Effects of transcutaneous electric acupoint stimulation on drug use and responses to cue-induced craving: a pilot study

Background: Transcutaneous electric acupoint stimulation (TEAS) avoids the use of needles, and instead delivers a mild electric current at traditional acupoints. This technique has been used for treating heroin addiction, but has not been systematically tested for other drugs of abuse. This study aims to investigate the effects of TEAS on drug addiction. Methods: Volunteers who were either cocaine-dependent (n = 9) or cannabis-dependent (n = 11) but were not seeking treatment for their dependence participated in a within-subject, single-blind study. Treatment consisted of twice daily 30-minute sessions of TEAS or sham stimulation for 3.5 days. The active TEAS levels were individually adjusted to produce a distinct twitching response in the fingers, while the sham stimulation involved 2 minutes of stimulation at threshold levels followed by 28 minutes of stimulation below the detection levels. The participants recorded their drug use and drug cravings daily. At 1 hour after the last morning session of TEAS or sham stimulation, a cue-induced craving EEG evaluation was conducted. Event-related P300 potentials (ERPs) were recorded, sorted, and analyzed for specific image types (neutral objects, non-drug-related arousing images, or drug-related images). Results: TEAS treatment did not significantly reduce the drug use or drug cravings, or significantly alter the ERP peak voltage or latency to peak response. However, the TEAS treatment did significantly modulate several self-reported measures of mood and anxiety. Conclusion: The results of this pilot study with a limited sample size suggest that the acupoint stimulation techniques and protocol used in this trial alone do not significantly reduce cravings for or use of cocaine or cannabis. The findings that TEAS modulates mood and anxiety suggest that TEAS could be used as an adjunct in a multimodal therapy program to treat cocaine and cannabis dependence if confirmed in a full randomized controlled clinical trial

Meeting Report: The Role of Environmental Lighting and Circadian Disruption in Cancer and Other Diseases

Light, including artificial light, has a range of effects on human physiology and behavior and can therefore alter human physiology when inappropriately timed. One example of potential light-induced disruption is the effect of light on circadian organization, including the production of several hormone rhythms. Changes in light–dark exposure (e.g., by nonday occupation or transmeridian travel) shift the timing of the circadian system such that internal rhythms can become desynchronized from both the external environment and internally with each other, impairing our ability to sleep and wake at the appropriate times and compromising physiologic and metabolic processes. Light can also have direct acute effects on neuroendocrine systems, for example, in suppressing melatonin synthesis or elevating cortisol production that may have untoward long-term consequences. For these reasons, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences convened a workshop of a diverse group of scientists to consider how best to conduct research on possible connections between lighting and health. According to the participants in the workshop, there are three broad areas of research effort that need to be addressed. First are the basic biophysical and molecular genetic mechanisms for phototransduction for circadian, neuroendocrine, and neurobehavioral regulation. Second are the possible physiologic consequences of disrupting these circadian regulatory processes such as on hormone production, particularly melatonin, and normal and neoplastic tissue growth dynamics. Third are effects of light-induced physiologic disruption on disease occurrence and prognosis, and how prevention and treatment could be improved by application of this knowledge

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

Debugging operating systems with time-traveling virtual machines

Operating systems are difficult to debug with traditional cyclic debugging. They are non-deterministic; they run for long periods of time; they interact directly with hardware devices; and their state is easily perturbed by the act of debugging. This paper describes a time-traveling virtual machine that overcomes many of the difficulties associated with debugging operating systems. Time travel enables a programmer to navigate backward and forward arbitrarily through the execution history of a particular run and to replay arbitrary segments of the past execution. We integrate time travel into a general-purpose debugger to enable a programmer to debug an OS in reverse, implementing commands such as reverse breakpoint, reverse watchpoint, and reverse single step. The space and time overheads needed to support time travel are reasonable for debugging, and movements in time are fast enough to support interactive debugging. We demonstrate the value of our time-traveling virtual machine by using it to understand and fix several OS bugs that are difficult to find with standard debugging tools. Reverse debugging is especially helpful in finding bugs that are fragile due to non-determinism, bugs in device drivers, bugs that require long runs to trigger, bugs that corrupt the stack, and bugs that are detected after the relevant stack frame is popped.

Detecting Past and Present Intrusions through Vulnerability-Specific Predicates

Most systems contain software with yet-to-be-discovered security vulnerabilities. When a vulnerability is disclosed, administrators face the grim reality that they have been running software which was open to attack. Sites that value availability may be forced to continue running this vulnerable software until the accompanying patch has been tested. Our goal is to improve security by detecting intrusions that occurred before the vulnerability was disclosed and by detecting and responding to intrusions that are attempted after the vulnerability is disclosed. We detect when a vulnerability is triggered by executing vulnerability-specific predicates as the system runs or replays. This paper describes the design, implementation and evaluation of a system that supports the construction and execution of these vulnerability-specific predicates. Our system, called Intro-Virt, uses virtual-machine introspection to monitor the execution of application and operating system software. Intro-Virt executes predicates over past execution periods by combining virtual-machine introspection with virtual-machine replay. IntroVirt eases the construction of powerful predicates by allowing predicates to run existing target code in the context of the target system, and it uses checkpoints so that predicates can execute target code without perturbing the state of the target system. IntroVirt allows predicates to refresh themselves automatically so they work in the presence of preemptions. We show that vulnerabilityspecific predicates can be written easily for a wide variety of real vulnerabilities, can detect and respond to intrusions over both the past and present time intervals, and add little overhead for most vulnerabilities

ReVirt: Enabling Intrusion Analysis through Virtual-Machine Logging and Replay

Rights to individual papers remain with the author or the author's employer. Permission is granted for noncommercial reproduction of the work for educational or research purposes. This copyright notice must be included in the reproduced paper. USENIX acknowledges all trademarks herein. Current system loggers have two problems: they depend on the integrity of the operating system being logged, and they do not save sufficient information to replay and analyze attacks that include any non-deterministic events. ReVirt removes the dependency on the target operating system by moving it into a virtual machine and logging below the virtual machine. This allows ReVirt to replay the system’s execution before, during, and after an intruder compromises the system, even if the intruder replaces the target operating system. ReVirt logs enough information to replay a long-term execution of the virtual machine instruction-by-instruction. This enables it to provide arbitrarily detailed observations about what transpired on the system, even in the presence of non-deterministic attacks and executions. ReVirt adds reasonable time and space overhead. Overheads due to virtualization are imperceptible for interactive use and CPU-bound workloads, and 13-58 % for kernel-intensive workloads. Logging adds 0-8 % overhead, and loggin

Sparse record and replay with controlled scheduling

Modern applications include many sources of nondeterminism, e.g. due to concurrency, signals, and system calls that interact with the external environment. Finding and reproducing bugs in the presence of this nondeterminism has been the subject of much prior work in three main areas: (1) controlled concurrency-testing, where a custom scheduler replaces the OS scheduler to find subtle bugs; (2) record and replay, where sources of nondeterminism are captured and logged so that a failing execution can be replayed for debugging purposes; and (3) dynamic analysis for the detection of data races. We present a dynamic analysis tool for C++ applications, tsan11rec, which brings these strands of work together by integrating controlled concurrency testing and record and replay into the tsan11 framework for C++11 data race detection. Our novel twist on record and replay is a sparse approach, where the sources of nondeterminism to record can be configured per application. We show that our approach is effective at finding subtle concurrency bugs in small applications; is competitive in terms of performance with the state-of-the-art record and replay tool rr on larger applications; succeeds (due to our sparse approach) in replaying the I/O-intensive Zandronum and QuakeSpasm video games, which are out of scope for rr; but (due to limitations of our sparse approach) cannot faithfully replay applications where memory layout nondeterminism significantly affects application behaviour