Dental microwear analysis is a widely used non-destructive method that provides insights into the adoption of specific diets, food preparation methods, and the conduction of paramasticatory activities using the mouth through the examination of dental features on the enamel surfaces. Recent methodological trends in the analysis of human dental wear have enriched the possibilities of the discipline, yet scarcely provide insights into the comparability of the values obtained from different microscopes on the same dental features. In this study, we microscopically observe the dental wear patterns of labial and buccal surfaces from 4 populations of the Iberian Late Prehistory, aiming to understand the level of intermicroscopy variability between the values of an optical microscope (ZEISS Axioscope A1 metallographic) and a 3D digital microscope (Hirox KH-8700). Within this framework, we adopt a dual microscopy approach, combining the existing methodological steps of the two microscopes, aiming to explore the level of agreement among the values obtained from both pieces of equipment. In this context, we provide, to our knowledge, the first ground for the quantification of diet-related wear patterns on human teeth using a Hirox KH-8700 3D digital microscope, underscoring its possibilities and observing discrepancies in the methodological implementation of the specific equipment in examining microscopic diet-related dental striations.
Infostealer malware infects devices worldwide and harvests their most sensitive contents: credentials, browser sessions, private keys, and access certificates. Yet its impact on victims remains difficult to study without an ethical, legal, and curated research dataset. To close this gap, we build a privacy-preserving pipeline that turns illicitly sourced infostealer logs into a reproducible research artifact, minimizing sensitive data while preserving measurement utility, and use it to construct a dataset of 170,298 victims from logs of multiple infostealer families. Analyzing these victims, we find that the most compromised services mirror the world's most popular platforms, with gaming and entertainment services strongly overrepresented. Within the sample we identify compromised credentials for high-value organizations, including law-enforcement domains, government and military services, and all eight Ivy League universities, as well as substantial exposure of security-critical infrastructure and of financial, remote-access, and development platforms. Victims also show widespread credential reuse and significant revictimization risk, overlapping with phishing and ransomware victim populations. We release the first anonymized victim-level infostealer dataset under controlled access to enable ethical, privacy-preserving, and reproducible research on information security and victim behavior.
Inflammageing links chronic inflammation to biological aging, contributing to senescence and multimorbidity common in the elderly. In neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, inflammatory processes play a causal role in accelerating neurodegeneration. Interestingly, apolipoprotein E (APOE), particularly the APOE epsilon 4 allele, is a major genetic risk factor for neurodegeneration, acting as a key immunomodulator with sex differences. This is especially relevant given the lack of clear prevention strategies for APOE epsilon 4 carriers. Therefore, this study characterized the sex-specific neuroinflammatory and cognitive vulnerability of APOE4 genotype under a chronic lipopolysaccharide (LPS) challenge in senescence-transition stage. Male and female homozygous apoE4 mice (15-16 months old) were administered intraperitoneal doses of 0 or 0.25 mg/kg LPS three times per week for a total of 17 doses. Body weight was monitored, and behavioural assessments were conducted from the 12th injection until the 17th. Serum and tissues were collected to assess hippocampal, cortical and systemic markers of inflammation, antioxidant-related genes, genes implied in myelin dynamics, and neurotrophin-related transcripts. Findings revealed basal sex-dependent divergent phenotypes with specific responses under LPS challenge. Under LPS treatment, males exhibited higher systemic fragility, with significantly increased mortality, which may have conditioned cognitive outcomes. Females showed greater central alterations related to neuroinflammation along with altered expression of myelin-related transcripts. However, the results suggest a stablished tolerance to LPS. These results highlight how chronic systemic inflammation during ageing in an APOE4 genotype background shapes sex-divergent pathological trajectories, underscoring the need to address sexspecific therapeutic strategies.
We report on the performance of Tm:KLu(WO4)2 lasers operating on the 3H4 → 3H5 transition under diode pumping at different wavelengths. Under 802 nm pumping, a maximum continuous-wave output power of 0.8 W at ∼2.3 µm is achieved. By adopting a wing pumping scheme at 792 nm, the longitudinal absorption distribution is elongated, leading to a more uniform thermal load and mitigating power saturation. This approach improves the slope efficiency to 12% at high pump powers, demonstrating clear advantages over resonance pumping. Furthermore, we demonstrate, for the first time to our knowledge, a diode-pumped Tm:KLu(WO4)2 laser simultaneously emitting at ∼1.9 µm (3F4 → 3H6) and ∼2.3 µm (3H4 → 3H5).
Sustainability is essentially about enabling everyone to live a good life within planetary boundaries. Analysing this goal is hindered by problems of definition, measurement, and the large number of relevant factors. Comprehensive assessments of countries' resource requirements and emissions (i.e. their socioeconomic metabolism or SEM) related to human wellbeing are missing. To advance the field, we develop a multi-dimensional set of SEM indicators and analyse its relationship with the number of ‘years of good life’ (YoGL) of their inhabitants. The wellbeing indicator ‘YoGL’ measures years a person can expect to live above absolute poverty while enjoying health and life satisfaction. A descriptive analysis of ~110 countries from 1990 to 2019 reveals saturation curves: strong association of SEM and YoGL at low and weaker relations at higher levels of SEM and wellbeing. In a range of panel analyses we introduce mediating factors capturing how countries' provisioning systems turn resources into well-being relevant services (e.g. GDP, education, pollution or inequality). The association between SEM indicators and YoGL mostly disappears or even becomes inverse when mediating factors are considered. GDP is positively associated with YoGL in many but not all analyses. Education is positively and air pollution negatively associated with YoGL when the other explanatory variables are controlled. A cluster analysis of high-YoGL countries identifies a group enjoying highest YoGL at intermediate levels of resource use and emissions. Our results imply that raising wellbeing for all while reducing resource use and emissions will require moving beyond simple ‘decoupling’ and resource-use efficiency approaches.
