BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Decoctions of the Chinese herb houpu contain honokiol and are used to treat a variety of mental disorders, including depression. Depression commonly presents alongside sleep disorders and sleep disturbances, which appear to be a major risk factor for depression. Here, we have evaluated the somnogenic effect of honokiol and the mechanisms involved. EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH Honokiol was administered i.p. at 20:00 h in mice. Flumazenil, an antagonist at the benzodiazepine site of the GABAA receptor, was administered i.p. 15 min before honokiol. The effects of honokiol were measured by EEG and electromyogram (EMG), c‐Fos expression and in vitro electrophysiology. KEY RESULTS Honokiol (10 and 20 mg·kg−1) significantly shortened the sleep latency to non‐rapid eye movement (non‐REM, NREM) sleep and increased the amount of NREM sleep. Honokiol increased the number of state transitions from wakefulness to NREM sleep and, subsequently, from NREM sleep to wakefulness. However, honokiol had no effect on either the amount of REM sleep or EEG power density of both NREM and REM sleep. Honokiol increased c‐Fos expression in ventrolateral preoptic area (VLPO) neurons, as examined by immunostaining, and excited sleep‐promoting neurons in the VLPO by whole‐cell patch clamping in the brain slice. Pretreatment with flumazenil abolished the somnogenic effects and activation of the VLPO neurons by honokiol. CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS Honokiol promoted NREM sleep by modulating the benzodiazepine site of the GABAA receptor, suggesting potential applications in the treatment of insomnia, especially for patients who experience difficulty in falling and staying asleep.

Digital signature is a major component of transactions on Blockchain platforms, especially in enterprise Blockchain platforms, where multiple signatures from a set of peers need to be produced to endorse a transaction. However, such process is often complex and time-consuming. Multi-signature, which can improve transaction efficiency by having a set of signers cooperate to produce a joint signature, has attracted extensive attentions. In this work, we propose two multi-signature schemes, GMS and AGMS, which are proved to be more secure and efficient than state-of-the-art multi-signature schemes. Besides, we implement the proposed schemes in a real Enterprise Blockchain platform, Fabric. Experiment results show that the proposed AGMS scheme helps achieve the goal of high transaction efficiency, low storage complexity, as well as high robustness against rogue-key attacks and k-sum problem attacks.

Honeypots have been widely used in the security community to understand the cyber threat landscape, for example to study unauthorized penetration attempts targeting industrial cyber-physical systems (ICPS) and observing the behaviors in such activities. However, some better-resourced cyber attackers may attempt to identify honeypots and develop strategies to compromise them, aka anti-honeypot. In this paper, we present an anti-honeypot enabled optimal attack strategy for ICPS, by employing a novel game-theoretical approach. Specifically, the interactions between the attacker and ICPS defender are captured with a proposed hybrid signaling and repeated game, i.e., a non-cooperative two-player one-shot game with incomplete information. By taking into account both various possible defenses of an ICPS and diverse offensive acts of attackers, a Nash equilibrium is derived, which exhibits an optimal attack strategy for attackers with varying technical sophistication. Extensive simulation experiments on multiple test cases demonstrate that, the derived strategy offers the attackers an optimal tactic to compromise the target ICPS protected by honeypots, while having only incomplete knowledge of the defensive mechanisms.

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The water environment in Chinese rural areas has seriously deteriorated to the extent that the development of rural areas is now under threat. To deal with this issue, the Chinese government has been promoting wastewater treatment systems (WTS) in rural areas since 2005. However, some of these wastewater treatment plants have shut down after just a few years. Thus, even though the number of newly built plants in rural areas has been rapidly increasing, the failure of these plants can impede the development of an efficient wastewater treatment in Chinese rural areas. This paper investigates the challenges faced by the management of the constructed wastewater treatment plants in Chinese rural areas using the case study method. Two cases, of Zhejiang and Hainan provinces, were analysed separately; the operation was successful in the former province and a failure in the latter one. The study demonstrates that the WTS in rural areas are faced with diverse implementation challenges, ranging from unsustainable financial sources for operation and maintenance cost to inappropriate governance structure, potential risks due to the local leadership rotation system of the government, limited participation by farmers in the management and technical complexity.