Instructions for authors
Please provide a short abstract of 100 to 250 words. The abstract should not contain any undefined abbreviations or unspecified references.
Genes and Aging
Genes may be regarded in at least two quite distinct ways in relation to processes of aging. They are units of genetic transmission from parent to offspring and, also, intracellular agents whose products interact with environmental forces to control development, differentiation, metabolism, and degeneration. Much of this chapter will deal with the results of genetic transmission, that is, with genetic similarities and differences between individuals, present throughout their life-spans. I will attempt to demonstrate that the patterns of the aging of individuals carrying an identical array of genes will show greater similarity than will the patterns of the aging of individuals carrying different assortments of genes. To do this, I will have to deal mostly with genetically controlled animals, and I will try to bring home to you why and how these animals with specific genotypes have become important in research on the biology of aging.
Rubik's for cryptographers
Hard mathematical problems are at the core of security arguments in cryptography. In this paper, we study mathematical generalizations of the famous Rubik’s cube puzzle, namely the factorization, representation and balance problems in non-Abelian groups. These problems arise naturally when describing the security of Cayley hash functions, a class of cryptographic hash functions with very interesting properties. The factorization problem is also strongly related to a famous long-standing conjecture of Babai, at the intersection of group theory and graph theory. A constructive proof of Babai’s conjecture would make all Cayley hash functions insecure, but on the other hand it would have many positive applications in graph theory and computer science. In this paper, we classify existing attacks against Cayley hash functions and we review known results on Babai’s conjecture. Despite recent cryptanalytic progress on particular instances, we show that the factorization, representation and balance problems presumably remain good sources of cryptographic hard problems. Our study demonstrates that Cayley hash functions deserve further interest by the cryptography community.