A comprehensive and version-controlled database of glacial lake outburst floods in High Mountain Asia

Glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) have been intensely investigated in High Mountain Asia (HMA) in recent years and are the most well-known hazard associated with the cryosphere. As glaciers recede and surrounding slopes become increasingly unstable, such events are expected to increase, although current evidence for an increase in events is ambiguous. Many studies have investigated individual events, and while several regional inventories exist, they either do not cover all types of GLOF or are geographically constrained. Further, downstream impacts are rarely discussed. Previous inventories have relied on academic sources and have not been combined with existing inventories of glaciers and lakes. In this study, we present the first comprehensive inventory of GLOFs in HMA, including details on the time of their occurrence, processes of lake formation and drainage involved, and downstream impacts. We document 697 individual GLOFs that occurred between 1833 and 2022. Of these, 23 % were recurring events from just three ephemeral ice-dammed lakes. In combination, the documented events resulted in 6906 fatalities of which 906 can be attributed to 24 individual GLOF events, which is 3 times higher than a previous assessment for the region. The integration of previous inventories of glaciers and lakes within this database will inform future assessments of potential drivers of GLOFs, allowing more robust projections to be developed. The database and future, updated versions are traceable and version-controlled and can be directly incorporated into further analysis. The database is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7271187 (Steiner and Shrestha, 2023), while the code including a development version is available on GitHub.</p

Widespread hybridization in the introduced hog deer population of Victoria, Australia, and its implications for conservation

In Australia, many species have been introduced that have since undergone drastic declines in their native range. One species of note is the hog deer (Axis porcinus) which was introduced in the 1860s to Victoria, Australia, and has since become endangered in its native range throughout South-East Asia. There is increased interest in using non-native populations as a source for genetic rescue; however, considerations need to be made of the genetic suitability of the non-native population. Three mitochondrial markers and two nuclear markers were sequenced to assess the genetic variation of the Victorian population of hog deer, which identified that the Victorian population has hybrid origins with the closely related chital (Axis axis), a species that is no longer present in the wild in Victoria. In addition, the mitochondrial D-loop region within the Victorian hog deer is monomorphic, demonstrating that mitochondrial genetic diversity is very low within this population. This study is the first to report of long-term persistence of hog deer and chital hybrids in a wild setting, and the continual survival of this population suggests that hybrids of these two species are fertile. Despite the newly discovered hybrid status in Victorian hog deer, this population may still be beneficial for future translocations within the native range. However, more in-depth analysis of genetic diversity within the Victorian hog deer population and investigation of hybridization rates within the native range are necessary before translocations are attempted

Computational study of hole shape effect on film cooling performance

Film cooling effectiveness has been studied by using a computational approach based on solving the Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes equations. A wind tunnel test configuration is considered with a total of four cooling hole geometries as a cylindrical hole, a cylindrical hole with an upstream wedge (called ‘ramp’ thereafter), a shaped diffuser, and a double console slot. In all cases, the hole centreline has an inclination angle of 35° against the mainstream airflow and the blowing ratio is unity. Choosing the cylindrical model as a baseline, simulations have been carried out for grid convergence and turbulence model influence studies. Results are compared with available experimental data and other numerical predictions and good agreement has been achieved. Further computations continue with three remaining geometries, using the baseline flow conditions and configuration. Comparing to the results from the baseline model, it was found that the centreline adiabatic cooling effectiveness has shown incremental increases for the ‘ramp’ model, while results from the console slot model and the shape diffuser model have exhibited significant improvements by a factor of 1.5 and 2, respectively. The reason for such a step change in cooling effectiveness is mainly due to the weakening of the vortex structures in the vicinity of the hole exit, thus significantly reducing the entrainment of surrounding ‘hot’ fluids

Large-scale mammography CAD with deformable conv-nets

State-of-the-art deep learning methods for image processing are evolving into increasingly complex meta-architectures with a growing number of modules. Among them, region-based fully convolutional networks (R-FCN) and deformable convolutional nets (DCN) can improve CAD for mammography: R-FCN optimizes for speed and low consumption of memory, which is crucial for processing the high resolutions of to 50 micrometers used by radiologists. Deformable convolution and pooling can model a wide range of mammographic findings of different morphology and scales, thanks to their versatility. In this study, we present a neural net architecture based on R-FCN / DCN, that we have adapted from the natural image domain to suit mammograms -- particularly their larger image size -- without compromising resolution. We trained the network on a large, recently released dataset (Optimam) including 6,500 cancerous mammograms. By combining our modern architecture with such a rich dataset, we achieved an area under the ROC curve of 0.879 for breast-wise detection in the DREAMS challenge (130,000 withheld images), which surpassed all other submissions in the competitive phase

Changes in nutritional status of children who lived in temporary shelters in Bhaktapur municipality after the 2015 Nepal earthquake

Background The nutritional status of children may deteriorate after natural disasters such as earthquakes. A 7.8 Richter scale earthquake struck Nepal in 2015 that affected 1.1 million children. Children whose homes were destroyed and had to live in temporary shelters were at risk of malnutrition. With the support of Nagasaki University School of Tropical Medicine and Global Health (TMGH) and Siddhi Memorial Hospital (SMH), we conducted a nutritional survey of under-5 children living in temporary shelters in Bhaktapur Municipality in 2015 immediately after the earthquake and a follow-up survey in 2017. Results We found 591 under-5 children living in 22 temporary shelters in 2015. A total of 285 children were followed up and re-assessed in 2017. In a paired analysis (n = 285), the prevalence of underweight children increased from 10.9% in 2015 to 14.0% in 2017 (P < 0.001), stunting increased from 26.7 to 31.9% (P = 0.07), and wasting decreased from 4.2 to 2.5% (P = 0.19). Conclusions Children who lived in temporary shelters after the 2015 Nepal earthquake might be at increased risk of a deterioration in nutritional status