BIOCHEMICAL AND HISTOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF DELTAMETHRIN EXPOSURE ON THE GILLS OF CARASSIUS AURATUS GIBELIO (Pisces Cyprinidae)

This study investigated the alterations in the activities of several antioxidant enzymesin the gills of the freshwater fish Carassius auratus gibelio exposed to deltamethrin.To get this goal, groups of 10 individuals were exposed for one, two, three, sevenand fourteen days to sublethal concentration of deltamethrin (2 g/L). Anothergroup was used as control. The activities of catalase, gluthatione peroxidase andgluthatione reductase were significantly decreased, while the glutathione-Stransferasewas up-regulated. All fish, exposed to 2glL deltamethrin revealed gillsmorphological alterations after 48h of exposure which were accentuated after 14days. In the gills hyperemia, fusion of secondary lamellae, epithelial layer ruptureand chloride cells proliferation were observed. These results suggest that animmediate adaptive response to the oxidative stress appeared, demonstratingalterations in the antoxidant defense mechanism in the gills of deltamethrinintoxicated fish

Bloch-Wall Phase Transition in the Spherical Model

The temperature-induced second-order phase transition from Bloch to linear (Ising-like) domain walls in uniaxial ferromagnets is investigated for the model of D-component classical spin vectors in the limit D \to \infty. This exactly soluble model is equivalent to the standard spherical model in the homogeneous case, but deviates from it and is free from unphysical behavior in a general inhomogeneous situation. It is shown that the thermal fluctuations of the transverse magnetization in the wall (the Bloch-wall order parameter) result in the diminishing of the wall transition temperature T_B in comparison to its mean-field value, thus favouring the existence of linear walls. For finite values of T_B an additional anisotropy in the basis plane x,y is required; in purely uniaxial ferromagnets a domain wall behaves like a 2-dimensional system with a continuous spin symmetry and does not order into the Bloch one.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figure

Charge and Spin Currents Generated by Dynamical Spins

We demonstrate theoretically that a charge current and a spin current are generated by spin dynamics in the presence of spin-orbit interaction in the perturbative regime. We consider a general spin-orbit interaction including the spatially inhomogeneous case. Spin current due to spin damping is identified as one origin of generated charge current, but other contributions exist, such as the one due to an induced conservative field and the one arising from the inhomogeneity of spin-orbit interaction.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure

On the precision loss in approximate homomorphic encryption

Since its introduction at Asiacrypt 2017, the CKKS approximate homomorphic encryption scheme has become one of the most widely used and implemented homomorphic encryption schemes. Due to the approximate nature of the scheme, application developers using CKKS must ensure that the evaluation output is within a tolerable error of the corresponding plaintext computation. Choosing appropriate parameters requires a good understanding of how the noise will grow through the computation. A strong understanding of the noise growth is also necessary to limit the performance impact of mitigations to the attacks on CKKS presented by Li and Micciancio (Eurocrypt 2021). In this work we present a comprehensive noise analysis of CKKS, that considers noise coming both from the encoding and homomorphic operations. Our main contribution is the first average-case analysis for CKKS noise, and we also introduce refinements to prior worst-case noise analyses. We develop noise heuristics both for the original CKKS scheme and the RNS variant presented at SAC 2018. We then evaluate these heuristics by comparing the predicted noise growth with experiments in the HEAAN and FullRNS-HEAAN libraries, and by comparing with a worst-case noise analysis as done in prior work. Our findings show mixed results: while our new analyses lead to heuristic estimates that more closely model the observed noise growth than prior approaches, the new heuristics sometimes slightly underestimate the observed noise growth. This evidences the need for implementation-specific noise analyses for CKKS, which recent work has shown to be effective for implementations of similar schemes

A Rapid Cost Modeling Tool for Evaluating and Improving Public Health Supply Chain Designs.

Effective and efficient health supply chains play a vital role in achieving health outcomes by ensuring supplies are available for people to access quality health services. However, supplying health commodities to service delivery points is complex and costly in many low- and middle-income countries. Thus, governments and partner organizations are often interested in understanding how to design their health supply chains more cost efficiently.Several modeling tools exist in the public and private market that can help assess supply chain efficiency and identify supply chain design improvements. These tools are generally capable of providing users with very precise cost estimates, but they often use proprietary software and require detailed data inputs. This can result in a somewhat lengthy and expensive analysis process, which may be prohibitive for many decision makers, especially in the early stages of a supply chain design process. For many use cases, such as advocacy, informing workshop and technical meetings, and narrowing down initial design options, decision makers may often be willing to trade some detail and accuracy in exchange for quicker and lower-cost analysis results. To our knowledge, there are no publicly available tools focused on generating quick, high-level estimates of the cost and efficiency of different supply chain designs.To address this gap, we designed and tested an Excel-based Rapid Supply Chain Modeling (RSCM) Tool. Our assessment indicated that, despite requiring significantly less data, the RSCM Tool can generate cost estimates that are similar to other common analysis and modeling methods. Furthermore, to better understand how the RSCM Tool aligns with real-world processes and decision-making timelines, we used it to inform an ongoing immunization supply chain redesign in Angola. For the use cases described above we believe that the RSCM Tool addresses an important need for quicker and less expensive ways to identify more cost-efficient supply chain designs

Laboratory-scale photomineralization of n-alkanes in gaseous phase by photocatalytic membranes immobilizing titanium dioxide

Kinetics of photocatalytic oxidation of methane, ethane, and n-heptane, to yield intermediates, and photomineralization of intermediates, to yield carbon dioxide and water, was studied in the gaseous phase, at 308 +/- 2 K, by a laboratory-scale photoreactor and photocatalytic membranes immobilizing 30 +/- 3wt.% of TiO2, in the presence of aerosolized stoichiometric hydrogen peroxide as oxygen donor, and at a relative humidity close to 100%. The whole volume of irradiated solution was 4.000 +/- 0.005 L, the ratio between this volume and the geometrical apparent surface of the irradiated side of the photocatalytic membrane was 3.8 +/- 0.1 cm, and the absorbed power was 0.30 W/cm ( cylindrical geometry). The pinetic parameters of the present work substantially coincide with those of the same molecules previously studied in aqueous solution, within the limits of experimental uncertainty. Photocatalytic processes thus appear to be controlled by interface phenomena, which are ruled kinetically, and apparently also thermodynamically, by concentration gradients, independently on diffusion and other processes in the aqueous or gaseous bulk, if turbulence in these phases is adequately assured

Identification of the crossing point at N=21 between normal and intruder configurations

The beta(-) decay of Mg-34 was used to study the Al-34 nucleus through. spectroscopy at the Isotope Separator On-Line facility of CERN. Previous studies identified two beta-decaying states in Al-34 having spin-parity assignments J(pi) = 4(-) dominated by the normal configuration pi(d(5/2))(-1)circle times nu(f(7/2)) and J(pi) = 1(+) by the intruder configuration pi(d(5/2))(-1) circle times nu(d(3/2))(-1) (f(7/2))(2). Their unknown ordering and relative energy have been the subject of debate for the placement of Al-34 inside or outside the N = 20 "island of inversion." We report here that the 1(+) intruder lies only 46.6 keV above the 4(-) ground state. In addition, a new half-life of T-1/2 = 44.9(4) ms, that is twice as long as the previously measured 20(10) ms, has been determined for Mg-34. Large-scale shell-model calculations with the recently developed SDPF-U-MIX interaction are compared with the new data and used to interpret the mechanisms at play at the very border of the N = 20 island of inversion.Peer reviewe

Evaluating the effectiveness of heuristic worst-case noise analysis in FHE

The purpose of this paper is to test the accuracy of worst-case heuristic bounds on the noise growth in ring-based homomorphic encryption schemes. We use the methodology of Iliashenko (PhD thesis, 2019) to provide a new heuristic noise analysis for the BGV scheme. We demonstrate that for both the BGV and FV schemes, this approach gives tighter bounds than previous heuristic approaches, by as much as 10 bits of noise budget. Then, we provide experimental data on the noise growth of HElib and SEAL ciphertexts, in order to evaluate how well the heuristic bounds model the noise growth in practice. We find that, in spite of our improvements, there is still a gap between the heuristic estimate of the noise and the observed noise in practice. We extensively justify that a heuristic worst-case approach inherently leads to this gap, and hence leads to selecting significantly larger parameters than needed. As an additional contribution, we update the comparison between the two schemes presented by Costache and Smart (CT-RSA, 2016). Our new analysis shows that the practical crossover point at which BGV begins to outperform FV occurs for very large plaintext moduli, well beyond the crossover point reported by Costache and Smart