Coulomb correlations effects on localized charge relaxation in the coupled quantum dots

We analyzed localized charge time evolution in the system of two interacting quantum dots (QD) (artificial molecule) coupled with the continuous spectrum states. We demonstrated that Coulomb interaction modifies relaxation rates and is responsible for non-monotonic time evolution of the localized charge. We suggested new mechanism of this non-monotonic charge time evolution connected with charge redistribution between different relaxation channels in each QD.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figure

A century of trends in adult human height

Being taller is associated with enhanced longevity, and higher education and earnings. We reanalysed 1472 population-based studies, with measurement of height on more than 18.6 million participants to estimate mean height for people born between 1896 and 1996 in 200 countries. The largest gain in adult height over the past century has occurred in South Korean women and Iranian men, who became 20.2 cm (95% credible interval 17.5-22.7) and 16.5 cm (13.3-19.7) taller, respectively. In contrast, there was little change in adult height in some sub-Saharan African countries and in South Asia over the century of analysis. The tallest people over these 100 years are men born in the Netherlands in the last quarter of 20th century, whose average heights surpassed 182.5 cm, and the shortest were women born in Guatemala in 1896 (140.3 cm; 135.8-144.8). The height differential between the tallest and shortest populations was 19-20 cm a century ago, and has remained the same for women and increased for men a century later despite substantial changes in the ranking of countries

Rising rural body-mass index is the main driver of the global obesity epidemic in adults

Body-mass index (BMI) has increased steadily in most countries in parallel with a rise in the proportion of the population who live in cities 1,2 . This has led to a widely reported view that urbanization is one of the most important drivers of the global rise in obesity 3�6 . Here we use 2,009 population-based studies, with measurements of height and weight in more than 112 million adults, to report national, regional and global trends in mean BMI segregated by place of residence (a rural or urban area) from 1985 to 2017. We show that, contrary to the dominant paradigm, more than 55 of the global rise in mean BMI from 1985 to 2017�and more than 80 in some low- and middle-income regions�was due to increases in BMI in rural areas. This large contribution stems from the fact that, with the exception of women in sub-Saharan Africa, BMI is increasing at the same rate or faster in rural areas than in cities in low- and middle-income regions. These trends have in turn resulted in a closing�and in some countries reversal�of the gap in BMI between urban and rural areas in low- and middle-income countries, especially for women. In high-income and industrialized countries, we noted a persistently higher rural BMI, especially for women. There is an urgent need for an integrated approach to rural nutrition that enhances financial and physical access to healthy foods, to avoid replacing the rural undernutrition disadvantage in poor countries with a more general malnutrition disadvantage that entails excessive consumption of low-quality calories. © 2019, The Author(s)

Editorial: Impacts of Tropical Landscape Change on Human Diet and Local Food Systems

The impacts of changing diets on land use and land cover has been an important area of research in recent years (Foley et al., 2011; Tilman and Clark, 2014; Fanzo and Davis, 2019; Willett et al., 2019). This special issue looks at the reverse side of this relationship – how land use change affects the diets of local communities living in landscapes where change is taking place. Clear links between forest cover and diet and nutritional outcomes have been shown (Johnson et al., 2013; Ickowitz et al., 2014; Rasolofoson et al., 2018; Fisher et al., 2019), while more recent work has started to disentangle the differential impacts of land use type, composition and configuration on diets and the consumption of specific food groups (Rasmussen et al., 2019; Gergel et al., 2020). This special issue brings together a collection of papers that examine the effects of land use and land use change on diet and nutritional outcomes in the tropics. It assembles papers from a wide range of disciplines, covering the links between forest conservation, deforestation, hydropower development, and changing patterns of agricultural production on diets and nutrition across a range of settings

What are the links between tree-based farming and dietary quality for rural households? A review of emerging evidence in low- and middle-income countries

In most low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), conventional agricultural policy promotes specialized production systems of carbohydrate-rich crops to address hunger and food insecurity. For rural populations, however, increased landscape uniformity can reduce both agrobiodiversity and wild biodiversity, which can contribute to diet uniformity. Although maintaining diversity in and around agricultural systems is far from a new approach, there is growing empirical attention on the contribution of trees on/around farms to dietary quality. While recent research suggests that forests can contribute to improved diets, there is only emerging evidence on how incorporating trees into farming systems not only benefits nature but also positively affects the diets of rural households