Search Results (67,737)

Leptospirosis is a zoonotic disease that can cause severe acute kidney injury (AKI) in dogs. A three-year-old intact male Border Collie, unvaccinated against leptospirosis, with a history of exposure to urban stagnant water presented with acute vomiting, diarrhea, and moderate dehydration. Initial evaluation revealed extreme azotemia (blood urea nitrogen, 175.8 mg/dL; creatinine, 11.10 mg/dL) and hyperphosphatemia (13.6 mg/dL), consistent with International Renal Interest Society (IRIS) AKI Grade V; urine output remained within the non-oliguric range (2.15–3.0 mL/kg/h) throughout the catheterized period (Day 0–4). Clinical and imaging findings supported acute intrinsic renal injury over chronic kidney disease. A multiplex real-time PCR targeting the Leptospira LipL32 gene was positive in urine (Ct 31.10), providing molecular evidence supporting active infection or shedding of pathogenic Leptospira spp., without identifying the infecting serovar. Empirical antimicrobial therapy targeting suspected leptospirosis, together with intravenous fluid therapy, was initiated on clinical suspicion prior to the PCR result. Renal and inflammatory biomarkers improved progressively over 22 days without extracorporeal kidney support; the patient’s non-oliguric status, hemodynamic stability, and objective clinical improvement supported this management approach. This report documents, in detail, the clinicopathological recovery trajectory of a dog with non-oliguric IRIS Grade V AKI associated with suspected leptospirosis, information that may assist clinicians in recognizing and managing similarly severe presentations without assuming that dialysis is always required. Full article

Pedestrians walking alone at night experience heightened fear, particularly women. Adequate lighting enhances perceived safety, yet conventional all-night static lighting in low-traffic residential areas generates substantial energy waste and light pollution, challenging sustainable urban lighting. This study examined a manually simulated dynamic tracking lighting condition and its impact on pedestrians’ perceived safety in real-world residential settings. We recruited 20 participants (10 females, 10 males) from a residential area and tested the effect of a single simulated dynamic tracking light. We examined the assessment of simulated dynamic tracking lighting in terms of reassurance compared with conventional static lighting. Additionally, we designed another similar dynamic tracking lighting condition with a smaller light spot to test whether the size of the light spot has an impact on perceived safety. Friedman ANOVA with post hoc Wilcoxon signed-rank tests showed that both dynamic tracking modes significantly outperformed static lighting across all three outcomes (all p < 0.001), while the Tracking mode yielded significantly higher visual comfort than the narrower Spot mode (p_adj = 0.014). Exploratory gender analyses suggested that females experienced greater baseline fear under Normal lighting and derived larger fear reductions from dynamic tracking, though formal inferential gender comparisons were limited by small subgroup sizes. The results further indicated that the configuration of light spots may exert measurable effects on visual comfort, warranting further investigation. These findings indicate that on-demand dynamic tracking lighting can enhance pedestrian reassurance while potentially reducing unnecessary nighttime illumination, offering a sustainable alternative to full-time static lighting in low-traffic residential environments. Full article

Supply-side assessments show what services are available nearby, but not how far residents travel from home. We examine alignment between neighborhood service breadth and realized local travel across Shenzhen, Nanjing and Xuzhou using 93.5 million home-based weekday trips and point-of-interest (POI) data for 11,047 residential grids. Service breadth counts how many of the eight service categories are represented within 1 km; local travel is the percentage of home-based weekday trips no farther than 2 km. Because trips are not linked to POIs, this outcome measures travel proximity rather than verified service use. A high-breadth/low-local-travel screening group, identified using within-city percentile ranks, accounts for 19.3% of grids. Its mean breadth is close to that of aligned-high grids, but its short-trip share is about 19 percentage points lower. After adjustment for observed covariates and district fixed effects, each additional category is associated with a 0.30-percentage-point higher short-trip share, about 90% below the raw gradient. Among the city-specific trip-weighted estimates, only Nanjing’s is statistically distinguishable from zero. A joint test does not resolve whether the city slopes differ, and the pooled estimate should not be interpreted as a common association across all three cities. Count-sensitive scores also show positive pooled associations, but collinearity prevents separating the contributions of breadth and POI intensity. The framework identifies where independently measured provision and local travel diverge without establishing causality or service use. It provides a spatial diagnostic for further local investigation across the three eastern Chinese city contexts. Full article

Bacillus cereus sensu lato (B. cereus s.l.) is ubiquitous in soil, but the extent to which urban-adjacent soils act as reservoirs of antimicrobial-resistant and potentially toxigenic lineages remains poorly understood globally. We analysed 243 B. cereus s.l. isolates representing unique sequence types from ten urban locations worldwide. Population structure was assessed by multilocus sequence typing and phylogenetic analyses, antimicrobial susceptibility by disk diffusion and MIC determination, and the presence and expression of nheA, hblA, and cytK by PCR and qPCR. Isolates from the same locations clustered on the phylogenetic tree more frequently than expected by chance, although isolates from different regions remained widely intermingled. Selected lineages also showed significant latitudinal distributions. Antimicrobial susceptibility varied markedly among locations, with frequent ampicillin resistance and geographic differences in cumulative elevated MIC burden that were not consistently associated with local phylogenetic clustering. These patterns may reflect region-specific anthropogenic selective pressures. The nheA gene was detected in all isolates, whereas hblA and cytK occurred in approximately half, and neither gene carriage nor relative expression was associated with elevated MIC burden. Urban-adjacent soils therefore harbour phylogenetically diverse B. cereus s.l. populations with widespread enterotoxin-associated genetic potential and geographically heterogeneous antimicrobial resistance. Full article

Perfectionism is multidimensional, yet it remains unclear whether evaluative self-criticism and high personal standards differentially identify adolescents with unfavorable depressive symptom profiles. Using data from a baseline sample of 1150 adolescents aged 14 to 19 years and six monthly follow-up assessments, a three-class quadratic growth mixture model identified low-stable, high-decreasing, and increasing/high-escalating profiles among 1129 trajectory-eligible participants. Three-Step Approach(R3STEP) models entered self-critical perfectionism, personal standards perfectionism, age, sex, rural/urban source, and highest parental education simultaneously; a sensitivity model additionally included baseline depressive symptoms. Self-critical perfectionism was associated with both non-low-stable profiles and remained significant after baseline symptom adjustment, although estimates were attenuated. Personal standards perfectionism showed no consistent association. Direct coefficient contrasts indicated stronger self-critical than personal-standards effects for both non-low-stable profiles in the primary model, but these between-predictor differences were no longer significant after baseline Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) adjustment. A targeted sensitivity analysis excluding parental education as a covariate yielded the same substantive pattern for self-critical perfectionism. The findings provide a person-centered extension of multidimensional perfectionism-depression research while also indicating that the two Child and Adolescent Perfectionism Scale(DPSCA) subscales showed only modest internal consistency and imperfect absolute factorial fit in this sample. Full article

The development of polycentric urban regions has strengthened the role of suburban settlements as secondary centres. However, centrality continues to be assessed primarily through the concentration of urban functions and amenities, while its social dimension remains insufficiently explored. This study extends the application of sociotope mapping from public open spaces to the assessment of social centrality in suburban settlement centres. The proposed framework was applied to Veternik, a suburban settlement within the urban region of Novi Sad in Serbia, combining functional and spatial analysis, a questionnaire survey, the Relative Importance Index, and GIS-based sociotope mapping. Functional and spatial analysis identified the existing urban functions, amenities, and their spatial organisation, while the questionnaire survey examined residents’ everyday patterns and frequency of centre-use activities. The Relative Importance Index ranked the relative importance of these activities, and GIS-based sociotope mapping visualised the resulting centre-use values. The findings indicate that Veternik exhibits relatively developed functional centrality, whereas its social centrality remains limited, particularly when considered in relation to users’ perceptions of the centre of Novi Sad. The study demonstrates the potential of sociotope mapping as a complementary framework for assessing social centrality and supporting the planning of socially sustainable suburban settlement centres. Full article

Automated manhole cover detection, a key task in urban infrastructure inspection, is hindered by modality-specific limitations: conventional monocular image-based detectors do not directly quantify cover-to-road elevation differences, LiDAR-based methods suffer from sparse sampling that limits recall for small, distant targets, and existing fusion approaches suffer from cross-modal spatial misalignment and lack 3D defect quantification. This paper proposes SDFA-Net, an end-to-end fisheye image and LiDAR point cloud fusion framework for manhole cover detection and diagnosis in wearable mobile mapping scenarios. The semi-dense depth-supervised view transformation (SDS-VT) module constructs semi-dense depth ground truth from multi-frame accumulated point clouds to explicitly supervise image-to-bird’s-eye-view (BEV) feature projection, addressing cross-modal spatial registration under wide-angle fisheye distortion. The fidelity-adaptive fusion (FA-Fusion) module builds a physical fidelity map by combining point-cloud projection density with depth-prediction entropy, then performs quality-aware adaptive fusion via cascaded channel-spatial attention. The geometry-aware decoupled detection head (Geo-Head) adopts an anchor-free decoupled architecture to jointly predict 2D localization, physical dimensions, and millimeter-level relative elevation in a single forward pass. A multimodal dataset of 3500 spatiotemporally aligned frames is constructed using the NavVis VLX wearable platform, covering five defect categories, with Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC)-derived relative-elevation reference labels independently validated by digital leveling. Experiments show that SDFA-Net achieves 92.9% mAP@0.5 and 63.5% mAP@0.5:0.95 with 18.5 M parameters, improving over the best single-modal baseline by 4.6, 11.0, and 8.7 percentage points in mAP@0.5, mAP@0.5:0.95, and Recall, respectively. Compared with BEVFusion, SDFA-Net achieves higher detection accuracy while maintaining a smaller overall model size and an inference speed of 35 FPS. Full article

City-level indicators are difficult to ground across heterogeneous statistical systems in the Global South, where large language model (LLM) agents accelerate multilingual source discovery but risk unsupported values and fabricated execution reports. We present TerriScan, a doctrine-governed multi-agent system built while producing a 142-indicator matrix for ten emerging centralities in eight countries. A versioned charter separates production, model review, deterministic validation and non-delegable human decisions. We evaluate it as a four-month longitudinal design case study with one instrumented four-day period; its lot evidence is stratified, and six lots required substantive interception. During 15–19 July 2026, eight defect classes were registered, each with an identifiable corrective and no recorded intra-class recurrence; exposure denominators were published where countable; and seven earlier qualifying corrections predating the register are reported. The arbiter origin recurred across classes; the exhaustive hash-resolution control remained planned. No unsupported value detected by recorded controls remained in the engraved matrix. The system stopped when work required unrecorded human decisions, but our audit found its absence rule unenforced—181 of 210 absence-state cells named no consulted source. We claim no minimal or universal architecture, but show how incident records, deterministic controls and decision boundaries make urban data production auditable and capable of principled refusal. Full article

Urban small wetlands face eutrophication. Using 15 small wetlands in Jinan, China, we analyzed phytoplankton community and trait responses to eutrophication. Based on autumn TLI (2020–2022), wetlands were classified into oligotrophic (3), mesotrophic (6), and lightly eutrophic (6). We evaluated functional α/β-diversity, phytoplankton standing biomass (a proxy for productivity), and resource use efficiency (RUE, biomass/TP). Total nitrogen, total phosphorus, and Chl-a increased with eutrophication, reaching 6.83, 0.14, and 0.03 mg/L in lightly eutrophic sites. Species richness, Shannon, and Simpson indices were highest in lightly eutrophic sites (25, 2.75, and 0.71, respectively), whereas functional richness was highest in oligotrophic sites (0.14). Taxonomic β-diversity was dominated by turnover components (63.7–73.7%), while functional β-diversity was dominated by nestedness components (79.7–97.1%). Mean phytoplankton standing biomass and RUE increased with eutrophication, reaching 44.79 mg/Land 350.64 in lightly eutrophic conditions. Biodiversity–ecosystem function relationships were gradient-dependent. Species richness positively correlated with standing biomass in mesotrophic and lightly eutrophic sites (p < 0.05), while evenness negatively correlated with standing biomass and RUE across all trophic grades (p < 0.05). Overall, these results reveal complex responses of phytoplankton community structure and function to eutrophication in small urban wetlands. The nestedness-dominated functional β-diversity reflects differences that arise mainly through nestedness rather than species turnover. We recommend incorporating these small wetlands into routine monitoring frameworks and prioritizing functional diversity in ecological health assessments. Full article

Urbanisation can catalyse development outcomes; however, rapid population growth under resource constraints can contribute to the proliferation of slum settlements. At the household level, access to livelihood capitals can shape vulnerability by providing resources or creating constraints. Although the Sustainable Livelihood Framework (SLF) provides a comprehensive basis for understanding livelihood capitals, its empirical application to household-level vulnerability assessment in urban slum contexts remains limited. This study develops an empirically validated Urban Livelihood Vulnerability Index (ULVI) to assess household-level vulnerability and compare slum settlements. A multiple-case study design was employed in two officially notified slum settlements in Kanpur, India. Primary data were collected through a structured household questionnaire, supplemented by field observations and interviews. The findings reveal a statistically significant difference in household-level ULVI between the two settlements, providing empirical evidence of inter-settlement heterogeneity in livelihood vulnerability. Capital-wise analysis indicates distinct configurations of livelihood capitals: 48 Quarter records higher level of human and physical capital, Nayapurwa records higher social capital, while financial capital does not differ significantly between the settlements. The findings demonstrate that urban slum settlements cannot necessarily be treated as homogeneous units of livelihood vulnerability. The study contributes a structured framework for household-level vulnerability assessment and provides evidence to support more targeted urban planning and policy interventions. Full article

The urban heat island (UHI) effect has become a persistent climate-related challenge affecting sustainable urban development, with consequences for public health, thermal comfort, energy demand, and climate adaptation. Numerous studies have investigated UHI using diverse observational, modeling, and analytical approaches. However, existing approaches remain fragmented and lack standardized integrated assessment frameworks. This study aims to synthesize the contemporary methodologies in UHI assessment and provide an integrated framework that supports sustainable urban heat mitigation and decision-making. A PRISMA-inspired systematic review was conducted using Web of Science (WoS) and considered peer-reviewed English-language articles published between 2016 and 2026. In line with the predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria, studies were screened and classified into several methodological domains: urban characterization, microclimate monitoring, urban environmental indicators, spatial analysis, statistical modeling, cooling interventions, and sustainable assessment. Based on the synthesized evidence, a proposed integrated methodological framework was developed, providing a comprehensive foundation for researchers, urban planners, and decision-makers to design standardized UHI studies and support climate-resilient and sustainable urban development. Full article

Context-aware building massing is an important early-stage design task: given a site for buildings, a generated massing should not only fit the target parcel, but also relate to the scale, density, and morphology of its surrounding urban fabric. This task is naturally multimodal, since the target output should remain structured and editable, while the surrounding context, including other buildings or roads, can be represented as vector geometry, map imagery, or three-dimensional views. In this paper, we study contextual massing generation using vision-language models (VLMs) and analyze their performance on this task across different context modalities during training and inference.We assemble an experimental dataset of 12,845 Melbourne massings with parcel contours, structured 3D geometry, neighboring buildings, top-down views, and multi-view 3D context images. We also introduce a learned contextual relevance metric for evaluating whether generated massings are morphologically compatible with their surrounding context. Using Qwen3-VL models, we compare no-context, unimodal-context, and multimodal-context training regimes and evaluate inference performance under controlled combinations of modalities and amounts of context. The results show that model size strongly affects generation quality, multimodal training improves the use of individual modalities, and multimodal inference provides a stronger contextual signal than isolated context inputs. Full article

Existing top-down carbon emission estimation studies often rely on single models or conventional ensemble approaches, which may limit their ability to capture complex nonlinear relationships under small-sample conditions. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a heterogeneous ensemble stacking network (HESTNet) for city-level monthly CO₂ emission estimation using electricity-centered multi-source data. A candidate feature set integrating sector-specific electricity consumption, socioeconomic statistics, nighttime light data, and environmental and climatic variables is first constructed, from which 28 core features are selected using autoencoder reconstruction errors. A heterogeneous stacking ensemble comprising CatBoost, TabPFN v2, and TabM is then developed, with five-fold out-of-fold predictions fused by an L2-regularized Ridge meta-learner. Because reliable ground-truth city-level monthly CO₂ observations are generally unavailable, the model is trained and evaluated using 360 province-year samples from 30 provincial-level regions in mainland China during 2013–2024, with provincial annual CO₂ emissions used as supervised labels. At the supervised province-year evaluation scale, HESTNet achieves an R² of 0.914, RMSE of 0.0781, MAE of 0.0580, and MAPE of 9.38%. Compared with the conventional stacking baseline, HESTNet yields numerical improvements of 0.028 in R² and approximately 12.6%, 13.2%, and 14.0% in RMSE, MAE, and MAPE, respectively; however, the paired RMSE difference does not reach statistical significance after Holm–Bonferroni correction (adjusted p = 0.061). The trained model is subsequently applied to city-month-scale predictors to generate relative Emission Proxy Indices (EPIs). Under the constraint of official city-level annual CO₂ emissions, the EPIs are normalized into monthly allocation weights to derive model-derived, annual-constrained monthly CO₂ estimates. The proposed framework integrates electricity-centered multi-source proxies, heterogeneous ensemble learning, and annual-constrained temporal disaggregation, providing a data-driven approach for characterizing intra-annual variations in city-level CO₂ emissions. Full article

Urban underground spaces are increasingly developing toward large-scale and multifunctional configurations, imposing higher requirements on the large span and ultimate load-bearing capacity of protective doors for critical infrastructure. To address the low load-bearing efficiency and susceptibility to local instability of conventional large protective doors, this study proposes a novel double-leaf, double-arched, bidirectionally supported protective door incorporating a rear grillage and horizontal coupling beams, based on a spatially coordinated load-bearing system. First, the dynamic response of a rib-stiffened double-leaf arched protective door, designated Type I, was investigated using the finite element code LS-DYNA. To address its closely spaced higher-order modal frequencies and insufficient stiffness, a preliminary optimization was conducted by adding a rear grillage, resulting in the Type II configuration. The stress concentration and localized connection damage caused by stiffness incompatibility in Type II were then examined, and a final optimized design incorporating horizontal coupling beams was proposed (Type III). The results indicate that the coordinated restraint provided by the rear grillage and horizontal coupling beams effectively mitigates the reduction in the fundamental frequency and the local stress concentrations observed in the Type II structure. The fundamental frequency of the Type III structure is 7.9% higher than that of the Type I structure. Under severe blast loading, the Type III structure exhibits a substantially improved load-transfer path. Compared with the Type I and Type II structures, respectively, its maximum displacement is reduced by 7.30% and 14.09%, and its peak equivalent plastic strain by 19.15% and 22.84%. Consequently, the Type III structure exhibits improved global deformation compatibility and effectively suppresses local instability. This study elucidates the spatially coordinated load-bearing mechanism of the double-leaf, double-arched, bidirectionally supported protective door under severe dynamic loading and represents a promising structural candidate for the innovative design and optimization of large protective doors for critical underground infrastructure. Full article

The Gaussian settlement-trough model assumes that ground settlement occurs because tunneling is symmetrical about the tunnel centerline. However, the shield causing the settlement operates in an asymmetric posture during earth pressure balance (EPB) tunneling. This study characterizes the postural asymmetry of the shield in EPB tunneling. Tail void (TV) clearance data for 1580 rings from published data on Guangzhou Metro Line 9, China, were analyzed. Two types of asymmetry indices—the horizontal asymmetry index (HAI) and the vertical asymmetry index (VAI)—were proposed. The two indices indicated systematic deviations from symmetry, with high statistical significance (all p-values < 0.001). The systematic horizontal deviation was to the left, with a pooled mean value of −0.055. In contrast, the stronger systematic vertical deviation was reduced crown clearance, with a pooled mean value of −0.097. Validation against independent shield axis records showed HAI tracked horizontal deviation (p < 0.001), but VAI did not track vertical attitude. The results indicated that postural asymmetry in EPB tunneling was a systematic, parameter-associated phenomenon, with implications for predicting ground settlement, annular grouting strategy, and risk-based monitoring design. However, the absolute values of the two indices were specific to this project and were not transferable without recalibration. Full article