The Anapole Moment of the Deuteron with the Argonne v18 Nucleon-Nucleon Interaction Model

We calculate the deuteron anapole moment with the wave functions obtained from the Argonne $v18$ nucleon-nucleon interaction model. The anapole moment operators are considered at the leading order. To minimize the uncertainty due to a lack of current conservation, we calculate the matrix element of the anapole moment from the original definition. In virtue of accurate wave functions, we can obtain a more precise value of the deuteron anapole moment which contains less uncertainty than the former works. We obtain a result reduced by more than 25% in the magnitude of the deuteron anapole moment. The reduction of individual nuclear contributions is much more important however, varying from a factor 2 for the spin part to a factor 4 for the convection and associated two-body currents.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figure

Detecting and characterizing lateral phishing at scale

We present the first large-scale characterization of lateral phishing attacks, based on a dataset of 113 million employee-sent emails from 92 enterprise organizations. In a lateral phishing attack, adversaries leverage a compromised enterprise account to send phishing emails to other users, benefit-ting from both the implicit trust and the information in the hijacked user's account. We develop a classifier that finds hundreds of real-world lateral phishing emails, while generating under four false positives per every one-million employee-sent emails. Drawing on the attacks we detect, as well as a corpus of user-reported incidents, we quantify the scale of lateral phishing, identify several thematic content and recipient targeting strategies that attackers follow, illuminate two types of sophisticated behaviors that attackers exhibit, and estimate the success rate of these attacks. Collectively, these results expand our mental models of the 'enterprise attacker' and shed light on the current state of enterprise phishing attacks

Risk Attitudes and Human Mobility during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Behavioral responses to pandemics are less shaped by actual mortality or hospitalization risks than they are by risk attitudes. We explore human mobility patterns as a measure of behavioral responses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results indicate that risk-taking attitude is a critical factor in predicting reduction in human mobility and increase social confinement around the globe. We find that the sharp decline in movement after the WHO (World Health Organization) declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic can be attributed to risk attitudes. Our results suggest that regions with risk-averse attitudes are more likely to adjust their behavioral activity in response to the declaration of a pandemic even before most official government lockdowns. Further understanding of the basis of responses to epidemics, e.g., precautionary behavior, will help improve the containment of the spread of the virus

Excitation spectrum and instability of a two-species Bose-Einstein condensate

We numerically calculate the density profile and excitation spectrum of a two-species Bose-Einstein condensate for the parameters of recent experiments. We find that the ground state density profile of this system becomes unstable in certain parameter regimes, which leads to a phase transition to a new stable state. This state displays spontaneously broken cylindrical symmetry. This behavior is reflected in the excitation spectrum: as we approach the phase transition point, the lowest excitation frequency goes to zero, indicating the onset of instability in the density profile. Following the phase transition, this frequency rises again.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, uses REVTe

Forward Pass: On the Security Implications of Email Forwarding Mechanism and Policy

The critical role played by email has led to a range of extension protocols (e.g., SPF, DKIM, DMARC) designed to protect against the spoofing of email sender domains. These protocols are complex as is, but are further complicated by automated email forwarding -- used by individual users to manage multiple accounts and by mailing lists to redistribute messages. In this paper, we explore how such email forwarding and its implementations can break the implicit assumptions in widely deployed anti-spoofing protocols. Using large-scale empirical measurements of 20 email forwarding services (16 leading email providers and four popular mailing list services), we identify a range of security issues rooted in forwarding behavior and show how they can be combined to reliably evade existing anti-spoofing controls. We show how this allows attackers to not only deliver spoofed email messages to prominent email providers (e.g., Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, and Zoho), but also reliably spoof email on behalf of tens of thousands of popular domains including sensitive domains used by organizations in government (e.g., state.gov), finance (e.g., transunion.com), law (e.g., perkinscoie.com) and news (e.g., washingtonpost.com) among others

Evaluation of a chiral cubane-based Schiff base ligand in asymmetric catalysis reactions

Recently, a novel chiral cubane-based Schiff base ligand was reported to yield modest enantioselectivity in the Henry reaction. To further explore the utility of this ligand in other asymmetric organic transformations, we evaluated its stereoselectivity in cyclopropanation and Michael addition reactions. Although there was no increase in stereocontrol, upon computational evaluation using both M06L and B3LYP calculations, it was revealed that a pseudo six-membered ring exists, through H-bonding of a cubyl hydrogen to the copper core. This decreases the steric bulk above the copper center and limits the asymmetric control with this ligand.The authors thank the Niagara University Academic Center for Integrated Science and the Rochester Academy of Science for their financial support. MLI would like to thank the Barbara S. Zimmer Memorial Research Award for financial aid. MLC gratefully acknowledges generous allocations of supercomputing time from the Australian National Computational Infrastructure, support from the Australian Research Council under its Centers of Excellence program, and an ARC Future Fellowship. RP would also like to thank Western New England University, College of Pharmacy for generous financial support

Development and validation of a novel non-contact monitor of nocturnal respiration for identifying sleep-disordered breathing in patients with heart failure

© 2016 The Authors. ESC Heart Failure published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of the European Society of Cardiology. Aims: At least 50% of patients with heart failure (HF) may have sleep-disordered breathing (SDB). Overnight in-hospital polysomnography (PSG) is considered the gold standard for diagnosis, but a lack of access to such testing contributes to under-diagnosis of SDB. Therefore, there is a need for simple and reliable validated methods to aid diagnosis in patients with HF. The aim of this study was to investigate the accuracy of a non-contact type IV screening device, SleepMinderTM (SM), compared with in-hospital PSG for detecting SDB in patients with HF. Methods and results: The study included 75 adult patients with systolic HF and suspected SDB who underwent simultaneous PSG and SM recordings. An algorithm was developed from the SM signals, using digital signal processing and pattern recognition techniques to calculate the SM apnoea-hypopnoea index (AHI). This was then compared with expert-scored PSGAHI. The SM algorithm had 70% sensitivity and 89% specificity for identifying patients with clinically significant SDB (AHI ≥ 15/h). At this threshold, it had a positive likelihood ratio of 6.3 and a negative likelihood ratio of 0.16. The overall accuracy of the SMAHI algorithm was 85.8% as shown by the area under a receiver operator characteristic curve. The mean AHI with SM was 3.8/h (95% confidence interval 0.5–7.1) lower than that with PSG. Conclusions: The accuracy of the non-contact type IV screening device SM is good for clinically significant SDB in patients with systolic HF and could be considered as a simple first step in the diagnostic pathway

Insulin resistance and white adipose tissue inflammation are uncoupled in energetically challenged Fsp27-deficient mice.

Fsp27 is a lipid droplet-associated protein almost exclusively expressed in adipocytes where it facilitates unilocular lipid droplet formation. In mice, Fsp27 deficiency is associated with increased basal lipolysis, 'browning' of white fat and a healthy metabolic profile, whereas a patient with congenital CIDEC deficiency manifested an adverse lipodystrophic phenotype. Here we reconcile these data by showing that exposing Fsp27-null mice to a substantial energetic stress by crossing them with ob/ob mice or BATless mice, or feeding them a high-fat diet, results in hepatic steatosis and insulin resistance. We also observe a striking reduction in adipose inflammation and increase in adiponectin levels in all three models. This appears to reflect reduced activation of the inflammasome and less adipocyte death. These findings highlight the importance of Fsp27 in facilitating optimal energy storage in adipocytes and represent a rare example where adipose inflammation and hepatic insulin resistance are disassociated.This work was supported by grants from the National Basic Research Program (2013CB530602 and 2011CB910801 to P.L.), from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31430040, 31321003 and 31030038), from the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2012M520249 and 2013T60103 to L.Z.) and from the Wellcome Trust (091551 to D.S.). This work was also supported by the Bio and Medical Technology Development Program of the National Research Foundation (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning (NRF-2013M3A9D5072563 to C.C.) and Korea Healthcare Technology R&D Project, Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs, Korea (A102060 to C.C.).This is the final published version. It first appeared at http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150107/ncomms6949/full/ncomms6949.html?WT.ec_id=NCOMMS-20150114