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A case of recurrent progressively severe ulceration secondary to erosive lichen planus is reported. The patient developed marked malnutrition as a result of extensive involvement of the oral cavity. In addition to the oral ulcerations, she also had violaceous spots present over her forearm. Treatment administered in view of histopathological report and clinical presentation, resulted in marked improvement in symptoms and weight gain.

The captions for Figure 2C,D have several minor errors numbering of the residues of Aβ. The corrected captions should read: (C) NMR-based structural model of Aβ1–40 fibrils showing central residues K16–D22 and A30–V36.1b,14 (D) NMR-based structural model of Aβ1–42 fibrils showing central residues L17–I41.2a These errors are peripheral to this paper and do not affect the results or conclusions in any way.

A new technique for the measurement of dissociative-recombination cross section functions using an ion-trap apparatus has been applied to the recombination of H2+ and H3+ in the energy range 0.3-1.0 eV. The energy dependence of the dissociative-recombination cross section is measured to be E-1.15 and E-0.74 for e-H2+ and e-H3+ collisions, respectively. Good agreement is obtained with results from earlier experiments utilising inclined electron and ion beams.

International audience

International audience; Today, reducing global greenhouse gas emissions has become a crucial issue for protecting the earth's environment. This requires the reduction of energy consumption in as many sectors as possible, including home networks. Indeed, in the home environment, networked devices consume a large proportion of household energy. There are three reasons that can explain the high energy consumption of home network devices. Firstly, devices are in idle state for hours when they are not in operation. Secondly, they cannot go to an ultra-low power consumption state when they are not needed. And last but not least, there is an increasing number of home network devices with soaring power consumption in our homes. These home network devices have a long switching time from idle state to sleeping state. Moreover, explicit user commands are required to switch the device from idle state to soft-off state. We can certainly gain energy if the device stays in sleeping state or soft-off state instead of idle state. We propose an Overlay Energy Control Network (OECN) which can switch devices from idle state to sleeping state much more quickly and from idle state to soft-off state automatically. The Overlay Energy Control Network (OECN) is formed by at least one overlay energy control node connected to each home network device. The OECN power management coordinates the power states of all home network devices. The overlay energy control nodes can exchange energy control messages. The devices can be turned on or turned off, or can return to their power states when they receive the OECN messages. So that the OECN can be adaptive to our home network devices, the OECN is developed in two ways: (i) all overlay energy control nodes in the home network are ZigBee nodes. This is a ZigBee Mandatory OECN Solution (ZMS); (ii) one or more devices become the overlay energy control nodes where there are no ZigBee modules on that device. This is a ZigBee Optional OECN Solution (ZOS). In our simulation, we will evaluate our overlay energy-saving solutions with a self-controlled energy solution in three metrics: energy consumption, delay and cost. In the self-controlled solution, the device controls its own power state. The proposed Overlay Energy Control Network provides an efficient energy-saving solution for home network devices. In our use case, the ZigBee Mandatory Solution can gain 21.79% energy on average compared to the self-controlled solution. It is an efficient energy-saving solution, but it has a relatively high delay compared to the ZigBee Optional Solution and the self-controlled solution.

Secure communications and cryptography is as old as civilization itself. The Greek Spartans for instance would cipher their military messages and, for Chinese, just the act of writing the message constituted a secret message since almost no-one could read or write Chinese. Modern public key Cryptography until the mid 1980’s was founded on computational complexity of certain trap-door one-way functions that are easy to compute in one direction, but very difficult in the opposite direction. To a large extent computational complexity is still the lynchpin of modern cryptography, but the whole paradigm was revolutionized by introduction of Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) which is founded on fundamental laws of Physics. Indeed, to date, QKD is de-facto the most successful branch of Quantum Information Science (QIS) encompassing such areas as quantum computing which is still in its infancy. Modern QKD is fundamentally composed of a series of three steps that shall be explained later in the chapter: 1) data transmission over the error-prone quantum channel; 2) information reconciliation to allow the parties engaged in communication to have two identical copies of a message that may not be as secure as desired; and 3) privacy amplification that ensures the parties possess copies of messages about which the information that could have possibly be gleaned by the eavesdropper is below a desirable threshold. It is this sufficiently private and often much shorter message that can be used as the secret key to allow exchange of longer messages between the legitimate parties. Step-1 must be based on the laws of quantum physics, whereas step-2 and -3 either necessitate the use of quantum error correcting codes which are often complex or as is often done in practice, based on information exchange over a classical public channel. Objective of this chapter is to give a tutorial presentation and evaluation of QKD protocols at the systems level based on classical error-correcting codes. The QKD systems can provide perfect security (from the viewpoint of information theory) in the distribution of a cryptographic key. QKD systems and related protocols, under particular conditions, can use the classic channel coding techniques instead of quantum error-correcting codes, both for correcting errors that occurred during the exchange of a cryptographic key between two authorized users, and to allow privacy amplification, in order to make completely vain a possible intruder attempt. The secret key is transmitted over a quantum, and thus safe channel, characterized by very low transmission rates and high error rates. This channel is safe given the properties of a quantum system, where each measurement on the system perturbs the system itself, allowing the authorized users to detect the presence of any intruder. Moreover, as shown by accurate experimental studies, the communication channel used for quantum key exchange is not able to reach high levels of reliability (the Quantum Bit Error Rate - QBER - may have a high value), both because of the inherent characteristics of the system, and of the presence of a possible attacker. In order to obtain acceptable residual error rates, it is necessary to use a parallel classical and public channel, characterized by high transmission rates and low error rates, on which to transmit only the redundancy bits of systematic channel codes with performance possibly close to the capacity limit. Furthermore, since the more redundancy is added by the channel code, the more the corresponding information can be used to decipher the private message itself, it becomes necessary to design high-rate codes obtained by puncturing a low-rate mother code, possibly achieving a redundancy such that elements of the secret message cannot be uniquely determined from the redundancy itself.