527 research outputs found
Electron cotunneling transport in gold nanocrystal arrays
We describe current-voltage characteristics I(V) of alkyl-ligated gold
nanocrystals arrays in long screening length limit. Arrays with
different alkyl ligand lengths have been prepared to tune the electronic tunnel
coupling between the nanocrystals. For long ligands, electronic diffusion
occurs through sequential tunneling and follows activated laws, as function of
temperature and as function of electric field . For better conducting arrays, i.e.
with small ligands, the transport properties crossover to the cotunneling
regime and follows Efros-Shklovskii laws as function of temperature and as function of electric field . The data shows that electronic
transport in nanocrystal arrays can be tuned from the sequential tunneling to
the cotunneling regime by increasing the tunnel barrier transparency
Group Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange Secure against Dictionary Attacks
Group Diffie-Hellman schemes for password-based key exchange are designed to provide a pool of players communicating over a public network, and sharing just a human-memorable password, with a session key (e.g, the key is used for multicast data integrity and confidentiality) . The fundamental security goal to achieve in this scenario is security against dictionary attacks. While solutions have been proposed to solve this problem no formal treatment has ever been suggested. In this paper, we define a security model and then present a protocol with its security proof in both the random oracle model and the ideal-cipher model
Human recombinant anti-thyroperoxidase autoantibodies: in vitro cytotoxic activity on papillary thyroid cancer expressing TPO
Beyond Controlled Environments: 3D Camera Re-Localization in Changing Indoor Scenes
Long-term camera re-localization is an important task with numerous computer
vision and robotics applications. Whilst various outdoor benchmarks exist that
target lighting, weather and seasonal changes, far less attention has been paid
to appearance changes that occur indoors. This has led to a mismatch between
popular indoor benchmarks, which focus on static scenes, and indoor
environments that are of interest for many real-world applications. In this
paper, we adapt 3RScan - a recently introduced indoor RGB-D dataset designed
for object instance re-localization - to create RIO10, a new long-term camera
re-localization benchmark focused on indoor scenes. We propose new metrics for
evaluating camera re-localization and explore how state-of-the-art camera
re-localizers perform according to these metrics. We also examine in detail how
different types of scene change affect the performance of different methods,
based on novel ways of detecting such changes in a given RGB-D frame. Our
results clearly show that long-term indoor re-localization is an unsolved
problem. Our benchmark and tools are publicly available at
waldjohannau.github.io/RIO10Comment: ECCV 2020, project website https://waldjohannau.github.io/RIO1
The secondary eclipses of WASP-19b as seen by the ASTEP 400 telescope from Antarctica
The ASTEP (Antarctica Search for Transiting ExoPlanets) program was
originally aimed at probing the quality of the Dome C, Antarctica for the
discovery and characterization of exoplanets by photometry. In the first year
of operation of the 40 cm ASTEP 400 telescope (austral winter 2010), we
targeted the known transiting planet WASP-19b in order to try to detect its
secondary transits in the visible. This is made possible by the excellent
sub-millimagnitude precision of the binned data. The WASP-19 system was
observed during 24 nights in May 2010. The photometric variability level due to
starspots is about 1.8% (peak-to-peak), in line with the SuperWASP data from
2007 (1.4%) and larger than in 2008 (0.07%). We find a rotation period of
WASP-19 of 10.7 +/- 0.5 days, in agreement with the SuperWASP determination of
10.5 +/- 0.2 days. Theoretical models show that this can only be explained if
tidal dissipation in the star is weak, i.e. the tidal dissipation factor Q'star
> 3.10^7. Separately, we find evidence for a secondary eclipse of depth 390 +/-
190 ppm with a 2.0 sigma significance, a phase consistent with a circular orbit
and a 3% false positive probability. Given the wavelength range of the
observations (420 to 950 nm), the secondary transit depth translates into a day
side brightness temperature of 2690(-220/+150) K, in line with measurements in
the z' and K bands. The day side emission observed in the visible could be due
either to thermal emission of an extremely hot day side with very little
redistribution of heat to the night side, or to direct reflection of stellar
light with a maximum geometrical albedo Ag=0.27 +/- 0.13. We also report a
low-frequency oscillation well in phase at the planet orbital period, but with
a lower-limit amplitude that could not be attributed to the planet phase alone,
and possibly contaminated with residual lightcurve trends.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics, 13 pages, 13
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Optimal Dosing and Dynamic Distribution of Vaccines in an Influenza Pandemic
Limited production capacity and delays inherent in vaccine development are major hurdles to the widespread use of vaccines to mitigate the effects of a new influenza pandemic. Antigen-sparing vaccines have the most potential to increase population coverage but may be less efficacious. The authors explored this trade-off by applying simple models of influenza transmission and dose response to recent clinical trial data. In this paper, these data are used to illustrate an approach to comparing vaccines on the basis of antigen supply and inferred efficacy. The effects of delays in matched vaccine availability and seroconversion on epidemic size during pandemic phase 6 were also studied. The authors infer from trial data that population benefits stem from the use of low-antigen vaccines. Delayed availability of a matched vaccine could be partially alleviated by using a 1-dose vaccination program with increased coverage and reduced time to full protection. Although less immunogenic, an overall attack rate of up to 6% lower than a 2-dose program could be achieved. However, if prevalence at vaccination is above 1%, effectiveness is much reduced, emphasizing the need for other control measures
Dual-wavelength laser source for onboard atom interferometry
We present a compact and stable dual-wavelength laser source for onboard atom
interferometry with two different atomic species. It is based on
frequency-doubled telecom lasers locked on a femtosecond optical frequency
comb. We take advantage of the maturity of fiber telecom technology to reduce
the number of free-space optical components which are intrinsically less
stable, and to make the setup immune to vibrations and thermal fluctuations.
The source provides the frequency agility and phase stability required for atom
interferometry and can easily be adapted to other cold atom experiments. We
have shown its robustness by achieving the first dual-species K-Rb magneto
optical trap in microgravity during parabolic flights
Segmentation of Fluorescence Microscopy Cell Images Using Unsupervised Mining
The accurate measurement of cell and nuclei contours are critical for the sensitive and specific detection of changes in normal cells in several medical informatics disciplines. Within microscopy, this task is facilitated using fluorescence cell stains, and segmentation is often the first step in such approaches. Due to the complex nature of cell issues and problems inherent to microscopy, unsupervised mining approaches of clustering can be incorporated in the segmentation of cells. In this study, we have developed and evaluated the performance of multiple unsupervised data mining techniques in cell image segmentation. We adapt four distinctive, yet complementary, methods for unsupervised learning, including those based on k-means clustering, EM, Otsu’s threshold, and GMAC. Validation measures are defined, and the performance of the techniques is evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively using synthetic and recently published real data. Experimental results demonstrate that k-means, Otsu’s threshold, and GMAC perform similarly, and have more precise segmentation results than EM. We report that EM has higher recall values and lower precision results from under-segmentation due to its Gaussian model assumption. We also demonstrate that these methods need spatial information to segment complex real cell images with a high degree of efficacy, as expected in many medical informatics applications
Thyroid peroxidase forms thionamide-sensitive homodimers: relevance for immunomodulation of thyroid autoimmunity
Thyroid peroxidase (TPO) is the key enzyme in thyroid hormone production and a universal autoantigen in Graves’ and other autoimmune thyroid diseases. We wished to explore the expression of TPO and whether it was affected by thionamide antithyroid drugs. We studied recombinant TPO, stably expressed by a Chinese hamster ovary cell line (CHO-TPO) and transiently expressed TPO-enhanced green fluorescent protein (eGFP) and -FLAG fusion proteins. Immunoblotting of CHO-TPO cell extracts showed high-molecular weight (HMW) TPO isoforms that were resistant to reduction, as well as 110 kDa monomeric TPO. Co-immunoprecipitation and enzyme-linked-immunosorbent assay (ELISA) binding studies of FLAG- and eGFP-tagged TPO demonstrated TPO dimerisation. CHO-TPO cells cultured in methimazole (MMI) for 10 days showed a significant reduction in HMW-TPO isoforms at MMI concentrations of 1 µM and above (p < 0.01), whereas monomeric TPO expression was unchanged. We observed a similar reduction in HMW-TPO in CHO-TPO cells cultured in propylthiouracil (10 µM and above). Binding of Graves’ disease patient sera and TPO-Fabs to enzymatically active TPO that was captured onto solid phase was not abrogated by MMI. The cellular localisation of TPO in CHO-TPO cells was unchanged by MMI treatment. Our demonstration of homodimeric TPO and the reduction in HMW-TPO isoforms during thionamide treatment of CHO-TPO cells shows, for the first time, an effect of thionamides on TPO structure. This suggests a structural correlate to the effect of thionamides on TPO enzymatic activity and opens up a novel potential mechanism for thionamide immunomodulation of autoimmune thyroid disease
Universally Convertible Directed Signatures
Many variants of Chaum and van Antwerpen's undeniable signatures have been proposed to achieve specific properties desired in real-world applications of cryptography. Among them, directed signatures were introduced by Lim and Lee in 1993. Directed signatures differ from the well-known confirmer signatures in that the signer has the simultaneous abilities to confirm, deny and individually convert a signature. The universal conversion of these signatures has remained an open problem since their introduction in 1993. This paper provides a positive answer to this quest by showing a very efficient design for universally convertible directed signatures (UCDS) both in terms of computational complexity and signature size. Our construction relies on the so-called xyz-trick applicable to bilinear map groups. We define proper security notions for UCDS schemes and show that our construction is secure, in the random oracle model, under computational assumptions close to the CDH and DDH assumptions. Finally, we introduce and realize traceable universally convertible directed signatures where a master tracing key allows to link signatures to their direction
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