Attribute-based encryption (ABE) with outsourced decryption not only enables fine-grained sharing of encrypted data, but also overcomes the efficiency drawback (in terms of ciphertext size and ...decryption cost) of the standard ABE schemes. In particular, an ABE scheme with outsourced decryption allows a third party (e.g., a cloud server) to transform an ABE ciphertext into a (short) El Gamal-type ciphertext using a public transformation key provided by a user so that the latter can be decrypted much more efficiently than the former by the user. However, a shortcoming of the original outsourced ABE scheme is that the correctness of the cloud server's transformation cannot be verified by the user. That is, an end user could be cheated into accepting a wrong or maliciously transformed output. In this paper, we first formalize a security model of ABE with verifiable outsourced decryption by introducing a verification key in the output of the encryption algorithm. Then, we present an approach to convert any ABE scheme with outsourced decryption into an ABE scheme with verifiable outsourced decryption. The new approach is simple, general, and almost optimal. Compared with the original outsourced ABE, our verifiable outsourced ABE neither increases the user's and the cloud server's computation costs except some nondominant operations (e.g., hash computations), nor expands the ciphertext size except adding a hash value (which is <;20 byte for 80-bit security level). We show a concrete construction based on Green et al.'s ciphertext-policy ABE scheme with outsourced decryption, and provide a detailed performance evaluation to demonstrate the advantages of our approach.
Summary
Recently, CRISPR‐Cas (clustered, regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats–CRISPR‐associated proteins) system has been used to produce plants resistant to DNA virus infections. However, ...there is no RNA virus control method in plants that uses CRISPR‐Cas system to target the viral genome directly. Here, we reprogrammed the CRISPR‐Cas9 system from Francisella novicida to confer molecular immunity against RNA viruses in Nicotiana benthamiana and Arabidopsis plants. Plants expressing FnCas9 and sgRNA specific for the cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) or tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) exhibited significantly attenuated virus infection symptoms and reduced viral RNA accumulation. Furthermore, in the transgenic virus‐targeting plants, the resistance was inheritable and the progenies showed significantly less virus accumulation. These data reveal that the CRISPR/Cas9 system can be used to produce plant that stable resistant to RNA viruses, thereby broadening the use of such technology for virus control in agricultural field.
Jasmonates (JAs) and abscisic acid (ABA) are phytohormones known play important roles in plant response and adaptation to various abiotic stresses including salinity, drought, wounding, and cold. JAZ ...(JASMONATE ZIM-domain) proteins have been reported to play negative roles in JA signaling. However, direct evidence is still lacking that JAZ proteins regulate drought resistance. In this study, OsJAZ1 was investigated for its role in drought resistance in rice. Expression of
was strongly responsive to JA treatment, and it was slightly responsive to ABA, salicylic acid, and abiotic stresses including drought, salinity, and cold. The
-overexpression rice plants were more sensitive to drought stress treatment than the wild-type (WT) rice Zhonghua 11 (ZH11) at both the seedling and reproductive stages, while the
T-DNA insertion mutant plants showed increased drought tolerance compared to the WT plants. The
-overexpression plants were hyposensitive to MeJA and ABA, whereas the
mutant plants were hypersensitive to MeJA and ABA. In addition, there were significant differences in shoot and root length between the OsJAZ1 transgenic and WT plants under the MeJA and ABA treatments. A subcellular localization assay indicated that OsJAZ1 was localized in both the nucleus and cytoplasm. Transcriptome profiling analysis by RNA-seq revealed that the expression levels of many genes in the ABA and JA signaling pathways exhibited significant differences between the
-overexpression plants and WT ZH11 under drought stress treatment. Quantitative real-time PCR confirmed the expression profiles of some of the differentially expressed genes, including
, and
. These results together suggest that OsJAZ1 plays a role in regulating the drought resistance of rice partially via the ABA and JA pathways.
It is without question that the COVID-19 pandemic has taken its toll on the U.S. economy. Stay-at-home orders led to reduced vehicular traffic and widespread declines in anthropogenic emissions ...(e.g., nitrogen oxides (NO
)). This study is the first to explore the potential consequences of O
changes resulting from the economic shutdown in the United States on soybean crop yields for 2020. The pandemic's impact on surface O
is quantified using the NOAA's National Air Quality Forecasting Capability (NAQFC), which is based on the Community Multi-Scale Air Quality (CMAQ) model for May-July 2020. The "would-be", 2020 level business-as-usual (BAU) emissions are compared to a simulation that uses representative COVID-19 (C19) emissions. For each emissions scenario, crop exposures are calculated using the AOT40 cumulative exposure index and then combined with county-level soybean production totals to determine regional yield losses. Exposure changes ranged between - 2 and 2 ppmVhr
. It was further shown that increased exposures (0.5 to 1.10 ppmVhr
) in the Southeast U.S. counteracted decreased exposures (0.8 to 0.5 ppmVhr
) in the other soybean-producing regions. As a result, corresponding yield improvements counteracted yield losses around the Mississippi River Valley and allowed for minimal improvements in soybean production loss totaling $6.5 million over CONUS.
2018 witnessed some unprecedently strict regulations on national media content production and distribution by the Chinese National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA). On its annual ...recommended lists of excellent national TV series, there is a noticeable increase in historical series in line with core socialist values. Since late 2019, there has been a strict home-quarantine policy amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Accompanied by the newly introduced three-child birth policy in the context of the country’s low fertility rate and significant ageing, a re-emphasis on traditional Confucian ideologies incented by the Chinese authorities emerged: the primary identity of women being an understanding wife and loving mother. Furthermore, thus, a manifestation of such enforced patriarchal ideologies and cultural values is visible in the country’s strictly regulated media content. This study sets off from a corpus of national recommended TV lists to investigate the myth of women’s fates in amid-pandemic Chinese TV series that are appraised and supported by authorities to explore how their identities are constructed and potentially abused under patriarchal media production.
Drought stress can cause huge crop production losses. Drought resistance consists of complex traits, and is regulated by arrays of unclear networks at the molecular level. A stress-responsive NAC ...transcription factor gene
has been reported for its function in the positive regulation of drought resistance in rice, and several downstream SNAC1 targets have been identified. However, a complete regulatory network mediated by SNAC1 in drought response remains unknown. In this study, we performed Chromatin immunoprecipitation sequencing (ChIP-Seq) and RNA-Seq of
-overexpression transgenic rice (
-OE) lines and wild-type under normal and moderate drought stress conditions, to identify all SNAC1 target genes at a genome-wide scale by RNA-Seq analyses. We detected 980 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in the
-OE lines compared to the wild-type control under drought stress conditions. By ChIP-Seq analyses, we identified 4,339 SNAC1-binding genes under drought stress conditions (SNAC1BGDs). By combining the DEGs and SNAC1BGDs, we identified 93 SNAC1-targeted genes involved in drought responses (SNAC1TGDs). Most SNAC1TGDs are involved in transcriptional regulation, response to water loss, and other processes related to stress responses. Moreover, the major motifs in the SNAC1BGDs promoters include a NAC recognition sequence (NACRS) and an ABA responsive element (ABRE).
-OE lines are more sensitive to ABA than wild-type. SNAC1 can bind to the
promoter, an important ABA signaling regulator, and positively regulate the expression of several ABA signaling genes.
Abstract
We present an unprecedented effort to map anthropogenic emissions of air pollutants at 1 km spatial resolution in the contiguous United States (CONUS). This new dataset, Neighborhood ...Emission Mapping Operation (NEMO), is produced at hourly intervals based on the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) National Emission Inventories 2017. Fine-scale spatial allocation was achieved through distributing the emission sources using 108 spatial surrogates, factors representing the portion of a source in each 1 km grid. Gaseous and particulate pollutants are speciated into model species for the Carbon Bond 6 chemical mechanism. All sources are grouped in 9 sectors and stored in NetCDF format for air quality models, and in shapefile format for GIS users and air quality managers. This dataset shows good consistency with the USEPA benchmark dataset, with a monthly difference in emissions less than 0.03% for any sector. NEMO provides the first 1 km mapping of air pollution over the CONUS, enabling new applications such as fine-scale air quality modeling, air pollution exposure assessment, and environmental justice studies.
Applying intelligence algorithms to conceive nanoscale meta-devices becomes a flourishing and extremely active scientific topic over the past few years. Inverse design of functional nanostructures is ...at the heart of this topic, in which artificial intelligence (AI) furnishes various optimization toolboxes to speed up prototyping of photonic layouts with enhanced performance. In this review, we offer a systemic view on recent advancements in nanophotonic components designed by intelligence algorithms, manifesting a development trend from performance optimizations towards inverse creations of novel designs. To illustrate interplays between two fields, AI and photonics, we take meta-atom spectral manipulation as a case study to introduce algorithm operational principles, and subsequently review their manifold usages among a set of popular meta-elements. As arranged from levels of individual optimized piece to practical system, we discuss algorithm-assisted nanophotonic designs to examine their mutual benefits. We further comment on a set of open questions including reasonable applications of advanced algorithms, expensive data issue, and algorithm benchmarking, etc. Overall, we envision mounting photonic-targeted methodologies to substantially push forward functional artificial meta-devices to profit both fields.
Deep learning-based automatic and accurate 3D pancreas segmentation plays a significant role in medical diagnosis and disease treatment, which has received a lot of attention from the medical image ...processing community. 3D pancreas segmentation embraces two challenges: one is that the pancreas occupies a relatively small proportion in CT images, and there is a serious class imbalance problem between foreground and background, which makes it difficult to achieve accurate segmentation. Another issue is that existing models are overly reliant on computer memory. In response to the above issues, we propose a two-stage training framework to alleviate the influence of background on segmentation results while reducing memory consumption. Among which, different from previous methods that used the entire pancreas region as input, we design a Selective Overlap Method (SOM) that can learn contextual information while reducing computing costs by selecting the most appropriate number of overlapping slices. In addition, a novel 3D segmentation model named ResConv-3DUnet (RC-3DUNet) is integrated into this framework, which not only maintains the receptive field while drastically reducing parameter number but also uses the residual information between layers to strengthen edge attention and regularizes the output by designing the supervision weights of each decoder layer. Extensive experiments were conducted on the Medical Segmentation Decathlon (MSD) pancreas segmentation and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) pancreas segmentation datasets, demonstrating that our method has a superior trade-off between accuracy and lightweight than existing approaches.
The Cyber Evaluation and Management Toolkit (CEMT) is an open-source university research-based plugin for commercial digital model-based systems engineering tools that streamlines conducting ...cybersecurity risk evaluations for complex cyber-physical systems. The authors developed this research tool to assist the Australian Defence Force (ADF) with the cybersecurity evaluation of complicated systems operating in an increasingly contested and complex cyber environment. This paper briefly outlines the functionality of the CEMT including the inputs, methodology, and outputs required to apply the toolkit using a sample model of the process applied to a generic insider threat attack. A face validity trial was conducted on the CEMT, surveying subject-matter experts in the field of complex cybersecurity analysis and risk assessment to present the generic case study and gather data on the expected benefits of a real-world implementation of the process. The results of the face validity broadly supports the effectiveness and usability of the CEMT, providing justification for industry research trials of the CEMT.
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