Carbon nanotubes as anti-bacterial agents

Multidrug-resistant bacterial infections that have evolved via natural selection have increased alarmingly at a global level. Thus, there is a strong need for the development of novel antibiotics for the treatment of these infections. Functionalized carbon nanotubes through their unique properties hold great promise in the fight against multidrug-resistant bacterial infections. This new family of nanovectors for therapeutic delivery proved to be innovative and efficient for the transport and cellular translocation of therapeutic molecules. The current review examines the latest progress in the antibacterial activity of carbon nanotubes and their composites.     

A forensic method for efficient file extraction in HDFS based on three-level mapping

The large scale and distribution of cloud computing storage have become the major challenges in cloud forensics for file extraction. Current disk forensic methods do not adapt to cloud computing well and the forensic research on distributed file system is inadequate. To address the forensic problems, this paper uses the Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS) as a case study and proposes a forensic method for efficient file extraction based on three-level (3L) mapping. First, HDFS is analyzed from overall architecture to local file system. Second, the 3L mapping of an HDFS file from HDFS namespace to data blocks on local file system is established and a recovery method for deleted files based on 3L mapping is presented. Third, a multi-node Hadoop framework via Xen virtualization platform is set up to test the performance of the method. The results indicate that the proposed method could succeed in efficient location of large files stored across data nodes, make selective image of disk data and get high recovery rate of deleted files.     

Cobalt doped titanate nanotubes: Synthesis and properties

Cobalt oxide doped titanate nanotubes are synthesized with a simple hydrothermal treatment of mixed Co_3O_4 and TiO_2 powders. The formed tubular nanostructure, chemical composition,and the elemental distribution are analyzed using TEM, BET, FTIR, XRD, and XPS. The electrocatalytic activity towards oxygen evolution reactions and photodegradation against Rhodamine B are investigated. It has been found out that the oxygen evolutions starts at 0.8 V and reaches 0.98 mA ·cm~(–1) at 1.4 V vs. SCE. For photodegradation of Rhodamine B, the concentration decreased to 24% after 1 h irradiation using the sample with a mass percentage of 5% cobalt. The results demonstrate that the cobalt oxide doped titanate nanotubes are good candidates as electrocatalysts and photocatalytic materials.     

Secure pairing with wearable devices by using ambient sound and light

Wearable devices usually work together with smart phones. To ensure only legitimate smart phones can read the data, they must conduct pairing to establish a shared key. Traditional pairing methods require that the pairing devices have a keyboard or screen for user interaction. However, due to the size limitation, keyboards or screens are hard to be installed in the wearable devices. To solve this problem, we propose a novel pairing method by using ambient sound and light. In this new scheme, any pairing request from smart phone will trigger wearable device vibration. Only after users press the confirm key on the device can the pairing process continues. Then pairing devices collect ambient sound and light at the predetermined time and establish a shared key by using the Diffie-Hellman protocol. To protect against potential man-in-the-middle attacks in the key establishment process, an improved interlock protocol with sound and light comparison is conducted to authenticate the key. If both the sound and light collected by the pairing devices are similar enough, the key is accepted. Otherwise, it is rejected. Compared with current context based pairing methods, our scheme does not impose strict synchronization on devices to collect ambient context data. Moreover, our scheme need not collect and exchange contextual information for multiple times to resist offline brute force attacks. The experimental results and security analysis prove the effectiveness of our scheme.     

Tyrosine 842 in the activation loop is required for full transformation by the oncogenic mutant FLT3-ITD

The type III receptor tyrosine kinase FLT3 is frequently mutated in acute myeloid leukemia. Oncogenic FLT3 mutants display constitutive activity leading to aberrant cell proliferation and survival. Phosphorylation on several critical tyrosine residues is known to be essential for FLT3 signaling. Among these tyrosine residues, Y842 is located in the so-called activation loop. The position of this tyrosine residue is well conserved in all receptor tyrosine kinases. It has been reported that phosphorylation of the activation loop tyrosine is critical for catalytic activity for some but not all receptor tyrosine kinases. The role of Y842 residue in FLT3 signaling has not yet been studied. In this report, we show that Y842 is not important for FLT3 activation or ubiquitination but plays a critical role in regulating signaling downstream of the receptor as well as controlling receptor stability. We found that mutation of Y842 in the FLT3-ITD oncogenic mutant background reduced cell viability and increased apoptosis. Furthermore, the introduction of the Y842 mutation in the FLT3-ITD background led to a dramatic reduction in in vitro colony forming capacity. Additionally, mice injected with cells expressing FLT3-ITD/Y842F displayed a significant delay in tumor formation, compared to FLT3-ITD expressing cells. Microarray analysis comparing gene expression regulated by FLT3-ITD versus FLT3-ITD/Y842F demonstrated that mutation of Y842 causes suppression of anti-apoptotic genes. Furthermore, we showed that cells expressing FLT3-ITD/Y842F display impaired activity of the RAS/ERK pathway due to reduced interaction between FLT3 and SHP2 leading to reduced SHP2 activation. Thus, we suggest that Y842 is critical for FLT3-mediated RAS/ERK signaling and cellular transformation.     

Two Innovative Coalition Formation Models for Dynamic Task Allocation in Disaster Rescues

This paper addresses the problem of multi-objective coalition formation for task allocation. In disaster rescue, due to the dynamics of environments, heterogeneity and complexity of tasks as well as limited available agents, it is hard for the single-objective and single (task)-to-single (agent) task allocation approaches to handle task allocation in such circumstances. To this end, two multi-objective coalition formation for task allocation models are proposed for disaster rescues in this paper. First, through coalition formation, the proposed models enable agents to cooperatively perform complex tasks that cannot be completed by single agent. In addition, through adjusting the weights of multiple task allocation objectives, the proposed models can employ the linear programming to generate more adaptive task allocation plans, which can satisfy different task allocation requirements in disaster rescue. Finally, through employing the multi-stage task allocation mechanism of the dynamic programming, the proposed models can handle the dynamics of tasks and agents in disaster environments. Experimental results indicate that the proposed models have good performance on coalition formation for task allocation in disaster environments, which can generate suitable task allocation plans according to various objectives of task allocation.     

水动力作用对污染物在河流水沙两相中分配的影响研究进展

通过总结近年来有关水动力作用对河流中泥沙吸附/释放重金属、磷等污染物影响研究成果,分析了水流紊动强度和流速对污染物在河流水沙两相中分配的影响规律。当水流紊动强度较低时,泥沙主要以床沙形式存在,泥沙对污染物的吸附/释放速率和强度较低;随着紊动强度增大,水沙界面切应力随之增大并促使泥沙悬浮,污染物与悬浮泥沙颗粒接触面积增大,使得泥沙对污染物的吸附/释放速率和强度显著增加。流速对污染物在水沙两相间分配的影响较为复杂。泥沙静止时,流速的增大会减小边界层厚度,增大水体溶解氧含量、氧化还原电位等参数,并使污染物在水体里的扩散由分子扩散转变为以紊动扩散为主,增强污染物在水-沙界面的交换通量,对污染物在水沙两相间的分配产生影响;随着流速进一步增大,床沙逐渐起动、悬浮,此时除上述因素外,泥沙运动状态、悬浮颗粒间碰撞强度、悬浮物的絮凝等均会对泥沙吸附/释放污染物产生影响,由于影响因素较多,作用机制复杂,目前关于泥沙运动对污染物在水沙两相间分配的影响所得结论仍存在分歧。相应的机理研究及数学模型的建立均做了较大简化。综观当前的研究成果,水沙运动及其化学生物过程等对污染物在河流水沙两相中的分配作用机理和耗氧有机物、有毒有机物等污染物与泥沙的作用机理是这一领域的未来研究重点。     

Efficient Feature Extraction Using Apache Spark for Network Behavior Anomaly Detection

Extracting and analyzing network traffic feature is fundamental in the design and implementation of network behavior anomaly detection methods. The traditional network traffic feature method focuses on the statistical features of traffic volume. However, this approach is not sufficient to reflect the communication pattern features. A different approach is required to detect anomalous behaviors that do not exhibit traffic volume changes,such as low-intensity anomalous behaviors caused by Denial of Service/Distributed Denial of Service(Do S/DDo S)attacks, Internet worms and scanning, and Bot Nets. We propose an efficient traffic feature extraction architecture based on our proposed approach, which combines the benefit of traffic volume features and network communication pattern features. This method can detect low-intensity anomalous network behaviors and conventional traffic volume anomalies. We implemented our approach on Spark Streaming and validated our feature set using labelled real-world dataset collected from the Sichuan University campus network. Our results demonstrate that the traffic feature extraction approach is efficient in detecting both traffic variations and communication structure changes.Based on our evaluation of the MIT-DRAPA dataset, the same detection approach utilizes traffic volume features with detection precision of 82.3% and communication pattern features with detection precision of 89.9%. Our proposed feature set improves precision by 94%.     

基于信任的服务实体跨域认证方案

根据目前基于身份的跨域认证过程中域代理(domain agent,DA)数量有限的特点,针对该跨域认证过程中计算复杂的问题,采用信任和基于身份密码体制相结合的方式,提出了基于信任的用户跨域访问信息服务实体(information services entity,ISE)资源的算法。该算法首先完成用户在DA的身份认证,然后采用提出的信任度判断方法进行信任度的判断达到双向认证的目的,最终实现用户跨域访问ISE。仿真结果表明,信任度的判断方法有效地实现抵抗“恶意”DA的攻击,同时该基于信任的ISE跨域认证方案与基于身份的跨域认证方案相比,计算量减少,通信开销降低。