Rani Mohanraj, Shuba Kumar, Sylvia Jayakumar
et al.
Polished white rice (WR), high in refined carbohydrates, the main staple in South India is associated with enhanced risk of diabetes. Brown Rice (BR), with lower glycemic load, high fibre content and micronutrients, is a healthier choice. Two hundred and twelve Persons with Diabetes (PwD) attending a tertiary diabetes care centre in a city in South India responded to a questionnaire documenting types, frequency and reasons for rice consumption, awareness and beliefs about BR. A sub-set of 10, participated in qualitative interviews, which additionally, explored the influence of traditional beliefs on and consumption patterns of rice, barriers to BR consumption and willingness to accept it in their diet. Ninety-three percent reported consuming WR with traditional usage (97 %) being the main reason for its preference. Brand image, grain size, texture and taste, of rice were other decisional considerations. Awareness about health benefits of BR was limited, with 69 % and 51 % believing it to be nutritious and helping to reduce blood sugar respectively. Appearance, texture, taste and cost were deterrents to its use. Over half agreed to switch to BR if they believed it would improve their health. Participants with a shorter duration of diabetes were more willing to change to BR. The study highlights the need to promote greater literacy regarding health benefits of BR and other forms of less polished rice. Larger trials examining the effectiveness of BR viz-a viz other types of less polished rice on blood glucose levels, metabolic factors and nutritional content among PwD are needed.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities, Social sciences (General)
The fundamental topology of manufacturing has not undergone a paradigm-level transformation since Henry Ford's moving assembly line in 1913. Every major innovation of the past century, from the Toyota Production System to Industry 4.0, has optimized within the Fordist paradigm without altering its structural logic: centralized mega-factories, located near labor pools, producing at scale. We argue that embodied intelligence is poised to break this century-long stasis, not by making existing factories more efficient, but by triggering phase transitions in manufacturing economic geography itself. When embodied AI capabilities cross critical thresholds in dexterity, generalization, reliability, and tactile-vision fusion, the consequences extend far beyond cost reduction: they restructure where factories are built, how supply chains are organized, and what constitutes viable production scale. We formalize this by defining a Capability Space C = (d, g, r, t) and showing that the site-selection objective function undergoes topological reorganization when capability vectors cross critical surfaces. Through three pathways, weight inversion, batch collapse, and human-infrastructure decoupling, we show that embodied intelligence enables demand-proximal micro-manufacturing, eliminates "manufacturing deserts," and reverses geographic concentration driven by labor arbitrage. We further introduce Machine Climate Advantage: once human workers are removed, optimal factory locations are determined by machine-optimal conditions (low humidity, high irradiance, thermal stability), factors orthogonal to traditional siting logic, creating a production geography with no historical precedent. This paper establishes Embodied Intelligence Economics, the study of how physical AI capability thresholds reshape the spatial and structural logic of production.
ABSTRACT The field of soil science has seen significant advancements in recent years, largely due to the integration of computational tools and statistical methods. Among these resources, the programming language R has emerged as a powerful and versatile platform for soil scientists, aiding in a spectrum of tasks from data analysis and modeling to visualization. Nonetheless, the broader trends and specific patterns of R usage in soil research have not been thoroughly documented. Our study investigated the prevalence of R and its package usage in 25,888 research articles published in 10 leading soil science journals over a decade, from 2014 to 2023. A considerable number of these articles, 7899 (or 30.5%), named R as their primary data analysis tool. The use of R has followed a steady linear growth pattern, rising from 13.9% in 2014 to 46.5% in 2023. The most commonly used R packages were “vegan,” “ggplot2,” “lme4,” “nlme,” and “randomForest,” with each journal showcasing unique research focuses, resulting in varying frequencies of R package applications across different publications. Furthermore, there was a notable increase in the average number of R packages used per article throughout the study period. This research highlights the pivotal role of R, armed with its robust statistical and visualization capabilities, in enabling soil scientists to conduct comprehensive analyses and gain in‐depth insights into the complex dimensions of soil science.
This paper studies the Footloose Entrepreneur model in new economic geography in continuous space. In an appropriate function space, the model is formulated as an initial value problem for an infinite-dimensional ordinary differential equation. A unique global solution is constructed based on the Banach fixed point theorem. The stability of a homogeneous stationary solution is then investigated and numerical simulations of the asymptotic behavior of the solution are performed. Numerical solutions starting near the unstable homogeneous stationary solution converge to spike-shaped stationary solutions, and the number of spikes decreases with decreasing transport costs and strengthening preference for variety.
The kasnak oak (Quercus vulcanica [Boiss. and Heldr. ex] Kotschy) is an endemic oak species in Türkiye whose largest distribution area is in the western part of the Turkish Lake District. The literature on current plant studies has emphasized some of the natural distribution areas of the kasnak oak in Türkiye to be found in the Murat, Türkmen, and Şaphane mountains in Kütahya province. The kasnak oak’s distribution is unknown regarding Budağan Mountain (İnyanı Peak 1612 m) which lies between Tavşanlı and Emet districts in western Kütahya. The field studies carried out in July 2022 on Budağan Mountain were the first to identify the presence of the kasnak oak there. Kasnak oaks are located in the dry forest area formed of junipers on land made of limestone at an altitude range of 1430-1600 m on Budağan Mountain, with dolines offering a more favorable environment in terms of humidity, especially on the northern side of the mountain. Young kasnak oak groups develop at the base of the dolines and have a height of 3-4 m Individual oaks can reach 80 cm in diameter and 12 m in length.This study involves the natural distribution of the kasnak oak, an endangered (NT) group according to the risk categories of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), on Budağan Mountain, an area that has not been previously studied in detail. In addition, the study aims to contribute to the information about the natural distribution of this endemic species and to reveal the area’s ecological characteristics.
It has been proposed that the flat rotation curves observed at large radii in disk galaxies can be interpreted as an effect of General Relativity (GR) instead of the presence of dark matter (DM) halos in Newtonian gravity. In Ciotti (2022) the problem is rigorously explored in the special setting of the weak-field, low-velocity gravitomagnetic limit of GR. The rotation curves are obtained for purely baryonic disk models with realistic density profiles, and compared with the predictions of Newtonian gravity for the same disks, in absence of DM. The rotation curves are indistinguishable, with percentual GR corrections at all radii of the order of $\approx 10^{-6}$ or less, so that DM halos are required in gravitomagnetism as in Newtonian gravity. From a more general point of view, a list of the most urgent problems that must be addressed by any proposed GR-based alternative to the existence of DM, is given.
Let $α$ be a map from the set of all knot types ${\mathcal K}$ to a set $X$. Let $β$ be a map from ${\mathcal K}$ to a set $Y$. We define the relation between $α$ and $β$ to be the image of a map $(α,β)$ from ${\mathcal K}$ to $X\times Y$ sending an element $K$ of ${\mathcal K}$ to $(α(K),β(K))$. We determine the relations between $α$ and $β$ for certain $α$ and $β$ such as crossing number, unknotting number, bridge number, braid index, genus and canonical genus. This is a study of geography problem in knot theory.
Direct imaging methods recover the presence, position, and shape of the unknown obstacles in time-harmonic inverse scattering without a priori knowledge of either the physical properties or the number of disconnected components of the scatterer, i.e., on the boundary condition. However, most of these methods require multi-static data and only obtain partial information about the obstacle. These qualitative methods are based on constructing indicator functions defined on the domain of interest, which help determine whether a spatial point or point source lies inside or outside the scatterer. This paper explains the main themes of each of these methods, with emphasis on highlighting the advantages and limitations of each scheme. Additionally, we will classify each method and describe how some of these methods are closely related to each other.
Jing Zhang, Xiaojuan Cheng, Peter W. Fritsch
et al.
Species diversity is high in the Himalaya-Hengduan Mountains, particularly at the edges characterized by deep ravines and “sky islands”. Studies focused on sky-island species are sparse and the patterns observed in response to both geographic and climatic factors are inconsistent. Here phylogeographic and phylogenetic analyses of <i>Gaultheria nummularioides</i>, a species originating in the late Pliocene with its main distribution in the Himalaya-Hengduan Mountains, were conducted to reveal the pattern of genetic dynamics in response to physical geography, glacial fluctuations, and monsoons. We found that in this species genetic variation is higher among populations than within populations, with a significant phylogeographic boundary between the central Himalaya and the eastern Himalaya and the Hengduan Mountains. We also found a high incidence of private alleles, possibly associated with strong habitat isolation. The phylogeographic pattern recovered is consistent with populations in glacial refugia that have experienced expansion after glaciation. The divergence times of most haplotypes coincide with the time of the weakening of the Asian monsoon in these regions. Models of geographic range size showed a significant decrease from the Last Interglacial through the Last Glacial Maximum to the Current, and a predicted increase from the Current to the year 2070. Our study provides insights for understanding speciation among sky islands in this region.
En el contexto mundial de la pandemia del COVID-19, las enfermeras/os han estado presente en el cuidado de enfermería, por tanto, se ha hecho imprescindible las estrategias de afrontamiento para lidiar con la situación. Esta investigación, identifica las estrategias de afrontamiento utilizadas por las enfermeras y los beneficios de dichas estrategias, durante la pandemia COVID-19. Se trata de una revisión integrativa de estudios originales publicados de marzo 2020 a junio de 2022 en idioma español e inglés. Partimos de la pregunta estructurada ¿Cuáles son las estrategias de afrontamiento utilizadas por las enfermeras durante la pandemia del COVID-19 y qué beneficios aportaron? La línea de investigación: Práctica en Enfermería. Bases de datos utilizadas, PUBMED, EBSCO Host, LILACS, SCIENCE DIRECT, BVS, SCIELO, MENDELEY y REDALYC. La estrategia que más beneficios aportó a las enfermeras fue la autoeficacia, ya que les permitía evaluar la capacidad con la que contaban para enfrentar los altos niveles de estrés, luego, las centradas en el problema (PFC), centradas en la emoción (EFC) y el desarrollo de la resiliencia.
This paper aims to highlight some issues, challenges and trends caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in the drug scene and the system of drug prevention in Ukraine. This article is based on the official statistics, available qualitative and quantitative studies conducted by the Institute for Psychiatry, Forensic Psychiatric Examination and Drug Monitoring of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine (Ukrainian National Focal Point), the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) and Ukrainian researchers. Of course, some studies are not representative of the general population; however, they give some information on the drug scene in Ukraine during the pandemic. The data used in the article were collected mainly in 2019–2020. Every actor on the drug scene had to adapt to the new reality caused by anti-pandemic measures. Drug sellers proposed “stable work” during lockdown; drug dealers dropped ordered substances closer to the customer’s place. At the same time, OST facilities implemented home-treatment, and many private facilities appeared. OST patients misused methadone and sold it on the illicit market, while drug users started to find substitutes of their main drug and notably increased drug-related deaths.
The detections of gravitational-wave (GW) signals from compact binary coalescence by ground-based detectors have opened up the era of GW astronomy. These observations provide opportunities to test Einstein's general theory of relativity at the strong-field regime. Here we give a brief overview of the various GW-based tests of General Relativity (GR) performed by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration on the detected GW events to date. After providing details for the tests performed in four categories, we discuss the prospects for each test in the context of future GW detectors. The four categories of tests include the consistency tests, parametrized tests for GW generation and propagation, tests for the merger remnant properties, and GW polarization tests.
Abstract More than half of the total population in China are living in cities. Especially, the people in highly developed and spatially integrated city clusters, i.e., urban agglomerations (UAs), are facing increasing human‐perceived heat stress that describes the combined effects of hot temperature, high humidity, and lowered surface wind speed. By analyzing multiple indicators over 20 major UAs across China, we demonstrate that summer heat stress has been significantly intensifying in nearly all UAs during 1971–2014. This intensification is more profound in northern than southern regions and is especially stronger in more urbanized and densely populated areas (e.g., Beijing‐Tianjin‐Hebei and the Yangtze River Delta). Based on a dynamic classification of weather stations using time‐varying land use/land cover maps, we find that urban core areas exhibit distinctly stronger increasing heat stress trends than their surrounding rural areas. On average, urbanization contributes to approximately one‐quarter of the total increase in mean heat stress over urban core areas of UAs and nearly half of the total increase in extreme heat stress events. The urbanization effect is also dependent on the geographical region within China. Urbanization tends to have stronger intensifying effects on heat stress in UAs with higher population density in low‐altitude areas, while it has a relatively weaker intensifying and even weakening effect in some arid and high‐altitude regions. Moreover, as various heat stress metrics may yield different estimations of long‐term trend and urbanization contribution, the particular choice of heat stress indicator is of critical importance for investigations on this subject matter.
To contribute to the debates on the implications, actors and geopolitical levers of tourism, this article particularly examines religious tourism. For this reason, it is based on the first results of a research in urban geography on the role of the religious tourism industry in the realignment of the Israeli-Palestinian space and as a geopolitical lever for the positioning of Israel and of the Palestinian Territories on the international scene. It responds to this by looking at the places that contribute to producing this form of tourism; and the physical flows and symbolic movements of which these places are the objectives. On this territory where the touristic attraction continues despite the continuous violence, three types of sites have been identified: pilgrimage sites, alternative sites, and religious theme parks. This article will show how these sites, which will be collected under the term “places of mobility”, are linked and how they produce what we will refer to as “mobility of places”.
Abstract Over the last two decades, southwestern North America (SWNA) has been in the grip of one of the most severe droughts of the last 1,200 years, with one third to nearly one half of its severity attributable to climate change. We analyze how the risk of extreme soil moisture droughts in SWNA, analogous to the most severe 21‐year (≥ in magnitude to 2000–2020) and single‐year (≥ in magnitude to 2002) events of the last several decades, changes in projections from Phase 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project. By the end of the 21st century, SWNA experiences robust (R ≥ 0.80) soil moisture drying and substantial increases in extreme single‐year drought risk that scale strongly with warming, spanning an 8%–26% probability of occurrence across +2–4 K. Notably, our results show that 21‐year droughts analogous to 2000–2020 are up to 5 times more likely than extreme single‐year droughts under all levels of warming (≈50%). These high levels of 21‐year drought risk are largely invariant across scenarios because of large spring precipitation declines in half the models, shifting SWNA into a drier mean state. Despite projections of this sweeping and ostensibly inevitable increase in 21‐year drought risk, climate mitigation reduces their severity by reducing the magnitude of extreme single‐year droughts during these events. Our results emphasize both the importance of preparing SWNA for imminent increases in persistent drought events and constraining projected precipitation uncertainty to better resolve future long‐term drought risk.
Paloma Mara de Lima Ferreira, Adriano Rolim da Paz, Juan Martín Bravo
ABSTRACT Hydrological models (HMs) can be applied for different purposes, and a key step is model calibration using objective functions (OF) to quantify the agreement between observed and calculated discharges. Fully understanding the OF is important to properly take advantage of model calibration and interpret the results. This study evaluates 36 OF proposed in the literature, considering two watersheds of different hydrological regimes. Daily simulated streamflow time-series, using a distributed hydrological model (MGB-IPH), and ten daily streamflow synthetic time-series, generated from the observed and calculated streamflows, were used in the analysis of each watershed. These synthetic data were used to evaluate how does each metric evaluate hypothetical cases that present isolated very well known error behaviors. Despite of all NSE-derived (Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency) metrics that use the square of the residuals in their formulation have shown higher sensitivity to errors in high flows, the ones that use daily and monthly averages of flow rates in absolute terms were more stringent than the others to assess HMs performance. Low flow errors were better evaluated by metrics that use the flow logarithm. The constant presence of zero flow rates deteriorate them significantly, with the exception of the metrics TRMSE (Transformed root mean square error) did not demonstrate this problem. An observed limitation of the formulations of some metrics was that the errors of overestimation or underestimation are compensated. Our results reassert that each metric should be interpreted specifically thinking about the aspects it has been proposed for, and simultaneously taking into account a set of metrics would lead to a broader evaluation of HM ability (e.g. multiobjective model evaluation). We recommend that the use of synthetic time series as those proposed in this work could be useful as an auxiliary step towards better understanding the evaluation of a calibrated hydrological model for each study case, taking into account model capabilities and observed hydrologic regime characteristics.