Buying drugs on a Darknet market: A better deal? Studying the online illicit drug market through the analysis of digital, physical and chemical data.

Darknet markets, also known as cryptomarkets, are websites located on the Darknet and designed to allow the trafficking of illicit products, mainly drugs. This study aims at presenting the added value of combining digital, chemical and physical information to reconstruct sellers' activities. In particular, this research focuses on Evolution, one of the most popular cryptomarkets active from January 2014 to March 2015. Evolution source code files were analysed using Python scripts based on regular expressions to extract information about listings (i.e., sales proposals) and sellers. The results revealed more than 48,000 listings and around 2700 vendors claiming to send illicit drug products from 70 countries. The most frequent categories of illicit drugs offered by vendors were cannabis-related products (around 25%) followed by ecstasy (MDA, MDMA) and stimulants (cocaine, speed). The cryptomarket was then especially studied from a Swiss point of view. Illicit drugs were purchased from three sellers located in Switzerland. The purchases were carried out to confront digital information (e.g., the type of drug, the purity, the shipping country and the concealment methods mentioned on listings) with the physical analysis of the shipment packaging and the chemical analysis of the received product (purity, cutting agents, chemical profile based on minor and major alkaloids, chemical class). The results show that digital information, such as concealment methods and shipping country, seems accurate. But the illicit drugs purity is found to be different from the information indicated on their respective listings. Moreover, chemical profiling highlighted links between cocaine sold online and specimens seized in Western Switzerland. This study highlights that (1) the forensic analysis of the received products allows the evaluation of the accuracy of digital data collected on the website, and (2) the information from digital and physical/chemical traces are complementary to evaluate the practices of the online selling of illicit drugs on cryptomarkets

Project Opti-Milk: Optimisation and Comparison of High Yield and Low Input Milk Production Strategies on Pilot Farms in the Lowlands of Switzerland

Compared to other European countries milk production costs in Switzerland are high. Therefore Swiss milk producers must drastically reduce their costs. The high yield strategy (HY) and the full grazing (FG) or low-cost strategy appear most promising, at least for the lowland regions. Although the basic knowledge is available for both strategies, they have been applied very little in Switzerland in a consistent and optimised form

Engineering the spatial confinement of exciton-polaritons in semiconductors

We demonstrate the spatial confinement of electronic excitations in a solid state system, within novel artificial structures that can be designed having arbitrary dimensionality and shape. The excitations under study are exciton-polaritons in a planar semiconductor microcavity. They are confined within a micron-sized region through lateral trapping of their photon component. Striking signatures of confined states of lower and upper polaritons are found in angle-resolved light emission spectra, where a discrete energy spectrum and broad angular patterns are present. A theoretical model supports unambiguously our observations

The Role of Randomly Distributed Well Widths in Disordered GaAs/AlGaAs Superlattices

Numerical and experimental results on the effect of randomness in GaAs/Al0.3Ga0.7As superlattices having a small number of randomly distributed well widths are reported. The numerical results indicate the splitting of the extended state miniband into sub-minibands of localized states having a disorder-induced fine structure. The comparison between the experimental results for low-temperature absorption spectra and the computed joint density of states of the investigated samples confirms the predicted features. The high-temperature photoluminescence intensity of random superlattices is observed to be enhanced with respect to the ordered case

NLRC5 shields T lymphocytes from NK-cell-mediated elimination under inflammatory conditions.

NLRC5 is a transcriptional regulator of MHC class I (MHCI), which maintains high MHCI expression particularly in T cells. Recent evidence highlights an important NK-T-cell crosstalk, raising the question on whether NLRC5 specifically modulates this interaction. Here we show that NK cells from Nlrc5-deficient mice exhibit moderate alterations in inhibitory receptor expression and responsiveness. Interestingly, NLRC5 expression in T cells is required to protect them from NK-cell-mediated elimination upon inflammation. Using T-cell-specific Nlrc5-deficient mice, we show that NK cells surprisingly break tolerance even towards 'self' Nlrc5-deficient T cells under inflammatory conditions. Furthermore, during chronic LCMV infection, the total CD8(+) T-cell population is severely decreased in these mice, a phenotype reverted by NK-cell depletion. These findings strongly suggest that endogenous T cells with low MHCI expression become NK-cell targets, having thus important implications for T-cell responses in naturally or therapeutically induced inflammatory conditions

High-sensitivity observations of solar flare decimeter radiation

A new acousto-optic radio spectrometer has observed the 1 - 2 GHz radio emission of solar flares with unprecedented sensitivity. The number of detected decimeter type III bursts is greatly enhanced compared to observations by conventional spectrometers observing only one frequency at the time. The observations indicate a large number of electron beams propagating in dense plasmas. For the first time, we report weak, reversed drifting type III bursts at frequencies above simultaneous narrowband decimeter spikes. The type III bursts are reliable signatures of electron beams propagating downward in the corona, apparently away from the source of the spikes. The observations contradict the most popular spike model that places the spike sources at the footpoints of loops. Conspicuous also was an apparent bidirectional type U burst forming a fish-like pattern. It occurs simultaneously with an intense U-burst at 600-370 MHz observed in Tremsdorf. We suggest that it intermodulated with strong terrestrial interference (cellular phones) causing a spurious symmetric pattern in the spectrogram at 1.4 GHz. Symmetric features in the 1 - 2 GHz range, some already reported in the literature, therefore must be considered with utmost caution.Comment: Astronomy and Astrophysics, in pres

Festchrift: A Collection of Essays on Architectural History

A collection of essays on architectural history prepared by the Northern Pacific Coast Chapter Society of Architectural Historians dedicated to Professor Marion Dean Ross, chapter founder, on the occasion of his 65th birthday

Zero dimensional exciton-polaritons

We present a novel semiconductor structure in which 0D polaritons coexist with 2D microcavity polaritons. Spatial trapping of the 2D microcavity polaritons results from the confinement of their photonic part in a potential well, consisting of an adjustable thickness variation of the spacer layer. This original technique allows to create polaritonic boxes of any size and shape. Strong coupling regime is evidenced by the typical energy level anticrossing, in real space and in momentum space, and supported by a theoretical model

TRIM27 Negatively Regulates NOD2 by Ubiquitination and Proteasomal Degradation

NOD2, the nucleotide-binding domain and leucine-rich repeat containing gene family (NLR) member 2 is involved in mediating antimicrobial responses. Dysfunctional NOD2 activity can lead to severe inflammatory disorders, but the regulation of NOD2 is still poorly understood. Recently, proteins of the tripartite motif (TRIM) protein family have emerged as regulators of innate immune responses by acting as E3 ubiquitin ligases. We identified TRIM27 as a new specific binding partner for NOD2. We show that NOD2 physically interacts with TRIM27 via the nucleotide-binding domain, and that NOD2 activation enhances this interaction. Dependent on functional TRIM27, ectopically expressed NOD2 is ubiquitinated with K48-linked ubiquitin chains followed by proteasomal degradation. Accordingly, TRIM27 affects NOD2-mediated pro-inflammatory responses. NOD2 mutations are linked to susceptibility to Crohns disease. We found that TRIM27 expression is increased in Crohns disease patients, underscoring a physiological role of TRIM27 in regulating NOD2 signaling. In HeLa cells, TRIM27 is partially localized in the nucleus. We revealed that ectopically expressed NOD2 can shuttle to the nucleus in a Walker A dependent manner, suggesting that NOD2 and TRIM27 might functionally cooperate in the nucleus. We conclude that TRIM27 negatively regulates NOD2-mediated signaling by degradation of NOD2 and suggest that TRIM27 could be a new target for therapeutic intervention in NOD2-associated diseases.Funding Agencies|German Research Foundation (DFG)|SFB670-NG01|Swedish Society of Medicine||Regional Research Council of South-East Sweden (FORSS)||Swedish Research Council division of Medicine||Gustav V 90th anniversary foundation||Italian Telethon Foundation||DFG|SE 1122/2-1|</p