209 research outputs found
Minimum mass-radius ratio for charged gravitational objects
We rigorously prove that for compact charged general relativistic objects
there is a lower bound for the mass-radius ratio. This result follows from the
same Buchdahl type inequality for charged objects, which has been extensively
used for the proof of the existence of an upper bound for the mass-radius
ratio. The effect of the vacuum energy (a cosmological constant) on the minimum
mass is also taken into account. Several bounds on the total charge, mass and
the vacuum energy for compact charged objects are obtained from the study of
the Ricci scalar invariants. The total energy (including the gravitational one)
and the stability of the objects with minimum mass-radius ratio is also
considered, leading to a representation of the mass and radius of the charged
objects with minimum mass-radius ratio in terms of the charge and vacuum energy
only.Comment: 19 pages, accepted by GRG, references corrected and adde
Secure Two-Party Computation with Low Communication
We propose a 2-party UC-secure protocol that can compute any function securely. The protocol requires only two messages, communication that is poly-logarithmic in the size of the circuit description of the function, and the workload for one of the parties is also only poly-logarithmic in the size of the circuit. This implies, for instance,
delegatable computation that requires no expensive off-line phase
and remains secure even if the server learns whether the client accepts
its results. To achieve this, we define two new notions of extractable hash functions, propose an instantiation based on the knowledge of exponent in an RSA group, and build succinct zero-knowledge arguments in the CRS model
A century of trends in adult human height
Being taller is associated with enhanced longevity, and higher education and earnings. We reanalysed 1472 population-based studies, with measurement of height on more than 18.6 million participants to estimate mean height for people born between 1896 and 1996 in 200 countries. The largest gain in adult height over the past century has occurred in South Korean women and Iranian men, who became 20.2 cm (95% credible interval 17.5-22.7) and 16.5 cm (13.3-19.7) taller, respectively. In contrast, there was little change in adult height in some sub-Saharan African countries and in South Asia over the century of analysis. The tallest people over these 100 years are men born in the Netherlands in the last quarter of 20th century, whose average heights surpassed 182.5 cm, and the shortest were women born in Guatemala in 1896 (140.3 cm; 135.8-144.8). The height differential between the tallest and shortest populations was 19-20 cm a century ago, and has remained the same for women and increased for men a century later despite substantial changes in the ranking of countries
Rising rural body-mass index is the main driver of the global obesity epidemic in adults
Body-mass index (BMI) has increased steadily in most countries in parallel with a rise in the proportion of the population who live in cities 1,2 . This has led to a widely reported view that urbanization is one of the most important drivers of the global rise in obesity 3�6 . Here we use 2,009 population-based studies, with measurements of height and weight in more than 112 million adults, to report national, regional and global trends in mean BMI segregated by place of residence (a rural or urban area) from 1985 to 2017. We show that, contrary to the dominant paradigm, more than 55 of the global rise in mean BMI from 1985 to 2017�and more than 80 in some low- and middle-income regions�was due to increases in BMI in rural areas. This large contribution stems from the fact that, with the exception of women in sub-Saharan Africa, BMI is increasing at the same rate or faster in rural areas than in cities in low- and middle-income regions. These trends have in turn resulted in a closing�and in some countries reversal�of the gap in BMI between urban and rural areas in low- and middle-income countries, especially for women. In high-income and industrialized countries, we noted a persistently higher rural BMI, especially for women. There is an urgent need for an integrated approach to rural nutrition that enhances financial and physical access to healthy foods, to avoid replacing the rural undernutrition disadvantage in poor countries with a more general malnutrition disadvantage that entails excessive consumption of low-quality calories. © 2019, The Author(s)
- …