Search Results (2,571)

Improving the living environment in rural areas is an important task and a key breakthrough point in implementing the rural revitalization strategy. It not only directly affects the vital interests and health protection of farmers, but is also an important measure to promote ecological civilization construction and achieve the development goal of a beautiful China. Taking environmental demonstration villages in Shaanxi Province as the research object, questionnaire data were obtained through field research and face-to-face interviews. This study constructs an evaluation index system covering five dimensions: village appearance, domestic sewage treatment, rural toilet renovation, domestic waste treatment, and construction and management mechanism. The entropy method is used to determine indicator weights, and fuzzy comprehensive evaluation is applied to measure the implementation effect. The research results indicate that the overall effect is between “average” and “good” (score 3.924), with domestic sewage treatment scoring highest and construction and management mechanism lowest. The study identifies key problems such as low farmer participation, insufficient funding sources, inadequate infrastructure maintenance, and weak environmental awareness. Based on these findings, countermeasures are proposed: enhancing farmers’ environmental awareness and participation; diversifying capital investment; improving infrastructure and establishing long-term management mechanisms; cultivating social capital; and strengthening the leading role of the government. This study provides empirical evidence and policy recommendations for improving rural environmental governance. Full article

Background: Population aging among people living with HIV (PLWH) has led to a growing burden of multimorbidity and complex medication regimens. However, the relationships between medication-related challenges and antiretroviral therapy (ART) adherence in older PLWH remain insufficiently understood. Methods: A multicenter cross-sectional study was conducted among PLWH aged ≥50 years receiving routine HIV care in Hunan Province, China. Multimorbidity, polypharmacy, potential drug–drug interactions (PDDIs), medication-related burden, and ART adherence were assessed using validated instruments and clinical records. Path analysis was applied to examine hypothesized relationships based on the transactional model of stress and coping. Results: Among 301 participants, 54.2% experienced multimorbidity and 29.2% met criteria for polypharmacy. Medication-related burden was moderate to high. The proposed path model demonstrated good fit. Multimorbidity was positively associated with polypharmacy and PDDIs, both of which contributed to higher medication-related burden. Medication-related burden was the only factor directly associated with lower ART adherence, whereas polypharmacy and PDDIs showed no significant direct effects. Conclusions: Medication-related burden was significantly associated with both clinical complexity indicators and ART adherence among older PLWH. Interventions addressing patients’ subjective treatment burden may be critical for sustaining long-term adherence in aging HIV populations. Full article

In Sri Lanka, despite cultural norms traditionally encouraging older adults to live with their families, a growing number now reside in homes for the elderly. Limited research has explored how attitudes toward aging affect these institutionalized older adults. This study examined the construct validity of the 12-item Attitudes to Ageing Questionnaire—Short Form (AAQ-SF) and its association with quality of life among 317 residents of 13 retirement homes. The AAQ-SF showed acceptable internal consistency for the total scale (Cronbach’s α = 0.71), though subscale reliabilities were modest. Confirmatory factor analysis supported good construct validity for a three-factor model—χ²/df = 1.91, TLI = 0.94, CFI = 0.95, RMSEA = 0.05—but the results suggested multidimensionality of the psychological growth factor. Positive attitudes toward aging were associated with greater quality of life, providing some evidence for convergent validity. The findings suggest that the AAQ-SF may be appropriate for assessing attitudes toward aging among older adults in Sri Lanka, though further validation is recommended. Full article

This study proposes a novel theoretical synthesis, bridging the sociology of lived religion with economic club good theory to explore the high-commitment dynamics in domestic spheres in the analysis of “Amen meals”, a rapidly spreading ritual among Jewish women. Using a qualitative–ethnographic methodology based on 23 participant observations and 53 in-depth interviews with a diverse spectrum of Jewish women in Israel, the research examines the ways this ritual functions as a gendered religious economy. The findings identify emotional stringency as a key mechanism for communal cohesion: unlike traditional religious clubs that filter out free riders through external prohibitions, this economy demands a tariff of emotional exposure and vulnerability, where public tears serve as costly signals of commitment. These enable the participants to gain access to exclusive club goods such as social insurance and spiritual agency. The study concludes that Amen meals challenge the binary between institutional–rational and private–emotional spheres, positioning women’s ritual creativity as a mutual insurance system for risks that formal institutions fail to cover. It reveals the powerful economies operating within the lived religion of women. Full article

Carbon fluxes from the atmosphere to the ocean and from the ocean surface to the deep ocean are a key pathway in the long-term sequestration of anthropogenic CO₂. Particulate Organic Carbon (POC), which comprises living plankton, detritus and other microscopic organisms, is a very dynamic carbon pool in surface waters, so an ability to assess POC reliably from satellites and autonomous profilers is fundamental to the quantification of the reservoirs and fluxes of carbon within the ocean, and to assess their response to climate change. In situ records from sample filtration during dedicated hydrographic surveys are limited both in terms of spatial coverage and time, so reliable algorithms are required that make use of readily available autonomously collected data that provide much better spatial and temporal coverage. In this paper, algorithms that use ocean colour data from satellites to estimate POC are re-assessed, and then the satellite-derived products are compared with near-surface in situ observations from biogeochemical (BGC) Argo profilers. The satellites and in situ BGC-Argo records match each other to within 30%, but a regional bias persists that may be related to the BGC-Argo fluorometers overestimating the chlorophyll concentration in the Southern Ocean. A simple coarse-resolution regional correction to the observed chlorophyll-a concentration and backscatter coefficient, plus the removal of clear outliers, improves the agreement to approximately 15%. The association of POC with the surface chlorophyll value is so strong that an algorithm based on chlorophyll-a alone provides an almost equally good estimate of POC compared with more complex algorithms that incorporate additional bio-optical variables such as the backscattering coefficient. Full article

University campus green spaces function as critical microcosms of urban building environments, directly advancing Sustainable Development Goals 3 (Good Health and Well-being) and 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) through evidence-based landscape design. Taking a large university in China as the research object, this study integrates virtual reality (VR) simulations with synchronized psychophysiological measurements and perceptual scales to quantify how three planting modes—clustered, scattered, and regular—influence restorative experiences across teaching, living, and administrative areas. Rigorous data processing ensured robustness. The results revealed functional-area-specific restoration pathways: clustered planting enhanced relaxation in living zones, scattered planting elevated vitality in teaching areas, and regular planting reinforced security perception in administrative spaces. A path model was used to elucidate how four-dimensional (4D) landscape indicators (openness, pleasantness, diversity, focus) mediate psychological and physiological responses. Theoretically, this 4D framework translates abstract restorative experiences into operable design dimensions; methodologically, VR-based multi-source measurement offers a replicable technical pathway for scheme verification; practically, it serves as a quantitative tool for planting optimization. Critically, these campus-derived insights offer transferable design principles for enhancing well-being across urban building environments, delivering a replicable VR-assisted framework that directly contributes to sustainable cities through human-centered, evidence-based landscape solutions. Full article

Background/Objectives: Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) impacts various aspects of patients’ lives. Some questionnaires assessing health-related quality of life are specific to PAH patients. The aims of the study were to translate and investigate the factor structure and psychometric properties of the Polish version of the EmPHasis-10 health-related quality of life questionnaire in a group of adults with PAH. Construct validity was explored by the relationship with results of the 36-Item Short Form Survey (SF-36) and non-invasive prognostic factors: WHO functional class, 6 min walk distance (6MWD) and NTproBNP level were measured. Methods: In a single-center study, PAH patients were included. The diagnosis of PAH was confirmed by right heart catheterization. The demographic and clinical data were obtained. The EmPHasis-10 and the SF-36 questionnaires were administered to all patients. Results: Data from 120 PAH patients, median age 57 (IQR 45–68.7) years, 88 (73%) women, were obtained. Most of the patients suffered from IPAH (73, 61%). Results revealed a unidimensional structure of the EmPHasis-10 questionnaire and demonstrated satisfactory reliability (Cronbach α = 0.94). The EmPHasis-10 showed an adequate relationship with both SF-36 dimensions and three non-invasive prognostic parameters, i.e., WHO functional class, 6MWD and NTproBNP level. Regression analysis indicated that the 6MWD was the only predictor of the EmPHasis-10. Conclusions: The obtained results showed very good psychometric properties and adequate internal consistency of the Polish version of EmPHasis-10 in PAH patients. The results showed a unidimensional structure and very good psychometric properties, including satisfactory internal consistency and external validity of the Polish version of the EmPHasis-10 scale in patients with PAH. Full article

Face recognition is increasingly being adopted in industries such as education, security, and personalized services. This research introduces a face recognition system that leverages the embedding capabilities of the CLIP model. The model is trained on multimodal data, such as images and text and it generates high-dimensional features, which are then stored in a vector index for further queries. The system is designed to facilitate accurate real-time identification, with potential applications in areas such as attendance tracking and security screening. Specific use cases include event check-ins, implementation of advanced security systems, and more. The process involves encoding known faces into high-dimensional vectors, indexing them using a vector index FAISS, and comparing them to unknown images based on L2 (euclidean) distance. Experimental results demonstrate a high accuracy that exceeds 90% and prove efficient scalability and good performance efficiency even in datasets with a high volume of entries. Notably, the system exhibits superior computational efficiency compared to traditional deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), significantly reducing CPU load and memory consumption while maintaining competitive inference speeds. In the first iteration of experiments, the system achieved over 90% accuracy on live video feeds where each identity had a single reference video for both training and validation; however, when tested on a more challenging dataset with many low-quality classes, accuracy dropped to approximately 73%, highlighting the impact of dataset quality and variability on performance. Full article

Background: Visceral leishmaniasis (VL) is a life-threatening protozoan disease prevalent in tropical and subtropical regions and a frequent coinfection among people living with HIV. Early identification of patients at high risk of death may reduce case-fatality. This study evaluated the post-test prognostic value of C-reactive protein (CRP) and interleukin-6 (IL-6) as biomarkers of mortality in VL. Methods: A retrospective hospital-based cohort of 101 VL patients was analyzed. CRP and IL-6 concentrations at admission were correlated with clinical findings, the Kala-Cal^® prognostic score, and in-hospital mortality. Results: Eight patients died, most presenting with hemorrhagic manifestations. At admission, 87.1% of patients had both biomarkers above the predefined cut-offs. CRP and IL-6 levels were markedly elevated in patients with hemorrhage or fatal outcomes. The AUC was 0.85 for CRP and 0.87 for IL-6, with no significant difference between markers. Optimal prognostic cut-offs were 150 mg/L for CRP and 90 pg/mL for IL-6. Conclusions: In this sample, CRP and IL-6 showed good prognostic performance in VL. In patients with low initial clinical risk, positive biomarker results substantially increased the probability of death. When combined with Kala-Cal^®, these markers may improve risk stratification and guide referral decisions. Full article

Fowl adenovirus serotype 4 (FAdV-4) is the major causative agent of hydropericardium-hepatitis syndrome (HHS), a disease responsible for considerable economic losses in poultry production. Although inactivated and live-attenuated vaccines reduce mortality, continued outbreaks highlight the need to optimize vaccination strategies. To address these limitations, we developed and evaluated a bivalent subunit vaccine composed of recombinant hexon-L1 and fiber-2 proteins, two major antigenic determinants associated with neutralization and pathogenicity. The proteins were expressed in Escherichia coli, purified under native conditions, confirmed for purity and antigenicity, and emulsified into a water-in-oil formulation. Chickens were immunized with either 10 μg or 20 μg doses, boosted after 14 days, and challenged with the homologous virulent FAdV-4 strain SDLC202009. The 20 μg dose conferred complete survival, eliminated histopathological lesions, prevented viral detection in tissues by PCR and immunohistochemistry, and fully blocked viral shedding. Similarly, the 10 μg dose induced a good protection with only minor pathological differences compared to the group treated with 20 μg. These results demonstrate that a bivalent hexon-L1 and fiber-2 subunit formulation elicits strong, dose-dependent humoral and tissue-level protection against homologous FAdV-4 challenge under the conditions tested. The experimental design did not include a monovalent fiber-2 comparator; therefore, conclusions regarding the relative contribution of each antigen are not drawn. Full article

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals requires intangible cultural heritage (ICH) policies that safeguard living heritage while enabling inclusive participation, capacity building, responsible use, and resilience. We introduce a reproducible, text-as-data framework that links semantic-agenda discovery to mechanism-level policy diagnosis by coupling BERTopic with the Policy Modeling Consistency (PMC) index. Using a corpus of 26 national-level Chinese ICH policies, BERTopic reconstructs agenda structure and stage-wise shifts; PMC operationalizes sustainable governance through nine primary dimensions and 45 binary indicators to test whether policies encode long-horizon, monitorable, and feedback-enabled governance loops. The agenda is dominated by inventory-based listing and key-item safeguarding, then expands toward standardization, implementation coordination, and communication/participation, and recently pivots toward resource allocation and performance governance. Policy design quality is moderate (mean PMC = 6.15; 8 Good, 14 Average, 4 Poor). Strengths concentrate on stated goals, instrument mixes, and implementation arrangements, whereas recurrent gaps cluster in time institutionalization (timelines, milestones, rolling revision), legal-institutional enforceability, and operational monitoring-evaluation-feedback provisions. We translate these bottlenecks into an SDG-aligned upgrading pathway that hardens temporal targets, binds evaluation to budgets and accountability, and codifies participation rights and risk boundaries, enabling ICH safeguarding to shift from project-style action to sustainable, cross-cycle governance. Full article

Zoonotic Salmonella strains are major pathogens causing foodborne illness, and poultry products are among the main sources of infection. Biosecurity on poultry farms is central to preventing the introduction of Salmonella; together with vaccination, it can reduce the risk of meat and eggs becoming contaminated. Live Salmonella vaccines are conveniently administered via drinking water, and good vaccination practices are essential to ensure flock protection. This requires drinking water to be compatible with live vaccines. Data about the impact of water quality on vaccine viability are limited; therefore, this study investigated the impact of different water parameters on the stability of a bivalent live Salmonella vaccine. In addition, the impact of the most common disinfectants used for drinking water sanitization was assessed. Fluoride, nitrate, sulphate levels, and hardness had little impact on vaccine survival, while aluminium, arsenic, iron, and manganese levels had a pronounced, dose-dependent effect. pH value, conductivity, and chloride levels impacted the vaccine stability only at high levels. Free chlorine, chlorine dioxide, and hydrogen peroxide strongly reduced the viability of the vaccine, even though a water stabilizer offered protection from chlorine and chlorine dioxide but not from hydrogen peroxide. These findings highlight the importance of drinking water quality for effective vaccination. Full article

The goal of antiretroviral therapy (ART) is to achieve viral suppression and improve the quality of life in people living with HIV (PLWH). Targeting the determinants of self-rated health in virally suppressed PLWH could significantly contribute towards sustaining the quality of life and health gains from ART. A qualitative study was conducted to investigate the determinants of excellent self-rated health in PLWH who are virally suppressed in the Eastern Cape province. A descriptive cross-sectional study using qualitative approach was conducted among 26 consenting adults living with HIV who have achieved viral load suppression in the rural province of the Eastern Cape using in-depth interviews. Themes were generated from the qualitative data using thematic analysis in NVivo 13^®. All participants described what they perceived as excellent quality of life as mostly determined by self-system (downward counterfactual thinking and pain discounting), perceived improved health, and adherence to recommended healthy behaviours (ART, diet, physical activity, and non-use of tobacco and alcohol products). Income/financial support availability and good healthcare access emerged as indispensable prerequisites for achieving and maintaining good health or adherence to healthy behaviours. Targeting the determinants of Self-Rated Health (SRH) has the potential to greatly improve physical and mental well-being of PLWH beyond viral suppression. Interventions can be more effective by drawing from evidence generated from context-based research. Full article

Drawing upon social presence and perceived value theories, this study examines how time-limited (TL) and quantity-limited (QL) promotions influence consumers’ purchase intention in live-streaming shopping. Through two controlled experiments (using countdown prompts for TL and inventory visualization for QL), the findings reveal distinct mechanisms: TL promotions elevate functional value by fostering a perception of collective synchronicity, whereas QL promotions boost social value identification through the perception of interactive control. Notably, this latter pathway is moderated by social cue sensitivity. Theoretically, this work unveils a “dual social presence–perceived value” framework that overcomes the limitations of single-mediation models and integrates evidence from eye-tracking and neurobehavioral analysis. Practically, it proposes a strategic promotion-matching criterion (recommending TL for high-circulation goods and QL for scarce items) to optimize live-streaming marketing effectiveness. Full article

In response to escalating global crises and widespread emotional distress, this paper advances a novel integrative framework that reconceptualizes emotional regulation as a relational public infrastructure essential for societal resilience. While traditional models treat emotional regulation as an individual psychological trait, we challenge this paradigm by repositioning it as a systemic capacity grounded in a psychodynamic living systems model. We argue that early caregiving experiences do not merely influence private development but form a foundational “affective infrastructure” that determines long-term social stability. Through this lens, the capacity to be alone is redefined from a solitary milestone to a relationally enabled skill that facilitates collective autonomy and prevents social polarization. We posit that when these relational fields are destabilized by inequality, the resulting dysregulation is a systemic failure rather than an individual deficit. The paper concludes by advocating for a normative shift in public health, treating emotional well-being as a public good cultivated through institutional systems of attunement. This perspective offers a timely and urgent vision for fostering inclusive, cooperative, and emotionally robust futures. Full article