ13CO2 might indicate a constant contribution of starch hydrolysis to the soluble sugar pool even outside pronounced stress periods (regular mixing). © 2018 The Authors. New Phytologist © 2018 New Phytologist Trus