Sleepwalking into lock-in? Avoiding wrongs to future people in the governance of solar radiation management research

This paper argues for two ways in which we can avoid the reckless endangerment of future people in the governance of solar radiation management (SRM) research, which could happen through lock-in to SRM deployment from research. SRM research is at an early stage, one at which the mechanisms of lock-in could start to operate. However, lock-in fit to endanger future people could be slowed or stopped through targeted governance. This paper argues that governance of SRM research that does not include provisions to detect, slow, or stop lock-in fails the test of an intergenerationally adequate precautionary principle, and that research governed without these provisions cannot itself be justified as a precaution against the impacts of climate change

Cascading effects of a highly specialized beech-aphid–fungus interaction on forest regeneration

Specialist herbivores are thought to often enhance or maintain plant diversity within ecosystems, because they prevent their host species from becoming competitively dominant. In contrast, specialist herbivores are not generally expected to have negative impacts on non-hosts. However, we describe a cascade of indirect interactions whereby a specialist sooty mold (Scorias spongiosa) colonizes the honeydew from a specialist beech aphid (Grylloprociphilus imbricator), ultimately decreasing the survival of seedlings beneath American beech trees (Fagus grandifolia). A common garden experiment indicated that this mortality resulted from moldy honeydew impairing leaf function rather than from chemical or microbial changes to the soil. In addition, aphids consistently and repeatedly colonized the same large beech trees, suggesting that seedling-depauperate islands may form beneath these trees. Thus this highly specialized three-way beech-aphid–fungus interaction has the potential to negatively impact local forest regeneration via a cascade of indirect effects

Radio Astronomy

Contains research objectives and summary of research on seven research projects and a report on one research project.Joint Services Electronics Program (Contract DAAB07-75-C-1346)National Science Foundation (Grant AST73-05042-AO2)National Institutes of Health (Grant 5 SO5 RR07047-10)U. S. Air Force - Electronic Systems Division (Contract F19628-75-C-0122)M.I.T. Sloan Fund for Basic ResearchNational Aeronautics and Space Administration (Contract NAS5-21980)National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Contract NAS5-22485

Extreme geomagnetic disturbances due to shocks within CMEs

We report on features of solar wind-magnetosphere coupling elicited by shocks propagating through coronal mass ejections (CMEs) by analyzing the intense geomagnetic storm of 6 August 1998. During this event, the dynamic pressure enhancement at the shock combined with a simultaneous increase in the southward component of the magnetic field resulted in a large earthward retreat of Earth\u27s magnetopause, which remained close to geosynchronous orbit for more than 4 h. This occurred despite the fact that both shock and CME were weak and relatively slow. Another similar example of a weak shock inside a slow CME resulting in an intense geomagnetic storm is the 30 September 2012 event, which strongly depleted the outer radiation belt. We discuss the potential of shocks inside CMEs to cause large geomagnetic effects at Earth, including magnetopause shadowing

Control-Flow Integrity for Real-Time Embedded Systems

Attacks on real-time embedded systems can endanger lives and critical infrastructure. Despite this, techniques for securing embedded systems software have not been widely studied. Many existing security techniques for general-purpose computers rely on assumptions that do not hold in the embedded case. This paper focuses on one such technique, control-flow integrity (CFI), that has been vetted as an effective countermeasure against control-flow hijacking attacks on general-purpose computing systems. Without the process isolation and fine-grained memory protections provided by a general-purpose computer with a rich operating system, CFI cannot provide any security guarantees. This work proposes RECFISH, a system for providing CFI guarantees on ARM Cortex-R devices running minimal real-time operating systems. We provide techniques for protecting runtime structures, isolating processes, and instrumenting compiled ARM binaries with CFI protection. We empirically evaluate RECFISH and its performance implications for real-time systems. Our results suggest RECFISH can be directly applied to binaries without compromising real-time performance; in a test of over six million realistic task systems running FreeRTOS, 85% were still schedulable after adding RECFISH

Allocating the Burdens of Climate Action: Consumption-Based Carbon Accounting and the Polluter-Pays Principle

Action must be taken to combat climate change. Yet, how the costs of climate action should be allocated among states remains a question. One popular answer—the polluter-pays principle (PPP)—stipulates that those responsible for causing the problem should pay to address it. While intuitively plausible, the PPP has been subjected to withering criticism in recent years. It is timely, following the Paris Agreement, to develop a new version: one that does not focus on historical production-based emissions but rather allocates climate burdens in proportion to each state’s annual consumption-based emissions. This change in carbon accounting results in a fairer and more environmentally effective principle for distributing climate duties

Microwave and Millimeter Wave Techniques

Contains reports on four research projects.Joint Services Electronics Program (Contract DAAB07-74-C-0630)National Science Foundation (Grant MPS-73-05043-A01