Given that concrete masonry walls are expected to experience shrinkage combined with thermal expansion and contraction, and in some cases even carbonation, throughout their service life, cracking is to be expected. However, after concrete masonry walls have been placed into service, originally anticipated and accounted for cracking is often misdiagnosed as a structural defect. Such misdiagnoses...

Passwords in the UNIX operating system are encrypted with the crypt algorithm and kept in the publicly-readable le /etc/passwd. This paper examines the vulnerability of UNIX to attacks on its password system. Over the past 10 years, improvements in hardware and software have increased the crypts/second/dollar ratio by ve orders of magnitude. We reexamine the UNIX password system in light of the...

A new advanced system for Ultrasonic Peening (UP) of materials, details and welded elements was developed recently. The UP produces a number of beneficial effects in metals and alloys. Foremost among these is increasing the resistance of materials to surface-related failures, such as fatigue, fretting fatigue and stress corrosion cracking. The beneficial effect is achieved mainly by relieving o...

A combined finite/ discrete element method is presented for modelling of composite specimens subjected to dynamic/impact loadings. The main task is set on developing an algorithm for simulation of potential bonding and debonding/delamination phenomena during impact or general dynamic loading conditions. In addition, full fracture analysis can also be performed. The proposed approach adopts a ge...

Ultrahigh-resolution transmission electron microscopy and atomic-scale spectroscopy are used to investigate the origin of the toughness in rare-earth doped silicon carbide (RE-SiC) by examining the mechanistic nature of the intergranular cracking events which we find to occur precisely along the RE-decorated interface between the SiC grains and the nanoscale grain-boundary phase. We conclude th...

The mechanical and environmental behavior of heterogeneous materials is essentially determined by their composition and microstructure. In many engineering materials, cracking at the various levels of observation also plays a crucial role, for both mechanical damage and chemical/durability attacks. For the last two decades, the group of Mechanics of Materials at UPC-Barcelona, has been developi...

Fruit cracking has long been a topic of great concern for growers and researchers of litchi (Litchi chinensis Sonn.). To understand the molecular mechanisms underlying fruit cracking, high-throughput RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) was first used for de novo assembly and characterization of the transcriptome of cracking pericarp of litchi. Comparative transcriptomic analyses were performed on non-crac...