Projected Heat-Related Mortality in the U.S. Urban Northeast

Increased heat-related mortality is projected to be among the major impacts of climate change on human health, and the United States urban Northeast region is likely to be particularly vulnerable. In support of regional adaptation planning, quantitative information is needed on potential future health responses at the urban and regional scales. Here, we present future projections of heat-related mortality in Boston, New York and Philadelphia utilizing downscaled next-generation climate models and Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) developed in support of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). Our analyses reveal that heat-related mortality rates per 100,000 of population during the baseline period between 1985 and 2006 were highest in Philadelphia followed by New York City and Boston. However, projected heat-related mortality rates in the 2020s, 2050s and 2080s were highest in New York City followed by Philadelphia and Boston. This study may be of value in developing strategies for reducing the future impacts of heat and building climate change resilience in the urban Northeast region

A PCA-based automated finder for galaxy-scale strong lenses

We present an algorithm using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to subtract galaxies from imaging data, and also two algorithms to find strong, galaxy-scale gravitational lenses in the resulting residual image. The combined method is optimized to find full or partial Einstein rings. Starting from a pre-selection of potential massive galaxies, we first perform a PCA to build a set of basis vectors. The galaxy images are reconstructed using the PCA basis and subtracted from the data. We then filter the residual image with two different methods. The first uses a curvelet (curved wavelets) filter of the residual images to enhance any curved/ring feature. The resulting image is transformed in polar coordinates, centered on the lens galaxy center. In these coordinates, a ring is turned into a line, allowing us to detect very faint rings by taking advantage of the integrated signal-to-noise in the ring (a line in polar coordinates). The second way of analysing the PCA-subtracted images identifies structures in the residual images and assesses whether they are lensed images according to their orientation, multiplicity and elongation. We apply the two methods to a sample of simulated Einstein rings, as they would be observed with the ESA Euclid satellite in the VIS band. The polar coordinates transform allows us to reach a completeness of 90% and a purity of 86%, as soon as the signal-to-noise integrated in the ring is higher than 30, and almost independent of the size of the Einstein ring. Finally, we show with real data that our PCA-based galaxy subtraction scheme performs better than traditional subtraction based on model fitting to the data. Our algorithm can be developed and improved further using machine learning and dictionary learning methods, which would extend the capabilities of the method to more complex and diverse galaxy shapes

Heat-Related Mortality in a Warming Climate: Projections for 12 U.S. Cities

Heat is among the deadliest weather-related phenomena in the United States, and the number of heat-related deaths may increase under a changing climate, particularly in urban areas. Regional adaptation planning is unfortunately often limited by the lack of quantitative information on potential future health responses. This study presents an assessment of the future impacts of climate change on heat-related mortality in 12 cities using 16 global climate models, driven by two scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions. Although the magnitude of the projected heat effects was found to differ across time, cities, climate models and greenhouse pollution emissions scenarios, climate change was projected to result in increases in heat-related fatalities over time throughout the 21st century in all of the 12 cities included in this study. The increase was more substantial under the high emission pathway, highlighting the potential benefits to public health of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Nearly 200,000 heat-related deaths are projected to occur in the 12 cities by the end of the century due to climate warming, over 22,000 of which could be avoided if we follow a low GHG emission pathway. The presented estimates can be of value to local decision makers and stakeholders interested in developing strategies to reduce these impacts and building climate change resilience

Bosonization and Scale Invariance on Quantum Wires

We develop a systematic approach to bosonization and vertex algebras on quantum wires of the form of star graphs. The related bosonic fields propagate freely in the bulk of the graph, but interact at its vertex. Our framework covers all possible interactions preserving unitarity. Special attention is devoted to the scale invariant interactions, which determine the critical properties of the system. Using the associated scattering matrices, we give a complete classification of the critical points on a star graph with any number of edges. Critical points where the system is not invariant under wire permutations are discovered. By means of an appropriate vertex algebra we perform the bosonization of fermions and solve the massless Thirring model. In this context we derive an explicit expression for the conductance and investigate its behavior at the critical points. A simple relation between the conductance and the Casimir energy density is pointed out.Comment: LaTex 31+1 pages, 2 figures. Section 3.6 and two references added. To appear in J. Phys. A: Mathematical and Theoretica

Ocular Manifestations In COVID-19: Clinical Case Reports And A Literature (Review)

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has affected more than 130 million people as of April 2021. During the current pandemic, SARS-CoV-2 has been found to cause conjunctivitis with anecdotal evidence of a wide range of manifestations from scleritis to retinitis, occlusive vasculitis and optic neuritis. The purpose of this study is to raise awareness about possible COVID-19 related ocular manifestations, including papillophlebitis, anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, uveitis and neuroretinitis. Further detailed analyses will be needed to elucidate the link between SARS-CoV-2 and ocular pathology

Vacuum Energy and Renormalization on the Edge

The vacuum dependence on boundary conditions in quantum field theories is analysed from a very general viewpoint. From this perspective the renormalization prescriptions not only imply the renormalization of the couplings of the theory in the bulk but also the appearance of a flow in the space of boundary conditions. For regular boundaries this flow has a large variety of fixed points and no cyclic orbit. The family of fixed points includes Neumann and Dirichlet boundary conditions. In one-dimensional field theories pseudoperiodic and quasiperiodic boundary conditions are also RG fixed points. Under these conditions massless bosonic free field theories are conformally invariant. Among all fixed points only Neumann boundary conditions are infrared stable fixed points. All other conformal invariant boundary conditions become unstable under some relevant perturbations. In finite volumes we analyse the dependence of the vacuum energy along the trajectories of the renormalization group flow providing an interesting framework for dark energy evolution. On the contrary, the renormalization group flow on the boundary does not affect the leading behaviour of the entanglement entropy of the vacuum in one-dimensional conformally invariant bosonic theories.Comment: 10 pages, 1 eps figur

Branching rules of semi-simple Lie algebras using affine extensions

We present a closed formula for the branching coefficients of an embedding p in g of two finite-dimensional semi-simple Lie algebras. The formula is based on the untwisted affine extension of p. It leads to an alternative proof of a simple algorithm for the computation of branching rules which is an analog of the Racah-Speiser algorithm for tensor products. We present some simple applications and describe how integral representations for branching coefficients can be obtained. In the last part we comment on the relation of our approach to the theory of NIM-reps of the fusion rings of WZW models with chiral algebra g_k. In fact, it turns out that for these models each embedding p in g induces a NIM-rep at level k to infinity. In cases where these NIM-reps can be be extended to finite level, we obtain a Verlinde-like formula for branching coefficients.Comment: 11 pages, LaTeX, v2: one reference added, v3: Clarified proof of Theorem 2, completely rewrote and extended Section 5 (relation to CFT), added various references. Accepted for publication in J. Phys.

Charges of twisted branes: the exceptional cases

The charges of the twisted D-branes for the two exceptional cases (SO(8) with the triality automorphism and E_6 with charge conjugation) are determined. To this end the corresponding NIM-reps are expressed in terms of the fusion rules of the invariant subalgebras. As expected the charge groups are found to agree with those characterising the untwisted branes.Comment: 15 page

Measuring the effects through time of the influence of visuomotor and visuotactile synchronous stimulation on a virtual body ownership illusion

Previous studies have examined the experience of owning a virtual surrogate body or body part through specific combinations of cross-modal multisensory stimulation. Both visuomotor (VM) and visuotactile (VT) synchronous stimulation have been shown to be important for inducing a body ownership illusion, each tested separately or both in combination. In this study we compared the relative importance of these two cross-modal correlations, when both are provided in the same immersive virtual reality setup and the same experiment. We systematically manipulated VT and VM contingencies in order to assess their relative role and mutual interaction. Moreover, we present a new method for measuring the induced body ownership illusion through time, by recording reports of breaks in the illusion of ownership ("breaks") throughout the experimental phase. The balance of the evidence, from both questionnaires and analysis of the breaks, suggests that while VM synchronous stimulation contributes the greatest to the attainment of the illusion, a disruption of either (through asynchronous stimulation) contributes equally to the probability of a break in the illusion

The complex multiscale structure in simulated and observed emission maps of the proto-cluster cloud G0.253+0.016 (\u27the Brick\u27)

The Central Molecular Zone (the central ∼500 pc of the Milky Way) hosts molecular clouds in an extreme environment of strong shear, high gas pressure and density, and complex chemistry. G0.253+0.016, also known as \u27the Brick\u27, is the densest, most compact, and quiescent of these clouds. High-resolution observations with the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) have revealed its complex, hierarchical structure. In this paper we compare the properties of recent hydrodynamical simulations of the Brick to those of the ALMA observations. To facilitate the comparison, we post-process the simulations and create synthetic ALMA maps of molecular line emission from eight molecules. We correlate the line emission maps to each other and to the mass column density and find that HNCO is the best mass tracer of the eight emission lines within the simulations. Additionally, we characterize the spatial structure of the observed and simulated cloud using the density probability distribution function (PDF), spatial power spectrum, fractal dimension, and moments of inertia. While we find good agreement between the observed and simulated data in terms of power spectra and fractal dimensions, there are key differences in the density PDFs and moments of inertia, which we attribute to the omission of magnetic fields in the simulations. This demonstrates that the presence of the Galactic potential can reproduce many cloud properties, but additional physical processes are needed to fully explain the gas structure