Social Media Attention Increases Article Visits: An Investigation on Article-Level Referral Data of PeerJ

In order to better understand the effect of social media in the dissemination of scholarly articles, employing the daily updated referral data of 110 PeerJ articles collected over a period of 345 days, we analyze the relationship between social media attention and article visitors directed by social media. Our results show that social media presence of PeerJ articles is high. About 68.18% of the papers receive at least one tweet from Twitter accounts other than @PeerJ, the official account of the journal. Social media attention increases the dissemination of scholarly articles. Altmetrics could not only act as the complement of traditional citation measures but also play an important role in increasing the article downloads and promoting the impacts of scholarly articles. There also exists a significant correlation among the online attention from different social media platforms. Articles with more Facebook shares tend to get more tweets. The temporal trends show that social attention comes immediately following publication but does not last long, so do the social media directed article views

Characterizing the IRC-based Botnet Phenomenon

Botnets, networks of compromised machines that can be remotely controlled by an attacker, are one of the most common attack platforms nowadays. They can, for example, be used to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, steal sensitive information, or send spam emails. A long-term measurement study of botnet activities is useful as a basis for further research on global botnet mitigation and disruption techniques. We have built a distributed and fully-automated botnet measurement system which allows us to collect data on the botnet activity we observe in China. Based on the analysis of tracking records of 3,290 IRC-based botnets during a period of almost twelve months, this paper presents several novel results of botnet activities which can only be measured via long-term measurements. These include. amongst others, botnet lifetime, botnet discovery trends and distributions, command and control channel distributions, botnet size and end-host distributions. Furthermore, our measurements confirm and extend several previous results from this area. Our results show that the botnet problem is of global scale, with a scattered distribution of the control infrastructure and also a scattered distribution of the victims. Furthermore, the control infrastructure itself is rather flexible, with an average lifetime of a Command \& Control server of about 54 days. These results can also leverage research in the area of botnet detection, mitigation, and disruption: only by understanding the problem in detail, we can develop efficient counter measures

Unusual Electronic Transport Properties in La0.96−xNdxK0.04MnO3

Polycrystalline La0.96−xNdxK0.04MnO3 has been studied by means of x-ray powder diffraction, dc magnetization, and electrical resistance measurement. La0.96−xNdxK0.04MnO3 initially crystallizes in a rhombohedral distorted perovskite structure. However, an orthorhombic structure is obtained with increasing Nd content more than 20%. Both the rhombohedral and the orthorhombic phases show ferromagnetic order. However, the compound shows a magnetic inhomogeneity behavior with increasing Nd content. With increasing Nd doping, the ferromagnetic order is significantly weakened, and the second magnetic transition occurs at a low temperature and its peak intensity enhances. The resistivity of these compounds also exhibits an imhomogeneity behavior. The rhombohedral phase shows a metal–insulator (MI) transition but the MI transition peak intensity is obviously weakened and broadens with increasing Nd content and a low temperature insulator state is observed in the orthorhombic phase. It is interesting that the second magnetoresistance ratio peak appears at low temperature. It might be due to Nd induced low temperature phase separation between the ferromagnetic metallic and antiferromagnetic insulating state

Studying Malicious Websites and the Underground Economy on the Chinese Web

The World Wide Web gains more and more popularity within China with more than 1.31 million websites on the Chinese Web in June 2007. Driven by the economic profits, cyber criminals are on the rise and use the Web to exploit innocent users. In fact, a real underground black market with thousand of participants has developed which brings together malicious users who trade exploits, malware, virtual assets, stolen credentials, and more. In this paper, we provide a detailed overview of this underground black market and present a model to describe the market. We substantiate our model with the help of measurement results within the Chinese Web. First, we show that the amount of virtual assets traded on this underground market is huge. Second, our research proofs that a significant amount of websites within China’s part of the Web are malicious: our measurements reveal that about 1.49% of the examined sites contain some kind of malicious content

Device-independent verification of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen steering

If the presence of entanglement could be certified in a device-independent (DI) way, it is likely to provide various quantum information processing tasks with unconditional security. Recently, it was shown that a DI protocol, combining measurement-device-independent techniques with self-testing, is able to verify all entangled states, however, it imposes demanding requirements on its practical implementation. Here, we present a less-demanding protocol based on Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) steering, which is achievable with current technology. Particularly, we first establish a complete framework for DI verification of EPR steering and show that all steerable states can be verified. Then, we analyze the three-measurement setting case, allowing for imperfections of self-testing. Finally, a four-photon experiment is implemented to device-independently verify EPR steering and to further demonstrate that even Bell local states can be faithfully verified. Our findings pave the way for realistic applications of secure quantum information tasksComment: 6+8 pages; Comments are welcom

Doping High-Mobility Donor : Acceptor Copolymer Semiconductors with an Organic Salt for High-Performance Thermoelectric Materials

Organic semiconductors (OSCs) are attractive for fabrication of thermoelectric devices with low cost, large area, low toxicity, and high flexibility. In order to achieve high-performance organic thermoelectric devices (OTEs), it is essential to develop OSCs with high conductivity (σ), large Seebeck coefficient (S), and low thermal conductivity (κ). It is equally important to explore efficient dopants matching the need of thermoelectric devices. The thermoelectric performance of a high-mobility donor–acceptor (D–A) polymer semiconductor, which is doped by an organic salt, is studied. Both a high p-type electrical conductivity approaching 4 S cm−1 and an excellent power factor (PF) of 7 µW K−2 m−1 are obtained, which are among the highest reported values for polymer semiconductors. Temperature-dependent conductivity, Seebeck coefficient and power factor of the doped materials are systematically investigated. Detailed analysis on the results of thermoelectric measurements has revealed a hopping transport in the materials, which verifies the empirical relationship: S ∝ σ−1/4 and PF ∝ σ1/2. The results demonstrate that D–A copolymer semiconductors with proper combination of dopants have great potential for fabricating high-performance thermoelectric devices. © 2020 The Authors. Published by WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinhei

Microbial traits determine soil C emission in response to fresh carbon inputs in forests across biomes

Soil priming is a microbial-driven process, which determines key soil–climate feedbacks in response to fresh carbon inputs. Despite its importance, the microbial traits behind this process are largely undetermined. Knowledge of the role of these traits is integral to advance our understanding of how soil microbes regulate carbon (C) emissions in forests, which support the largest soil carbon stocks globally. Using metagenomic sequencing and C-glucose, we provide unprecedented evidence that microbial traits explain a unique portion of the variation in soil priming across forest biomes from tropical to cold temperature regions. We show that microbial functional profiles associated with the degradation of labile C, especially rapid simple sugar metabolism, drive soil priming in different forests. Genes involved in the degradation of lignin and aromatic compounds were negatively associated with priming effects in temperate forests, whereas the highest level of soil priming was associated with β-glucosidase genes in tropical/subtropical forests. Moreover, we reconstructed, for the first time, 42 whole bacterial genomes associated with the soil priming effect and found that these organisms support important gene machinery involved in priming effect. Collectively, our work demonstrates the importance of microbial traits to explain soil priming across forest biomes and suggests that rapid carbon metabolism is responsible for priming effects in forests. This knowledge is important because it advances our understanding on the microbial mechanisms mediating soil–climate feedbacks at a continental scale.This work were financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41907031), the Chinese Academy of Sciences “Light of West China” Program for Introduced Talent in the West, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31570440, 31270484), the Key International Scientific and Technological Cooperation and Exchange Project of Shaanxi Province, China (2020KWZ-010), the 2021 First Funds for Central Government to Guide Local Science and Technology Development in Qinghai Province (2021ZY002), the i-LINK +2018 (LINKA20069) from CSIC, and a Ramón y Cajal grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (RYC2018-025483-I

The More Similar, the Healthier: The Effect of Perceived Parent-Child Facial Resemblance on Parental Physical Health

Parent-child facial resemblance (PCFR) is one of the direct cues used to assess the genetic relationship between two individuals. Due to the inner fertilization of humans, fathers are liable to suffer from paternal uncertainty. When a father perceives low father-child facial resemblance, he would become anxious, which is detrimental to his immune system and physical health. For a mother, however, she can assure her genetic relationship to her children and does not need any external cues to verify her maternity. Thus, the mother-child facial resemblance does not influence the mothers’ physical health. To test these hypotheses, we examined the moderating effect of parental gender and the mediating effect of trait anxiety on the relationship between PCFR and physical health of parents. The results showed that fathers’ PCFR positively predicted their physical health, whereas the mothers’ PCFR failed to show any predicting effect on mothers’ physical health. Furthermore, trait anxiety mediated the relationship between fathers’ PCFR and their physical health. The implications for paternal uncertainty, gender difference, and public policy were discussed

Virome and metagenomic analysis reveal the distinct distribution of microbiota in human fetal gut during gestation

Studies have shown that fetal immune cell activation may result from potential exposure to microbes, although the presence of microbes in fetus has been a controversial topic. Here, we combined metagenomic and virome techniques to investigate the presence of bacteria and viruses in fetal tissues (small intestine, cecum, and rectum). We found that the fetal gut is not a sterile environment and has a low abundance but metabolically rich microbiome. Specifically, Proteobacteria and Actinobacteria were the dominant bacteria phyla of fetal gut. In total, 700 species viruses were detected, and Human betaherpesvirus 5 was the most abundant eukaryotic viruses. Especially, we first identified Methanobrevibacter smithii in fetal gut. Through the comparison with adults’ gut microbiota we found that Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes gradually became the main force of gut microbiota during the process of growth and development. Interestingly, 6 antibiotic resistance genes were shared by the fetus and adults. Our results indicate the presence of microbes in the fetal gut and demonstrate the diversity of bacteria, archaea and viruses, which provide support for the studies related to early fetal immunity. This study further explores the specific composition of viruses in the fetal gut and the similarities between fetal and adults’ gut microbiota, which is valuable for understanding human fetal immunity development during gestation