Building safe and reliable programs is an important but difficult endeavor. The challenge is even greater in the context of distributed environments, which may involve complex synchronization operations in the presence of process and network failures. Transactions are one of the earliest and simplest abstractions for reliable concurrent programming [2]. They provide fault-isolation by guarantee...

Speculations that encounters with interstellar clouds modify the terrestrial climate have appeared in the scientific literature for over 85 years. The articles in this volume seek to give substance to these speculations by examining the exact mechanisms that link the pressure and composition of the interstellar medium surrounding the Sun to the physical properties of the inner heliosphere at the

We speculate that above or just below the electroweak phase transition magnetic fields are generated which have a net helicity (otherwise said, a ChernSimons term) of order of magnitude NB + NL, where NB,L is the baryon or lepton number today. (To be more precise requires much more knowledge of B,L-generating mechanisms than we currently have.) Electromagnetic helicity generation is associated ...

Two kinds of difficulties have challenged the physics community for many years: (1) knowing nature’s building blocks (particle physics) and (2) understanding interacting many-body systems (many-body physics). Both of them exist in the research of quark matter and compact stars. This paper addresses the possibility that quark clustering, rather than a color super-conducting state, could occur in...