The Potential for cross-drive analysis using automated digital forensic timelines

Cross-Drive Analysis (CDA) is a technique designed to allow an investigator to “simultaneously consider information from across a corpus of many data sources”. Existing approaches include multi-drive correlation using text searching, e.g. email addresses, message IDs, credit card numbers or social security numbers. Such techniques have the potential to identify drives of interest from a large set, provide additional information about events that occurred on a single disk, and potentially determine social network membership. Another analysis technique that has significantly advanced in recent years is the use of timelines. Tools currently exist that can extract dates and times from the file system metadata (i.e. MACE times) and also examine the content of certain file types and extract metadata from within. This approach provides a great deal of data that can assist with an investigation, but also compounds the problem of having too much data to examine. A recent paper adds an additional timeline analysis capability, by automatically producing a high-level summary of the activity on a computer system, by combining sets of low-level events into high-level events, for example reducing a setupapi event and several events from the Windows Registry to a single event of ‘a USB stick was connected’. This paper provides an investigation into the extent to which events in such a high-level timeline have the properties suitable to assist with Cross-Drive Analysis. The paper provides several examples that use timelines generated from multiple disk images, including USB stick connections, Skype calls, and access to files on a memory card

Assessing Friction Characteristics of Liquid Lubricants

The decline of fossil fuel reserves and the increasing awareness of greenhouse gas emissions have been the primary driving forces behind the need to conserve energy. To improve fuel efficiency friction modifiers are commonly blended into lubricants. Reduction of friction will clearly lead to less energy requirements. However, an accurate evaluation of lubricant performance is not possible using existing test equipment. The main reason is that current test rigs require operating conditions that induce wear so that the measurement of friction in these rigs is not a real evaluation of friction. The paper will detail the design and commissioning of a purpose built test rig to measure frictional characteristics of various oils as well as the results of the tests performed

The denitridation of nitrides of iron, cobalt and rhenium under hydrogen

The denitridation behaviour of binary iron, cobalt and rehnium nitrides under H2 /Ar has been investigated. The iron nitride was found to lose over 70 % of its as prepared nitrogen content at 400 °C. The cobalt nitride was completely denitrided at 250 °C. Rhenium nitride lost close to 90 % of its nitrogen at 350 °C. In addition, Co-Re4 prepared by ammonolyis was investigated, whilst only traces of NH<sub>3</sub> were lost from this material under H<sub>2</sub>/Ar at 400 °C, with H<sub>2</sub>/N2 it proved to be an active ambient pressure ammonia synthesis catalyst in accordance with previous literature

Elastic scattering of intermediate-energy electrons from C_(60) molecules

Experimental and calculated differential cross sections for elastic scattering of electrons by C_(60) molecules at collision energies of 100 to 500 eV are reported. The elastic differential cross sections were measured in a standard crossed-beam apparatus, while the calculations were performed employing the Schwinger multichannel technique at the static-exchange level. Diffraction effects, some due to the overall spherical-cage structure and some to scattering by individual C atoms, are observed in both the measured and calculated cross sections

Hot methane line lists for exoplanet and brown dwarf atmospheres

We present comprehensive experimental line lists of methane (CH4) at high temperatures obtained by recording Fourier transform infrared emission spectra. Calibrated line lists are presented for the temperatures 300 - 1400 degC at twelve 100 degC intervals spanning the 960 - 5000 cm-1 (2.0 - 10.4 microns) region of the infrared. This range encompasses the dyad, pentad and octad regions, i.e., all fundamental vibrational modes along with a number of combination, overtone and hot bands. Using our CH4 spectra, we have estimated empirical lower state energies (Elow in cm-1) and our values have been incorporated into the line lists along with line positions (cm-1) and calibrated line intensities (S' in cm molecule-1). We expect our hot CH4 line lists to find direct application in the modeling of planetary atmospheres and brown dwarfs.Comment: Supplementary material is provided via the Astrophysical Journal referenc

On the importance of paleoclimate modelling for improving predictions of future climate change

We use an ensemble of runs from the MIROC3.2 AGCM with slab-ocean to explore the extent to which mid-Holocene simulations are relevant to predictions of future climate change. The results are compared with similar analyses for the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and pre-industrial control climate. We suggest that the paleoclimate epochs can provide some independent validation of the models that is also relevant for future predictions. Considering the paleoclimate epochs, we find that the stronger global forcing and hence larger climate change at the LGM makes this likely to be the more powerful one for estimating the large-scale changes that are anticipated due to anthropogenic forcing. The phenomena in the mid-Holocene simulations which are most strongly correlated with future changes (i.e., the mid to high northern latitude land temperature and monsoon precipitation) do, however, coincide with areas where the LGM results are not correlated with future changes, and these are also areas where the paleodata indicate significant climate changes have occurred. Thus, these regions and phenomena for the mid-Holocene may be useful for model improvement and validation

Chromatin accessibility underlies synthetic lethality of SWI/SNF subunits in ARID1A-mutant cancers.

ARID1A, a subunit of the SWI/SNF chromatin remodeling complex, is frequently mutated in cancer. Deficiency in its homolog ARID1B is synthetically lethal with ARID1A mutation. However, the functional relationship between these homologs has not been explored. Here, we use ATAC-seq, genome-wide histone modification mapping, and expression analysis to examine colorectal cancer cells lacking one or both ARID proteins. We find that ARID1A has a dominant role in maintaining chromatin accessibility at enhancers, while the contribution of ARID1B is evident only in the context of ARID1A mutation. Changes in accessibility are predictive of changes in expression and correlate with loss of H3K4me and H3K27ac marks, nucleosome spacing, and transcription factor binding, particularly at growth pathway genes including MET. We find that ARID1B knockdown in ARID1A mutant ovarian cancer cells causes similar loss of enhancer architecture, suggesting that this is a conserved function underlying the synthetic lethality between ARID1A and ARID1B