Artisanal ceramic factories using wood combustion: A nanoparticles and human health study

The ceramics industry, resulting from developments of modern compounds, is a segment of great influence in worldwide sustainability. Artisanal ceramic factories based on wood combustion have significant risks for the creation and discharge of atmosphere nanoparticles (NPs) and ultra-fine particles (UFPs). At present, there is insufficient recognition on the influence of engineered-NPs on the atmosphere and health. Real improvements are indispensable to diminish contact with NPs. The present study demonstrates the main NPs and UFPS present in an area of intense artisanal wood-combustion ceramic manufacturing. Particulate matter was sampled for morphological, chemical, and geochemical studies by sophisticated electron microbeam microscopy, X-Ray Diffraction, and Raman spectroscopy. From NPs configuration (10 nm) were produced around the studied artisanal ceramic factories. This study presents an indication of the recent information on population and work-related contact to NPs in the artisanal ceramic factories and their influence on health

Universal fluctuations in subdiffusive transport

Subdiffusive transport in tilted washboard potentials is studied within the fractional Fokker-Planck equation approach, using the associated continuous time random walk (CTRW) framework. The scaled subvelocity is shown to obey a universal law, assuming the form of a stationary Levy-stable distribution. The latter is defined by the index of subdiffusion alpha and the mean subvelocity only, but interestingly depends neither on the bias strength nor on the specific form of the potential. These scaled, universal subvelocity fluctuations emerge due to the weak ergodicity breaking and are vanishing in the limit of normal diffusion. The results of the analytical heuristic theory are corroborated by Monte Carlo simulations of the underlying CTRW

Components of a Neanderthal gut microbiome recovered from fecal sediments from El Salt

A comprehensive view of our evolutionary history cannot ignore the ancestral features of our gut microbiota. To provide some glimpse into the past, we searched for human gut microbiome components in ancient DNA from 14 archeological sediments spanning four stratigraphic units of El Salt Middle Paleolithic site (Spain), including layers of unit X, which has yielded well-preserved Neanderthal occupation deposits dating around 50 kya. According to our findings, bacterial genera belonging to families known to be part of the modern human gut microbiome are abundantly represented only across unit X samples, showing that well-known beneficial gut commensals, such as Blautia, Dorea, Roseburia, Ruminococcus, Faecalibacterium and Bifidobacterium already populated the intestinal microbiome of Homo since as far back as the last common ancestor between humans and Neanderthals.Results and discussion - Ancient DNA sequencing and damage assessment. - Detection of ancient human mitochondrial DNA. - Profiling of ancient prokaryotic DNA. - Putative components of the Neanderthal gut microbiome. Methods - Site and sampling. - Ancient DNA extraction. - Library preparation and sequencing. - Bioinformatics analysis. - Independent validation of taxonomic assignments. - mtDNA analysis and contamination estimate. - Statistics and reproducibility

On the relation of optical obscuration and X-ray absorption in Seyfert galaxies

The optical classification of a Seyfert galaxy and whether it is considered X-ray absorbed are often used interchangeably. But there are many borderline cases and also numerous examples where the optical and X-ray classifications appear to be in conflict. In this article we re-visit the relation between optical obscuration and X-ray absorption in AGNs. We make use of our "dust color" method (Burtscher et al. 2015) to derive the optical obscuration A_V and consistently estimated X-ray absorbing columns using 0.3--150 keV spectral energy distributions. We also take into account the variable nature of the neutral gas column N_H and derive the Seyfert sub-classes of all our objects in a consistent way. We show in a sample of 25 local, hard-X-ray detected Seyfert galaxies (log L_X / (erg/s) ~ 41.5 - 43.5) that there can actually be a good agreement between optical and X-ray classification. If Seyfert types 1.8 and 1.9 are considered unobscured, the threshold between X-ray unabsorbed and absorbed should be chosen at a column N_H = 10^22.3 / cm^2 to be consistent with the optical classification. We find that N_H is related to A_V and that the N_H/A_V ratio is approximately Galactic or higher in all sources, as indicated previously. But in several objects we also see that deviations from the Galactic ratio are only due to a variable X-ray column, showing that (1) deviations from the Galactic N_H/A_V can simply be explained by dust-free neutral gas within the broad line region in some sources, that (2) the dust properties in AGNs can be similar to Galactic dust and that (3) the dust color method is a robust way to estimate the optical extinction towards the sublimation radius in all but the most obscured AGNs.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication by A&A; updated PDF to include abstrac

Accelerating lattice reduction with FPGAs

International audienceWe describe an FPGA accelerator for the Kannan­–Fincke­–Pohst enumeration algorithm (KFP) solving the Shortest Lattice Vector Problem (SVP). This is the first FPGA implementation of KFP specifically targeting cryptographically relevant dimensions. In order to optimize this implementation, we theoretically and experimentally study several facets of KFP, including its efficient parallelization and its underlying arithmetic. Our FPGA accelerator can be used for both solving stand-alone instances of SVP (within a hybrid CPU­–FPGA compound) or myriads of smaller dimensional SVP instances arising in a BKZ-type algorithm. For devices of comparable costs, our FPGA implementation is faster than a multi-core CPU implementation by a factor around 2.12

Rational isogenies from irrational endomorphisms

In this paper, we introduce a polynomial-time algorithm to compute a connecting $\mathcal{O}$-ideal between two supersingular elliptic curves over $\mathbb{F}_p$ with common $\mathbb{F}_p$-endomorphism ring $\mathcal{O}$, given a description of their full endomorphism rings. This algorithm provides a reduction of the security of the CSIDH cryptosystem to the problem of computing endomorphism rings of supersingular elliptic curves. A similar reduction for SIDH appeared at Asiacrypt 2016, but relies on totally different techniques. Furthermore, we also show that any supersingular elliptic curve constructed using the complex-multiplication method can be located precisely in the supersingular isogeny graph by explicitly deriving a path to a known base curve. This result prohibits the use of such curves as a building block for a hash function into the supersingular isogeny graph

Identification of absolute geometries of cis and trans molecular isomers by Coulomb Explosion Imaging

Citation: Ablikim, U., Bomme, C., Xiong, H., Savelyev, E., Obaid, R., Kaderiya, B., . . . Rolles, D. (2016). Identification of absolute geometries of cis and trans molecular isomers by Coulomb Explosion Imaging. Scientific Reports, 6, 8. doi:10.1038/srep38202An experimental route to identify and separate geometric isomers by means of coincident Coulomb explosion imaging is presented, allowing isomer-resolved photoionization studies on isomerically mixed samples. We demonstrate the technique on cis/trans 1,2-dibromoethene (C2H2Br2). The momentum correlation between the bromine ions in a three-body fragmentation process induced by bromine 3d inner-shell photoionization is used to identify the cis and trans structures of the isomers. The experimentally determined momentum correlations and the isomer-resolved fragment-ion kinetic energies are matched closely by a classical Coulomb explosion model

Arya: Nearly linear-time zero-knowledge proofs for correct program execution

There have been tremendous advances in reducing interaction, communication and verification time in zero-knowledge proofs but it remains an important challenge to make the prover efficient. We construct the first zero-knowledge proof of knowledge for the correct execution of a program on public and private inputs where the prover computation is nearly linear time. This saves a polylogarithmic factor in asymptotic performance compared to current state of the art proof systems. We use the TinyRAM model to capture general purpose processor computation. An instance consists of a TinyRAM program and public inputs. The witness consists of additional private inputs to the program. The prover can use our proof system to convince the verifier that the program terminates with the intended answer within given time and memory bounds. Our proof system has perfect completeness, statistical special honest verifier zero-knowledge, and computational knowledge soundness assuming linear-time computable collision-resistant hash functions exist. The main advantage of our new proof system is asymptotically efficient prover computation. The prover’s running time is only a superconstant factor larger than the program’s running time in an apples-to-apples comparison where the prover uses the same TinyRAM model. Our proof system is also efficient on the other performance parameters; the verifier’s running time and the communication are sublinear in the execution time of the program and we only use a log-logarithmic number of rounds