Image-based sexual abuse (IBSA), including the non-consensual distribution of intimate images (NCII), is an exponentially growing issue. Private online reporting and removal tools, such as the Take It Down service run by the NCMEC, can empower victim-survivors, especially young people, who experience threats of the sharing of their intimate images. By pre-emptively reporting images, users could ideally block them from ever being posted on multiple major online platforms with one report, taking power away from perpetrators of sextortion and protecting against the reuploading of known IBSA content.

These services rely on sharing “perceptual hash values” (like digital fingerprints) of images with online platforms in order to match IBSA content without sharing the images/videos themselves. However, our research shows that generative AI attacks using consumer-grade hardware can be used to approximately reconstruct images from their hash value, known as “hash inversion”. This indicates that the hash values should be treated as carefully as the original images, otherwise vulnerable users’ privacy may be put at risk, for example if perceptual hash values of reported intimate images became public as the result of a data breach.

To mitigate this attack, we propose implementing Private Set Intersection (PSI) as an additional layer of protection, to enhance the security and privacy for users whilst maintaining the functionality required to detect and remove IBSA. We highlight the future potential for private pre-emptive reporting to combat sextortion threats, and the need for user-focused design and greater transparency in IBSA reporting and removal tools.

The Protection of Children Act, 1978 (PCA) is widely considered the definitive piece of legislation with regards to youth sexual image sharing. It states that it is an offence to make, possess or distribute indecent images of anyone under 18 and was designed to respond to cases where adults sexually abused children and filmed or photographed that abuse. As youth sexual image sharing has become increasingly normalised, many have called for the legislation to be changed or updated to prevent the over-criminalisation of young people. Another issue with the PCA is its influence on education policy, promoting the prevention / prohibition approach. I will explore how this prohibition message does not in fact prevent young people being victimised by adults but instead serves to reinforce the threats and control tactics used by groomers who coerce young people to take and share sexual images, therefore the PCA is no longer compatible with children’s rights. I will discuss how the Online Safety Act’s (2023) development of non-consensual image sharing offences may offer an alternative approach. This approach could be used to foreground young people’s consent, whilst also providing opportunities to share details of support services and how to remove images that have been shared to social media and pornography sites (such as takeitdown.ncmec.org), which a straightforward prevention message cannot easily achieve. I will conclude by showing how this approach is more compatible with children’s rights and can challenge rather than reinforce the tactics used by groomers.

There is notably growth in the use of deepfake technology to create fake, yet indistinguishable from real life, sexual images and videos of others without their consent. Though there is an emerging understanding of the impact to which this has on it’s targets, the individuals from which this information comes from is almost entirely those whose facial likeness has been used within the media, with little attention paid to those whose bodies have been used as the canvas. Across 321 participants (Mage = 45.70 years, SD = 15.88; 48.9% female), we explored societal judgements of survivors whose face and/or body likeness had been used to create sexualized videos via a vignette design, which also took into account whether said survivors where sex workers or not. Though perceived criminality did not differ across our conditions, participants allocated more blame and less anticipated impact to the body target, relative to the face target, especially if they were noted in the vignette to be a sex worker. Moreover, when accounting for personality traits, beliefs, and demographics, being male and viewing sex work as ‘a choice’ and/or ‘deviant’ predicted greater victim-blame, lower perceived criminality of deepfaking, and lower anticipated harm, with increased empathy being the only predictor of higher anticipated harm. Results suggest a need to understand the broader impacts of sexualized deepfake abuse for both facial and body targets, and continue to generate public awareness of the impact this form of image-based sexual abuse can have on its survivors.

With a strategy of obtaining deep JWST imaging and following up interesting candidates with NIRSpec spectroscopy, the JADES survey has: broken the highest redshift spectroscopically confirmed record (twice); found possible evidence for the earliest black hole at z~10.6, though other explanations exist; found direct evidence for the stochasticity of star formation in early galaxies with the highest redshift ‘mini-quenched’ galaxy, and much more besides. I will summarise key results from JADES survey focusing on Chemical evolution and abundances of the earliest galaxies.

The astrophysical origins of the heaviest elements via rapid neutron capture remain unresolved, even with exciting recent progress in gravitational wave and astronomical observations. One key barrier to elucidating r-process origins using these new observables are the uncertainties that arise from the unknown properties of the thousands of nuclear species that participate in the r process. Here we consider the role played by nuclear physics uncertainties in our interpretations of r-process observables such as light curves, abundance patterns, and isotopic ratios. We will discuss the prospects for reducing these uncertainties via advances in nuclear theory and experiment and point out potential observables that may rise above current uncertainties.

The merging of two neutron stars can provide the conditions necessary for the production of the heaviest elements in the universe via the rapid neutron capture process (r-process). When this occurs, an abundance of material is produced lying far from nuclear stability, and the decays of these nuclei produce the electromagnetic signal: the kilonova. Modeling these kilonova signals, and indeed the entire merger system, remains subject to uncertainties stemming from both nuclear properties far from stability as well as from incomplete information regarding the evolution of the extreme astrophysical environment in which this occurs.
I will discuss current work aimed at approaching this problem from both an astrophysical perspective with magnetohydrodynamic simulations of the post-merger disk with neutrino transport, as well as from a nuclear perspective with detailed nucleosynthesis studies.

We measure stellar age for APOGEE giants using our Bayesian Machine Learning framework BINGO (Bayesian INference for Galactic archaeOlogy, Ciuca et al. 2024). After de-noising the data, we found a drop in metallicity with an increase in [Mg/Fe] at an early epoch, followed by a rapid chemical enrichment with increasing [Fe/H] and decreasing [Mg/Fe]. Comparing with the Milky Way-like zoom-in cosmological simulation Auriga, we discuss that this could be due to the early epoch of gas-rich merger. We further argue that this could be associated with the last massive merger of our Galaxy, the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus merger, and discuss how it impacted the formation of the Galactic thick and thin disks and also the Galactic bar. We will also briefly introduce Japan Astrometry Satellite Mission for INfrared Exploration (JASMINE), which will reveal the Milky Way’s central core structure and its formation history with Gaia-level (~25 uas) astrometry in the NIR Hw-band, (1.0-1.6 um), Galactic centre archaeology survey.

The spectra currently emerging from ground- and space-based facilities are of exceptional resolution and cover a broad range of wavelengths. To meaningfully analyse these spectra, astronomers utilise complex modelling codes to simulate the astrophysical observations. The main inputs to these codes are radiative and collisional atomic data to include energy levels, transition probabilities, collision rates for electron-impact excitation/ionisation, photoionisation and recombination. While some of the data can be obtained experimentally, they are usually of insufficient accuracy or limited to a small number of transitions. The R-Matrix approach is credited as one of the most powerful and reliable tools in calculating these atomic data. Recent and ongoing developments of the relativistic parallel DARC codes have enabled an order of magnitude advance in the accuracy of the atomic structure and subsequent collision calculations that are now feasible for lowly ionised high Z ions.
In 2017 the first gravitational wave from a binary neutron star merger (NSM) was detected and the ejected matter created a bright glow called a Kilonova via r-process nucleosynthesis. Disentangling r-process abundances from the broad spectra of NSM is a challenging task that demands a high degree of rigour in calculations of the ejecta opacity and the atomic calculations that underpin them. Recent publications by the group at QUB report on extensive relativistic atomic structure and electron-impact excitation collision calculations for the species Au I-III, Pt I-III, Sr II, Y II and Te I-III, which were subsequently used in collisional-radiative models to investigate line ratio diagnostics in NSM environments.

Currently, the explanation behind the explosion mechanism of core collapse supernovae is yet to be fully understood. New insight to this phenomena may come through observations of 44Ti cosmic gamma rays; this technique compares the observed flux of cosmic 44Ti gamma rays to that predicted by state-of-the-art models of supernova explosions. In doing so, the mass cut point of the star can be found. However, a road block in this procedure comes from a lack of precision in the nuclear reactions that destroy 44Ti in supernovae, most notably the reactions 44T(alpha,p)47V and 45V(p,gamma)46Cr. Therefore, this study aims to better understand the 45V(p,gamma)46Cr reaction by performing gamma-ray spectroscopy of 46Cr with the aim of identifying proton-unbound resonant states.
The experiment was conducted at the ATLAS facility at Argonne National Laboratory, using the GRETINA+FMA setup, where 46Cr was produced via the fusion-evaporation reaction 12C(36Ar,2n). The cross section for producing 46Cr, in this reaction, is estimated to be in the mu b range. Nevertheless, with the power of the GRETINA+FMA setup, we show that it is possible to cleanly identify gamma rays in 46Cr. These include decays from previously unidentified states above the proton-emission threshold, corresponding to resonances in the 45V + p system.

Type-I X-ray bursts are interpreted as thermonuclear explosions in the atmospheres of accreting neutron stars in close binary systems. During these bursts, sufficiently high temperatures are achieved such that “breakout” from the hot CNO cycle occurs. This results in a whole new set of thermonuclear reactions known as the rp process. This process involves a series of rapid proton captures resulting in the synthesis of very proton-rich nuclei up to the Sn – Te (A ∼ 100) mass region. Various sensitivity studies have highlighted the 59Cu(p,γ)60Zn reaction as significant in its impact on energy generation along the rp -process path within X-ray bursts, and hence, the resultant light curve and final isotopic burnt ashes composition. In particular, competition between the 59Cu(p,α)56Ni and 59Cu(p,γ)60Zn reactions within the NiCu cycle directly determines whether the pathway of nucleosynthesis flows towards higher mass regions. At present, stellar reaction rates for both of these astrophysical processes are based entirely on statistical-model calculations. Recently, however, an indirect study of the nucleus 60Zn has surprisingly shown a plateau in the level-density of states in the region of interest, contrary to the usual expectation of exponential growth with increasing excitation energy. As a result, a statistical-model approach of the 59Cu(p,γ) reaction rate may be insufficient, and it is therefore now essential to explore the properties of excited states in 60Zn that influence the astrophysical 59Cu(p,γ)60Zn reaction. Specifically, the 59Cu(p,γ) reaction is expected to be dominated by resonant capture to excited states above the proton-emission threshold in 60Zn, Sp = 5105.0(4) keV, that lie within the Gamow energy window, Ecm ∼ 0.7 – 1.5 MeV. In this work, we aim to utilise the 59Cu(d,n) reaction in inverse kinematics at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) to obtain the first measurement of single-particle properties of resonances in the 59Cu(p,γ) reaction. Specifically, 60Zn ions separated within the S800 spectrometer and identified prompt with respect to γ-rays detected by the GRETINA array will be used to determine the energy and angle-integrated cross sections of key resonance states, while neutrons detected by the LENDA array will be used to constrain the distribution of spin-parity assignments across the relevant excitation energy region of Type-I X-ray burst nucleosynthesis.