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Himalayan lakes represent critical water resources, culturally important waterbodies, and potential hazards. Some of these lakes experience dramatic water-level changes, responding to seasonal monsoon rains and post-monsoonal draining. To address the paucity of direct observations of hydrology in retreating mountain glacial systems, we describe a field program in a series of high altitude lakes in Sagarmatha National Park, adjacent to Ngozumba, the largest glacier in Nepal. In situ observations find extreme (>12 m) seasonal water-level changes in a 60-m deep lateral-moraine-dammed lake (lacking surface outflow), during a 16-month period, equivalent to a 5$$\times 10^6$$$\times {10}^6$m$$^3$$${}^3$volume change annually. The water column thermal structure was also monitored over the same period. A hydraulic model is constructed, validated against observed water levels, and used to estimate hydraulic conductivities of the moraine soils damming the lake and improves our understanding of this complex hydrological system. Our findings indicate that lake level compared to the damming glacier surface height is the key criterion for large lake fluctuations, while lakes lying below the glacier surface, regulated by surface outflow, possess only minor seasonal water-level fluctuations. Thus, lakes adjacent to glaciers may exhibit very different filling/draining dynamics based on presence/absence of surface outflows and elevation relative to retreating glaciers, and consequently may have very different fates in the next few decades as the climate warms.

 

Regular expressions (regexps) are a convenient way for programmers to express complex string searching logic. Sev- eral popular programming languages expose an interface to a regexp matching subsystem, either by language-level primi- tives or through standard libraries. The implementations be- hind these matching systems vary greatly in their capabilities and running-time characteristics. In particular, backtracking matchers may exhibit worst-case running-time that is either linear, polynomial, or exponential in the length of the string being searched. Such super-linear worst-case regexps expose applications to Regular Expression Denial-of-Service (Re- DoS) when inputs can be controlled by an adversarial attacker. In this work, we investigate the impact of ReDoS in back- tracking engines, a popular type of engine used by most programming languages. We evaluate several existing tools against a dataset of broadly collected regexps, and find that despite extensive theoretical work in this field, none are able to achieve both high precision and high recall. To address this gap in existing work, we develop REGULATOR, a novel dy- namic, fuzzer-based analysis system for identifying regexps vulnerable to ReDoS. We implement this system by directly instrumenting a popular backtracking regexp engine, which increases the scope of supported regexp syntax and features over prior work. Finally, we evaluate this system against three common regexp datasets, and demonstrate a seven-fold in- crease in true positives discovered when comparing against existing tools. 

Abstract Habits are inflexible behaviors that develop after extensive repetition, and overreliance on habits is a hallmark of many pathological states. The striatum is involved in the transition from flexible to inflexible responding, and interspersed throughout the striatum are patches, or striosomes, which make up ~15% of the volume of the striatum relative to the surrounding matrix compartment. Previous studies have suggested that patches are necessary for normal habit formation, but it remains unknown exactly how patches contribute to habit formation and expression. Here, using optogenetics, we stimulated striatal patches in Sepw1-NP67 mice during variable interval training (VI60), which is used to establish habitual responding. We found that activation of patches at reward retrieval resulted in elevated responding during VI60 training by modifying the pattern of head entry and pressing. Further, this optogenetic manipulation reduced subsequent responding following reinforcer devaluation, suggesting modified habit formation. However, patch stimulation did not generally increase extinction rates during a subsequent extinction probe, but did result in a small ‘extinction burst’, further suggesting goal-directed behavior. On the other hand, this manipulation had no effect in omission trials, where mice had to withhold responses to obtain rewards. Finally, we utilized fast-scan cyclic voltammetry to investigate how patch activation modifies evoked striatal dopamine release and found that optogenetic activation of patch projections to the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc) is sufficient to suppress dopamine release in the dorsal striatum. Overall, this work provides novel insight into the role of the patch compartment in habit formation, and provides a potential mechanism for how patches modify habitual behavior by exerting control over dopamine signaling.