Search Results (105)

Ceramic production generates large quantities of fired waste that is durable, non-biodegradable, and increasingly difficult to manage through conventional waste disposal practices. This study analyzes how ceramic waste is transformed into sustainable value in Jingdezhen, China, a city where ceramic production and cultural heritage have developed over more than a millennium. Using a qualitative multiple-case design, this study examines representative cases from three ceramic waste reutilization pathways: industrial reuse, environment-oriented reuse, and craft-based artistic reuse. The analysis shows that ceramic waste creates sustainable value through three interconnected processes: material transformation, economic activation, and cultural re-signification. Industrial cases primarily promote resource recovery and product innovation; public and environmental projects improve environmental awareness by integrating ceramic waste into urban spaces; and artistic practices reinterpret discarded ceramics as a medium for historical reflection, cultural expression, and public engagement. Based on these findings, the study proposes a material economic cultural analytical framework that explains how these value dimensions interact to transform ceramic waste from an environmental burden into a strategic resource. This study goes beyond documenting feasible ceramic waste recycling models by demonstrating that effective circular resource management in heritage-based industrial regions depends not only on technical recycling practices but also on cultural connotations and public recognition, which, together, generate value across environmental, economic, and cultural significance. These findings extend the scope of circular economy research by demonstrating a viable pathway for heritage-based industrial regions to leverage their own cultural heritage in transforming ceramic waste into environmental, economic, and cultural value. They also provide a practical model for other heritage-based regions seeking to align waste management with sustainable development. Full article

Infectious disease outbreaks strain medical resources and public-health systems, making accurate multi-horizon, multi-regional forecasting essential for early warning and resource allocation. Existing approaches face a trade-off: data-driven deep models can capture nonlinear spatiotemporal patterns but often overlook transmission mechanisms, whereas mechanistic models are interpretable but limited in modeling complex regional dependencies. To address this challenge, we propose Epidemic Spatial–Temporal Large Language Model (EpiSTLLM), which is a graph-structure-enhanced large language model for multi-regional infectious disease forecasting. EpiSTLLM injects regional adjacency information into Transformer-based representation learning to capture cross-regional transmission structure and long-term temporal dependencies. A temporal-gated cross-attention module generates horizon-specific latent transmission and recovery parameters, while a latent-space SIR-inspired propagation mechanism with a residual correction branch enables stable multi-horizon forecasting without requiring fully observed compartmental states. Experiments on the FluView state-level influenza-like illness dataset and NHSN state-level influenza hospitalization dataset show that EpiSTLLM achieves the best or highly competitive performance in most evaluation settings against statistical, deep learning, graph-based, and mechanism-guided baselines across 4-, 8-, and 12-week horizons. For example, EpiSTLLM reduces MAE and RMSE values by $9.5\%$ and $6.2\%$ at $H=4$ on FluView, and by $12.0\%$ and $13.1\%$ at $H=8$ on NHSN compared with the strongest baselines, respectively. Full article

Against the backdrop of China’s “Dual Carbon” strategy—the national strategic goal of achieving carbon peaking by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060—and the accelerated improvement of the solid waste governance system specified in the 15th Five-Year Plan, the low-carbon recycling of construction waste has become a core research topic for the sustainable development of the construction industry. To systematically reveal the evolutionary laws, research hotspots and frontier trends regarding the life-cycle carbon emissions of recycled concrete (this study defines its accounting scope clearly for the first time, covering three parts: ① direct carbon emissions generated in the stages of recycled aggregate recovery, processing, transportation and concrete mixing; ② indirect carbon emissions reduced by replacing the exploitation of natural aggregates with recycled aggregates; ③ potential carbon sequestration benefits brought by carbonation curing during the service phase of recycled concrete), the literature published from 2015 to 2025 retrieved from the CNKI and Web of Science Core Collection databases was selected as the research sample. Standardized data preprocessing was carried out: intra-database duplicate literatures were removed based on titles, authors and publication years, cross-database duplicate records were manually eliminated, and non-academic documents including news, editorial notes and conference abstracts were screened out. A total of 1340 valid publications were finally obtained to form the analysis dataset. Bibliometric tools CiteSpace and VOSviewer were adopted to quantitatively analyze the annual publication trends, national and institutional distribution, keyword co-occurrence clustering and temporal evolution characteristics in this research field. The results show that the annual publication volume concerning the life-cycle carbon emissions of recycled concrete presents a continuous upward trend, and the research development can be divided into three stages: initial exploration, rapid expansion and steady growth. China, the United States and Australia act as the core research forces in this field. Current research hotspots mainly focus on recycled aggregate modification, life-cycle assessment, carbon emission accounting, durability performance optimization and low-carbon preparation technologies, while research frontiers are gradually shifting toward multi-source data fusion, machine learning-based carbon emission prediction and low-carbon path optimization. Based on the quantitative bibliometric results, this study puts forward targeted priorities for future research: establishing a unified localized specification system for life-cycle carbon accounting, developing data-driven optimization models for the low-carbon mix proportion design of recycled concrete, and promoting the large-scale engineering demonstration and application of high-value resource utilization technologies, to facilitate the full life-cycle low-carbon transformation of construction waste recycling. Full article

Urban parks, as essential urban green infrastructure, contribute significantly to public health, psychological restoration, and socially sustainable urban living. However, existing research has primarily emphasized landscape aesthetics while paying comparatively limited attention to routine landscape maintenance as an important component of sustainable urban park governance. Drawing on Stress Recovery Theory (SRT), this study examines how landscape maintenance quality influences perceived well-being through perceived safety and restorative experience. Survey data were collected from 278 urban park users in Wangjianglou Park, Chengdu, China, and analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The results indicate that maintenance quality positively affects perceived well-being both directly and indirectly through perceived safety and restorative experience, which serve as significant mediators. Multi-group analysis further reveals demographic differences, with female users demonstrating stronger safety-related responses and older users exhibiting stronger restorative and perceived well-being benefits associated with maintenance conditions. The findings highlight the importance of routine park maintenance in supporting perceived safety, psychological restoration, inclusiveness, and the long-term usability of urban public spaces. The study advances understanding of how maintenance practices shape psychological restoration and urban perceived well-being while providing empirical support for sustainable urban green space management and the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 11. Full article

Background: Virtual reality (VR) has been increasingly used in motor rehabilitation over the past two decades, but the overall research landscape of this field has not been fully mapped from a bibliometric perspective. Objective: This study aimed to conduct a bibliometric analysis to determine the development of research on VR for motor rehabilitation, focusing on its knowledge structure, major research topics, and temporal changes in the field. Methods: A topic-based search combining VR- and motor rehabilitation-related terms was conducted in the Web of Science Core Collection for the period from 2005 to 2025, yielding 1232 publications. VOSviewer, CiteSpace, R, and Scimago Graphica were used to analyze publication trends, country and institutional contributions, author collaboration, journal and reference co-citation, keyword co-occurrence, citation bursts, and thematic evolution. Results: Publications increased in three stages: slow exploration, steady growth, and rapid expansion. The United States, Italy, China, and Canada were the leading contributors, with McGill University as the most productive institution. Research hotspots included gait and neurological rehabilitation, post-stroke upper-limb recovery, robotics- and neuroscience-integrated rehabilitation, and the rise of immersive VR technology. Conclusions: This study provides a bibliometric overview of research progress in the application of virtual reality technology to motor rehabilitation, offering systematic insights into the field’s knowledge structure, core research themes, evolutionary trajectory, and future research directions. Full article

Cold-region community outdoor spaces are not only everyday activity settings for older adults in winter, but also public-space types that need to be translated into design evidence for architecture and healthy human-settlement research. Existing restorative-environment studies usually treat improved mood, perceived restoration, and environmental appraisal as evidence of health benefits. The key finding of this study is that subjective restoration and physiological recovery are not always synchronized after outdoor exposure in cold-region communities. This discordance reveals a design risk and an innovative value that can be overlooked when restoration is evaluated only through perception-based indicators. Based on a winter field exposure experiment with 345 older adults in a community in Shenyang, China, this study compared staged changes in systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), pulse pressure (PP), POMS, ROS, and ENPQ across an activity plaza, a greenway walkway, and a street corridor. It further developed a psychophysiological concordance classification and a residual cardiovascular risk indicator for the recovery period. The greenway walkway showed the most stable concordant recovery, with 86.84% of women and 79.35% of men showing concordant recovery. The activity plaza showed a clear pattern of emotional recovery: the proportions of women and men whose psychological state improved without a synchronized SBP decrease were 61.58% and 50.32%, respectively. The street corridor had the highest recovery-failure rates, at 92.63% for women and 91.61% for men. Among women, 90.53% reached SBP values of 140 mmHg or higher during the walking phase in the street corridor, and 59.47% remained above this risk threshold during recovery. These results show that health evaluation of cold-region community outdoor spaces should not rely only on subjective restoration indicators, but should also include psychophysiological concordance and residual risk after exposure. The study translates site health effects into three architectural design judgments: concordant-restoration spaces, emotional-restoration spaces, and recovery-failure spaces, providing a testable evidence framework for age-friendly community renewal, path organization, green buffering, and winter wind-protection design. Full article

Youth drug abuse is a persistent public health concern in China. Community-based drug rehabilitation (CBDR), the final three-year stage of China’s official rehabilitation system, aims to help people who use drugs (PWUD) reintegrate into society, but reintegration remains limited, particularly among young PWUD. This study explores the social reintegration challenges faced by young PWUD aged 18 to 35 during the CBDR stage in Guangzhou, China. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 16 participants and analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis (RTA). Three themes were identified: stigma and relational struggles, socioeconomic marginalization and daily life disruption, and limitations of the CBDR service model. These challenges were not separate but reinforced one another, with difficulties in one domain spilling into others and narrowing the space in which reintegration could occur. These findings suggest that addressing the reinforcing linkages between stigma, economic hardship, and service limitations requires a more coordinated approach to CBDR service provision, one that integrates vocational support into relapse prevention, builds flexibility into surveillance procedures, and provides participants and their families with realistic, evidence-based information about the prospects of recovery. Full article

Sustainable public access to rock art caves requires an evaluation of how visitor presence alters cave microclimates. This study analyzed the response of Santián Cave (Cantabria, northern Spain) to controlled experimental visits conducted during the seasonal phase of reduced cave ventilation and elevated background CO₂. Visitor impact showed a strong spatial contrast: Sector I exhibited only minor thermal anomalies (0.01–0.02 °C), whereas the inner decorated sector recorded mean increases of 0.11 °C in Conjunto I and 0.28 °C in Conjunto II, with a maximum of 0.37 °C. CO₂ showed the clearest cumulative behavior, with daily increases of 268–368 ppm in Conjunto I and 327–376 ppm in Conjunto II, incomplete overnight recovery, and delayed propagation into connected sectors. Suspended particles also increased with visit intensity, from values below 300 particles L⁻¹ for spaced groups of five visitors to a maximum of 686 particles L⁻¹ and recovery times of 13.6 h for consecutive groups of 6–8 visitors. The results show that the most stable cave areas are highly sensitive to visits, cumulative effects become significant without adequate recovery time, and CO₂ serves as the best short-term indicator for access management. The proposed thresholds should be considered preliminary and seasonally dependent. Full article

Background: Exogenous nucleotides are bioactive compounds involved in nucleic acid synthesis, cellular metabolism, intestinal function, immune regulation, and related physiological processes. Owing to their potential roles in supporting growth, gut health, immune function, metabolic regulation, and physiological resilience, they have attracted increasing attention as functional dietary supplements and feed additives. However, the global research landscape of exogenous nucleotides has not been systematically characterized. This study aimed to map the development of this field and identify its major contributors, knowledge structures, application domains, and emerging research hotspots. Methods: Global literature on exogenous nucleotides published between 2000 and 2025 was retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection. After screening and data standardization, 710 records were analyzed using VOSviewer, CiteSpace, and R-based visualization tools. The bibliometric analysis included publication output, country and institutional collaboration, keyword co-occurrence, co-cited references and journals, and citation burst detection. Results: A total of 710 publications were included. Annual publication output showed an overall upward trend, with marked growth after 2017. China and the United States were the leading contributors, while the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Peking University were among the most productive institutions. Keyword and co-citation analyses identified three major research themes: basic molecular mechanisms, physiological and health-related effects, and practical applications. Aquaculture and animal nutrition represented the most prominent application areas, with studies mainly focusing on growth performance, feed utilization, intestinal morphology, immune responses, oxidative stress resistance, and disease resistance. In human nutrition, research was mainly related to infant nutrition, intestinal and immune health, nutritional recovery, metabolic regulation, and healthy aging. Burst detection indicated a shift in research attention from early topics such as human milk and receptors to intestinal morphology and, more recently, nicotinamide mononucleotide and molecular activation. Conclusions: Research on exogenous nucleotides has expanded rapidly and is moving toward more mechanism-oriented and more diverse applications. Current evidence suggests that exogenous nucleotides have potential value as functional dietary supplements and feed additives, particularly in aquaculture, animal nutrition, infant nutrition, gut and immune health, metabolic regulation, and healthy aging. Future studies should further clarify compound-specific mechanisms, effective dose ranges, bioavailability, long-term safety, and population- or species-specific benefits to support their evidence-based application in functional foods, dietary supplements, infant formula, clinical nutrition, and functional feed products. Full article

Existing single-image super-resolution methods for remote sensing images suffer from insufficient global receptive fields, weak high-frequency texture recovery, and excessive computational complexity. To address these issues, this paper proposes DFSMamba, a novel spatial–frequency collaborative modeling framework. First, Semantic Continuous-Sparse Attention enhances semantic perception through dynamic chunking and sparse connections while maintaining linear complexity, effectively alleviating the semantic truncation problem caused by fixed window partitioning. Second, the Adaptive State-Space Module employs parallel forward and backward state-space model branches to achieve bidirectional long-range dependency modeling and introduces an activation-guided feature fusion mechanism to adaptively enhance semantically relevant regions. Third, the Discrete Fourier Transform Module maps images to the frequency domain, establishes a global lossless receptive field, and explicitly enhances high-frequency details, compensating for the insufficient utilization of frequency-domain information in pure spatial-domain methods. Experiments on five public datasets demonstrate that DFSMamba outperforms mainstream CNN, Transformer, and Mamba-based methods across ×2 to ×4 scales. On the AID×3 task, it achieves a PSNR of 31.48 dB, exceeding MambaIRv2 by 1.07 dB. Ablation studies verify the positive synergistic effect of the three modules, with the full configuration achieving a PSNR improvement of 0.85 dB over the single-module setup. Fine-grained category, multi-scale input, and loss function experiments further confirm its robustness and generalization capability, particularly in edge and texture detail reconstruction. Full article

Post-war reconstruction in Aleppo requires more than replacing damaged buildings; it demands an understanding of the city’s historically layered urban fabrics, their differing socio-spatial logics, and their unequal capacities for recovery. Following severe conflict-related destruction during the Syrian civil war, particularly between 2012 and 2016, and the additional impact of the February 2023 earthquake, Aleppo’s recovery is further complicated by the heritage significance of its Ancient City, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1986 and included on the List of World Heritage in Danger since 2013. This study examines how urban morphology can guide reconstruction through a comparative analysis of four neighborhoods representing major phases of Aleppo’s development: Jdaideh, Azizieh, Mohafaza, and Jabal Badro. Using a qualitative historical–morphological approach, the research analyzes figure–ground relations, street-network structure, degrees of transition between public, semi-public, semi-private, and private spaces, and landmark–node systems to identify the spatial characteristics, temporal persistence, and planning meaning of each district. The findings show that Aleppo is not a homogeneous urban system but a city composed of distinct fabrics with different strengths, vulnerabilities, and reconstruction needs. The comparison further demonstrates that density alone is not an adequate indicator of urban quality or resilience. The study concludes that reconstruction should be based on fabric-specific strategies, including preservation-sensitive rehabilitation, reinforcement of public nodes, balanced connectivity, governance-aware phasing, and incremental upgrading. Urban morphology is therefore proposed as a practical, but not exhaustive, framework for context-sensitive recovery in conflict-affected and historically layered cities. Full article

Post-war Aleppo is often framed through destruction, legal constraints, and the technical demands of reconstruction. This article challenges that assumption by re-reading Aleppo’s pre-2011 municipal vision as an analytical resource for post-war recovery. The study adopts a qualitative interpretive methodology based on municipal archival material, including the City Council work programme, strategic planning presentations, project documents, and materials related to the City Development Strategy, Madinatuna initiative, the old city, Bab Antakiya, and major public-space and service initiatives. The analysis followed three steps: identifying repeated municipal priorities and planning concepts; organizing them into thematic axes; and interpreting flagship projects as spatial expressions of a broader municipal vision. To assess post-war relevance, the archive is also read against evidence of damage, displacement, urban functionality, and heritage loss. The results show that Aleppo’s pre-2011 municipal vision can be reconstructed through six interrelated axes: strategic urban development and managed growth; the old city as a living urban fabric; urban repair in the city centre; mobility and accessibility; culture and social development; and development partnerships and international cooperation. The findings reveal that these axes formed a partially integrated municipal urbanism rather than isolated projects, while flagship interventions such as Bab Antakiya, the Green Path, the river corridor, and the Citadel surroundings materialized this logic. The study also finds that this vision remained institutionally vulnerable because of political centralization and limited municipal autonomy. It concludes that post-war recovery should build on critical continuity rather than reconstruction from scratch. Full article

High-density urban plazas hosting multi-session public events often experience pulsed inflows, prolonged crowd retention, and localized bottleneck congestion, creating crowd-safety risks that cannot be fully captured by static capacity or total evacuation time alone. This study develops an agent-based simulation framework to evaluate ultra-high-density exposure and evacuation dynamics in Guangzhou Huacheng Plaza during the International Light Festival. The model was constructed in AnyLogic using site-layout data, event organization records, official attendance information, historical event timelines, and publicly available video observations. Two scenarios were examined: normal dynamic entry–exit operation under different inter-performance intervals, and overload-triggered evacuation under alternative spatial management strategies. Model calibration and event-process validation were conducted by comparing simulated congestion hotspots, key event timing, delayed dispersal patterns, and evacuation-duration ranges with historical observations and documented event records. The results show that extending the inter-performance interval from 90 min to 120 min reduced the overload duration from 75 min to 5 min and decreased cumulative ultra-high-density exposure from 25.62 to 13.93. Under overload evacuation, zonal guidance mainly improved early-stage crowd redistribution, whereas increased exit capacity produced a stronger reduction in total evacuation time and sustained congestion. Total evacuation time decreased from 185 min in the baseline condition to 160 min under the combined strategy, while effective discharge capacity increased from 231.12 to 338.28 pedestrians/min. These findings indicate that crowd safety in open urban plazas depends not only on total attendance, but also on event pacing, bottleneck recovery time, and effective discharge capacity. The proposed exposure-oriented framework provides a quantitative basis for evaluating crowd accumulation and evacuation strategies in high-density open public spaces. Full article

Virtual reality (VR) has been increasingly adopted as a digital tool in rehabilitation for balance training, coordination improvement, and motor recovery, yet the literature remains dispersed across clinical rehabilitation, exercise-based interventions, and broader motor-related applications. This fragmentation makes it difficult to determine how the field has evolved and where research emphasis has shifted. This study mapped the research landscape and thematic evolution of VR for balance, coordination, and motor rehabilitation using bibliometric analysis and topic modeling. A total of 1258 articles indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection from 2011 to 2025 were analyzed. Only English language articles and reviews relevant to VR-based balance, coordination, or motor rehabilitation research were included, yielding a final dataset of 1258 publications. CiteSpace and VOSviewer were used to examine keyword co-occurrence, clustering patterns, and temporal trends, while Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) was applied to identify latent themes and their temporal dynamics. The field has moved beyond early feasibility testing toward a more differentiated landscape shaped by distinct clinical targets, population groups, and training purposes. Seven recurring themes were identified, including vestibular rehabilitation and immersive training, post-stroke upper-limb rehabilitation, efficacy and adverse-effect assessment, balance and gait training interventions, evidence synthesis and review-based evaluation, elderly exercise and cognitive interventions, and skill-oriented virtual task training with recent expansion toward broader population groups and task-specific applications beyond traditional rehabilitation settings. VR research on balance, coordination, and motor rehabilitation has evolved into a more thematically differentiated field rather than remaining a single rehabilitation-oriented domain. By combining bibliometric mapping with topic modeling, this study clarifies where evidence is concentrated and which thematic directions are gaining visibility, providing a clearer basis for future evidence synthesis and more comparable intervention reporting. Full article

City-scale augmented reality (AR) learning paths are outdoor, multi-stop educational routes delivered through mobile devices in public space. This paper examines the Art Nouveau Path, a mobile AR game (MARG) route in Aveiro, Portugal, as a deployable learning service. The focus is on implementation requirements and traceability rather than learning outcomes. The analysis combined profiling of eight points of interest (POIs) and 36 tasks, group-session logs from 118 sessions, and teacher-facing evidence from a validation workshop (T1-VAL, N = 30) and on-site observation (T2-OBS, N = 24). Open-text responses were segmented into meaning units and coded with an eight-determinant taxonomy, with good intercoder reliability (Krippendorff’s alpha = 0.83). Logs and the post-path questionnaire (S2-POST, N = 439) were used only to describe enactment feasibility and data integrity. The strongest determinants concerned onboarding and legibility, marker robustness and recovery, and curriculum alignment, together with safety and fallback needs. These signals were translated into 18 testable requirements linked to six transfer artefacts for enactment, maintenance, incident handling, and fallback. Overall, the study provides an implementation-oriented specification to support auditability, replication, and transfer in city-scale AR learning services. Full article