Search Results (5,016)

The PPR Global Research and Expertise Network (GREN) plays a central role in identifying research priorities supporting the Global Peste des Petits Ruminants (PPR) Eradication Programme (GEP). A scoping review of PPR epidemiological research published between 2015 and 2025 was conducted to assess progress and remaining gaps across research domains relevant to GREN priorities. A total of 670 PPR-related publications were retrieved. Epidemiological research constituted 46.9% of the PPR literature, pathogenesis (19.1%), and diagnostics (15.6%), followed by vaccinology (9.5%) and immunology (7.9%). From the 273 epidemiological studies, most originated from Africa (53.1%) and Asia (37.7%). The epidemiological studies were categorized into seven domains. Molecular epidemiology and virus strain characterization represented the largest proportion of published studies (40.0%), followed by surveillance and disease monitoring (23.8%), transmission dynamics and risk modelling (12.5%), vaccination epidemiology (10.6%), analytical and risk factor epidemiology (8.4%), control strategy evaluation (2.9%), and socioeconomic research (1.8%). Progress towards GREN research priorities was variable. Molecular epidemiology and surveillance demonstrated the greatest methodological advancement, supported by widespread application of phylogenetics, serological surveillance, and expanding sequencing capacity across endemic settings. Transmission dynamics and risk modelling also showed increasing analytical sophistication through spatial modelling, network analysis, ecological suitability modelling, and dynamic simulation approaches, although applications remained geographically concentrated and only partially integrated into operational decision-support systems. In contrast, vaccination epidemiology, comparative evaluation of control strategies, and socioeconomic research remained limited in volume and operational integration. Across domains, important gaps persisted in implementation-focused evaluation, integrated surveillance systems, and translation of research evidence into adaptive eradication planning and policy development. Overall, the findings demonstrate substantial growth in the global PPR epidemiological evidence base over the past decade but also reveal a persistent imbalance across research domains and geographies. While major advances have been achieved in molecular characterization and descriptive surveillance, greater integration of epidemiological, operational, modelling, and socioeconomic evidence is needed to strengthen adaptive eradication planning and improve alignment between research priorities and policy implementation. Research and policy need to be better integrated, with policy needs driving research focus and research findings then informing policy. Experience from rinderpest eradication demonstrates that strong research–policy interfaces are essential to ensure that scientific evidence is translated into effective eradication strategies and decision-making. Full article

Background/Objectives: It is unclear whether the type of intrauterine inflammatory exposure influences global oxidant/antioxidant status or neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin (NGAL) in preterm infants. Methods: Ninety-four infants born before 32 weeks of gestation were enrolled prospectively at three centers and grouped as clinical chorioamnionitis (n = 31), preterm premature rupture of membranes (PPROM; n = 33), or controls (n = 30) delivered preterm chiefly for preeclampsia, growth restriction, or placental insufficiency. Groups were not matched, but gestational age and birth weight were comparable. Serum total oxidant status (TOS), total antioxidant status (TAS), and NGAL were measured at the 1st postnatal hour. Results: TAS, TOS, and the oxidative stress index did not differ among groups (p = 0.966, 0.525, and 0.729). NGAL differed (p = 0.031) and was lowest in the clinical chorioamnionitis group, confined to the clinical chorioamnionitis-versus-PPROM contrast (adjusted p = 0.029) and persisting after multivariable adjustment. After correction for multiple testing, no biomarker correlated with C-reactive protein, blood counts, or procalcitonin at the 1st or 24th postnatal hour, or with the first-hour Töllner sepsis score; the strongest single association was NGAL with the first-hour neutrophil count (ρ = 0.29). Necrotizing enterocolitis was more frequent in controls (p = 0.003); mortality (20.2%) did not differ among groups. Conclusions: A single early measurement of these biomarkers did not reliably classify the type of intrauterine inflammatory exposure; discrimination was modest (area under the curve, 0.689), so serum NGAL has no current clinical applicability. These hypothesis-generating findings require confirmation in adequately powered studies with serial sampling. Full article

The digital economy is profoundly reshaping the global economic landscape; however, its impact on the innovation capacity of cultural and tourism integration—particularly within developing regions—remains insufficiently empirically tested. Utilizing panel data from 43 cities in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River (2009–2023), this study constructs indices for the digital economy and the innovation capacity of cultural and tourism integration using the entropy weight method. Employing a two-way fixed effects model, instrumental variable approach (using lagged variables and historical interaction terms), and mediation effect models, we empirically examine the impact, transmission mechanisms, and heterogeneity across city scales. The findings reveal that: (1) The digital economy significantly enhances the innovation capacity of cultural and tourism integration, with a benchmark regression coefficient of 0.683 (significant at the 1% level). (2) Mediation analysis indicates two transmission pathways—enhancing development potential of culture and tourism and promoting digitalization of cultural and tourism enterprises—with mediating effects accounting for 15.95% and 2.62%, respectively. (3) Heterogeneity analysis shows a significant negative effect in megacities (coefficient = −1.3726, significant at the 10% level), contrasting with positive effects observed in super-large and large cities. This study elucidates the differentiated pathways through which the digital economy empowers cultural–tourism integration innovation, providing empirical evidence for tailored digital–cultural–tourism policies across cities of varying sizes, with implications for other developing regions exhibiting similar urban hierarchies. Full article

Landslide-generated impulse waves in deeply incised gorge regions pose significant risks to hydropower infrastructure, particularly under fluctuating reservoir water levels. This study investigates the potential global instability sliding of the Sejiang deforming slope on the left bank of the Bala Hydropower Station, Sichuan Province of China. A three-dimensional numerical simulation of the landslide–water entry, wave generation, and propagation processes conducted using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) shows a maximum wave height of 5.57 m on the opposite bank. Moreover, the CFD results were compared with those derived from Pan′s empirical formula method. In contrast, Pan′s empirical formula only provides conservative predictions for water-entry velocity and wave height, with a maximum wave height of 13.60 m on the opposite bank. Notably, the CFD numerical simulations precisely characterize complex topographic effects, such as the approximately 156% wave height amplification at the spoil disposal bend due to reflection and superposition, as well as the localized energy convergence in front of the dam. Furthermore, the impulse wave destructive potential is positively correlated with reservoir water levels. While the assessment confirms no risk of dam overtopping under the current scenarios, it highlights the necessity for differentiated protection strategies targeting three critical zones, i.e., the initial wave impact zone, the multi-directional superposition zone at the spoil disposal area, and the localized energy convergence zone near the dam. This study provides a reliable quantitative basis for refined hazard assessment and disaster mitigation in complex reservoir topographies. Full article

Data-driven models are increasingly used for flood and landslide susceptibility mapping in rapidly urbanizing regions, particularly in the Global South. In this context, land use and land cover (LULC) is routinely adopted as a conditioning factor, although its geomorphological meaning and temporal consistency with hazard inventories are seldom evaluated. Information Value (IV) models have been widely applied to landslide susceptibility, but their use for flood susceptibility in complex coastal cities remains limited. This study evaluates IV-based flood and landslide susceptibility in Vitória, Brazil, a predominantly insular city characterized by sharp geomorphological contrasts and high population density. Two LULC datasets with different levels of urban detail were tested as conditioning factors alongside topographic and hydrological variables. Eighteen models were constructed for each hazard and validated using Area Under the Curve (AUC) metrics and expert judgement. Morphological attributes were the most important predictors: slope alone achieved an AUC of 0.90 for landslides, whereas elevation reached 0.71 for floods. The inclusion of LULC increased AUC values to 0.94–0.95 for landslides and 0.85–0.89 for floods, but also introduced spatial and temporal biases associated with stationary and coarsely classified land cover. Our findings highlight the limitations of incorporating LULC as a conditioning factor without temporal harmonization with hazard inventories or adequate urban class disaggregation. We argue that, in complex urban settings, LULC is more appropriately interpreted as a proxy for exposure and vulnerability than as a dominant predisposing factor, and that its use in predictive models should be critically assessed to avoid misleading conclusions. Full article

Accurate evapotranspiration (ET) estimates are essential for hydrological assessment, water-resource management, and wetland conservation, yet global ET products often disagree in heterogeneous coastal environments. This study compared ERA5-Land, GLDAS Noah, TerraClimate, MERRA-2, MOD16A2GF, and PML_V2 across Hong Kong during 2001–2020 and examined their applicability to the Mai Po Marshes. The products were standardized to annual water-depth equivalents and evaluated using descriptive statistics, the Friedman repeated-measures test, Holm-adjusted Wilcoxon signed-rank tests, lag-1 autocorrelation analysis, and standard and Hamed–Rao modified Mann–Kendall tests. Spatial uncertainty was quantified using the inter-product coefficient of variation and summarized by land-cover class. Mean annual ET ranged from 530.09 mm yr⁻¹ for GLDAS to 1182.80 mm yr⁻¹ for ERA5-Land. Product differences were significant (χ²(5) = 94.74, p < 0.001; Kendall’s W = 0.947), and all pairwise contrasts remained significant after Holm correction. GLDAS was the only product with a significant increasing trend (Sen’s slope = 4.88 mm yr⁻², p < 0.001), while the remaining products showed no significant trends. Within Mai Po, ET estimates differed among products but showed negligible variation among aggregated wetland habitat classes. The findings support uncertainty-aware, multi-product interpretation for regional ET monitoring and cautious application to compact coastal wetlands. Full article

Fungal infections remain a major global health challenge, underscoring the need to better understand host–pathogen interactions. Extracellular vesicles (EVs) released by fungal pathogens are emerging as key modulators of immune responses. Here, we investigated how EVs from Candida albicans and Aspergillus fumigatus influence macrophage activation, focusing on the integration of pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) and cytosolic sensing pathways. EVs were characterized by nanoparticle tracking analysis, zeta potential, and cryo-electron microscopy. Human THP-1-derived macrophages were stimulated with fungal EVs, and cytokine production, gene expression, and signaling pathway activation were assessed by ELISA, RT-qPCR, and Western blotting. C. albicans EVs induced a strong pro-inflammatory response, with increased production of IL-1β, IL-6, TNF, IL-8, and IFN-β after 24 h. In contrast, A. fumigatus EVs elicited a more limited response, characterized by IL-4 production and minimal pro-inflammatory cytokine induction. Both EV populations modulated PRR expression and activated the cGAS–STING–IRF3 axis; however, C. albicans EVs promoted coordinated activation of TLR4, TLR9, and Dectin-1–CARD9 signaling, whereas A. fumigatus EVs downregulated CARD9 and dampened inflammation. These findings demonstrate that fungal EVs differentially shape macrophage responses through species-specific integration of immune sensing pathways. Full article

Argan oil (Argania spinosa L.) is a culturally and economically significant product in North Africa, yet little is known about how extraction practices shape its nutritional and sensory qualities. The present study compares mechanical cold pressing with solvent extraction (diethyl ether and petroleum ether) on roasted and unroasted kernels from Algerian argan trees. The comparison focused on lipid recovery, fatty acid composition, sterol profile, and volatile compounds as nutritional, functional, and sensory-related quality indicators. Diethyl ether extraction achieved the highest lipid recovery and was associated with higher relative proportions of oleic acid and β-sitosterol, which may be relevant for oxidative-stability-related and compositional quality considerations. In contrast, mechanical pressing preserved the authentic sterolic profile, dominated by schottenol (44.1%) and spinasterol (32.6%), characteristic of traditional argan oil. Roasting intensified Maillard-derived volatiles, notably pyrazines and furans, defining the roasted–nutty aroma of culinary-grade oils. The originality of this study lies in the integrated evaluation of extraction efficiency, fatty acid composition, sterol authenticity markers, and aroma-related volatile compounds in argan oil produced from Mostaganem kernels under roasted and unroasted conditions. These results reveal that extraction and pre-treatment are decisive levers for tailoring argan oil’s nutritional, functional, and sensory attributes, providing practical guidance for selecting processing conditions according to the intended food, culinary, cosmetic, or neutral-aroma application. The findings also support process standardization, product differentiation, authenticity preservation, and the sustainable valorization of Algerian argan oil in global food systems. Full article

Facial expression recognition in the wild is challenged by both noisy supervision and degraded visual evidence: subtle expression cues must be interpreted under blur, contrast changes, image noise, and annotator disagreement. Existing noisy-label FER methods mainly regulate samples, labels, or attention, while frequency information is rarely used to adapt the semantic representation itself. We propose Frequency-Guided Expert Modulation (FARM-FER), which treats local and global frequency descriptors as a control signal rather than an additional classifier input. A joint Haar-DWT and radial-FFT context guides soft routing among nonlinear experts and channel-wise affine recalibration of the semantic feature, while a learned gate combines the two corrections before a lightweight classifier predicts the expression from the refined representation. Across RAF-DB, FER+, and AffectNet under symmetric label noise, with additional evaluations under class-dependent label noise on RAF-DB and native crowd-label ambiguity on FER+, FARM-FER consistently improves matched baselines. At 30% symmetric noise, FARM-FER reaches 89.18% accuracy on RAF-DB, with a 1.6% performance gain over the matched Swin-Tiny baseline; the gains also hold in a controlled ResNet18 reimplementation and in class-sensitive AffectNet evaluation. Measured cost analyses show only modest parameter and FLOP overhead, supporting a lightweight yet effective design in terms of model size and arithmetic cost for noisy-label FER. Full article

Residential radon is an invisible radioactive gas produced during the uranium-238 decay series and is an established cause of lung cancer. In Canada, recent national surveillance suggests that about one in five residential buildings may exceed the national radon guidelines, yet household testing remains uncommon. This narrative clinical review translates international and Canadian evidence into practical primary-care and hospital-to-community actions. Evidence was prioritized from carcinogen classifications, World Health Organization guidance, pooled residential case–control analyses, Canadian surveillance and guidance, and the peer-reviewed literature on mechanisms, histology, and risk communication. Radon-222 can enter buildings from soil gas; its short-lived progeny deposits in the respiratory tract and emits high-linear-energy-transfer alpha particles that can damage bronchial epithelial DNA. Because elevated levels cannot be reliably predicted from symptoms, smoking status, house age, or community maps, clinicians should use a simple workflow: ask about prior testing and lower-level occupancy; test with a long-term, approved device in the lowest occupied level; act by interpreting the result, advising mitigation, and directing patients to certified radon professionals when needed; document the exposure assessment, result, advice, referral, and retesting plan; and follow up after mitigation or major building changes. This review clarifies Canadian residential and workplace guidance, contrasts global reference-level approaches, and distinguishes radon prevention from lung cancer screening. No individual patient information or human-subject data are reported. Full article

Professional wildland firefighters are exposed to substantial physical, thermal, respiratory, and psychosocial demands. This cross-sectional study examined whether cardiometabolic and work-related health indicators differed among the five provinces of Castilla-La Mancha after accounting for age and sex. The analytical sample comprised 757 salaried GEACAM wildland firefighters (663 men and 94 women). Outcomes were visceral fat level, device-derived metabolic age, metabolic age gap, the Work Ability Index (WAI), the 14-item Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-14), self-rated health, and anxiety problems. Province effects were tested using heteroscedasticity-robust linear models or logistic regression, with age and sex as covariates. Adjusted pairwise provincial contrasts were corrected using Holm’s method. Province was associated with visceral fat level (F(4, 687) = 3.21, p = 0.013, partial R² = 0.021) and PSS-14 score (F(4, 685) = 4.64, p = 0.001, partial R² = 0.029). No adjusted provincial association was found for metabolic age, metabolic age gap, WAI, self-rated health, or anxiety problems. After Holm correction, PSS-14 scores were lower in Albacete than in Guadalajara (adjusted difference = −3.17, 95% CI −5.18 to −1.16; pHolm = 0.018) and Toledo (−3.54, 95% CI −5.36 to −1.72; pHolm = 0.001). Although the global province effect for visceral fat was significant, no individual pairwise contrast remained significant after Holm correction. Provincial heterogeneity was therefore modest and concentrated in perceived stress and, less conclusively, visceral fat. These findings support age- and sex-adjusted surveillance while precluding causal explanations based on terrain, fire exposure, workload, or recovery, none of which were measured. Full article

Existing end-to-end infrared–visible fusion methods often blur edges, smooth textures and weaken target-to-background contrast. We therefore propose Structure–Detail Constrained Fusion (SDC-Fusion), a frequency-decoupled framework with separate constraints on structure and detail. The proposed method employs the Haar wavelet transform to decompose the source images into low-frequency structural and high-frequency detail components. The high-frequency branch uses a local directional-energy prior to construct the target guidance. Unlike existing Rectified Flow-based approaches that operate on the full image or a generic latent representation, our gated module applies Rectified Flow only to the high-frequency wavelet subbands. It learns a few-step residual trajectory from the visible high-frequency coefficients to the target representation, enhancing infrared target boundaries and visible textures without altering low-frequency structure. In the low-frequency branch, adaptive weighting, four-directional Mamba scanning, and multi-dilation depthwise convolutions are integrated to preserve global luminance and background structure while optimizing local grayscale transitions. Comparative experiments against eleven representative fusion methods on the MSRS and M³FD datasets show that SDC-Fusion ranks first in SSIM, VIF, Q_abf, SF, and PSNR on MSRS, and first in SSIM, VIF, Q_abf, SD, and PSNR on M³FD, while ranking second in the remaining two metrics on each dataset. Relative to the strongest competing result, the largest improvements reach 10.44% in SF on MSRS and 5.72% in VIF on M³FD. The model contains 0.535 M parameters and requires 67.5 G FLOPs. Full article

The rapid expansion of road construction has significantly contributed to economic development and regional connectivity. However, linear infrastructure such as roads, railways, and utility corridors has also introduced considerable ecological disruptions. Although increasing global attention is being paid to mitigating these effects, most existing research primarily focuses on quantifying and monitoring external environmental changes (e.g., landscape structure or vegetation coverage) while often neglecting internal ecological dynamics such as ecosystem resilience. Previous road-ecology studies have extensively examined road-buffer effects, land-use/land-cover changes, vegetation-index dynamics, and landscape fragmentation. Therefore, the contribution of this study does not lie in proposing an entirely new class of indicators. Rather, it lies in applying a combined external–internal assessment framework to a recently constructed expressway corridor by jointly examining annual land-cover transitions and leaf area index (LAI)-derived temporal variability/resilience indicators across multiple distance buffers and spatial resolutions. This design allows us to compare whether structural land-cover changes and vegetation time-series responses show similar distance–decay patterns around the expressway corridor. The results show that: (1) Land-cover transformation was mainly concentrated within the first 500–1000 m from the expressway, especially for impervious surface expansion and vegetation loss. Multi-indicator distance-gradient analysis showed that land-cover change intensity and LAI-derived variability indicators gradually approached the distal reference condition at approximately 2000 m, which was therefore used as an empirical corridor-analysis boundary rather than a definitive ecological impact threshold. (2) Within the 2000 m buffer zone, forest area increased from 21.866 km² in 2001 to 45.370 km² in 2023, while impervious surface area increased from 3.016 km² to 6.869 km². During the construction and early operation period from 2018 to 2023, impervious surface area increased from 6.268 km² to 6.869 km², indicating localized artificial surface expansion along the expressway corridor. (3) During 2018–2023, the 30 m LAI product showed a 22.3% increase in coefficient of variation (CV), indicating enhanced relative LAI variability. In contrast, temporal autocorrelation (TAC) did not show the consistent increase expected under classical critical slowing down theory, suggesting that TAC-based evidence for resilience decline was weak or inconclusive during this short period. The observed TAC/CV changes were interpreted as critical slowing down (CSD)-related vegetation variability signals, rather than as a distinct or definitive critical slowing down signature. (4) The multi-resolution comparison showed weak pixel-level correspondence between the 30 m and 250 m LAI products, indicating clear scale dependence rather than robust multi-scale consistency. The 250 m data were useful for characterizing long-term regional background trends, whereas the 30 m data were more suitable for detecting localized corridor-scale vegetation variability. Thus, the multi-resolution analysis should be regarded as a scale-sensitivity assessment rather than as direct cross-scale validation. Full article

Subterranean metro stations require substantial structural material inputs and can generate prolonged disruption in dense urban environments. Rather than assessing the environmental performance of an entire metro system, this study compares the embodied environmental impacts and surface-occupation effects of two representative underground station typologies from the Istanbul M7 Metro Line: a deep Top-Down station and a shallower Cut-and-Cover station. The proposed SECURE framework integrates Building Information Modelling (BIM)-based Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) with a Spatiotemporal Disruption Index (SDI), which is used as a physical proxy for cumulative surface occupation during construction. The assessment covers material production, transport, end-of-life processes, and recovery benefits in accordance with ISO 14040/14044, while excluding operational energy and on-site construction machinery from the comparative LCA boundary. The results show that the deep Top-Down typology requires 3.11 m³/m² of structural concrete, compared with 2.22 m³/m² for the Cut-and-Cover typology. Within the analysed cases, this higher structural material intensity is associated with a 54% increase in Global Warming Potential, from 9953.62 to 15,343.14 kg CO₂ eq/m². The difference primarily reflects the combined influence of excavation depth, station geometry, reinforced concrete volume, and permanent retaining elements, rather than the construction sequence alone. In contrast, the Top-Down typology substantially reduces modelled surface occupation, with cumulative SDI decreasing from 115,800 to 45,675 m²·month. These findings indicate a trade-off between embodied environmental burden and potential socio-spatial disruption. The study therefore suggests that early-stage metro station planning should evaluate excavation depth, structural mass, construction sequence, and surface continuity together. For deep urban stations where Top-Down construction is required, low-carbon cement substitution and localised material sourcing may help reduce material-related environmental impacts. Full article

Camouflaged object detection (COD) remains a challenging task because objects blend into the background, exhibiting low contrast, incomplete edges, and highly similar appearances. Recent deep learning methods have improved detection performance, but most rely solely on visual features and lack semantic-level reasoning to distinguish concealed objects. To address both performance and deployment scalability, we use an edge–cloud network paradigm in which lightweight visual processing operates on an internet device while semantic reasoning is handled remotely, enabling real-time COD in internet-scale applications such as wildlife monitoring, perimeter surveillance, and UAV-based sensing. We implement this in SPINet, a vision–language-driven hybrid COD framework that integrates a multi-stage BiRefNet-Large decoder with BLIP-Large semantic comprehension. Our Multi-Stage Semantic Prior Injection (MS-SPI) module extracts and injects three complementary semantic representations for global context, region-level features, and spatial attention maps into three decoder stages (Stages 3, 4, and 5) of BiRefNet, enabling hierarchical semantic guidance at multiple scales. Experiments on three benchmark datasets (COD10K, CAMO, and NC4K) demonstrate that SPINet achieves consistent improvements over the BiRefNet-Large visual-only baseline across all benchmarks. SPINet attains $S_{\alpha }=0.921$ on COD10K, $0.859$ on CAMO, and $0.893$ on NC4K, outperforming BiRefNet-Large by $+0.9\%$, $+1.7\%$, and $+3.5\%$ in structure measure, respectively, with MAE reductions of $7\%$, $29\%$, and $22\%$. These results show that frozen semantic priors provide robust and transferable guidance for COD with negligible additional parameters. Full article