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This article examines nightmare narratives collected as part of a person-centered ethnographic study of altered states of consciousness (ASCs) and supernaturalism in a mainland Puerto Rican community in the late 1990s. Utilizing a descriptive backdrop informed by cross-cultural studies of ASCs and highlighting the relevance of recent insights from the cognitive sciences of religion and from the anthropology of embodiment or cultural phenomenology, I examine the lived experience and psychocultural elaboration of diverse Puerto Rican nightmare events. Taking the nightmare to be a trauma in its waking-nightmare sense (i.e., through the extreme fright caused by sleep paralysis) as well as an intrusive, traumatic memory in its posttraumatic sense (i.e., a reliving of trauma themes in dreams), I show how the perceptual and interpretive processes evoked by intensely affective ASCs both inform and are informed by Puerto Rican religious and spiritualistic orientations and values.

The International Space Station (ISS) primary elements are to be assembled and operated in the severe on-orbit thermal environment. This environment is widely varying, resulting in a broad range of thermally induced structural load conditions defined by parameters such as spacecraft articulating geometry, orbit inclination, flight attitude and altitude, and the annual solar cycle. This paper presents an overview of the thermostructural analysis that was conducted using detailed thermal and structural models to produce thermally induced loads and deflections of the ISS. A unique thermal radiation analysis approach is described that was used to compute ISS structural temperature gradients. The analysis approach was necessary due to the large size and complexity of the component thermal models required to adequately represent the assembled ISS. Analytical methods are described for representing aspects of mechanism design for on-orbit berthing and mating of pre-integrated truss (PIT) segments. Also, a unique substructuring analysis approach is discussed that has been implemented to manage the voluminous structural model and temperature data required for the assembled ISS thermal loads analysis.

The block cipher MMB was designed by Daemen, Govaerts and Vandewalle, in 1993, as an alternative to the IDEA block cipher. We exploit and describe unusual properties of the modular multiplication in $Z_{2^{32} - 1}$, which lead to a differential attack on the full 6-round MMB cipher (both versions 1.0 and 2.0). Further contributions of this paper include detailed square and linear cryptanalysis of MMB. Concerning differential cryptanalysis (DC), we can break the full MMB with 2^118 chosen plaintexts, 2^95.91 6-round MMB encryptions and 2^64 counters, effectively bypassing the cipher's countermeasures against DC. For the square attack, we can recover the 128-bit user key for 4-round MMB with 2^34 chosen plaintexts, 2^126.32 4-round encryptions and 2^64 memory blocks. Concerning linear cryptanalysis, we present a key-recovery attack on 3-round MMB requiring 2^114.56 known-plaintexts and 2^126 encryptions. Moreover, we detail a ciphertext-only attack on 2-round MMB using 2^93.6 ciphertexts and 2^93.6 parity computations. These attacks do not depend on weak-key or weak-subkey assumptions, and are thus independent of the key schedule algorithm.