This is an introduction to some recent developments in string theory and M theory. We try to concentrate on the main physical aspects, and often leave more technical details to the original literature. In the past four years, a series of exciting developments in the area of supersymmetric field theories and string theory has completely changed the landscape of these subjects. Duality has been t...

We investigated the impact of a short intensive language course on attentional functions. We examined 33 participants of a one-week Scottish Gaelic course and compared them to 34 controls: 16 active controls who participated in courses of comparable duration and intensity but not involving foreign language learning and 18 passive controls who followed their usual routines. Participants complete...

We study the Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (NMSSM) as the simplest candidate solution to the μ-problem in the context of the gauge mediation of supersymmetry breaking (GMSB). We first review various proposals to solve the μ-problem in models with the GMSB. We find none of them entirely satisfactory and point out that many of the scenarios still lack quantitative studies, and mot...

A definite relative phase and amplitude exists between the doubly-Cabibbosuppressed amplitude for D → KM and the Cabibbo-favored amplitude forD → K0M0, whereM = (π, η, η): A(D → KM) = − tan θCA(D → K 0 M). Here θC is the Cabibbo angle. This relation, although previously recognized (for M = π) as a consequence of the U-spin subgroup of SU(3), is argued to be less sensitive to corrections involvi...

In this contribution we review recent results from the BESIII experiment. We focus on the investigation of XYZ states and the discovery of new charged charmonium like structures. Two isospin triplets Z(3900) and Z(4020) have been discovered, decaying into π±J/ψ and π±hc, respectively. Structures with compatible parameters have been found decaying to DD̄∗ and D∗D̄∗, respectively, suggesting that t...

A definite relative phase and amplitude exists between the doubly-Cabibbosuppressed amplitude for D → KM and the Cabibbo-favored amplitude forD → K0M0, whereM = (π, η, η): A(D → KM) = − tan θCA(D → K 0 M). Here θC is the Cabibbo angle. This relation, although previously recognized (for M = π) as a consequence of the U-spin subgroup of SU(3), is argued to be less sensitive to corrections involvi...

In this work, we provide the first construction of Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) for general circuits. Our construction is based on the existence of multilinear maps. We prove selective security of our scheme in the standard model under the natural multilinear generalization of the BDDH assumption. Our scheme achieves both Key-Policy and Ciphertext-Policy variants of ABE. Our scheme and its ...

Land-development offset policies consist of measures that require compensation to be made for the negative impact of land development on agricultural production, ecological and environmental conservation, and the sustainability of economic and social development. However, when such policies are inappropriately designed, unexpected problems can result. This paper describes certain land-developme...

Machine) are quite efficient and give the possibility of good integration in general purpose environments. Presently, we are planning to increase the number of existing primitives with other generic and domain-specific representations. In this future work we will use also other languages (e.g., Java) and, even, other tools (commercial or distribution-free) will be integrated in the library of K...