Search Results (9,941)

Background/Objectives: To analyse trends in online information-seeking behaviour for five major cancers in Hungary, compare them with global trends, and assess changes during the COVID-19 pandemic, cancer-related awareness campaigns, and major cancer-related events on search activity. Methods: A retrospective observational infodemiological study was conducted using Google Trends™ (GT) data for lung, colorectal, breast, prostate, and pancreatic cancers between 2013 and 2022. Search intensity was assessed using uncorrected relative search volume (RSV_raw) as the primary measure, complemented by RSV_sens, as an Internet penetration-adjusted sensitivity analysis. Descriptive statistics, parametric tests, time-series and seasonality analyses, Mann–Kendall tests, and joinpoint regression were performed using IBM SPSS Statistics 22.0, PAST 4.03, and Joinpoint 5.3.0 (α: 0.05; 95% confidence interval [CI]). Benjamini–Hochberg (BH) false discovery rate (FDR) correction was applied for multiple testing. Results: Among the cancer types relevant to our study, lung and breast cancer showed the highest reference-adjusted RSV (RSV_ref: 61) in Hungary, followed by prostate (RSV_ref: 59), colorectal (RSV_ref: 52), and pancreatic cancer (RSV_ref: 11); whereas globally, breast cancer ranked first (RSV_ref: 49). RSV_sens showed significant decreasing trends for all five cancer types (Mann–Kendall, all p < 0.05), with average annual percentage changes (AAPCs) of −5.39% for lung, −4.06% for breast, −3.56% for colorectal, −3.59% for prostate, and −5.23% for pancreatic cancer, respectively (all p < 0.05). Breast and prostate cancers exhibited significant (p < 0.001) and recurring seasonal peaks. During COVID-19 (vs. the pre-pandemic period), mean RSV values decreased by 10–30% across all cancers; only colorectal cancer-related campaigns were associated with a notable increase in search intensity (+66.9%, p = 0.013, q = 0.058), although this association did not remain significant after FDR correction.. Symptom-related searches predominated, whereas screening- and prevention-related queries were infrequent during the study period. Conclusions: GT may be a useful complementary tool for monitoring public interest and evaluating public health communication. The absence of consistent increases in search activity during most campaign periods, together with the predominance of symptom-related queries, suggests that current communication initiatives may have limited measurable visibility in GT search behaviour and highlights the need to strengthen communication on cancer prevention and early detection. Full article

Seasonal snow regulates spring water supply and vegetation development, thereby shaping vegetation responses to summer compound dry–hot events. Whether snowmelt timing relative to event onset explains the contrast between peak damage and cumulative deficit remains unresolved. Regional observations from 2006 to 2025 were integrated with high-resolution satellite data across Northwest China to combine regional association analyses with local comparisons within the same events. Snowmelt completion timing, the snowmelt–event interval, antecedent root-zone moisture, and local snow–terrain conditions were evaluated. Earlier snowmelt was associated with lower peak damage but greater seasonal cumulative vegetation deficit. As the snowmelt–event interval increased from 56 to 148 days, cumulative deficit decreased by 9.30 z·observations. The mean standardized root-zone moisture residual declined from 0.12 during the initial post-snowmelt period to −0.43 in the last valid period. In local annual-baseline comparisons, late-snow candidates showed greater peak damage and cumulative deficit than matched controls. Under an event-preceding baseline, candidate pixels had 0.0489 lower cumulative EVI2 deficit than controls across 77 event-sensitive samples, and this direction persisted after sequentially excluding mountain systems. Future scenarios showed jointly high peak damage and cumulative deficit in the Altai under some climate combinations. These results provide evidence for incorporating snowmelt preconditioning into assessments of mountain vegetation risk that account for both event impacts and seasonal losses. Full article

Wildfires are an underexplored component of the Earth system that can alter atmospheric chemistry and climate by emitting greenhouse gases and aerosols. Biomass burning (BB) emissions perturb tropospheric chemistry by releasing ozone precursors and reactive nitrogen, degrading air quality and enhancing regional radiative forcing. This study investigates the effects of interannual variability (IAV) in BB emissions on short-lived tropospheric constituents, namely aerosols, CO, O₃ and NO₂, through global chemistry transport model (CTM) experiments spanning 1997–2015, a period encompassing strong El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events and associated major wildfires. BB emissions were derived from the Global Fire Emissions Database version 5 (GFED5), which better represents the atmospheric impacts of major wildfire events than its predecessors. Using the Tracer Model 5 Massively Parallel (TM5-MP) CTM, we conducted three simulations: a base scenario with interannually varying emissions, a mean scenario retaining the seasonal cycle but removing IAV, and a zero scenario with BB emissions nullified. We find that BB IAV contributes substantially to CO IAV in all regions, whereas O₃ is influenced much less, except in regions directly affected by ENSO. BB is associated with aerosol variability over boreal and tropical burning regions and contributes to NO₂ variability outside industrialised regions. Full article

Heat pumps are increasingly used for low-temperature heating applications. But their operation can create electricity demand peaks during periods of high thermal load. This paper presents a concept and calculation study for integrating phase change materials (PCMs) with air-to-water heat pump (AWHP) systems as a condenser-side thermal buffer for residential buildings. The analyzed retrofit-oriented storage unit is a 200 L tank containing 30% PCM by volume, corresponding to 60 L of paraffin PCM and 140 L of water. The sizing calculation gives 3.08 kWh of PCM thermal storage, 0.81 kWh of sensible storage in the remaining water over the 55–60 °C interval, and almost 3.89 kWh of total short-term thermal reserve for the PCM-plus-water tank. A 200 L water tank over the same 5 °C interval would store approximately 1.16 kWh. At the nominal 14 kW heat pump output, the PCM buffer corresponds to about 13.2 min of operation. At representative part load it corresponds to about 53 min at 25% load and 26 min at 50% load. The PCM sizing model predicts storage capacity, buffer time and possible cycling relevance, but it does not by itself predict a seasonal COP increase. Therefore, annual electricity and economic effects are evaluated only as COP-uplift sensitivity cases, including 0%, 3%, 4%, 5%, 8%, 15% and 28.6%. Given the assumptions in this study, the PCM add-on reaches positive net present value at approximately 11% COP uplift when the initial marginal investment and discounted year 10 replacement cost are considered. Approximately 14.1% is reached if the replacement cost is added upfront as a simplified lifecycle basis. The results indicate that the condenser-side PCM buffer may be technically useful for short-term thermal buffering and possible on-off cycle reduction, but its annual energy and economic benefit requires dynamic simulation or experimental validation. Moreover, peak-demand reduction, demand shifting and renewable electricity utilization are discussed as potential applications of the buffer concept. Full article

The electrification of residential heating through heat pumps represents one of the central directions of the European energy transition; however, evaluating these systems requires moving beyond classical approaches limited to purely energy-based indicators. This paper proposes an integrated 3E analysis (Energy–Economy–Environment) of a hybrid system composed of a split-type air-to-water heat pump (nominal heating capacity of 8 kW, R410A refrigerant) and an on-grid photovoltaic installation with a peak power of 6.02 kWp, installed in a single-family house with a usable floor area of 122.3 m², located in climatic zone II with a conventional winter design outdoor temperature of t_ext = −15 °C. Operational data, collected over two consecutive heating seasons (2024–2025 and 2025–2026) at daily resolution and aggregated monthly, were processed to determine the seasonal performance factor (SPF), the specific heat demand, the operating costs compared with a conventional natural-gas solution, and the climatic impact through the TEWI (Total Equivalent Warming Impact) indicator. The results show SPF values of 3.30–3.51 (±7%, standard uncertainty), a strong correlation between outdoor temperature and COP (at both the monthly and daily levels), average annual savings of approximately 2834 RON compared with the natural-gas solution, and a payback period of 15–16 years. The cumulative climatic impact over the equipment’s lifetime (TEWI ≈ 35.1 t CO₂-eq over 15 years) is offset to a large extent (≈83%) by the emissions avoided through photovoltaic production (≈29.25 t CO₂-eq). The results indicated a higher LCCP (Life Cycle Climate Performance) compared with TEWI, by approximately 4.0%, for the system presented in this paper. The study also identifies limitations associated with the local electricity grid infrastructure, which reduce the exploitation of photovoltaic production during periods of high solar potential, and proposes optimization directions such as battery storage and improvements to the building envelope. The results support the need for multicriteria, 3E/4E-type assessments to underpin decisions on the decarbonization of the residential building sector. Full article

Legumes play an important role in agriculture by enriching soil with nitrogen, drawing water and nutrients from deeper soil layers, and supplying organic matter. They are also a valuable source of food for humans and animals. Protecting these plants from pests usually involves the use of synthetic products, whilst non-chemical methods remain poorly understood. The use of plant-based extracts is one possible approach. There is limited data in the available literature on the use of aqueous extracts (which is an easy and potentially low-cost solution) to protect legumes from pests. In particular, there is a lack of long-term studies conducted under field conditions. Accordingly, the aim of the three-year field studies was to determine the effect of aqueous tarragon extracts, prepared from dried and fresh plant material at concentrations conventionally defined as 2% (D2), 5% (D5) and 10% (D10) for the dried material, and 10% (F10), 20% (F20) and 30% (F30) for fresh material, on the control of two serious legume pests: Sitona spp. weevils and the broad bean weevil (Bruchus rufimanus Boh.). Aqueous extracts of tarragon reduced the area of losses and the percentage of leaf blade losses caused by adult Sitona spp. There were no significant differences between extracts using dry or fresh material as well as between different concentrations of the extracts. The effect of extracts was visible particularly during the early stages of plant growth in two out of three study seasons; this is especially significant given that these insects cause the worst damage during this period. No significant effect of the most studied extracts on the feeding of Sitona spp. larvae was observed. In D10 and F10 there was a significantly lower proportion of damaged nodules than in the control; however, this effect was markedly weaker than when Ch was used. All extracts from the dried plant material and F30 proved to be effective in reducing seed damage caused by B. rufimanus. However, the percentage of damaged seeds remained high, indicating that weekly application of tarragon extracts is not sufficient to protect broad beans against this pest. Taking into account the effect on the plants’ morphological parameters, the aqueous extract prepared from dried material at a concentration of 10% (D10) should be considered the most effective in practice. The damage caused by adult Sitona spp. and B. rufimanus differed significantly between years of the study. Full article

Grid-deficient environments such as Iraq experience frequent and prolonged outages, forcing buildings to operate as isolated microgrids for substantial periods. This study proposes a hierarchical hybrid energy management controller combining a tabular Q-learning supervisory master based on reinforcement learning (RL), an Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) tactical slave, and a physical safety layer that protects urgent-load service whenever physically feasible. The controller was evaluated over a full year using measured Iraqi irradiance and grid-availability data and compared with rule-based, standalone ANFIS, standalone RL, model predictive control, and perfect-foresight dynamic programming benchmarks. For the learned controllers, annual performance is reported as mean ± standard deviation across four independent retraining runs, while generalisation is assessed separately using a seasonally distributed four-month temporal hold-out. The Hybrid achieved a mean annual cost of $9353.49 ± 122.63, a 20.91% reduction relative to the deterministic rule-based baseline. It also reduced diesel use by 55.6%, generator starts by 56.4%, and deep-discharge events by 54.8%, while maintaining 100% urgent-load service. Standalone RL used less fuel but showed more generator cycling and deep discharge. On the 11,808-timestep hold-out, normalised cost differed by 2.6% for RL and 1.2% for ANFIS between training and test periods. The Hybrid mean annual cost was 12.48% above the perfect-foresight DP lower bound. These results support the proposed architecture as a lightweight, priority-aware option for weak-grid microgrids. Full article

Ready-mixed concrete (RMC) produced under commercial conditions exhibits substantial variation in mix proportions that may not be fully represented by environmental assessments based on representative or average mixtures. This study investigated the relationship between actual mix design variability and carbon emissions using approximately 13,000 production records collected from 25 RMC manufacturers in South Korea. Carbon emissions were calculated for a functional unit of 1 m³ at the raw material production stage using the Korean national Life Cycle Inventory database. Variations associated with compressive strength, geographical region, company size, seasonal production conditions, and supplementary cementitious material (SCM) replacement ratio were evaluated using descriptive statistics and regression analysis. Substantial emission variability was observed within the same compressive strength grade, with average emissions ranging from 236.17 kg CO₂-eq/m³ for 21 MPa concrete to 299.36 kg CO₂-eq/m³ for 30 MPa concrete. Cement content exhibited a strong relationship with calculated carbon emissions (R² = 0.996–0.998), although this relationship partly reflects the calculation framework in which cement quantity is directly used as an input to the GWP calculation. SCM replacement ratio showed a consistent negative relationship with calculated carbon emissions across the investigated strength grades (R² = 0.735–0.863). Descriptive differences in carbon emissions were also observed across geographical regions, company-size groups, and seasonal production periods. Field-scale validation at two commercial batch plants showed that mixtures incorporating approximately 35% SCM replacement satisfied the specified requirements for slump, air content, and 28-day compressive strength under the evaluated production conditions. These findings demonstrate the importance of incorporating actual production variability and distribution characteristics into carbon assessment of commercially produced RMC and provide a basis for improving low-carbon mix design and environmental performance assessment. Full article

Urban air pollution remains a major challenge in rapidly growing metropolitan regions, but pollutant behavior and meteorological controls differ substantially among cities. This study compares air-quality trends in Shanghai, Delhi, Paris, Los Angeles, and São Paulo during 2018–2023 using observations of PM_2.5, PM₁₀, O₃, NO₂, and SO₂ together with temperature, sea-level pressure, and wind speed. Annual and seasonal means, exceedance frequencies, and pollutant–meteorology relationships were evaluated. PM_2.5 declined in Shanghai from 43.52 µg/m³ in 2018 to 27.02 µg/m³ in 2022 before increasing to 30.28 µg/m³ in 2023. Delhi remained the most persistently polluted city, with PM_2.5 remaining above 87 µg/m³ throughout the period, whereas Los Angeles maintained substantially lower PM_2.5 concentrations. Paris showed declining PM_2.5 and NO₂, while São Paulo exhibited increasing PM_2.5 by 2023. The analysis of the study concerning exceedances showed that Delhi and Shanghai had 2025 and 1881 PM_2.5 exceedance days, respectively, as compared to 366 in Los Angeles. For O₃, Los Angeles had the highest number of exceedance days, 1973, followed by Shanghai, 1801, then Paris, 1347, and São Paulo, 1196, whereas Delhi had the lowest figure, 571. Moreover, when the influence of meteorological factors on PM_2.5 and O₃ is examined, it is observed that temperature was negatively correlated with PM_2.5 in Delhi (r = −0.66), in Shanghai (r = −0.25), and in Paris (r = −0.21), while Los Angeles (r = 0.16) and São Paulo (r = 0.09) showed a weak positive relationship. Sea-level pressure was most strongly associated with PM_2.5 in Delhi (r = 0.65), and wind speed was negatively correlated with PM_2.5 in all five cities. Temperature–ozone relationships were strongest in Paris (r = 0.71) and Los Angeles (r = 0.66). These results emphasize strong city-specific differences in pollutant trends and meteorological sensitivity and support locally tailored air-quality management strategies. Full article

Herbaceous perennials contribute to the functional stability and ornamental quality of urban plantings, but these dimensions are rarely assessed together. This study evaluated nine perennial taxa in an established municipal planting in southern Poland. During a 370-day period fortnightly observations documented canopy development, flowering, foliage persistence, winter interest, overwintering and stand retention. Ten performance indicators were calculated and taxon profiles were compared using hierarchical cluster analysis. Canopy Closure Time ranged from 43 days in Rudbeckia fulgida ‘Goldsturm’ to 109 days in Imperata cylindrica ‘Red Baron’, whereas Echinacea purpurea ‘Golden Skipper’ did not achieve complete canopy closure. All other taxa showed 100% overwintering and stand retention; the values for E. purpurea ‘Golden Skipper’ were 67% and 11%. R. fulgida ‘Goldsturm’ and Miscanthus sinensis ‘Silberspinne’ achieved the highest Flowering Effect, while M. sinensis ‘Silberspinne’ and Panicum virgatum ‘Shenandoah’ had the highest Structural Value. Ornamental Continuity was greatest in R. fulgida ‘Goldsturm’ and E. purpurea ‘Golden Skipper’, despite the poor persistence of the latter. Four clusters differentiated taxa according to canopy stability, flowering, persistent structure, and seasonal foliage effects. Within the studied perennial planting, functional stability and ornamental continuity arose from different trait combinations, suggesting complementary roles among the evaluated taxa. Full article

Continuous monitoring of animal behavior may provide quantitative information on responses to environmental changes; however, its application in seismobiological research requires reliable characterization of baseline behavioral variability. This study developed and evaluated an edge-based bioacoustic monitoring system for the continuous analysis of vocal activity in budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus). Ten birds were monitored under stable housing conditions from June 2025 to May 2026. Audio was processed locally on a Raspberry Pi-based system that combined a pretrained YAMNet feature extractor with a task-specific binary classifier. Vocal activity was quantified using the vocal activity second (VAS), defined as a 1 s interval containing at least one detected vocalization. Time-series analysis revealed a pronounced diel organization of vocal activity, with increased activity during daylight hours and minimal activity at night, together with seasonal variability. Wavelet and periodogram analyses identified a periodic component near 24 h, with weaker components within the 2–8 h range. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of autonomous edge-based monitoring of avian vocal behavior and establish a quantitative analysis of acoustic activity. The present study represents a methodological framework for the collection and analysis of avian acoustic signals using machine learning and computational signal processing approaches. The proposed approach provides a quantitative framework for investigating changes in avian behavior and for evaluating whether potential behavioral responses in vocal organization are associated with environmental factors. Full article

Long-term time series forecasting is important in energy, transportation, and meteorology, yet existing methods struggle to model multi-scale features and preserve local sequence structure. We propose PatchRNN, a decomposition- and structure-aware framework for multivariate forecasting. Its parallel trend branch uses multi-scale patch embedding to capture and fuse long-term patterns at different temporal granularities. The seasonal forecasting branch separates the residual components via average pooling and employs a segmented recurrent neural network (SegRNN) to efficiently model their periodic fluctuations. Joint optimization combines point-wise error with Patch-wise Structural Loss (PSLoss). Fourier-based adaptive partitioning enables PSLoss to constrain local trend correlation, fluctuation variance, and mean. Extensive experiments across multiple real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model obtains competitive long-term forecasting performance while preserving favorable local-structure consistency. On the real-world ocean-wave dataset School.nc, our model yields an MSE of 0.814 at prediction horizon 96, corresponding to an 8.64% reduction over the best competing baseline. Full article

Bike-sharing systems are widely promoted as a low-carbon transport option for sustainable urban mobility, but their environmental benefits depend on the travel modes they replace and the emissions generated by system operations. This study develops a net operational carbon-reduction framework for free-floating bike sharing (FFBS) that jointly considers distance-based modal substitution and bicycle rebalancing. Distance tolerance and the fuzzy maximum-membership principle are used to identify plausible modal substitutions, while traveller characteristics and surrounding points of interest (POIs) are incorporated to refine substitution shares. The framework is applied to large-scale bike-sharing trip data from Nanjing, China, for October 2019, February–March 2020, and June 2020. Under the baseline accounting assumptions, the system was estimated to achieve positive net operational greenhouse-gas (GHG) reductions in all three periods, with most riding-stage benefits retained after accounting for rebalancing emissions. Carbon-reduction density was higher in June 2020 than in October 2019 in five of the six analysed districts, while changes in demand density varied across districts. The period differences are interpreted alongside seasonal and pandemic-related changes in travel conditions. These findings highlight the importance of jointly considering modal substitution, operational emissions, and spatial heterogeneity when evaluating the environmental performance of bike-sharing systems. The proposed framework can support district-level assessment of operational carbon performance, inform transport decarbonisation and sustainable urban mobility planning, and identify the data that would be most beneficial to such an assessment. Full article

Reliable urban air-quality assessment increasingly depends on integrating heterogeneous data sources, yet doing so in data-sparse cities, where reference monitoring is limited and low-cost sensors dominate, remains an open challenge. This study presents a reproducible framework for integrating and analyzing heterogeneous urban sensor data, demonstrated on Almaty, Kazakhstan. Two complementary sources were linked at the station level through a shared identifier: a historical low-cost network of 146 stations (2020–2026; 544,943 records) and a real-time collector providing traffic and source-context features. A three-stage quality-control pipeline retained 442,322 records across 39 stations. Spatial inequality was quantified with complementary indices, attributed to emission sources through geometric descriptors, and used to compare predictive models. Exposure was substantially unequal (winter, seasonally standardized Gini 0.197; full-period Gini 0.210; population-weighted Gini 0.09), with the population-weighted annual mean PM2.5 (19.8 µg/m³) nearly four times the WHO annual guideline (5 µg/m³); virtually the entire population lives in districts whose annual mean exceeds this guideline. The inequality showed a spatial association with position downwind (p = 0.056), reported as exploratory given Almaty’s lack of a consistent prevailing winter wind. On the sparse network, regression failed to predict continuous concentrations (R² ≈ 0), and once evaluation leakage was removed, classification of high-exposure locations did not exceed a prevalence-aware baseline either (best model 72%, 95% CI overlapping the baseline), indicating that neither task is reliably validated at this network size—a cautionary finding for data-sparse settings generally. The framework provides a transferable template for air-quality assessment in data-scarce urban environments. Full article

Goats in subtropical and temperate regions experience seasonal anestrus during long-day conditions. This study evaluated the effects of bee pollen (BP) supplementation on circulating metabolic and endocrine measures, plasma short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), and reproductive outcomes. Thirty crossbred Spanish × Boer does were assigned to T-CTL (n = 15) or T-BP (n = 15). After a 7-day adaptation period, T-BP received 10 g/day BP for 42 days (approximately 0.31 g/kg initial body weight/day), while T-CTL received carrier feed alone. We measured plasma glucose, insulin, insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), progesterone (P4), and SCFAs. BP supplementation did not significantly (p > 0.05) alter plasma glucose, insulin, IGF-1, or overall P4 concentrations. Only five does became pregnant (T-BP, 2/15; T-CTL, 3/15); therefore, fertility, prolificacy, and reproductive rate were summarized descriptively. Most plasma SCFAs did not show a consistent treatment-dependent temporal response. Isovalerate showed a significant treatment × date interaction, whereas hexanoate differed overall between treatments without a significant treatment × date interaction. Under this single-dose protocol, BP did not consistently modify circulating metabolic–endocrine markers or improve reproductive performance during the suboptimal breeding season. Future studies should include dose-ranging, direct rumen measurements, and adequately powered reproductive endpoints. Full article