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Heat-health warning systems and services are important preventive actions for extreme heat, however, global evidence differs on which temperature indicator is more informative for heat-health outcomes. We comprehensively assessed temperature predictors on their summer associations with adverse health impacts in a high-density subtropical city. Maximum, mean, and minimum temperatures were examined on their associations with non-cancer mortality and hospital admissions in Hong Kong during summer seasons 2010-2019 using Generalized Additive Models and Distributed Lag Non-linear Models. In summary, mean and minimum temperatures were identified as strong indicators for mortality, with a relative risk(RR) and 95% confidence interval(CI) of 1.037 (1.006-1.069) and 1.055 (1.019-1.092), respectively, at 95th percentile vs. optimal temperature. Additionally, minimum temperatures captured the effects of hospital admissions, RR1.009 (95%CI: 1.000- 1.018). In stratified analyses, significant associations were found for older adults, female sex, and respiratory-related outcomes. For comparison, there was no association between maximum temperature and health outcomes. With climate change and projected increase of night-time warming, the findings from this comprehensive assessment method are useful to strengthen heat prevention strategies and enhance heat-health warning systems. Other locations could refer to this comprehensive method to evaluate their heat risk, especially in highly urbanized environments and subtropical cities., Competing Interests: Declarations. Ethical approval: Ethics approval was obtained from the Survey and Behavioural Ethics Committee of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Competing interests: The authors declare no potential conflicts of interest., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Existing studies have analyzed the spatio-temporal patterns of air pollutants by combining ground and satellite measurements, primarily for cross-validation purposes. However, the unique characteristics and discrepancies between satellite and ground measurements have rarely been leveraged to understand pollution patterns and identify air pollution sources. To our best knowledge, this study is the first to utilize these discrepancies to holistically analyze the spatial and temporal patterns and investigate local biomass-burning effects on the five typical air pollutants: particulate matter (PM 2.5 )/aerosol optical depth (AOD), carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ), sulphur dioxide (SO 2 ), and ozone (O 3 ). Guangdong (GD) province was selected as a case study due to its complex air pollution sources and patterns. Ground-based analysis from 2015 to 2023 shows significant decreases in PM 2.5 , CO, NO 2 , and SO 2 , and a significant increase in O 3 in urban areas, indicating the efficacy of stringent air pollution control policies. However, satellite analysis shows significant downtrend only in AOD, while the trends of other pollutants are almost negligible, which are likely to be evidence of industrial migration. Both measurements exhibit regular seasonal patterns for all air pollutants. In-depth time-series comparisons between ground and satellite data reveal seasonal consistency for NO 2 but noticeable discrepancies for both AOD and CO, which could be attributed to urban-rural differences and local versus transported pollution sources. Spatially, AOD and NO 2 exhibits the most significant regional discrepancies, followed by SO 2 and CO, with higher values observed over Pearl River Delta (PRD) compared to non-PRD regions. O 3 is more evenly distributed, showing more pronounced seasonal variations than regional differences. The synergetic use of satellite and ground measurements collectively verifies the significant local biomass-burning effects on the five pollutants. These findings can aid in developing more targeted air pollution control policies., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Near-surface air temperature (Tair) is crucial for assessing urban thermal conditions and their impact on human health. Traditional Tair estimation methods, reliant on sparse weather stations, often miss spatial variability. This study proposes a novel framework using a federated learning artificial neural network (FLANN) for fine-scale Tair prediction. Leveraging spatially complete thermal data from Landsat 8/9, Sentinel 3, and Himawari 8/9 (105 acquisition days, 2013-2023), and data from automatic weather stations, 23 predictor variables were extracted. After rigorous selection processes, nine variables significantly correlated with Tair were identified. Comparative analysis against established machine learning and linear models, using cross-validation data, showed FLANN's superior performance with a Pearson correlation coefficient (r) of 0.98 and a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.97 K, compared to r and RMSE of 0.85 and 1.09, respectively, for the linear model. FLANN showed greater improvements for urban stations with r and RMSE differences of 0.19 and - 2.03 K. Application of FLANN to predict Tair in Hong Kong in July 2023 enabled detailed urban heat island (UHI) analysis, revealing dynamic spatial and temporal UHI patterns. This study highlights FLANN's potential for accurate Tair prediction and UHI analysis, enhancing urban thermal environment management., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Hong Kong, renowned for its densely packed urban areas, poses unique challenges for understanding the effects of buildings on local meteorological conditions. To address this, the Hong Kong Observatory has started building a network of urban meteorological monitoring stations since 2017 for monitoring, analysing and studying urban microclimate. This paper presents an observational and numerical study focusing on wind measurements obtained from wind sensors installed on two smart lampposts in Tsim Sha Tsui, a major urban area in Hong Kong. Two representative high wind conditions in Hong Kong, Super Typhoon Saola in 2023 and a strong monsoon case characterized by prevailing easterly winds, are considered. With the use of high resolution computational fluid dynamic simulations, major features of actual observations can be reproduced. This suggests that district scale or even street scale weather services could be possible in the future with sufficient computational power., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (© 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.)

The identification of aviation hazardous winds is crucial and challenging in air traffic management for assuring flight safety, particularly during the take-off and landing phases. Existing criteria are typically tailored for special wind types, and whether there exists a universal feature that can effectively detect diverse types of hazardous winds from radar/lidar observations remains as an open question. Here we propose an interpretable semi-supervised clustering paradigm to solve this problem, where the prior knowledge and probabilistic models of winds are integrated to overcome the bottleneck of scarce labels (pilot reports). Based on this paradigm, a set of high-dimensional hazard features is constructed to effectively identify the occurrence of diverse hazardous winds and assess the intensity metrics. Verification of the paradigm across various scenarios has highlighted its high adaptability to diverse input data and good generalizability to diverse geographical and climate zones., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

The occurrence of severe low-level wind shear (S-LLWS) events in the vicinity of airport runways poses a significant threat to flight safety and exacerbates a burgeoning problem in civil aviation. Identifying the risk factors that contribute to occurrences of S-LLWS can facilitate the improvement of aviation safety. Despite the significant influence of S-LLWS on aviation safety, its occurrence is relatively infrequent in comparison to non-SLLWS incidents. In this study, we develop an S-LLWS risk prediction model through the utilization of ensemble imbalance learning (EIL) strategies, namely, BalanceCascade, EasyEnsemble, and RUSBoost. The data for this study were obtained from PIREPs and LiDAR at Hong Kong International Airport. The analysis revealed that the BalanceCascade strategy outperforms EasyEnsemble and RUSBoost in terms of prediction performance. Afterward, the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) interpretation tool was used in conjunction with the BalanceCascade model for the risk assessment of various factors. The four most influential risk factors, according to the SHAP interpretation tool, were hourly temperature, runway 25LD, runway 25LA, and RWY (encounter location of LLWS). S-LLWS was likely to happen at Runway 25LD and Runway 25LA in temperatures ranging from low to moderate. Similarly, a high proportion of S-LLWS events occurred near the runway threshold, and a relatively small proportion occurred away from it. The EIL strategies in conjunction with the SHAP interpretation tool may accurately predict the S-LLWS without the need for data augmentation in the data pre-processing phase., (© 2023 Society for Risk Analysis.)

The occurrence of wind shear and severe thunderstorms during the final approach phase contributes to nearly half of all aviation accidents. Pilots usually employ the go-around procedure in order to lower the likelihood of an unsafe landing. However, multiple factors influence the go-arounds induced by wind shear. In order to predict the wind shear-induced go-around, this study utilized a cutting-edge AI-based Combined Kernel and Tree Boosting (KTBoost) framework with various data augmentation strategies. First, the KTBoost model was trained, tested, and compared to other Machine Learning models using the data extracted from Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA)-based Pilot Reports for the years 2017-2021. The performance evaluation revealed that the KTBoost model with Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique - Edited Nearest Neighbor (SMOTE-ENN)- augmented data demonstrated superior performance as measured by the F1-Score (94.37%) and G-Mean (94.87%). Subsequently, the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) approach was employed to elucidate the interpretation of the KTBoost model using data that had been treated with the SMOTE-ENN technique. According to the findings, flight type, wind shear magnitude, and approach runway contributed the most to the wind shear-induced go-around. Compared to international flights, Hong Kong-based airlines endured the highest number of wind shear-induced go-arounds. Shear due to the tailwind contributed more to the go-around than the headwinds. The runways with the most wind shear-induced Go-arounds were 07C and 07R., Competing Interests: The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Afaq Khattak reports financial support was provided by 10.13039/501100001809National Natural Science Foundation of China. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (© 2024 The Authors.)

We used nuclear genomic data and statistical models to evaluate the ecological and evolutionary processes shaping spatial variation in species richness in Calochortus (Liliaceae, 74 spp.). Calochortus occupies diverse habitats in the western United States and Mexico and has a center of diversity in the California Floristic Province, marked by multiple orogenies, winter rainfall, and highly divergent climates and substrates (including serpentine). We used sequences of 294 low-copy nuclear loci to produce a time-calibrated phylogeny, estimate historical biogeography, and test hypotheses regarding drivers of present-day spatial patterns in species number. Speciation and species coexistence require reproductive isolation and ecological divergence, so we examined the roles of chromosome number, environmental heterogeneity, and migration in shaping local species richness. Six major clades-inhabiting different geographic/climatic areas, and often marked by different base chromosome numbers (n = 6 to 10)-began diverging from each other ~10.3 Mya. As predicted, local species number increased significantly with local heterogeneity in chromosome number, elevation, soil characteristics, and serpentine presence. Species richness is greatest in the Transverse/Peninsular Ranges where clades with different chromosome numbers overlap, topographic complexity provides diverse conditions over short distances, and several physiographic provinces meet allowing immigration by several clades. Recently diverged sister-species pairs generally have peri-patric distributions, and maximum geographic overlap between species increases over the first million years since divergence, suggesting that chromosomal evolution, genetic divergence leading to gametic isolation or hybrid inviability/sterility, and/or ecological divergence over small spatial scales may permit species co-occurrence., Competing Interests: Competing interests statement:The authors declare no competing interest.

Background: Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is frequently utilized as a complementary therapy for breast cancer patients. TCM primarily involves the use of Chinese herbal products (CHPs), which consist of single or multiherb formulas with diverse therapeutic effects documented in medical classics. The study aims to investigate the association between medication possession ratios to CHPs within 2-year post breast cancer diagnosis and 5-year survival, to explore the potential beneficial class effect of TCM., Methods: This retrospective population-based cohort study included newly diagnosed breast cancer patients between 2003 and 2006, identified from the National Health Insurance Research Database of Taiwan. Logistic regression and Cox proportional hazards analysis were utilized to assess the likelihood of medication possession ratios (MPRs) for CHPs and to examine the association of variables with 5-year survival., Results: A total of 3472 patients with breast cancer were included. Patients who had MPR of 1% to 9% and 10% to 19% for CHPs within 2 years after breast cancer diagnosis exhibited better 5-year survival rates compared with those who did not use CHPs (adjusted hazard ratio [aHR] 0.69, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.55-0.86, p = 0.001; aHR 0.50, 95% CI 0.28-0.88, p = 0.016). Furthermore, the use of TCM formulations specifically targeting insomnia, such as Tian-wang-bu-xin-dan and Suan-zao-ren-tang, demonstrated a significantly positive association with survival (aHR 0.71, 95% CI 0.52-0.98, p = 0.035) among patients who were short-term users of CHPs (MPR of 1% to 19%)., Conclusion: Short-term use of TCM (ie, MPR to CHPs 1~19%) within 2-year post breast cancer diagnosis present positive association with survival outcome. Tian-wang-bu-xin-dan and Suan-zao-ren-tang may have benefits to 5-year survival, but their causality still need further investigation., Competing Interests: Conflicts of interest: Dr. Chun-Yu Liu, an editorial board member at Journal of the Chinese Medical Association , had no role in the peer review process of or decision to publish this article. The other authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest related to the subject matter or materials discussed in this article., (Copyright © 2023, the Chinese Medical Association.)

Based on the simulation of the fluid-structure interaction response, the cause of an overturning of a gantry crane induced by a downburst in Shenzhen is studied in this paper. According to the results, (1) Vicroy's downburst model could establish the steady-state wind field of the downburst more reasonably when there was only low-level wind speed observation data, and its simulation results were close to the two-dimensional downburst numerical simulation results; (2) Compared with the normal exponential vertical profile of wind speed, the disturbance caused by the front girder of the double-girder gantry crane structure under the downburst wind field was more severe, which increases the probability of the gantry crane overturning. (3) The downwind displacement of the main girder of the gantry crane under the condition of downburst is far greater than that under the normal condition. At the same time, under the condition of downburst, the pressure difference on the surface of the gantry crane was greater, and the distribution of the support reaction force was more uneven, resulting in a stronger overturning tendency of the gantry crane. (4) Under the condition of downburst, the overturning moment and the shearing force borne by the foundation of gantry crane exceeded the critical value to maintain the stability of the gantry crane by the gravity, resulting in the overturning of the gantry crane., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (© 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.)

Aircraft landings are especially perilous when the wind is gusty near airport runways. For this reason, an aircraft may deviate from its glide slope, miss its approach, or even crash in the worst cases. In the study, we used the state-of-the-art glass-box model, the Explainable Boosting Machine (EBM), to estimate the variation in headwind speed and turbulence intensity along the airport runway glide slope and to interpret the various contributing factors. To begin, the wind field characteristics were examined by developing a scaled-down model of Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA) runway as well as and the surrounding buildings and complex terrain in the TJ-3 atmospheric boundary layer wind tunnel. The placement of probes along the glide slope of the model runway aided in the measurement of wind field characteristics at different locations in the presence and absence of surrounding buildings. Next, the experimental data was used to train the EBM model in conjunction with Bayesian optimization approach. The counterpart black box models (extreme gradient boosting, random forest, extra tree and adaptive boosting) as well as other glass box models (linear regression and decision tree) were compared with the outcomes of the EBM model. Based on the holdout testing data, the EBM model revealed superior performance for both variation in headwind speed and turbulence intensity in terms of mean absolute error, mean squared error, root mean squared error and R-square values. To further evaluate the impact of different factors on the wind field characteristics along the airport runway glide slope, the EBM model allows for a full interpretation of the contribution of individual and pairwise interactions of factors to the prediction results from both a global and a local perspective., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

This study investigates the atmospheric boundary layer structure based on multiple-level tower observations with a height of 350 m during the landfall of Super Typhoon Mangkhut (2018). Results show a layer of log wind profile outside of the radius of maximum wind speed with a height of 100 m or larger. The log layer height increases with the wind speed. The height of the constant flux layer reaches ~ 300 m for 10-m wind speeds less than 13 m s -1 while this height decreases with the wind speed. Momentum fluxes and turbulent kinetic energy increase with the wind speed at all vertical levels. The drag coefficient and surface roughness length estimated at the tower location have values of 7.3 × 10 -3 and 0.09 m, respectively, which are independent of wind speed. The estimated vertical eddy diffusivity and mixing length increase with height up to ~ 160 m and then slowly decrease with height. The vertical eddy diffusivity increases with the wind speed while the vertical mixing length has no dependence on the wind speed. Comparing our results with previous work indicates that the vertical eddy diffusivity is larger over land than over ocean at a given wind speed range., (© 2022. The Author(s).)

A COVID-19 outbreak occurred in May 2020 in a public housing building in Hong Kong - Luk Chuen House, located in Lek Yuen Estate. The horizontal cluster linked to the index case' flat (flat 812) remains to be explained. Computational fluid dynamics simulations were conducted to obtain the wind-pressure coefficients of each external opening on the eighth floor of the building. The data were then used in a multi-zone airflow model to estimate the airflow rate and aerosol concentration in the flats and corridors on that floor. Apart from flat 812 and corridors, the virus-laden aerosol concentrations in flats 811, 813, 815, 817 and 819 (opposite to flat 812, across the corridor) were the highest on the eighth floor. When the doors of flats 813 and 817 were opened by 20%, the hourly-averaged aerosol concentrations in these two flats were at least four times as high as those in flats 811, 815 and 819 during the index case's home hours or the suspected exposure period of secondary cases. Thus, the flats across the corridor that were immediately downstream from flat 812 were at the highest exposure risk under a prevailing easterly wind, especially when their doors or windows that connected to the corridor were open. Given that the floorplan and dimension of Luk Chuen House are similar to those of many hotels, our findings provide a probable explanation for COVID-19 outbreaks in quarantine hotels. Positive pressure and sufficient ventilation in the corridor would help to minimise such cross-corridor infections., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (© 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

With the dynamic air traffic demand and the constrained capacity resources, accurately predicting airport throughput is essential to ensure the efficiency and resilience of air traffic operations. Many research efforts have been made to predict traffic throughputs or flight delays at an airport or over a network. However, it is still a challenging problem due to the complex spatiotemporal dynamics of the highly interacted air transportation systems. To address this challenge, we propose a novel deep learning model, graph attention neural network stacking with a Long short-term memory unit (GAT-LSTM), to predict the short-term airport throughput over a national air traffic network. LSTM layers are included to extract the temporal correlations in the data, while the graph attention mechanism is used to capture the spatial dependencies. For the graph attention mechanism, two graph modeling methods, airport-based graph and OD-pair graph are explored in this study. We tested the proposed model using real-world air traffic data involving 65 major airports in China over 3 months in 2017 and compared its performance with other state-of-the-art models. Results showed that the temporal pattern was the dominate factor, compared to the spatial pattern, in predicting airport throughputs over an air traffic network. Among the prediction models that we compared, both the proposed model and LSTM performed well on prediction accuracy over the entire network. Better performance of the proposed model was observed when focusing on airports with larger throughputs. We also conducted an analysis on model interpretability. We found that spatiotemporal correlations in the data were learned and shown via the model parameters, which helped us to gain insights into the topology and the dynamics of the air traffic network., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Zhu, Lin, He, Tsui, Chan and Li.)

Using surface air temperature observations from 1901 to 2020, this study compared the warming trends of Shanghai and Hong Kong over a period of 120 years. The statistical results reveal the following: (1) The average temperatures of the two cities underwent fluctuating increases during the past 120 years, with linear warming rates of 0.23 °C/decade in Shanghai and 0.13 °C/decade in Hong Kong. (2) The fluctuation ranges of maximum temperature in the two cities were considerably higher than those of mean temperature. Moreover, in both cities, the annual mean maximum temperature decreased during a phase of more than a decade. The fluctuation ranges of minimum temperature were smaller, whereas the linear increases were higher than those for the mean temperature. (3) The diurnal temperature ranges (DTRs) of the two cities decreased; a certain phase of the decreases in DTR in the two cities was caused by decreases in the maximum temperature. (4) At a certain stage of urban development, owing to the shading effect of new high-rise buildings, the solar shortwave radiation reaching the Earth's surface decreased, and anthropogenic heat generated by the energy consumption of buildings and urban human activities at that time was not sufficient to make up for the reduced shortwave radiation. This result may have led to the declines in the maximum temperature experienced by both cities. (5) Currently, the number of hot days and extremely hot days in the two cities has increased significantly compared with that a century ago, indicating that climate warming has an adverse impact on human settlements.

Vertical transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) along a vertical column of flats has been documented in several outbreaks of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Guangdong and Hong Kong. We describe an outbreak in Luk Chuen House, involving two vertical columns of flats associated with an unusually connected two-stack drainage system, in which nine individuals from seven households were infected. The index case resided in Flat 812 (8th floor, Unit 12), two flats (813, 817) on its opposite side reported one case each (i.e., a horizontal sub-cluster). All other flats with infected residents were vertically associated, forming a vertical sub-cluster. We injected tracer gas (SF 6 ) into drainage stacks via toilet or balcony of Flat 812, monitored gas concentrations in roof vent, toilet, façade, and living room in four of the seven flats with infected residents and four flats with no infected residents. The measured gas concentration distributions agreed with the observed distribution of affected flats. Aerosols leaking into drainage stacks may generate the vertical sub-cluster, whereas airflow across the corridor probably caused the horizontal sub-cluster. Sequencing and phylogenetic analyses also revealed a common point-source. The findings provided additional evidence of probable roles of drainage systems in SARS-CoV-2 transmission., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The outbreak of the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) had a large impact on human health and socio-economics worldwide. The lockdown implemented in China beginning from January 23, 2020 led to sharp reductions in human activities and associated emissions. The declines in primary pollution provided a unique opportunity to examine the relationship between anthropogenic emissions and air quality. This study reports on air pollutant and meteorological measurements at different heights from a tall tower in the Pearl River Delta. These measurements were used to investigate the vertical scale response of pollutants to understand reductions in human activities. Compared to that in the pre-lockdown period (from December 16, 2019), the concentrations of surface layer nitric oxide (NO x ), fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 ), and daily maximum 8 h average ozone (MDA8O 3 ) declined significantly during the lockdown by 76.8%, 49.4%, and 18.6%, respectively. Although the vertical profiles of NO x and O 3 changed during the lockdown period, those of PM 2.5 remained the same. During the lockdown period, there were statistically significant correlations between PM 2.5 and O 3 but not between PM 2.5 and NO x at four heights, indicating that the main composition of PM 2.5 have dramatically changed, during which the impact of NO x on PM 2.5 became insignificant. Additionally, O 3 concentrations were also insensitive to NO x concentrations during the lockdown, implying that O 3 levels were more of a representative of regional background level. In this case, local photochemical formation is no longer a significant ozone source. This evidence suggests that it is possible to mitigation of PM 2.5 and O 3 levels simultaneously by significant reductions in anthropogenic emissions., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have influenced the work reported in this paper., (© 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

During the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing protective facemasks (PFMs) can effectively reduce infection risk, but the use of PFMs can amplify heat-related health risks. We studied the amplified PFM-induced human thermal stress via both field measurements and model simulations over a typical subtropical mountainous city, Hong Kong. First, a hot and humid PFM microenvironment has been observed with high temperature (34-35 °C) and high humidity (80-95%), resulting in an aggravated facial thermal stress with a maximal PFM-covered facial heat flux of 500 W/m 2 under high-intensity activities. Second, to predict the overall PFM-inclusive human thermal stress, we developed a new facial thermal load model, S PFM and a new human-environment adaptive thermal stress (HEATS) model by coupling S PFM with an enhanced thermal comfort model to resolve modified human-environment interactions with the intervention of PFM under realistic climatic and topographical conditions. The model was then applied to predict spatiotemporal variations of PFM-inclusive physiological subjective temperature (PST) and corresponding heat stress levels during a typical heat wave event. It was found wearing PFM can significantly aggravate human thermal stress over Hong Kong with a spatially averaged PST increment of 5.0 °C and an additional spatial area of 158.4% exposed to the severest heat risks. Besides, PFM-inclusive PST was found to increase nonlinearly with terrain slopes at a rate of 1.3-3.9 °C/10°(slope), owing to elevated metabolic heat production. Furthermore, urban residents were found to have higher PFM-aggravated heat risks than rural residents, especially at night due to synergistic urban heat and moisture island effects., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Dynamic calibration was performed in the laboratory on two catching-type drop counter rain gauges manufactured as high-sensitivity and fast response instruments by Ogawa Seiki Co. Ltd. (Japan) and the Chilbolton Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (UK). Adjustment procedures were developed to meet the recommendations of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) for rainfall intensity measurements at the one-minute time resolution. A dynamic calibration curve was derived for each instrument to provide the drop volume variation as a function of the measured drop releasing frequency. The trueness of measurements was improved using a post-processing adjustment algorithm and made compatible with the WMO recommended maximum admissible error. The impact of dynamic calibration on the rainfall amount measured in the field at the annual and the event scale was calculated for instruments operating at two experimental sites. The rainfall climatology at the site is found to be crucial in determining the magnitude of the measurement bias, with a predominant overestimation at the low to intermediate rainfall intensity range.

Background: Medical adherence is often higher in clinical trials than in real world practice. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) on medical adherence to hormonal therapy (HT) and survival outcome in ER (+) breast cancer patients in Taiwan., Subjects and Methods: Using a nationwide longitudinal population-based database, we enrolled patients with newly diagnosed ER-positive breast cancer who had received HT, and followed for up to 5 years (N = 872). Medication adherence in terms of medication possession ratios (MPR) and patient outcome were evaluated with or without TCM exposure. We applied logistic regression and Cox proportional hazards (PH) analysis to identify factors, including TCM exposure, associated with adherence to HT and mortality., Results: MPR to HT in general decreased over the 5-year period post breast cancer diagnosis. Both TCM and MPR to HT ≥ 80% were significantly associated with reduced risk of breast cancer-associated mortality. Subgroup analysis revealed that TCM annual visits ≥ 3 times with CHP prescription 1~90 days per year affected mortality reduction most significantly (HR: 0.26; 95% CI = 0.08-0.83; p < 0.05) compared to other TCM use. In contrast, using TCM (either short-term or long-term) was not associated with MPR in HT., Conclusions: Our results supported the potential advantage of TCM on breast cancer-associated mortality, whereas TCM use does not compromise medical adherence to HT. This study offers important insights in integrative therapy for HT in patients with estrogen receptor (+) breast cancer., (Copyright © 2020. Published by Elsevier GmbH.)

Failure of neural tube closure during embryonic development can result in anencephaly, one of the most common birth defects in humans. A family with recurrent anencephalic fetuses was investigated to understand its etiology and pathogenesis. Exome sequencing revealed a recessive germline 21-bp in-frame deletion in NUAK2 segregating with the disease. In vitro kinase assays demonstrated that the 7-amino acid truncation in NUAK2, a serine/threonine kinase, completely abrogated its catalytic activity. Patient-derived disease models including neural progenitor cells and cerebral organoids showed that loss of NUAK2 activity led to decreased Hippo signaling via cytoplasmic YAP retention. In neural tube-like structures, endogenous NUAK2 colocalized apically with the actomyosin network, which was disrupted in patient cells, causing impaired nucleokinesis and apical constriction. Our results establish NUAK2 as an indispensable kinase for brain development in humans and suggest that a NUAK2-Hippo signaling axis regulates cytoskeletal processes that govern cell shape during neural tube closure., Competing Interests: Disclosures: The authors declare no competing interests exist., (© 2020 Bonnard et al.)

Aircraft wake is a pair of strong counter-rotating vortices generated behind a flying aircraft. It might be very hazardous to a following aircraft and the real-time detection of it is of great interest in aviation safety field. Vortex-core positions and velocity circulations, which respectively represent the location and strength of a wake, are two characteristic parameters that have attracted the main attention in wake vortex detection. This paper introduces a new algorithm, the Path Integration (PI) method, to retrieve the characteristic parameters of wake vortex. The method uses Doppler velocity distribution to locate the vortex-core positions, and the integration of Doppler velocity along a LOS (line-of-sight) is derived as a linear expression about the circulations. From this expression, the circulations can be solved with the least square method. Moreover, an vortex-core position adjusting method is proposed to compensate the compressing and expanding effects of wake vortex caused by the scanning of Lidar beam. Basically, the use of Doppler velocity integration can improve the method's adaptability in turbulence environment and mitigate the impact of noise. Numerical examples and field detection data from Hong Kong international airport and Tsingtao Liuting airport have well verified the good performance of the method, in terms of both accuracy and efficiency.

A novel fiber anemometer based on two pairs of fiber gratings is experimentally demonstrated and can simultaneously detect wind speed and wind direction. One pair of gratings, which are separated by 90&deg; in space, is fixed on a small stainless steel pipe driven by a rotating disc for measuring the wind-direction angle. The other pair is composed of a sensing and a matched grating. The frequency of the spectrum-shifted of the sensing grating to overlap with that of the matched grating is employed for determining the wind speed. The errors in the wind-speed and wind-angle measurements are experimentally demonstrated to be less than 1%. The proposed fiber anemometer with a simple and durable structure can be applied in wind-powered electricity generators.

A wake vortex is a form of irregular airflow generated by a flying aircraft, which can cause a severe hazard for aviation. To quantify the hazard of a wake after fully roll-up and before rebound, this paper proposes an algorithm to retrieve its characteristic parameters (circulations, vortex-core positions, and vortex-core radii) with a scanning Doppler Lidar. In the algorithm, a governing equation related to the Doppler velocities and characteristic parameters is established based on the aerosols' weak inertia, from which the target parameters are solved with an optimization method. During the process, the distortion of Doppler velocity caused by the scanning of the Lidar beam is adjusted by the Doppler acceleration to achieve better estimations of the target characteristic parameters. Good performance of the algorithm has been verified by simulation and field detection data.

Recent advancement in the understanding of the pathophysiology of inflammatory bowel disease has seen an expansion in therapeutic options. Vedolizumab, a selective α4β7 inhibitor, and ustekinumab, an IL 12/23 p40 inhibitor, have provided the much-awaited out-of-class alternatives for patients who have failed or who are intolerant to anti-Tumor Necrosis Factor (TNF) therapy. However, questions remain as to how we may best use these novel therapeutic agents. We evaluate the evidence available from randomized controlled trials and postmarketing cohort studies and discuss their safety, efficacy, and limitations, in relation to anti-TNF therapy, in optimizing the treatment outcomes.

The hilly topography of Hong Kong influences oncoming winds and gradually changes their wind directions along the profiles' height. The vertical variation in wind directions, or the twist effect, significantly influences the Pedestrian Level Wind (PLW) field in urban areas of Hong Kong, thus it is a topic demanding systematic investigations. In this study, a new set of inflow boundary conditions are proposed to model twisted wind flows in Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) simulations. The new inflow boundary condition derived based on the horizontal homogeneous assumption, specifies a vertical profile of lateral wind speeds at the inlet boundary to sustain the twist effect in the empty computational domain. The proposed boundary conditions are used to simulate the PLW fields near three isolated buildings with different Height-to-Width ratio using two CFD codes; OpenFOAM, and FLUENT. The results reveal that OpenFOAM is more reliable in simulating PLW fields in twisted wind flows using the new set of boundary conditions. The three-dimensional flow field provided by the OpenFOAM simulation shows sparse streamlines downstream the buildings, indicating lack of organized eddies in the building far wake, which negatively affects the dispersion of air pollutants in twisted winds., (© 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Vehicular traffic has strong implication in the severity and degree of Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect in a city. It is crucial to map and monitor the spatio-temporal heat patterns from vehicular traffic in a city. Data observed from traffic counting stations are readily available for mapping the traffic-related heat across the stations. However, macroscopic models utilizing traffic counting data to estimate dynamic directional vehicular flows are rarely established. Our work proposes a simple and robust cell-transmission-model to simulate all the possible cell-based origin-destination trajectories of vehicular flows over time, based on the traffic counting stations. Result shows that the heat patterns have notable daily and weekly periodical circulation/pattern, and volumes of heat vary significantly in different grid cells. The findings suggest that vehicular flows in some places are the dominating influential factor that make the UHI phenomenon more remarkable.

As a powerful representation paradigm for networked and multi-typed data, the heterogeneous information network (HIN) is ubiquitous. Meanwhile, defining proper relevance measures has always been a fundamental problem and of great pragmatic importance for network mining tasks. Inspired by our probabilistic interpretation of existing path-based relevance measures, we propose to study HIN relevance from a probabilistic perspective. We also identify, from real-world data, and propose to model cross-meta-path synergy , which is a characteristic important for defining path-based HIN relevance and has not been modeled by existing methods. A generative model is established to derive a novel path-based relevance measure, which is data-driven and tailored for each HIN. We develop an inference algorithm to find the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimate of the model parameters, which entails non-trivial tricks. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and relevance measure.

A synthetic method to prepare partially hydrogenated isoquinolines efficiently from silver-mediated [3,3]-sigmatropic rearrangement/Diels-Alder reaction of 1,9-dien-4-yne esters is described. The reactions were shown to be robust with a wide variety of substitution patterns tolerated to provide the corresponding nitrogen-containing heterocyclic products in good to excellent yields. This includes examples containing a bridgehead sp 3 quaternary carbon center as well as the cycloisomerization of one substrate to give the corresponding bicyclic adduct in excellent yield at the gram scale.

Aerosol liquid water content (ALWC) has an important effect on atmospheric visibility as well as heterogeneous chemical reactions. In this paper, we used the data size-resolved particle hygroscopic growth factor, and particle number size distribution (PNSD) obtained from H-TDMA and SMPS to compute ALWC at the Guangzhou Panyu site from the winter of 2014 and the spring of 2015. The corresponding results were relatively consistent with the trend for ALWC ISO calculated from the ISORROPIA II thermodynamic equilibrium model based on the measurement of aerosol water-soluble ionic compositions obtained from MARGA, with a linear fit yielding an R 2 value of 0.76. The fact that ALWC HTDMA was somewhat higher than ALWC ISO at low RH values was at least partially attributable to the fact that effects resulting from organic matter hygroscopicity were not taken into account when computing ALWC ISO . In sensitivity testing, ambient relative humidity, PNSD and particle hygroscopicity were all found to affect ALWC, in that order. Particles of different modes made different contributions to ALWC with the contributions of nuclear, Aitken, accumulation and coarse modes assessed at <1%, 3%, 85% and 12%, respectively, indicating that the contribution of accumulation mode particles to ALWC dominated among all the aerosol particle modes. During clean processes, decreases in relative humidity and PM 2.5 both resulted in a decrease in ALWC. During the pollution processes, calm winds caused local particle accumulation, with ALWC increasing as RH increased. Intraday trends in ALWC and relative humidity were consistent, with minimum mean values observed in the afternoon due to low ambient relative humidity inhibiting an increase in ALWC. However, diurnal variation of aerosol hygroscopicity and ALWC tended to be somewhat anti-correlated, indicating that diurnal changes in aerosol hygroscopicity are not a primary factor resulting in ambient AWLC changes., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Colorectal cancer, which is the leading cancer in Singapore, can be prevented by increased use of screening and polypectomy. A range of screening strategies such as stool-based tests, flexible sigmoidoscopy, colonoscopy and computed tomography colonography are available, each with different strengths and limitations. Primary care physicians should discuss appropriate screening modalities with their patients, tailored to their individual needs. Physicians, patients and the government should work in partnership to improve uptake of colorectal cancer screening to reduce the morbidity and mortality from colorectal cancer., (Copyright: © Singapore Medical Association.)

A synthetic method for the efficient assembly of bicyclo[2.2.1]hept-2-en-7-ones that relies on gold(I)-catalyzed Rautenstrauch rearrangement followed by Brønsted acid-mediated formal [3 + 2]-cycloaddition/deacetylation of 1,8-diynyl vinyl acetates at room temperature under atmospheric conditions is described.

Light scattering of aerosols depends on ambient relative humidity (RH) since hygroscopic particles absorb significant water at high RH, and this results in low visibility. This paper used custom-made parallel nephelometers (PNEPs) to measure aerosol light scattering enhancement factor ƒ(RH), and utilized data including visibility, PM2.5, black carbon, water-soluble ions mass concentrations and surface meteorological parameters, in conjunction with background weather conditions, to analyze a haze event in Guangzhou during 8th-15th Dec. 2013. Unfavorable weather conditions, such as high RH and low wind speed, were observed during the haze event. The hourly average mass concentration of PM2.5 was 127μg/m(3), with concentration of 192.4μg/m(3) on 9th and 196μg/m(3) on 13th. The ƒ(RH) did not exhibit significant changes during this haze process, with value of ƒ(80%)=1.58±0.07. Although the mass fraction of water-soluble ions to PM2.5 decreased after 12th Dec., the aerosol hygroscopicity might not have changed significantly since the mass fraction of nitrate became more dominant, which has stronger ability to take up water. The best-fitted parameterized function for ƒ(RH) is ƒ(RH)=0.731+0.1375∗(1-RH/100)(-1)+0.00719∗(1-RH/100)(-2). Combining the fixed parameterization of ƒ(RH) above, the visibility was calculated with the measured light scattering and absorption coefficient of particles and gas under dry condition, as well as ambient RH. The predicted visibility range agrees well with the measurements without precipitation. Using ISORROPIA II model, the calculated aerosol liquid water content (ALWC) at ambient RH varied consistently with the PM2.5 under lower RH, while it was more influenced by high RH. This work also show that high RH accompanied with precipitation will enhance aerosol hygroscopic growth effect, leading to further visibility degradation, even if PM2.5 mass decreased due to precipitation., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

A synthetic method that relies on Au(I)-catalyzed tandem 1,3-acyloxy migration/double cyclopropanation of 1-ene-4,9-diyne and 1-ene-4,10-diyne esters to construct the respective architecturally challenging tetracyclodecene and tetracycloundecene derivatives is described. Achieved under mild reaction conditions, the transformation was shown to be robust with a wide variety of substitution patterns tolerated to give the two members of the carbocyclic family in good to excellent yields and as a single regio- and diastereomer.

A synthetic method that relies on a gold(I)-catalyzed cycloisomerization of 1-en-3,9-diyne esters to spiro[4.4]non-2-ene-substituted 1,2-dihydronaphthalenes is described. Robust with a wide variety of substitution patterns tolerated, the reaction provides the first example of a one-step strategy to construct such novel and architecturally challenging members of the carbocycle family in good to excellent yields. A mechanism is proposed in which the sequential cycloisomerization pathway was thought to involve a gold-catalyzed 1,3-acyloxy migration/Nazarov cyclization followed by a formal [4+2] cycloaddition to give the tetracarbocyclic product., (© 2016 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.)

A synthetic method to prepare (E)-(pyridin-2-yl)enones and (E)-(quinolin-8-yl)enones that relies on the respective copper(I)-catalyzed formal cross-dehydrogenative coupling (CDC) reaction of 2-methylpyridine and 8-methylquinoline with methyl ketones has been discovered. The mechanism was delineated to follow a pathway involving oxidation of the N-heterocycle to its corresponding aldehyde adduct prior to reaction with the methyl ketone. The versatility and substrate dependent divergence in the reactivity of the copper-mediated CDC strategy was exemplified by its application to the synthesis of N-(quinolin-8-ylmethyl)amide and N-(quinolin-8-ylmethyl)aniline adducts on switching the cross-coupling partner to benzamides or an aniline derivative., (© 2016 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.)

The synthesis of 1,4-amino alcohols from THF treated with N-tosyliminobenzyliodinane (PhINTs) followed by a Grignard reagent under mild reaction conditions at room temperature is described herein. Various Grignard reagents were shown to be compatible, furnishing the corresponding 4-substituted-N-1,4-tosylamino alcohols in good to excellent yields. A partial or full detosylation of the N-tosyl-1,4-amino alcohol was observed in instances involving a sterically bulky Grignard reagent, leading to the deprotected 1,4-amino alcohol product in moderate to good yields. The synthetic utility of this protocol was demonstrated by the synthesis of a 5-substituted-N-tosyl-1,5-amino alcohol from THP and the conversion of two examples to their corresponding γ-lactam and pyrrolidine adducts.

We report herein the use of an exonuclease III and G-quadruplex probe to construct a G-quadruplex-based luminescence detection platform for Hg 2+ . Unlike common DNA-based Hg 2+ detection methods, when using the dsDNA probe to monitor the hairpin formation, the intercalation of the dsDNA probe may be influenced by the distortion of dsDNA. This 'mix-and-detect' methodology utilized the G-quadruplex probe as the signal transducer and is simple, rapid, convenient to use and can detect down to 20 nM of Hg 2+ .

A method for the efficient preparation of hydronaphthalene and -cinnoline derivatives by Au(I)-catalyzed cycloisomerzation of 1,6-diyne esters followed by a Diels-Alder reaction with alkenes or diazenes under mild conditions at room temperature with catalyst loadings as low as 1 mol % is described.

A one-pot, two-step approach to prepare 2-tetrahydrofuran and -pyran substituted 1,3-dicarbonyl compounds by PhI=NTs-mediated amination/Brønsted base-catalyzed cross dehydrogenative coupling (CDC) reaction of the cyclic ether and 1,3-dicarbonyl derivative under mild conditions is reported. The reaction is compatible with a variety of cyclic ethers and 1,3-dicarbonyl compounds, affording the corresponding coupled products in moderate to good yields of up to 80% over two steps.

A synthetic method to prepare 3a,6-methanoisoindole esters efficiently by gold(I)-catalyzed tandem 1,2-acyloxy migration/Nazarov cyclization followed by Diels-Alder reaction of 1,4,9-dienyne esters is described. We also report the ability of one example to inhibit binding of tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) to the tumor necrosis factor receptor 1 (TNFR1) site and TNF-α-induced nuclear factor κ-light-chain-enhancer of activated B cells (NF-κB) activation in cell at a half-maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50 ) value of 6.6 μM. Along with this is a study showing the isoindolyl derivative to exhibit low toxicity toward human hepatocellular liver carcinoma (HepG2) cells and its possible mode of activity based on molecular modeling analysis., (© 2015 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.)

A synthetic method to prepare tricyclic bridged heptenones and hexenones from gold(I)-catalyzed double cycloisomerization of 1,11-dien-3,9-diyne benzoates is described. A divergence in product selectivity was achieved by fine-tuning the steric nature of the ligand of the Au(I) catalyst. In the presence of [MeCNAu(JohnPhos)](+)SbF6(-) (JohnPhos = (1,1'-biphenyl-2-yl)-di-tert-butylphosphine) as the catalyst, tandem 1,3-acyloxy migration/metallo-Nazarov cyclization/1,6-enyne addition/Cope rearrangement of the substrate was found to selectively occur to afford the bridged heptenone adduct. In contrast, changing the Au(I) catalyst to [MeCNAu(Me4tBuXPhos)](+)SbF6(-) (Me4tBuXPhos = di-tert-butyl(2',4',6'-triisopropyl-3,4,5,6-tetramethyl-[1,1'-biphenyl]-2-yl)phosphine) was observed to result in the 1,11-dien-3,9-diyne benzoate undergoing a more rapid tandem 1,3-acyloxy migration/metallo-Nazarov cyclization/[4 + 2]-cyclization pathway to give the bridged hexenone derivative.

Tumor necrosis factor α-converting enzyme (TACE) plays a critical role in diverse physiological processes such as inflammation, hematopoiesis, and development. In this study, a pharmacophore model constructed from a training set of TACE inhibitors was used to screen an in-house database of organic compounds, from which compound 1 emerged as a top candidate. In a cell-free assay, compound 1 inhibited TACE enzymatic activity in a dose-dependent manner. Moreover, compound 1 inhibited the production of soluble TNF-α in human acute monocytic leukemia THP-1 cells without impacting nitric oxide production, and exhibited anti-proliferative activity against THP-1 cells. We envisage that compound 1 may be employed as a useful scaffold for the development of more potent TACE inhibitors. This study also validates the use of pharmacophore modeling to identify enzyme inhibitors., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The mol-ecule of the title compound, C25H24O, obtained by acid-catalysed 1,3-migration of an alcohol group, is T-shaped. The planes of the two phenyl rings are inclined to one another by 81.9 (2)°. In the crystal, mol-ecules are linked by O-H⋯O hydrogen bonds, forming chains along [001].

STAT3 modulates the transcription of a wide variety of regulatory genes involved in cell proliferation, differentiation, migration, apoptosis, and other critical cellular functions. Constitutive activation of STAT3 has been detected in a wide spectrum of human malignancies. A pharmacophore model constructed from a training set of STAT3 inhibitors binding to the SH2 domain was used to screen an in-house database of compounds, from which azepine 1 emerged as a top candidate. Compound 1 inhibited STAT3 DNA-binding activity in vitro and attenuated STAT3-directed transcription in cellulo with comparable potency to the well-known STAT3 inhibitor S3I-201. A fluorescence polarization assay revealed that compound 1 targeted the SH2 domain of STAT3. Furthermore, compound 1 inhibited STAT3 phosphorylation in cells without affecting the total expression of STAT3. This study also validates the use of pharmacophore modeling to identify inhibitors of protein-protein interactions., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

A synthetic method to chemoselectively prepare 1H-cyclopenta[b]naphthalenes, cis-cyclopenten-2-yl δ-diketones, and bicyclo[3.2.0]hepta-1,5-dienes efficiently by gold-catalyzed cycloisomerization of 1,6-diyne esters is described. These three product classes were accessed divergently by taking advantage of the electronic and steric differences between a phosphine and NHC (NHC = N-heterocyclic carbene) ligand in the respective gold(I) complexes and that of gold(III) complex combined with substrate substitution patterns and optimized reaction conditions. In the presence of [PhCNAuIPr](+)SbF6(-) (IPr = 1,3-bis(2,6-diisopropylphenyl)imidazol-2-ylidine) as the catalyst, substrates with a pendant aryl group at the acetate alkynyl position were found to undergo preferential 1,3-acyloxy migration/5-exo-dig cyclization/Friedel-Crafts reaction to give 1H-cyclopenta[b]naphthalenes. In contrast, the analogous reactions with PicAuCl2 (Pic =2-picolinate) were found to proceed by selective 1,3-acyloxy migration/5-exo-dig cyclization/1,5-acyl migration to afford cis-cyclopenten-2-yl δ-diketones. Changing the catalyst to [MeCNAu(JohnPhos)](+)SbF6(-) (JohnPhos = (1,1'-biphenyl-2-yl)-di-tert-butylphosphine) and the acetate alkynyl position from an aryl to vinyl substituent in the starting ester led to 1,3-acyloxy migration/5-exo-dig cyclization/Prins-type [2 + 2]-cycloaddition to provide bicyclo[3.2.0]hepta-1,5-dienes.