Countering Terrorism on Tomorrow’s Battlefield: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency (NATO COE-DAT Handbook 2)

Every day, malicious actors target emerging technologies and medical resilience or seek to wreak havoc in the wake of disasters brought on by climate change, energy insecurity, and supply-chain disruptions. Countering Terrorism on Tomorrow’s Battlefield is a handbook on how to strengthen critical infrastructure resilience in an era of emerging threats. The counterterrorism research produced for this volume is in alignment with NATO’s Warfighting Capstone Concept, which details how NATO Allies can transform and maintain their advantage despite new threats for the next two decades. The topics are rooted in NATO’s Seven Baseline requirements, which set the standard for enhancing resilience in every aspect of critical infrastructure and civil society. As terrorists hone their skills to operate lethal drones, use biometric data to target innocents, and take advantage of the chaos left by pandemics and natural disasters for nefarious purposes, NATO forces must be prepared to respond and prevent terrorist events before they happen. Big-data analytics provides potential for NATO states to receive early warning to prevent pandemics, cyberattacks, and kinetic attacks. NATO is perfecting drone operations through interoperability exercises, and space is being exploited by adversaries. Hypersonic weapons are actively being used on the battlefield, and satellites have been targeted to take down wind farms and control navigation. This handbook is a guide for the future, providing actionable information and recommendations to keep our democracies safe today and in the years to come.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1953/thumbnail.jp

What Ukraine Taught NATO about Hybrid Warfare

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 forced the United States and its NATO partners to be confronted with the impact of hybrid warfare far beyond the battlefield. Targeting Europe’s energy security, Russia’s malign influence campaigns and malicious cyber intrusions are affecting global gas prices, driving up food costs, disrupting supply chains and grids, and testing US and Allied military mobility. This study examines how hybrid warfare is being used by NATO’s adversaries, what vulnerabilities in energy security exist across the Alliance, and what mitigation strategies are available to the member states. Cyberattacks targeting the renewable energy landscape during Europe’s green transition are increasing, making it urgent that new tools are developed to protect these emerging technologies. No less significant are the cyber and information operations targeting energy security in Eastern Europe as it seeks to become independent from Russia. Economic coercion is being used against Western and Central Europe to stop gas from flowing. China’s malign investments in Southern and Mediterranean Europe are enabling Beijing to control several NATO member states’ critical energy infrastructure at a critical moment in the global balance of power. What Ukraine Taught NATO about Hybrid Warfare will be an important reference for NATO officials and US installations operating in the European theater.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1952/thumbnail.jp

Adam Smith’s Green Thumb and Malthus’ Three Horsemen: Cautionary tales from classical political economy

This essay identifies a contradiction between the flourishing interest in the environmental economics of the classical period and a lack of critical parsing of the works of its leading representatives. Its focus is the work of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus. It offers a critical analysis of their contribution to environmental thought and surveys the work of their contemporary devotees. It scrutinizes Smith's contribution to what Karl Polanyi termed the "economistic fallacy," as well as his defenses of class hierarchy, the "growth imperative" and consumerism. It subjects to critical appraisal Malthus's enthusiasm for private property and the market system, and his opposition to market regulation. While Malthus's principal attraction to ecological economists lies in his having allegedly broadened the scope of economics, and in his narrative of scarcity, this article shows that he, in fact, narrowed the scope of the discipline and conceptualized scarcity in a reified and pseudo-scientific way

Essential Role of Cyclophilin A for Hepatitis C Virus Replication and Virus Production and Possible Link to Polyprotein Cleavage Kinetics

Viruses are obligate intracellular parasites and therefore their replication completely depends on host cell factors. In case of the hepatitis C virus (HCV), a positive-strand RNA virus that in the majority of infections establishes persistence, cyclophilins are considered to play an important role in RNA replication. Subsequent to the observation that cyclosporines, known to sequester cyclophilins by direct binding, profoundly block HCV replication in cultured human hepatoma cells, conflicting results were obtained as to the particular cyclophilin (Cyp) required for viral RNA replication and the underlying possible mode of action. By using a set of cell lines with stable knock-down of CypA or CypB, we demonstrate in the present work that replication of subgenomic HCV replicons of different genotypes is reduced by CypA depletion up to 1,000-fold whereas knock-down of CypB had no effect. Inhibition of replication was rescued by over-expression of wild type CypA, but not by a mutant lacking isomerase activity. Replication of JFH1-derived full length genomes was even more sensitive to CypA depletion as compared to subgenomic replicons and virus production was completely blocked. These results argue that CypA may target an additional viral factor outside of the minimal replicase contributing to RNA amplification and assembly, presumably nonstructural protein 2. By selecting for resistance against the cyclosporine analogue DEBIO-025 that targets CypA in a dose-dependent manner, we identified two mutations (V2440A and V2440L) close to the cleavage site between nonstructural protein 5A and the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase in nonstructural protein 5B that slow down cleavage kinetics at this site and reduce CypA dependence of viral replication. Further amino acid substitutions at the same cleavage site accelerating processing increase CypA dependence. Our results thus identify an unexpected correlation between HCV polyprotein processing and CypA dependence of HCV replication

Advancing the use of passive sampling in risk assessment and management of contaminated sediments: Results of an international passive sampling inter-laboratory comparison

This work presents the results of an international interlaboratory comparison on ex situ passive sampling in sediments. The main objectives were to map the state of the science in passively sampling sediments, identify sources of variability, provide recommendations and practical guidance for standardized passive sampling, and advance the use of passive sampling in regulatory decision making by increasing confidence in the use of the technique. The study was performed by a consortium of 11 laboratories and included experiments with 14 passive sampling formats on 3 sediments for 25 target chemicals (PAHs and PCBs). The resulting overall interlaboratory variability was large (a factor of ∼10), but standardization of methods halved this variability. The remaining variability was primarily due to factors not related to passive sampling itself, i.e., sediment heterogeneity and analytical chemistry. Excluding the latter source of variability, by performing all analyses in one laboratory, showed that passive sampling results can have a high precision and a very low intermethod variability

A Multisite Preregistered Paradigmatic Test of the Ego-Depletion Effect

We conducted a preregistered multilaboratory project (k = 36; N = 3,531) to assess the size and robustness of ego-depletion effects using a novel replication method, termed the paradigmatic replication approach. Each laboratory implemented one of two procedures that was intended to manipulate self-control and tested performance on a subsequent measure of self-control. Confirmatory tests found a nonsignificant result (d = 0.06). Confirmatory Bayesian meta-analyses using an informed-prior hypothesis (δ = 0.30, SD = 0.15) found that the data were 4 times more likely under the null than the alternative hypothesis. Hence, preregistered analyses did not find evidence for a depletion effect. Exploratory analyses on the full sample (i.e., ignoring exclusion criteria) found a statistically significant effect (d = 0.08); Bayesian analyses showed that the data were about equally likely under the null and informed-prior hypotheses. Exploratory moderator tests suggested that the depletion effect was larger for participants who reported more fatigue but was not moderated by trait self-control, willpower beliefs, or action orientation.</p

Measurement of the prompt J/psi and psi(2S) polarizations in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV

The polarizations of prompt J/psi and psi(2S) mesons are measured in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV, using a dimuon data sample collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 4.9 inverse femtobarns. The prompt J/psi and psi(2S) polarization parameters lambda[theta], lambda[phi], and lambda[theta, phi], as well as the frame-invariant quantity lambda(tilde), are measured from the dimuon decay angular distributions in three different polarization frames. The J/psi results are obtained in the transverse momentum range 14 &lt; pt &lt; 70 GeV, in the rapidity intervals abs(y) &lt; 0.6 and 0.6 &lt; abs(y) &lt; 1.2. The corresponding psi(2S) results cover 14 &lt; pt &lt; 50 GeV and include a third rapidity bin, 1.2 &lt; abs(y) &lt; 1.5. No evidence of large transverse or longitudinal polarizations is seen in these kinematic regions, which extend much beyond those previously explored

Alignment of the CMS tracker with LHC and cosmic ray data

© CERN 2014 for the benefit of the CMS collaboration, published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License by IOP Publishing Ltd and Sissa Medialab srl. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation and DOI.The central component of the CMS detector is the largest silicon tracker ever built. The precise alignment of this complex device is a formidable challenge, and only achievable with a significant extension of the technologies routinely used for tracking detectors in the past. This article describes the full-scale alignment procedure as it is used during LHC operations. Among the specific features of the method are the simultaneous determination of up to 200 000 alignment parameters with tracks, the measurement of individual sensor curvature parameters, the control of systematic misalignment effects, and the implementation of the whole procedure in a multi-processor environment for high execution speed. Overall, the achieved statistical accuracy on the module alignment is found to be significantly better than 10μm