Highways, railways and entrepreneurship in peripheral cities: evidence from China

Peripheral cities are more susceptible to transportation infrastructure than core cities in terms of entrepreneurial activities. We use market access approach to estimate the impacts of highways and high-speed railways on entrepreneurship in the small and medium-sized cities in China under knowledge spillover entrepreneurship framework. The results show that the increased market potential caused by highways and high-speed railways significantly improves the entrepreneurial performance of peripheral cities. The entrepreneurship effects of highways are stronger than high-speed railways, especially for these cities that are relatively closer to core cities. On the contrary, the entrepreneurship effects of high-speed railways are stronger in these cities that are far from core cities. This study suggests that transportation infrastructure plays an important role in entrepreneurship, and there is a complementary effect between highways and high-speed railways

Diurnal Variation of Tropical Ice Cloud Microphysics: Evidence from Global Precipitation Measurement Microwave Imager Polarimetric Measurements

The diurnal variation of tropical ice clouds has been well observed and examined in terms of the occurring frequency and total mass but rarely from the viewpoint of ice microphysical parameters. It accounts for a large portion of uncertainties in evaluating ice cloud's role on global radiation and hydrological budgets. Owing to the advantage of precession orbit design and paired polarized observations at a high-frequency microwave band that is particularly sensitive to ice particle microphysical properties, three years of polarimetric difference (PD) measurements using the 166 GHz channel of Global Precipitation Measurement Microwave Imager (GPM-GMI) are compiled to reveal a strong diurnal cycle over tropical land (30degS-30deg N) with peak amplitude varying up to 38%. Since the PD signal is dominantly determined by ice crystal size, shape, and orientation, the diurnal cycle observed by GMI can be used to infer changes in ice crystal properties. Moreover, PD change is found to lead the diurnal changes of ice cloud occurring frequency and total ice mass by about 2 hours, which strongly implies that understanding ice microphysics is critical to predict, infer, and model ice cloud evolution and precipitation processes

Salinity can change the lipid composition of adult Chinese mitten crab after long-term salinity adaptation

The Chinese mitten crab (Eriocheir sinensis) is an euryhaline crustacean, whose adults migrate downstream to estuaries for reproduction. Lipids are believed to be involved in salinity adaptation during migration. This study investigated the effects of different salinities (0, 6, 12, and 18‰) on the total lipids, neutral lipids, and polar lipids contents, and fatty acid profiles in the gonads, hepatopancreas, and muscles of adult E. sinensis after 40 days of salinity adaptation. The results showed that the males and females from 12‰ treatment had the highest contents of total lipids and neutral lipids in their hepatopancreas and total lipids in the muscles. Notably, salinity had a greater effect on the fatty acid profiles in the hepatopancreas compared to that in the gonads and muscles. The male hepatopancreas treated with 18‰ salinity had the highest percentage of total n-6 polyunsaturated fatty acid (∑n-6PUFA) in both neutral lipids and polar lipids, while the percentage of total n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid (∑n-3PUFA) in neutral lipids and polar lipids decreased significantly with increasing salinity in males. In females, the 0‰ treatment had the highest percentages of total saturated fatty acids in neutral lipids and polar lipids in the hepatopancreas, while the highest ∑n-3PUFA and ∑n-6PUFA in neutral lipids and polar lipids were detected in the 12‰ treatment group. In conclusion, brackish water could promote the accumulations of total lipids and neutral lipids in the hepatopancreas and change the fatty acid profiles of adult E. sinensis, particularly in the hepatopancreas after long-term salinity adaptation

Use NU-WRF and GCE Model to Simulate the Precipitation Processes During MC3E Campaign

One of major CRM approaches to studying precipitation processes is sometimes referred to as "cloud ensemble modeling". This approach allows many clouds of various sizes and stages of their lifecycles to be present at any given simulation time. Large-scale effects derived from observations are imposed into CRMs as forcing, and cyclic lateral boundaries are used. The advantage of this approach is that model results in terms of rainfall and QI and Q2 usually are in good agreement with observations. In addition, the model results provide cloud statistics that represent different types of clouds/cloud systems during their lifetime (life cycle). The large-scale forcing derived from MC3EI will be used to drive GCE model simulations. The model-simulated results will be compared with observations from MC3E. These GCE model-simulated datasets are especially valuable for LH algorithm developers. In addition, the regional scale model with very high-resolution, NASA Unified WRF is also used to real time forecast during the MC3E campaign to ensure that the precipitation and other meteorological forecasts are available to the flight planning team and to interpret the forecast results in terms of proposed flight scenarios. Post Mission simulations are conducted to examine the sensitivity of initial and lateral boundary conditions to cloud and precipitation processes and rainfall. We will compare model results in terms of precipitation and surface rainfall using GCE model and NU-WR

Diagnosing the Ice Crystal Enhancement Factor in the Tropics

Recent modeling studies have revealed that ice crystal number concentration is one of the dominant factors in the effect of clouds on radiation. Since the ice crystal enhancement factor and ice nuclei concentration determine the concentration, they are both important in quantifying the contribution of increased ice nuclei to global warming. In this study, long-term cloud-resolving model (CRM) simulations are compared with field observations to estimate the ice crystal enhancement factor in tropical and midlatitudinal clouds, respectively. It is found that the factor in tropical clouds is ~10 3-104 times larger than that of mid-latitudinal ones, which makes physical sense because entrainment and detrainment in the Tropics are much stronger than in middle latitudes. The effect of entrainment/detrainment on the enhancement factor, especially in tropical clouds, suggests that cloud microphysical parameterizations should be coupled with subgrid turbulence parameterizations within CRMs to obtain a more accurate depiction of cloud-radiative forcing

FusionAI: Decentralized Training and Deploying LLMs with Massive Consumer-Level GPUs

The rapid growth of memory and computation requirements of large language models (LLMs) has outpaced the development of hardware, hindering people who lack large-scale high-end GPUs from training or deploying LLMs. However, consumer-level GPUs, which constitute a larger market share, are typically overlooked in LLM due to their weaker computing performance, smaller storage capacity, and lower communication bandwidth. Additionally, users may have privacy concerns when interacting with remote LLMs. In this paper, we envision a decentralized system unlocking the potential vast untapped consumer-level GPUs in pre-training, inference and fine-tuning of LLMs with privacy protection. However, this system faces critical challenges, including limited CPU and GPU memory, low network bandwidth, the variability of peer and device heterogeneity. To address these challenges, our system design incorporates: 1) a broker with backup pool to implement dynamic join and quit of computing providers; 2) task scheduling with hardware performance to improve system efficiency; 3) abstracting ML procedures into directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to achieve model and task universality; 4) abstracting intermediate represention and execution planes to ensure compatibility of various devices and deep learning (DL) frameworks. Our performance analysis demonstrates that 50 RTX 3080 GPUs can achieve throughputs comparable to those of 4 H100 GPUs, which are significantly more expensive

A Contribution by Ice Nuclei to Global Warming

Ice nuclei (IN) significantly affect clouds via supercooled droplets, that in turn modulate atmospheric radiation and thus climate change. Since the IN effect is relatively strong in stratiform clouds but weak in convective ones, the overall effect depends on the ratio of stratiform to convective cloud amount. In this paper, 10 years of TRMM (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission) satellite data are analyzed to confirm that stratiform precipitation fraction increases with increasing latitude, which implies that the IN effect is stronger at higher latitudes. To quantitatively evaluate the IN effect versus latitude, large-scale forcing data from ten field campaigns are used to drive a CRM (cloud-resolving model) to generate longterm cloud simulations. As revealed in the simulations, the increase in the net downward radiative flux at the TOA (top of the atmosphere) from doubling the current IN concentrations is larger at higher latitude, which is attributed to the meridional tendency in the stratiform precipitation fraction. Surface warming from doubling the IN concentrations, based on the radiative balance of the globe, is compared with that from anthropogenic COZ . It is found that the former effect is stronger than the latter in middle and high latitudes but not in the Tropics. With regard to the impact of IN on global warming, there are two factors to consider: the radiative effect from increasing the IN concentration and the increase in IN concentration itself. The former relies on cloud ensembles and thus varies mainly with latitude. In contrast, the latter relies on IN sources (e.g., the land surface distribution) and thus varies not only with latitude but also longitude. Global desertification and industrialization provide clues on the geographic variation of the increase in IN concentration since pre-industrial times. Thus, their effect on global warming can be inferred and then be compared with observations. A general match in geographic and seasonal variations between the inferred and observed warming suggests that IN may have contributed positively to global warming over the past decades, especially in middle and high latitudes