Team One Carbon Catcher Design Report

Overview The burning of fossil fuels largely contributes to the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. The US Department of Transportation alone contributed almost 6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2018 (EIA). Due to this, this report proposes recycling captured CO2 into a base for cleaner burning fuel in order to reduce emissions from the transportation industry and many others, which has the potential to impact many areas. Extraction of atmospheric CO2 is possible through a membrane filtration system based on traditional nitrogen generation. The passive filtration system autonomously separates the CO2 from other air components, thereby reducing energy consumption. The system's working sensors and actuators utilize similar energy saving strategies, such as distributing cloud-computing services over multiple servers and mainframes to reduce computing power. The movement of air is directed by a scalable fan device, which is presented as a modular design to allow customization of fan parts to specific size and installation requirements. As an integrated device, Team 1’s Carbon Catcher operates with a high efficiency in order to maximize the commercial opportunity of converting captured CO2 into cleaner fuel while also reducing CO2 emissions and the greenhouse effect. Goal The goal of Team 1’s Carbon Catcher project proposal is to design a cost-effective, scalable, and modular atmospheric carbon dioxide removal system that is capable of being utilized in a range of urban environments and may fit a variety of different customer requirements or requests

Forward-Secure Searchable Encryption on Labeled Bipartite Graphs

Forward privacy is a trending security notion of dynamic searchable symmetric encryption (DSSE). It guarantees the privacy of newly added data against the server who has knowledge of previous queries. The notion was very recently formalized by Bost (CCS \u2716) independently, yet the definition given is imprecise to capture how forward secure a scheme is. We further the study of forward privacy by proposing a generalized definition parametrized by a set of updates and restrictions on them. We then construct two forward private DSSE schemes over labeled bipartite graphs, as a generalization of those supporting keyword search over text files. The first is a generic construction from any DSSE, and the other is a concrete construction from scratch. For the latter, we designed a novel data structure called cascaded triangles, in which traversals can be performed in parallel while updates only affect the local regions around the updated nodes. Besides neighbor queries, our schemes support flexible edge additions and intelligent node deletions: The server can delete all edges connected to a given node, without having the client specify all the edges

Mexico City and the biogeochemistry of global urbanization

Mexico City is far advanced in its urban evolution, and cities in currently developing nations may soon follow a similar course. This paper investigates the strengths and weaknesses of infrastructures for the emerging megacities. The major driving force for infrastructure change in Mexico City is concern over air quality. Air chemistry data from recent field campaigns have been used to calculate fluxes in the atmosphere of the Valley of Mexico, for compounds that are important to biogeochemistry including methane (CH4), carbon monoxide (CO), nonmethane hydrocarbons (NMHCs), ammonia (NH3), sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx and NOy), soot, and dust. Leakage of liquified petroleum gas approached 10% during sampling periods, and automotive pollutant sources in Mexico City were found to match those in developed cities, despite a lower vehicle-to-person ratio of 0.1. Ammonia is released primarily from residential areas, at levels sufficient to titrate pollutant acids into particles across the entire basin. Enhancements of reduced nitrogen and hydrocarbons in the vapor phase skew the distribution of NOy species towards lower average deposition velocities. Partly as a result, downwind nutrient deposition occurs on a similar scale as nitrogen fixation across Central America, and augments marine nitrate upwelling. Dust suspension from unpaved roads and from the bed of Lake Texcoco was found to be comparable to that occurring on the periphery of the Sahara, Arabian, and Gobi deserts. In addition, sodium chloride (NaCl) in the dust may support heterogeneous chlorine oxide (ClOx) chemistry. The insights from our Mexico City analysis have been tentatively applied to the upcoming urbanization of Asia

Characterization and immunomodulatory effects of canine adipose tissue- and bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stromal cells

Background Mesenchymal stromal cells (MSC) hold promise for both cell replacement and immune modulation strategies owing to their progenitor and non-progenitor functions, respectively. Characterization of MSC from different sources is an important and necessary step before clinical use of these cells is widely adopted. Little is known about the biology and function of canine MSC compared to their mouse or human counterparts. This knowledge-gap impedes development of canine evidence-based MSC technologies. Hypothesis and Objectives We hypothesized that canine adipose tissue (AT) and bone marrow (BM) MSC (derived from the same dogs) will have similar differentiation and immune modulatory profiles. Our objectives were to evaluate progenitor and non-progenitor functions as well as other characteristics of AT- and BM-MSC including 1) proliferation rate, 2) cell surface marker expression, 3) DNA methylation levels, 4) potential for trilineage differentiation towards osteogenic, adipogenic, and chondrogenic cell fates, and 5) immunomodulatory potency in vitro. Results 1) AT-MSC proliferated at more than double the rate of BM-MSC (population doubling times in days) for passage (P) 2, AT: 1.69, BM: 3.81; P3, AT: 1.80, BM: 4.06; P4, AT: 2.37, BM: 5.34; P5, AT: 3.20, BM: 7.21). 2) Canine MSC, regardless of source, strongly expressed cell surface markers MHC I, CD29, CD44, and CD90, and were negative for MHC II and CD45. They also showed moderate expression of CD8 and CD73 and mild expression of CD14. Minor differences were found in expression of CD4 and CD34. 3) Global DNA methylation levels were significantly lower in BM-MSC compared to AT-MSC. 4) Little difference was found between AT- and BM-MSC in their potential for adipogenesis and osteogenesis. Chondrogenesis was poor to absent for both sources in spite of adding varying levels of bone-morphogenic protein to our standard transforming growth factor (TGF-β3)-based induction medium. 5) Immunomodulatory capacity was equal regardless of cell source when tested in mitogen-stimulated lymphocyte reactions. Priming of MSC with pro-inflammatory factors interferon-gamma and/or tumour necrosis factor did not increase the lymphocyte suppressive properties of the MSC compared to untreated MSC. Conclusions/Significance No significant differences were found between AT- and BM-MSC with regard to their immunophenotype, progenitor, and non-progenitor functions. Both MSC populations showed strong adipogenic and osteogenic potential and poor chondrogenic potential. Both significantly suppressed stimulated peripheral blood mononuclear cells. The most significant differences found were the higher isolation success and proliferation rate of AT-MSC, which could be realized as notable benefits of their use over BM-MSC

Improved HMM Models for High Performance Speech Recognition

In this paper we report on the various techniques that we tmplemented in order to improve the basic speech recognition performance of the BYBLOS system. Some ot these methods are new, while others are not. We present methods that improved pertbrmance as well as those that did not. The methods include Linear Discrirninan

RNA-RNA Interactions Enable Specific Targeting of Noncoding RNAs to Nascent Pre-mRNAs and Chromatin Sites

Intermolecular RNA-RNA interactions are used by many noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) to achieve their diverse functions. To identify these contacts, we developed a method based on RNA antisense purification to systematically map RNA-RNA interactions (RAP-RNA) and applied it to investigate two ncRNAs implicated in RNA processing: U1 small nuclear RNA, a component of the spliceosome, and Malat1, a large ncRNA that localizes to nuclear speckles. U1 and Malat1 interact with nascent transcripts through distinct targeting mechanisms. Using differential crosslinking, we confirmed that U1 directly hybridizes to 5′ splice sites and 5′ splice site motifs throughout introns and found that Malat1 interacts with pre-mRNAs indirectly through protein intermediates. Interactions with nascent pre-mRNAs cause U1 and Malat1 to localize proximally to chromatin at active genes, demonstrating that ncRNAs can use RNA-RNA interactions to target specific pre-mRNAs and genomic sites. RAP-RNA is sensitive to lower abundance RNAs as well, making it generally applicable for investigating ncRNAs

The RIVUR Voiding Cystourethrogram Pilot Study: Experience with Radiologic Reading Concordance

Published cohorts of children with vesicoureteral reflux placed on antibiotic prophylaxis differ in baseline characteristics and methodology. These data have been combined in meta-analyses to derive treatment recommendations. We analyzed these cohorts in an attempt to understand the disparate outcomes reported

On Sustainable Ring-based Anonymous Systems

Anonymous systems (e.g. anonymous cryptocurrencies and updatable anonymous credentials) often follow a construction template where an account can only perform a single anonymous action, which in turn potentially spawns new (and still single-use) accounts (e.g. UTXO with a balance to spend or session with a score to claim). Due to the anonymous nature of the action, no party can be sure which account has taken part in an action and, therefore, must maintain an ever-growing list of potentially unused accounts to ensure that the system keeps running correctly. Consequently, anonymous systems constructed based on this common template are seemingly not sustainable. In this work, we study the sustainability of ring-based anonymous systems, where a user performing an anonymous action is hidden within a set of decoy users, traditionally called a ``ring\u27\u27. On the positive side, we propose a general technique for ring-based anonymous systems to achieve sustainability. Along the way, we define a general model of decentralised anonymous systems (DAS) for arbitrary anonymous actions, and provide a generic construction which provably achieves sustainability. As a special case, we obtain the first construction of anonymous cryptocurrencies achieving sustainability without compromising availability. We also demonstrate the generality of our model by constructing sustainable decentralised anonymous social networks. On the negative side, we show empirically that Monero, one of the most popular anonymous cryptocurrencies, is unlikely to be sustainable without altering its current ring sampling strategy. The main subroutine is a sub-quadratic-time algorithm for detecting used accounts in a ring-based anonymous system