A richness that cures

A study in Nature by Fischer et al. shows that environmental enrichment or increasing histone acetylation rescue the ability to form new memories and re-establish access to remote memories even in the presence of brain degeneration. Chromatin remodeling may be the final gate environmental enrichment opens to enhance plasticity and represents a promising target for therapeutical intervention in neurodegenerative diseases

Nonlinear Transmission of Financial Shocks: Some New Evidence

Financial shocks generate a protracted and quantitatively important effect on real economic activity and financial markets only if the shocks are both negative and large. Otherwise, their role is quite modest. Financial shocks have become more important for economic fluctuations after 2000 and have contributed substantially to deepening the recessions of 2001 and 2008. The evidence is obtained using a new econometric procedure based on a Vector Moving Average representation that includes a nonlinear function of the financial shock. This method is a contribution of the present work

The Effectiveness of an On-Line Graduate Engineering Management Course

In the summer of 1997, the Engineering Management Department of the University of Missouri-Rolla\u27s (UMR) began offering its first Internet-based graduate level course. This course, Advanced Production Management, was designed to utilize a combination of Internet-based tools, such as EMail and Chat rooms to create a alternative means for the delivery of course material. This paper will draw these following conclusions from more than a year of research, which included over 100 students in six different course offerings. First, the Internet-based students performed equally as well as the control group students. Second, students tend to have exaggerated time requirement expectations for Internet-based classes. Third, students tend to have positive course effectiveness experiences. Fourth, students tend to be very skeptical of electronic lectures but their experiences are positive. Fifth, learning styles play a role influencing student expectations regarding Internet-based education. This influence is especially strong in student course time expectations and both the effectiveness and satisfaction of the use of EMail and Chat rooms

Towards Linked Data for Oceanographic Science: The R2R Eventlogger Project, Controlled Vocabularies, and Ontologies at The MBLWHOI Library

Objective: Research vessels coordinated by the United States University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (US-UNOLS) collect data which are considered important oceanographic science research products. The NSF-funded Rolling Deck to Repository (R2R) project aims to improve access to these data and diminish barriers to their use. One aspect of the R2R project has been to develop a shipboard scientific event logging system, Eventlogger, which incorporates best practice guidelines, controlled vocabularies, a cruise metadata schema, and a scientific event log. Eventlogger facilitates the eventual ingestion of datasets into oceanographic data repositories for subsequent integration and synthesis by investigators. The careful use of controlled vocabularies and ontologies is an important feature of this system, as the use of internationally-informed, consensus-driven controlled vocabularies will make data sets more interoperable, discoverable and reusable. Methods: The R2R Eventlogger project is led by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), and the management of the controlled vocabularies is led by the Data Librarian in the Marine Biological Laboratory/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (MBLWHOI) Library. The first target vocabulary has been one for oceanographic instruments. Management of this vocabulary has thus far consisted of reconciling project vocabulary terms with the more widely used community vocabularies served by the NERC Vocabulary Server v2.0 (NVS2.0): terms included in the SeaDataNet Device Catalogue (L22) and the SeaDataNet Device Category vocabularies (L05). Rather than adopt existing community terms, it is more often the case that local terms are mapped by the Data Managers in the NSF-funded Biological and Chemical Oceanographic Data Management Office (BCO-DMO) to community terms, which preserves any important information and meaning investigators impart through the process of assigning these local terms, and has less impact on researchers. New terms, those that cannot be mapped to the existing community vocabularies (often custom, or modified instruments), are submitted for review to the SeaVOX governance process for addition to the community vocabularies. These vocabularies and their mappings are an important part of the aforementioned Eventlogger system. Before a research cruise, investigators configure the instruments they intend to use for their science activities. The instruments available for selection are provided by the MBLWHOI Data Librarian, who curates UNOLS ship-specific lists of standard shipboard instruments using terms for instruments from the R2R Eventlogger Project Vocabulary. Nonstandard shipboard instruments a researcher or investigator wishes to use can also be added, and these instrument terms will eventually be inducted into the R2R Eventlogger Project Vocabulary. Results: Eventlogger is currently being tested across the UNOLS fleet. A large submission of suggested instrument terms to the SeaDataNet community listserv is currently in progress. New tools for facilitating the management, mapping, and use of these controlled vocabularies are being developed, and new projects with eager partners are envisioned. Ideas for future controlled vocabularies for the ocean science community include: Cruise IDs, Persons, and Ships. Conclusions: The promotion and use of controlled vocabularies and ontologies will pave the way for linked data in oceanographic science. By mapping local terms to authoritative and community-accepted terms, links are created whereby related data sets can be better discovered, and utilized. Librarians have an established history of working with controlled vocabularies and metadata. Libraries, have and will continue to, serve as centers for information discovery as well as a natural home for the management of standards

Can i take your subdomain? Exploring same-site attacks in the modern web

Related-domain attackers control a sibling domain of their target web application, e.g., as the result of a subdomain takeover. Despite their additional power over traditional web attackers, related-domain attackers received only limited attention from the research community. In this paper we define and quantify for the first time the threats that related-domain attackers pose to web application security. In particular, we first clarify the capabilities that related-domain attackers can acquire through different attack vectors, showing that different instances of the related-domain attacker concept are worth attention. We then study how these capabilities can be abused to compromise web application security by focusing on different angles, including cookies, CSP, CORS, postMessage, and domain relaxation. By building on this framework, we report on a large-scale security measurement on the top 50k domains from the Tranco list that led to the discovery of vulnerabilities in 887 sites, where we quantified the threats posed by related-domain attackers to popular web applications

ADVANCED 3D TECHNOLOGY IN SUPPORT OF THE BIM PROCESSES IN THE CULTURAL HERITAGE: IN-DEPTH ANALYSIS OF THE CASE STUDY OF THE ROMAN FLUVIAL PORT OF AQUILEIA (ITALY)

Abstract. Advanced 3D technology, in line with the directives of the European Commission's Reflective 7 - Horizon 2020 project, allows to represent in an organized and accurate way (geometrically and chromatically speaking) any type of artefact belonging to the Cultural Heritage. This article will deal with the specific case-study of the research carried out in the archaeological site of the Roman fluvial port of Aquileia, in collaboration with the University of Trieste. Thirtysix MA Architecture students attending the experimental course in "Technologies for the conservation and enhancement of architectural heritage" were involved. The Advanced 3D model of the fluvial port was conveniently divided into 15 sectors, in order to allow the assignment of each sector to a different group of students. The students, using the tools provided by the proprietary EasyCUBE PRO software, were able to create a digital database with an accurate 3D representation of all types of degradation affecting the archaeological structures existing in situ. Starting from the digital database, the students created a report containing the surfaces, volumes, count of the specific elements and all the other textual and graphical data related to the degradation processes. The collected data allowed to produce a metric estimate of the restoration intervention and to realize visual simulations of the post-intervention result. This experience gave the chance to evaluate the advantages of creating a digital database of 3D representations of the various forms of degradation, also in terms of possible future developments.</p

Detection of Zak phases and topological invariants in a chiral quantum walk of twisted photons

Topological insulators are fascinating states of matter exhibiting protected edge states and robust quantized features in their bulk. Here, we propose and validate experimentally a method to detect topological properties in the bulk of one-dimensional chiral systems. We first introduce the mean chiral displacement, and we show that it rapidly approaches a multiple of the Zak phase in the long time limit. Then we measure the Zak phase in a photonic quantum walk, by direct observation of the mean chiral displacement in its bulk. Next, we measure the Zak phase in an alternative, inequivalent timeframe, and combine the two windings to characterize the full phase diagram of this Floquet system. Finally, we prove the robustness of the measure by introducing dynamical disorder in the system. This detection method is extremely general, as it can be applied to all one-dimensional platforms simulating static or Floquet chiral systems.Comment: 10 pages, 7 color figures (incl. appendices) Close to the published versio

Therapeutic potential of yeast killer toxin-like antibodies and mimotopes

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Coronary atherosclerosis as the main endpoint of non-invasive imaging in cardiology: A narrative review

The change of paradigm determined by the introduction of cardiac computed tomography (CCT) in the field of cardiovascular medicine has allowed new evidence to emerge. These evidences point towards a major role, probably the most important one in terms of prognostic impact, in the detection, characterization and quantification of atherosclerosis as the main driver and endpoint for the management of coronary artery disease (CAD). Extensive literature has been published in the last decade with large numbers and patients’ populations, investigating several aspects and correlations between atherosclerotic plaque features and risk factors; also, the relationship between plaque features, both with qualitative and quantitative approaches, and cardiovascular events has been investigated. More recent studies have also pointed out the relationship between the knowledge and classification of sub-clinical atherosclerosis and the induced modification of medical therapy (both aggressiveness and compliance) that is most likely able to increase the effect of anti-atherosclerotic drugs, hence significantly improving prognosis. Non-invasive assessment of CAD by means of CCT is becoming the primary tool for management and also the most important parameter for the comprehension of natural history of CAD and how the therapies we adopt are affecting plaque burden as a whole. In this review we will address the modern concepts of CAD driven understanding and management of cardiovascular disease