Search Results (13,267)

Planning effective collision avoidance routes is a crucial measure for ensuring ship safety. However, position uncertainty caused by sensor noise, communication delays, and sudden changes in the maneuvering of target vessels severely restricts the reliability of traditional collision avoidance methods. To address this, this study integrates the velocity obstacle method and conditional value at risk theory to design a ship collision avoidance framework under position uncertainty. The position uncertainty of the target vessel is modeled using a Gaussian distribution. By fusing multi-source sensor data from radars and the Automatic Identification System through Bayesian inference, the posterior estimate of the vessel’s position is dynamically updated, thereby constructing an uncertainty velocity obstacle region. The Gaussian posterior distribution of the position is incorporated into a stochastic loss function to formulate a stochastic optimization model that balances navigation efficiency and collision risk. The model is solved using the sample mean approximation method and strictly complies with the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea. The results of two sets of multi-vessel encounter simulations demonstrate that, compared with traditional methods, the proposed method achieves superior performance in terms of total path length and algorithm runtime. It is capable of generating compliant collision avoidance strategies in complex dynamic crossing scenarios, attaining optimal comprehensive performance with respect to safety, economy, and regulatory compliance. Full article

In Cambodia, farmers construct artificial household bat roosts to collect and sell guano as fertilizer. We investigated farming practices and attendant spillover risks using (1) surveys on guano production; (2) an estimation of bat population size and species present using carcasses, visual identification, and audio recordings; (3) surveys of guano-producing and neighboring households on water, sanitation, and hygiene practices; and (4) the testing of guano and household food, water, and surfaces for coronaviruses using RT-qPCR. Bat roosts are constructed using dried palm leaves with coconut tree and/or steel/concrete supports. Roosting areas ranged from 42 to 327 m², bat abundance varied from 0 to 11,187, guano production was between 5 and 120 kg/week, guano yields were from 0.15 to 0.4 kg/m²/week, and farmers earned USD ~100–200/household/month. Higher guano production in the peak (normally wet) season was associated with greater bat abundance (p = 0.016). The lesser Asiatic yellow house bat (Scotophilus kuhlii) was the only bat species identified. Roosts were <20 m from guano-producing households. Neighbors and households’ hygiene risks included not having handwashing stations and not covering food in storage/while drying. Coronaviruses (Alphacoronaviruses or Infectious Bronchitis Virus) were detected in 14.6%, 17.3%, 2.9%, 1.4%, and 0.0% of guano, urine, household surface, food, and water samples, respectively. While guano farming offers economic benefits, spillover risks exist. Safe guano collection and storage, handwashing, and food covering in guano-producing communities are necessary to mitigate spillover risks. Full article

Background: Asthma is one of the leading chronic inflammatory respiratory conditions affecting children under 5 years of age, especially those who reside in socio-economically disadvantaged and densely populated low- and middle-income communities. Methods: A cross-sectional analytical study was conducted to ascertain the prevalence of factors influencing asthma and wheeze among young children attending early childhood development centres in Alexandra Township. Data were collected using a self-administered modified International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood questionnaire. The analysis was performed utilising STATA version 19. The study sample comprised 3265 young children and their parents or guardians. Results: The findings reveal that the prevalence of asthma and current wheeze was 17.52% and 35.56%, respectively, while the prevalence of a history of wheeze was 64.36%. In the multivariate analysis, a family history of asthma was identified as a risk factor for asthma (p < 0.001) and for current wheeze (p < 0.001) and historical wheeze (p < 0.001). Additionally, the use of pain medication and passing of public transport were seldom identified as risk factors for both asthma and wheeze. Furthermore, exposure to second-hand tobacco smoke (p = 0.025) was found to influence the occurrence of asthma. Conclusions: This study highlights the impact of individual, household, and environmental factors on asthma. The findings are critical for the implementation of preventive environmental health measures to address this issue, particularly in low- and middle-income countries with limited curative resources. Full article

Urban fires are highly destructive with high casualty rates, often causing significant casualties and property losses. The obstruction of the Community Emergency Corridor System is a critical factor exacerbating fire casualties, directly related to residents’ life safety and public security governance effectiveness. Currently, community emergency corridors face severe systemic bottlenecks in the coordinated development of triadic space (physical, social, and information spaces), and the lag of information space has become a fatal shortcoming restricting emergency response efficiency, highlighting the urgent need for a comprehensive evaluation framework. However, existing studies mostly focus on a single spatial dimension, lacking a systematic framework for the coordinated patency of triadic space. Based on this, this study adopts the triadic space perspective, takes 77 typical communities in China as research objects, and uses the Entropy Weighted TOPSIS method to construct an evaluation index system for the accessibility of the Community Emergency Corridor System and systematically measure its level. The results show that the patency of triadic space is unbalanced overall; social space outperforms physical and information spaces (with the latter being the lowest), reflecting deficiencies in emergency information release and acquisition. Regionally, accessibility in Northeast China is significantly higher than in other regions (Northeast > West > Central > East), and eastern China has the lowest scores in physical and information spaces due to high urbanization, dense buildings, and land scarcity. Corresponding countermeasures are proposed to address regional disparities. The triadic space evaluation framework and methodological path provide a replicable analytical tool for urban fire-oriented community emergency management and references for fire resilience governance in other countries or high-density communities. Full article

Although grazing is a key driver of nitrogen cycling in alpine meadow soils, a systematic understanding of how different grazing intensities shape the structure and functional potential of soil nitrogen-cycling microbial communities remains lacking. In this study, soil samples were collected under five grazing intensities (no grazing, light grazing, moderate grazing, heavy grazing, and extreme grazing) and metagenomic sequencing was employed to analyze variations in nitrogen-cycling microbial communities and functional genes. The results showed that bacteria were the dominant group in nitrogen-cycling communities (relative abundance: 93.99–98.98%), with significant community differentiation across grazing intensities. Light grazing maintained relatively high microbial diversity, whereas moderate and heavy grazing led to more pronounced differences in community composition. Functional gene analysis identified 41 nitrogen-cycling-related genes, primarily involved in denitrification, nitrate reduction, and ammonia assimilation. Light grazing enhanced nitrate reduction and glutamate synthesis; moderate grazing exhibited the strongest ammonia assimilation potential; heavy grazing significantly increased denitrification activity, indicating an elevated risk of nitrogen loss; and under extreme grazing, both the number and abundance of nitrogen-cycling functional genes declined markedly, with functional composition becoming simplified. Collectively, light grazing is more conducive to maintaining the balance between soil microbial diversity and nitrogen-cycling function in alpine meadows, whereas overgrazing disrupts the equilibrium between microbial communities and nitrogen metabolism. This study provides a microbiological basis for the restoration of degraded alpine meadows and sustainable grazing management. Full article

Tourism and hospitality organisations in remote, highly seasonal Arctic and sub-Arctic destinations face persistent workforce instability, multicultural team dynamics, and well-being risks that threaten service reliability and organisational continuity. Previous research has focused mainly on destination- and community-level resilience, while giving less attention to how resilience is built within tourism organisations through everyday workforce-related practices. This study examines people-centred organisational resilience through a qualitative comparative design in two northern contexts: Iceland and Finnish Lapland. The empirical material comprised semi-structured interviews in Iceland and interviews, organisational documents, and field observations in Finnish Lapland, collected in autumn 2025. The data were analysed using thematic analysis. The findings identify four recurring resilience mechanisms: leadership under seasonal and environmental pressure; employee experience across employment phases; living conditions and belonging; and ethical governance. Here, “mechanisms” refers not simply to broad topics but to organisational processes through which recurring practices support resilience in remote, highly seasonal tourism settings. Together, these mechanisms show that resilience in remote tourism is built not only through operational flexibility or crisis response, but through people-centred organisational practices that support continuity, coordination, safety, and trust across seasons. The study contributes a workforce-centred extension of resilience theory in tourism and offers a comparative account of how these mechanisms operate across two northern tourism settings. Full article

Crop losses driven by fungal pathogens remain a major constraint to global food production, reinforcing agriculture’s dependence on fungicide-based disease control. Soil acts as a long-term reservoir and key hotspot for the evolution and persistence of antifungal-resistant Fusarium. The intensive, prolonged use of overlapping single-site fungicides in agriculture strongly selects for both intrinsic and acquired resistance in soilborne Fusarium populations, contributing to major crop losses, food insecurity, and One Health concerns. This review synthesizes current knowledge on (i) target-site (CYP51, β-tubulin, cytochrome b, SDH, myosin-5) and non-target-site (ABC/MFS efflux, multidrug resistance, epigenetic regulation) resistance mechanisms across the genus Fusarium; (ii) the influence of management practices and fungicide characteristics and behaviour in soil in reshaping microbial communities and selecting for resistant Fusarium; (iii) the consequences for plant disease management and the limitations of practices like cultural and biological control; and (iv) innovative strategies for plant disease management, as well as the monitoring and detection of antifungal resistance in soils. These aspects show that soil reservoirs of antifungal-resistant Fusarium are compromising fungicide-based control and increasing risks across sectors, highlighting the urgent need for sustainable, multi-layered, integrated pest management strategies combined with robust, molecularly informed resistance monitoring. Full article

semantic communication (SemCom) has emerged as a task-oriented communication paradigm that prioritizes meaning delivery over exact bit recovery. The integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) into SemCom further enables knowledge-guided inference, multimodal reconstruction, and semantic compression through architectures such as large language models, variational autoencoders, generative adversarial networks, and diffusion models. At the same time, this integration introduces new security and privacy risks, including semantic eavesdropping, model inversion, semantic jamming, covert backdoors, prompt manipulation, and knowledge-base leakage, which are not adequately captured by conventional communication security models. In this survey, we provide a security-centric review of GenAI-assisted semantic communication systems by organizing the literature according to threat models, attack surfaces, defence strategies, and semantic modalities across text, image, and multimodal settings. The survey was conducted using IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, SpringerLink, arXiv, and Google Scholar. Approximately 180 papers were initially screened, and 53 representative studies published between 2021 and 2026 were selected for detailed review. Based on this analysis, we classify the major threats into adversarial perturbation, jamming, poisoning and backdoor attacks, privacy leakage and semantic eavesdropping, and generative-model-specific vulnerabilities involving diffusion, large language models, and multimodal foundation models. We further map the corresponding defences, including adversarial training, model ensembling, semantic-aware encryption, diffusion-guided denoising, privacy-preserving representation learning, and secure resource allocation. The survey also identifies persistent open challenges, including the lack of standardized semantic security metrics, unified benchmarks, cross-layer evaluation frameworks, and robust defences for GenAI-native and multimodal semantic communication systems. Overall, this work provides a structured reference for the design of secure, trustworthy, and attack-resilient generative semantic communication systems for future intelligent networks. Full article

Housing acquisition decisions play a strategic role in shaping urban habitability and long-term sustainability, as they directly influence the quality of the built environment and users’ well-being. From an architectural and urban perspective, housing selection can be understood as an assessment of urban habitat quality, in which economic, spatial, social, environmental, and risk-related dimensions interact to define the conditions of livability. This study proposes a multi-objective decision-support framework that integrates evolutionary optimization algorithms (NSGA-II and MOEA/D) with multi-criteria decision analysis (TOPSIS) to support sustainable housing decisions. The model simultaneously considers four conflicting objectives: minimizing acquisition cost, minimizing spatial accessibility and disutility from essential services, maximizing socio-spatial safety and long-term habitat value, and minimizing environmental and territorial risk. A real-world case study in the Tampico metropolitan area demonstrates how the proposed approach generates Pareto-optimal housing alternatives that explicitly reveal trade-offs between habitability dimensions. The resulting non-dominated solutions are subsequently ranked using TOPSIS to reflect user-centered preferences and facilitate transparent decision-making. The results show that the proposed framework effectively operationalizes the concept of urban habitat quality through an explainable, customizable computational tool, thereby contributing to sustainable urban development, resilience, and informed housing choices. This research supports the technological enablement of habitat assessment and aligns with the objectives of SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities, offering a replicable methodology for urban and architectural decision-making contexts. Full article

Adolescents and young people (AYP) experience a disproportionate burden of both mental health conditions and HIV, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs)-nations classified by the World Bank as having lower or middle economies. Mental health problems such as depression, anxiety, and substance use increase HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus that attacks the human immune system and leads to various illnesses when untreated) risk, and negatively affect treatment adherence and outcomes. However, mental health remains insufficiently integrated into HIV research and programming. Evidence on how mental health services are operationally integrated into HIV prevention and treatment for this population is limited and fragmented. This scoping review mapped existing evidence on the integration of mental health services into HIV treatment programs for AYP in LMICs, guided by PRISMA-ScR (a guideline used for reporting scoping reviews in research) and the Person–Concept–Context framework, a framework used to define specific research question in research. In this case, the population was adolescents and young people (10–24 years) receiving HIV prevention or treatment services, the concept referring to the integration of mental health interventions such as screening, assessment and counseling within HIV services, and the context focused on low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). PubMed, MEDLINE, Scopus and PsycINFO databases were searched for studies published between 2014 and 2024. Eligible studies reported mental health screening, assessment, treatment, or referral within HIV services for AYP in LMICs. Two reviewers independently screened studies, assessed full texts, and extracted data. Of 634 records identified, ten (10) studies met the inclusion criteria. All were conducted in Sub-Saharan Africa and primarily used qualitative or pilot designs. Four integration approaches were identified: routine mental health screening within HIV services, task-shifting to trained lay providers, peer-led and community-based psychosocial support, and culturally adapted, youth-centered psychological interventions. Common barriers included stigma, low mental health literacy, limited training and supervision, staffing constraints, and weak referral systems. Existing evidence is limited, remains exploratory, preliminary, and largely focused on feasibility and implementation experiences, suggesting that integrating mental health services within adolescent HIV care in LMICs may be feasible and acceptable when approaches are contextually adapted and participatory. Full article

Fusobacterium nucleatum (Fn) has emerged as one of the most extensively studied tumor-associated opportunistic pathogens in colorectal cancer (CRC). The central question in Fn–CRC research has shifted from species-level detection or enrichment toward identifying specific lineages with enhanced persistence and tumor-promoting potential under defined host and ecological contexts. Accumulating evidence suggests substantial heterogeneity within Fn at the subspecies and clade levels. Among these, the F. nucleatum subsp. animalis C2 (Fna C2) lineage has been proposed as a candidate high-risk clade with potentially greater adaptability to the gastrointestinal tract and tumor microenvironment. However, current support for Fna C2 is derived mainly from ecological enrichment, comparative genomics, inferred metabolic features, and limited functional observations, while direct clinical and mechanistic validation at the clade level remains limited. Fn has been implicated in CRC progression through multiple interconnected processes, including adhesion and colonization, host signaling activation, inflammatory amplification, immune suppression, and metabolic adaptation. Notably, these pathogenic outputs are unlikely to be uniformly distributed across all Fn lineages, but instead appear to be shaped by the combined influence of bacterial lineage, host molecular context, microbial community structure, and spatial organization within the tumor microenvironment. In this review, we summarize the lineage heterogeneity of Fn, its association with CRC, and the underlying host–pathogen interaction mechanisms. We further discuss implications for high-resolution stratification, risk classification, and clinical translation, emphasizing the need to move from species-level associations toward lineage-resolved and context-aware frameworks. Full article

Property development, roads, vehicles, and suburban sprawl cause biodiversity habitat fragmentation. Some herpetofauna are at risk from a conservation perspective. This phenomenon is simultaneously a road ecology and a public health problem. The article analyzes the impact of “campus-based growth machine” development on herpetofauna habitat fragmentation around various wetlands in uptown Albany, New York, U.S. This study fills an unresearched gap on the impact of the campus-based growth machine, roads, vehicles, and suburban sprawl on biodiversity habitat fragmentation. The research methods comprised both qualitative and quantitative assessments of property development inventories, wildlife observations, student engagements and biodiversity monitoring at the University at Albany, the cataloging of test-design and conservation measures, and the review of institutional planning regulations and roadway design features. The key finding is the need for more biodiversity conservation innovations to increase the continuity of habitats, uniform underground crossings, and the elimination of biodiversity road crossing deaths. The article presents research and management practice recommendations. The study shows a plausible association between university expansion and biodiversity reductions on campus grounds. It also identifies potential mitigation measures and opportunities for community service collaborations. Full article

Demand response is shifting towards continuous coordination of flexible demand, storage, and distributed generation across buildings and prosumer communities. Multi-agent reinforcement learning has gained attention because it can support decentralized execution under partial observability while still learning coordinated behavior through centralized training. This systematic review follows PRISMA 2020 guidance and synthesizes $n=70$ peer-reviewed studies published in the 2021 to 2025 window, covering building clusters, grid-aware district coordination, program-level aggregation, industrial demand response, and transactive energy mechanisms. The results show that the dominant evaluation context is grid-responsive building clusters, with growing reliance on benchmark environments that standardize interfaces and encourage reproducible multi-KPI reporting. Across the methods, centralized training with decentralized execution is the prevailing pattern, often combined with attention-based critics or value factorization to handle heterogeneity and global rewards. Reward design and constraint handling emerge as primary determinants of stability, since objectives mix cost, peak, ramp, comfort, and emissions, while rebound and synchronized behavior are recurring risks. A descriptive and cross-variable quantitative synthesis is also provided, showing that publication activity increased from three studies (4.3%) in 2021 to 28 studies (40.0%) in 2025, with the strongest concentration in 2024–2025. Quantitatively, grid-responsive building clusters accounted for 26 of 70 studies (37.1%), actor–critic methods for 24 studies (34.3%), CityLearn for 16 studies (22.9%), and cost-based evaluation was reported in 64 studies (91.4%), whereas robustness testing appeared in only 16 studies (22.9%). Across the reviewed studies, peak reduction was reported in 55 (78.6%) studies, whereas robustness testing appeared in only 16 studies (22.9%) and transferability or deployment realism in 11 (15.7%), indicating that evaluation remains much stronger for operational performance than for real-world generalization. Full article

The increasing digitalization of electrical substations, enabled by IEC 61850-based architectures, has improved operational efficiency while expanding the cyber attack surface. This paper introduces a standards-aligned cybersecurity risk mitigation model specifically designed for digital substations and mapped to representative attack scenarios. The model integrates preventive, detective, and application-level controls derived from NIST SP 800-82r3, IEC 62443, and ISO/IEC 27019, and is validated in a laboratory process-bus environment. A baseline risk assessment identified four high-risk scenarios in the studied digital substation architecture. For validation, a selected subset of controls was experimentally evaluated against two representative attack vectors, namely false data injection (FDI) on GOOSE messages and denial-of-service (DoS) against PTP synchronization. For the remaining scenarios, the post-mitigation effects were reassessed analytically based on control coverage, architectural exposure, and standards-aligned cybersecurity reasoning. The experimental validation demonstrated that both empirically tested high-risk scenarios (FDI on GOOSE and DoS on PTP) were effectively mitigated, reducing their residual risk to moderate and low levels, respectively. For the remaining two scenarios, a post-mitigation analytical reassessment based on control coverage and architectural exposure suggested a consistent risk reduction trend, although without direct experimental confirmation. Under this combined empirical–analytical assessment, the number of high-risk scenarios decreased from four to one, corresponding to a 50% experimentally validated reduction in high-risk exposure, complemented by an analytical reassessment of the remaining scenarios. These results provide quantitative evidence about the effectiveness of the model, even with partial implementation. The scientific contribution of this study lies in integrating multistandard cybersecurity requirements into an operational mitigation model tailored to IEC 61850 substations, combined with experimental risk quantification in a realistic process-bus testbed. The proposed model offers practical guidance for utilities and establishes a scalable foundation for advancing cybersecurity in critical power infrastructure. Full article

This study analyzes the closure, decommissioning, and abandonment (CDA) of a fuel storage and distribution facility in southern Quito, Ecuador, conceptualizing the process as a socio-technical urban transition embedded within territorial governance dynamics. While infrastructure decommissioning is commonly addressed from a predominantly technical perspective, limited research integrates reverse logistics design, stakeholder influence structures, and territorial development into a unified analytical framework, particularly in Latin American metropolitan contexts. Using a mixed-methods case study approach, the research combines documentary analysis, operational data, and 34 semi-structured interviews with public authorities, engineers, fuel marketers, business owners, and community representatives. A thematic analysis was applied to reconstruct the decommissioning logistics chain and to develop a stakeholder mapping and influence matrix assessing actor positions, economic interdependencies, and legitimacy claims. The findings show that decommissioning operates as a structured reverse logistics system embedded within asymmetric governance configurations, where economic dependency, risk perception, and urban redevelopment expectations generate competing territorial imaginaries. Technical feasibility alone proves insufficient to guide decision-making; instead, legitimacy emerges through the alignment of engineering planning, institutional coordination, and community-level expectations. The study advances an integrated socio-technical framework that articulates Engineering Management, Social Management, and Territorial Development, positioning decommissioning as a governance-driven transition rather than a purely technical operation. The results contribute to sustainability and infrastructure transition scholarship while offering practical guidance for managing urban hydrocarbon infrastructure closure in socially vulnerable territories. Full article