Global land surface temperature influenced by vegetation cover and PM2.5 from 2001 to 2016

Land surface temperature (LST) is an important parameter to evaluate environmental changes. In this paper, time series analysis was conducted to estimate the interannual variations in global LST from 2001 to 2016 based on moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) LST, and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) products and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) data from the Atmospheric Composition Analysis Group. The results showed that LST, seasonally integrated normalized difference vegetation index (SINDVI), and PM2.5 increased by 0.17 K, 0.04, and 1.02 �g/m3 in the period of 2001–2016, respectively. During the past 16 years, LST showed an increasing trend in most areas, with two peaks of 1.58 K and 1.85 K at 72�N and 48�S, respectively. Marked warming also appeared in the Arctic. On the contrary, remarkable decrease in LST occurred in Antarctic. In most parts of the world, LST was affected by the variation in vegetation cover and air pollutant, which can be detected by the satellite. In the Northern Hemisphere, positive relations between SINDVI and LST were found; however, in the Southern Hemisphere, negative correlations were detected. The impact of PM2.5 on LST was more complex. On the whole, LST increased with a small increase in PM2.5 concentrations but decreased with a marked increase in PM2.5. The study provides insights on the complex relationship between vegetation cover, air pollution, and land surface temperature

Decision tool of medical endoscope maintenance service in Chinese hospitals: a conjoint analysis

Medical devices are instruments, apparatus, appliances, software, implants, reagents, materials or other articles that are intended for use in the treatment or diagnosis of disease or injury in humans. Concerning medical endoscope devices, which enable doctors to observe and manipulate the area under examination through a puncture hole in the body cavity or organ, hospitals predominantly consider the quality and cost of maintenance services when making their selection. The effective and efficient provision of maintenance services plays a crucial role in ensuring cost-effective and high-quality management of medical devices. In this study, we have developed an innovative decision tool that analyzed key factors impacting the choice of medical devices’ maintenance service. This tool assists hospitals in evaluating and selecting appropriate maintenance services for medical device, specifically endoscopy devices. Moreover, it also serves as a valuable resource for manufacturers and suppliers to enhance their after-sales service offerings

A stable aluminosilicate zeolite with intersecting three-dimensional extra-large pores

Anyone can then access the published paper FREE OF CHARGE by clicking on this link. Cualquier persona puede acceder al documento publicado de forma GRATUITA, accediendo a través del enlace: https://www.science.org/stoken/author-tokens/ST-242/full[EN] Zeolites are crystalline porous materials with important industrial applications, including uses in catalytic and adsorption-separation processes. Access into and out of their inner confined space, where adsorption and reactions occur, is limited by their pore apertures. Stable multidimensional zeolites with larger pores able to process larger molecules are in demand in the fine chemical industry and for the oil processing on which the world still relies for fuels. Currently known extra-large-pore zeolites display poor stability and/or lack pore multidimensionality, limiting their usefulness. We report ZEO-1, a robust, fully connected aluminosilicate zeolite with mutually intersecting three-dimensional extra-large plus three-dimensional large pores. ZEO-1 is stable up to 1000°C, has an extraordinary specific surface area (1000 square meters per gram), and shows potential as a catalytic cracking catalys.National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers: 21601004, 21776312, 22078364), the Natural Science Foundation of the Higher Education Institutions of Anhui Province, China (grant numbers: KJ2020A0585), and the Spanish Ministry of Science Innovation and Universities (MICIU) (PID2019-105479RB-I00 project, AEI, Spain and FEDER, EU). The cRED data was collected at the Electron Microscopy Center (EMC), Department of Materials and Environmental Chemistry (MMK) in Stockholm University with the support of the Swedish Research Council (Grant No. 1444205) and the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (KAW, 2012-0112) through the 3DEM-NATUR project. Use of the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory was supported by the U. S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357. W.F. gratefully acknowledges support from the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division, under Award # DE-SC0019170.Peer reviewe

The Development and Assessment on the Social Studies Handbook for Supporting Teacher’s Lesson Planning and Improvement : A Content Structure of Handbook which can be Applied to Pre-service and In-service Teacher Education

The purposes of this paper are to develop the draft of handbook for planning, teaching and accessing the class of social studies and evaluate effects of the handbook for teacher training and their professional development. The structure of the first draft was designed based on Kolb’s learning theory. The present results suggested that the usefulness of the contents structure was perceived by (1) pre-service teachers and (2) in-service teachers, and the possibility for application was also recognized by the teacher educator as (3) university professor who teach methods courses, (4) senior supervisor who is in charge of designing the professional development programs and (5) younger supervisor who is in charge of tutoring the novice teacher, but they illustrated their different types of the significances, limits and utilization according to their purposes and as well as their responsibility. The authors implicated the alterative design of the handbook based on Korthagen’s reflective learning model for meeting their purposes and solving the structural problems inherit in the handbook

Education for Disaster Prevention in England : Analysis of Secondary Geography Textbooks

The purpose of this study is to clarify the aims, contents and activities of education for disaster prevention on geographical education in England, by analysis of secondary textbooks. Thereby, we want to contribute the improvement of Japanese geographical education. As a result, we clarified the following: 1) when students study a natural disaster in UK, they learn a plurality of cases including domestic and foreign regions, 2) all textbooks contain activities that students can form attitudes and decide what to do for disaster prevention. On the basis of these results, we suggest improvements of education for disaster prevention. The first is to develop a clear understanding of a natural disaster with multi-area including Japan. The second is to place contents and activities for forming a value relevant to awareness of disaster prevention into Japanese geography textbook. The third is to set an activity to learn practical strategies for disaster prevention in the real world

Comprehensive genomic profiling reveals prognostic signatures and insights into the molecular landscape of colorectal cancer

BackgroundColorectal cancer (CRC) is a prevalent malignancy with diverse molecular characteristics. The NGS-based approach enhances our comprehension of genomic landscape of CRC and may guide future advancements in precision oncology for CRC patients.MethodIn this research, we conducted an analysis using Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) on samples collected from 111 individuals who had been diagnosed with CRC. We identified somatic and germline mutations and structural variants across the tumor genomes through comprehensive genomic profiling. Furthermore, we investigated the landscape of driver mutations and their potential clinical implications.ResultsOur findings underscore the intricate heterogeneity of genetic alterations within CRC. Notably, BRAF, ARID2, KMT2C, and GNAQ were associated with CRC prognosis. Patients harboring BRAF, ARID2, or KMT2C mutations exhibited shorter progression-free survival (PFS), whereas those with BRAF, ARID2, or GNAQ mutations experienced worse overall survival (OS). We unveiled 80 co-occurring and three mutually exclusive significant gene pairs, enriched primarily in pathways such as TP53, HIPPO, RTK/RAS, NOTCH, WNT, TGF-Beta, MYC, and PI3K. Notably, co-mutations of BRAF/ALK, BRAF/NOTCH2, BRAF/CREBBP, and BRAF/FAT1 correlated with worse PFS. Furthermore, germline AR mutations were identified in 37 (33.33%) CRC patients, and carriers of these variants displayed diminished PFS and OS. Decreased AR protein expression was observed in cases with AR germline mutations. A four-gene mutation signature was established, incorporating the aforementioned prognostic genes, which emerged as an independent prognostic determinant in CRC via univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses. Noteworthy BRAF and ARID2 protein expression decreases detected in patients with their respective mutations.ConclusionThe integration of our analyses furnishes crucial insights into CRC’s molecular characteristics, drug responsiveness, and the construction of a four-gene mutation signature for predicting CRC prognosis

Implementation and performances of the IPbus protocol for the JUNO Large-PMT readout electronics

The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is a large neutrino detector currently under construction in China. Thanks to the tight requirements on its optical and radio-purity properties, it will be able to perform leading measurements detecting terrestrial and astrophysical neutrinos in a wide energy range from tens of keV to hundreds of MeV. A key requirement for the success of the experiment is an unprecedented 3% energy resolution, guaranteed by its large active mass (20 kton) and the use of more than 20,000 20-inch photo-multiplier tubes (PMTs) acquired by high-speed, high-resolution sampling electronics located very close to the PMTs. As the Front-End and Read-Out electronics is expected to continuously run underwater for 30 years, a reliable readout acquisition system capable of handling the timestamped data stream coming from the Large-PMTs and permitting to simultaneously monitor and operate remotely the inaccessible electronics had to be developed. In this contribution, the firmware and hardware implementation of the IPbus based readout protocol will be presented, together with the performances measured on final modules during the mass production of the electronics

Mass testing of the JUNO experiment 20-inch PMTs readout electronics

The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is a multi-purpose, large size, liquid scintillator experiment under construction in China. JUNO will perform leading measurements detecting neutrinos from different sources (reactor, terrestrial and astrophysical neutrinos) covering a wide energy range (from 200 keV to several GeV). This paper focuses on the design and development of a test protocol for the 20-inch PMT underwater readout electronics, performed in parallel to the mass production line. In a time period of about ten months, a total number of 6950 electronic boards were tested with an acceptance yield of 99.1%

Validation and integration tests of the JUNO 20-inch PMTs readout electronics

The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is a large neutrino detector currently under construction in China. JUNO will be able to study the neutrino mass ordering and to perform leading measurements detecting terrestrial and astrophysical neutrinos in a wide energy range, spanning from 200 keV to several GeV. Given the ambitious physics goals of JUNO, the electronic system has to meet specific tight requirements, and a thorough characterization is required. The present paper describes the tests performed on the readout modules to measure their performances.Comment: 20 pages, 13 figure