Negligible impacts of early COVID-19 confinement on household carbon footprints in Japan

The rapid and extensive changes in household consumption patterns during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic can serve as a natural experiment for exploring the environmental outcomes of changing human behavior. Here, we assess the carbon footprint of household consumption in Japan during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic (January–May 2020), which were characterized by moderate confinement measures. The associated lifestyle changes did not have a significant effect on the overall household carbon footprint compared with 2015–2019 levels. However, there were significant trade-offs between individual consumption categories such that the carbon footprint increased for some categories (e.g., eating at home) or declined (e.g., eating out, transportation, clothing, and entertainment) or remained relatively unchanged (e.g., housing) for others. Furthermore, carbon footprint patterns between age groups were largely consistent with 2015–2019 levels. However, changes in food-related carbon footprints were visible for all age groups since March and, in some cases, since February

Differentiated responsibilities of US citizens in the country’s sustainable dietary transition

Industrial Ecolog

Pharmacotherapy in patients with epilepsy and psychosis.

The recognition and treatment of psychosis in persons with epilepsy (PWE) is recommended with the apparent dilemma between treating psychosis and opening the possibility of exacerbating seizures. The pooled prevalence estimate of psychosis in PWE is 5.6%. It has been proposed that a 'two hit' model, requiring both aberrant limbic activity and impaired frontal control, may account for the wide range of clinical phenotypes. The role of antiepileptic drugs in psychosis in PWE remains unclear. Alternating psychosis, the clinical phenomenon of a reciprocal relationship between psychosis and seizures, is unlikely to be an exclusively antiepileptic drug-specific phenomenon but rather, linked to the neurobiological mechanisms underlying seizure control. Reevaluation of antiepileptic treatment, including the agent/s being used and degree of epileptic seizure control is recommended. The authors found very few controlled studies to inform evidence-based treatment of psychosis in PWE. However, antipsychotics and benzodiazepines are recommended as the symptomatic clinical treatments of choice for postictal and brief interictal psychoses. The general principle of early symptomatic treatment of psychotic symptoms applies in epilepsy-related psychoses, as for primary psychotic disorders. In the authors' experience, low doses of antipsychotic medications do not significantly increase clinical risk of seizures in PWE being concurrently treated with an efficacious antiepileptic regimen

Monthly direct and indirect greenhouse gases emissions from household consumption in the major Japanese cities

Urban household consumption contributes substantially to global greenhouse gases (GHGs) emissions. Urban household emissions encompass both direct and indirect emissions, with the former associated with the direct use of fossil fuels and the latter with the emissions embodied in the consumed goods and services. However, there is a lack of consistent and comprehensive datasets outlining in great detail emissions from urban household consumption. To bridge this data gap, we construct an emission inventory of urban household emissions for 52 major cities in Japan that covers around 500 emission categories. The dataset spans from January 2011 to December 2015 and contains 12,384 data records for direct emissions and 1,543,128 records for indirect emissions. Direct emission intensity is provided in g-CO2/JPY to facilitate both future studies of household emission in Japan, as well as act as a reference for the development of detailed household emission inventories in other countries

Co-variation of fish and coral traits in relation to habitat type and fishery status

Escalating climate impacts on coral reefs are increasingly expanding management goals beyond preserving biodiversity to also maintaining ecosystem functions. Morphological and ecological species traits can help assess changes within reef communities beyond taxonomic identities alone. However, our limited understanding of trait interactions between habitat-building corals and associated reef fishes and whether they are captured by current monitoring practices hampers management. Here, we apply co-inertia analyses to test whether trait assemblages in corals and fishes co-vary across different habitats and test whether different components of the reef fish community (fisheries vs. non-target species) display distinct relationships. We find that spatial co-variation across habitat types between coral and fish traits is strengthened by the addition of non-target fishes. Additionally, even in fisheries with diverse targets, non-target species make unique contributions to the overall trait structure and highlight the importance of considering monitoring protocols when drawing conclusions about traits and ecosystems

Urinary Transforming Growth Factor-beta 1 as a marker of response to immunosuppressive treatment, in patients with crescentic nephritis

BACKGROUND: Crescentic nephritis is characterized by formation of cellular crescents that soon become fibrotic and result in irreversible damage, unless an effective immunosuppressive therapy is rapidly commenced. TGF-β(1 )is involved in the development of crescents through various pathways. The aim of this study was to identify whether the determination of urinary TGF-β(1 )levels in patients with crescentic nephritis could be used as a marker of response to treatment. METHODS: Fifteen patients with crescentic nephritis were included in the study. The renal expression of TGF-β(1 )was estimated in biopsy sections by immunohistochemistry and urinary TGF-β(1 )levels were determined by quantitative sandwich enzyme immunoassay (EIA). TGF-β(1 )levels were determined at the time of renal biopsy, before the initiation of immunosuppressive treatment (corticosteroids, cyclophosphamide and plasma exchange). Twelve patients with other types of proliferative glomerulonephritis and ten healthy subjects were used as controls. RESULTS: Improvement of renal function with immunosuppressive therapy was observed in 6 and stabilization in 4 patients (serum creatinine from 3.2 ± 1.5 to 1.4 ± 0.1 mg/dl and from 4.4 ± 1.2 to 4.1 ± 0.6 mg/dl, respectively). In 5 patients, with severe impairment of renal function who started on dialysis, no improvement was noted. The main histological feature differentiating these 5 patients from others with improved or stabilized renal function was the percentage patients with poor response to treatment were the percentage of glomeruli with crescents and the presence of ruptured Bowman's capsule and glomerular necrosis. Urinary TGF-β(1 )levels were significantly higher in patients who showed no improvement of renal function with immunosuppressive therapy (930 ± 126 ng/24 h vs. 376 ± 84 ng/24 h, p < 0.01). TGF-β(1 )was identified in crescents and tubular epithelial cells, whereas a significant correlation of TGF-β(1 )immunostaining with the presence of fibrocellular cresents was observed (r = 0.531, p < 0,05). CONCLUSION: Increased TGF-β(1 )renal expression and urinary excretion that is related to the response to immunosuppressive therapy was observed in patients with crescentic nephritis. Evaluation of urinary TGF-β(1 )levels may be proved a useful marker of clinical outcome in patients with crescentic nephritis

Scale-free memory model for multiagent reinforcement learning. Mean field approximation and rock-paper-scissors dynamics

A continuous time model for multiagent systems governed by reinforcement learning with scale-free memory is developed. The agents are assumed to act independently of one another in optimizing their choice of possible actions via trial-and-error search. To gain awareness about the action value the agents accumulate in their memory the rewards obtained from taking a specific action at each moment of time. The contribution of the rewards in the past to the agent current perception of action value is described by an integral operator with a power-law kernel. Finally a fractional differential equation governing the system dynamics is obtained. The agents are considered to interact with one another implicitly via the reward of one agent depending on the choice of the other agents. The pairwise interaction model is adopted to describe this effect. As a specific example of systems with non-transitive interactions, a two agent and three agent systems of the rock-paper-scissors type are analyzed in detail, including the stability analysis and numerical simulation. Scale-free memory is demonstrated to cause complex dynamics of the systems at hand. In particular, it is shown that there can be simultaneously two modes of the system instability undergoing subcritical and supercritical bifurcation, with the latter one exhibiting anomalous oscillations with the amplitude and period growing with time. Besides, the instability onset via this supercritical mode may be regarded as "altruism self-organization". For the three agent system the instability dynamics is found to be rather irregular and can be composed of alternate fragments of oscillations different in their properties.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figur

Mapping potential conflicts between global agriculture and terrestrial conservation

Industrial EcologyEnvironmental Biolog

PNES around the world: Where we are now and how we can close the diagnosis and treatment gaps-an ILAE PNES Task Force report

An international consensus clinical practice statement issued in 2011 ranked psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES) among the top three neuropsychiatric problems. An ILAE PNES Task Force was founded and initially charged with summarizing the current state of the art in terms of diagnosis and treatment, resulting in two publications. The first described different levels of diagnostic certainty. The second summarized current knowledge of management approaches. The present paper summarizes an international workshop of the ILAE PNES Task Force that focused on the current understanding and management of PNES around the world. We initially provide a knowledge update about the etiology, epidemiology, and prognosis of PNES-in adults and in special patient groups, such as children, older adults, and those with intellectual disability. We then explore clinical management pathways and obstacles to optimal care for this disorder around the world by focusing on a number of countries with different cultural backgrounds and at very different stages of social and economic development (United Kingdom, U.S.A., Zambia, Georgia, China, and Japan). Although evidence-based methods for the diagnosis and treatment of PNES have now been described, and much is known about the biopsychosocial underpinnings of this disorder, this paper describes gaps in care (not only in less developed countries) that result in patients with PNES not having adequate access to healthcare provisions. A range of challenges requiring solutions tailored to different healthcare systems emerges. Continued attention to PNES by the ILAE and other national and international neurologic, psychiatric, and health organizations, along with ongoing international collaboration, should ensure that patients with PNES do not lose out as healthcare services evolve around the world

Uncovering Blind Spots in Urban Carbon Management: The Role of Consumption-Based Carbon Accounting in Bristol, UK

The rapid urbanisation of the twentieth century, along with the spread of high-consumption urban lifestyles, has led to cities becoming the dominant drivers of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Reducing these impacts is crucial, but production-based frameworks of carbon measurement and mitigation—which encompass only a limited part of cities’ carbon footprints—are much more developed and widely applied than consumption-based approaches that consider the embedded carbon effectively imported into a city. Frequently, therefore, cities are left blind to the importance of their wider consumption-related climate impacts, while at the same time left lacking effective tools to reduce them. To explore the relevance of these issues, we implement methodologies for assessing production- and consumption-based emissions at the city-level and estimate the associated emissions trajectories for Bristol, a major UK city, from 2000 to 2035. We develop mitigation scenarios targeted at reducing the former, considering potential energy, carbon and financial savings in each case. We then compare these mitigation potentials with local government ambitions and Bristol’s consumption-based emissions trajectory. Our results suggest that the city’s consumption-based emissions are three times the production-based emissions, largely due to the impacts of imported food and drink. We find that low-carbon investments of circa £3 billion could reduce production-based emissions by 25% in 2035. However, we also find that this represents <10% of Bristol’s forecast consumption-based emissions for 2035 and is approximately equal to the mitigation achievable by eliminating the city’s current levels of food waste. Such observations suggest that incorporating consumption-based emission statistics into cities’ accounting and decision-making processes could uncover largely unrecognised opportunities for mitigation that are likely to be essential for achieving deep decarbonisation