Heat and Chemical Transport in Aquifers at Different Geological Setting

Heat and chemical transport are two fundamental processes that are widely existed in the subsurface environments and come with natural phenomena (e.g., volcanic eruption, diurnal or seasonal temperature variation) or anthropogenic activities (e.g., well injection). A common characteristic of these two transport processes is they are both governed by the advection-dispersion equation (ADE) and both advective movements are impacted by the local heterogeneity of porous media. However, they still exhibit many different behaviors. For example, heat diffusivity in the solid matrix is usually two order of magnitude higher than the matrix diffusivity of chemicals. In addition, chemical transport usually comes with reaction and sorption. To investigate the characteristic behaviors of heat and chemical transport at different geological settings, this study focuses on three geological environments ranging from kilometer-scale to meter-scale, including volcanic hydrothermal system, shallow riverbeds where surface-water and groundwater exchange occurs and local fractured aquifer for well testing. For the volcanic hydrothermal system, a novel model that connects the heat and chemical transport is proposed to explain the over 10-year temperature and chemical data collected at the thermal springs near volcanic summit. For the shallow riverbeds, an ensemble data assimilation approach is proposed to estimate the hydraulic exchange flux between surface water and groundwater based on the heat transport observed in the riverbeds. For the local fractured aquifer, a novel fractional model for single-well push-pull test is proposed to explain the observed long tailing behavior of conservative tracer during pumping. This study demonstrates the capability of using heat and chemical as tracers to quantitatively or qualitatively estimate the flow and transport behaviors at different geological environments. Further work is needed to explore the capability of model and methods to accommodate more geological conditions

Public Perception of and Preference for Designed Naturalistic Urban Plantings in Beijing, China

Naturalistic plantings provide environmental and human well-being benefits and have become increasingly popular in many parts of the world, particularly in Europe and North America. China, a major carbon emitter with a mission to achieve carbon neutrality, is gradually recognizing the ecological benefits of naturalistic plantings in promoting sustainable environmental improvement. In recent years, naturalistic plantings have been introduced in major Chinese cities such as Beijing and Chengdu. If this approach is to be upscaled to deliver environmental and wellbeing effects across China, there is an urgent need for a greater understanding of the level of acceptance of naturalistic planting design amongst the Chinese public. This study aimed to explore public perceptions of and preferences for designed naturalistic planting design in Beijing, China to inform future urban landscape design and management throughout China. An on-site questionnaire was conducted with 1600 participants who were visiting national nature reserves, urban parks, and EXPO show gardens in Beijing. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were then carried out online or on-site with a sub-set of 47 interviewees. Our results show that most respondents recognized and defined nature according to the degree of human intervention and the scale of a scene. Respondents surveyed in urban parks perceived designed naturalistic urban plantings, more positively than conventional Chinese planting design. They recognized and appreciated naturalistic plantings for their ecological values, enjoyment, and fitness, as well as acknowledging the perception of disorder and unsafety in small-scale design show gardens. We identified relationships between respondents’ gender, age, education level, income and professional background and their preference for designed naturalistic urban plantings. Our study contributes to the growing body of research on urban plantings and provides valuable insights for urban planners and greenspace designers in China. By harnessing the preferred planting characteristics identified in our study, urban planners and designers can shape greener, more sustainable environments that effectively address the challenges of urbanization while creating harmonious spaces that benefit both urban residents and the ecosystem

Applications of neuroimaging to disease-modification trials in Alzheimer's disease.

Critical to development of new therapies for Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the ability to detect clinical or pathological change over time. Clinical outcome measures typically used in therapeutic trials have unfortunately proven to be relatively variable and somewhat insensitive to change in this slowly progressive disease. For this reason, development of surrogate biomarkers that identify significant disease-associated brain changes are necessary to expedite treatment development in AD. Since AD pathology is present in the brain many years prior to clinical manifestation, ideally we want to develop biomarkers of disease that identify abnormal brain structure or function even prior to cognitive decline. Magnetic resonance imaging, fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography, new amyloid imaging techniques, and spinal fluid markers of AD all have great potential to provide surrogate endpoint measures for AD pathology. The Alzheimer's disease neuroimaging initiative (ADNI) was developed for the distinct purpose of evaluating surrogate biomarkers for drug development in AD. Recent evidence from ADNI demonstrates that imaging may provide more sensitive, and earlier, measures of disease progression than traditional clinical measures for powering clinical drug trials in Alzheimer's disease. This review discusses recently presented data from the ADNI dataset, and the importance of imaging in the future of drug development in AD

LookinGood^{\pi}: Real-time Person-independent Neural Re-rendering for High-quality Human Performance Capture

We propose LookinGood^{\pi}, a novel neural re-rendering approach that is aimed to (1) improve the rendering quality of the low-quality reconstructed results from human performance capture system in real-time; (2) improve the generalization ability of the neural rendering network on unseen people. Our key idea is to utilize the rendered image of reconstructed geometry as the guidance to assist the prediction of person-specific details from few reference images, thus enhancing the re-rendered result. In light of this, we design a two-branch network. A coarse branch is designed to fix some artifacts (i.e. holes, noise) and obtain a coarse version of the rendered input, while a detail branch is designed to predict "correct" details from the warped references. The guidance of the rendered image is realized by blending features from two branches effectively in the training of the detail branch, which improves both the warping accuracy and the details' fidelity. We demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods at producing high-fidelity images on unseen people

Use of vulture bone flutes and other products in China

No abstrac

A free-standing graphene-polypyrrole hybrid paper via electropolymerization with an enhanced areal capacitance

Here we developed a free-standing reduced graphene oxide (rGO)-polypyrrole (PPy) hybrid paper via electropolymerization on a paper-like graphene gel. This flexible hybrid paper displayed a uniform layered structure with PPy coated onto the graphene layers. A high areal mass of 2.7 mg cm−2 could be obtained. It delivered a greatly enhanced areal capacitance of 440 mF cm−2 at 0.5 A g−1, in contrast to that 151∼198.5 mF cm−2 previously reported for graphene paper or polypyrrole-graphene paper. It can retain ∼81% of the initial capacitance at a high current density of 6 A g−1. The combined high flexibility with outstanding electrochemical performance, makes such novel hybrid paper a promising electrode for flexible supercapacitors