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Spatiotemporal patterns and propagation characteristics of convective activity on the northeast slope of Tibetan Plateau: A high-resolution radar perspective
No full textThe northeastern slope of the Tibetan Plateau, situated in a complex terrain and the monsoon-westerly transition zone, experiences frequent convective storms and high disaster risk. Based on CINRAD radar and ERA5 reanalysis data from 2015 to 2019, a high-resolution convective climatology was established, and its environmental fields were diagnosed. Results indicate a significant topographic anchoring effect on convection, with persistent hotspots located in the Yellow River valley-Xinglong Mountain, the eastern Qilian Mountains, and the sharp-bend reach of the Yellow River. Moderate convection dominates (64.7 %), while deep convection has a low frequency but high local intensity. The most active month seasonally is July, with June and August exhibiting similar levels of activity. The convective activity in July is most active during the season, with levels in June and August being similar. The configuration of synoptic patterns indicates a synergistic mode of “upper-level trough, lower-level convergence, and strong moisture transport” for convective days. Diurnal variation is characterized by a peak in the afternoon (13:00–18:00 BJT) and is weakest in the early morning to morning, consistent with the synergistic trigger between solar radiation and terrain convergence. Atmospheric environment diagnostics reveal that, compared to non-convective events, convective events have higher CAPE, stronger updrafts, greater vertical wind shear, and more abundant water vapor in the two hours prior to triggering. The statistical distribution of storm scales exhibits an exponential decay with a “long-tail” pattern, with approximately 80 %–85 % of convective events having a propagation distance of less than 20 km and a max area of less than 200 km². The propagation direction of convective activity exhibits inter-monthly shifts, trending eastward/southward in June, shifting northward to east-southeastward in July, and westward/northward in August. These findings reveal the mechanisms by which large-scale circulation and local topography jointly influence convection, providing critical scientific support for monitoring and early warning systems for severe convection in the Tibetan Plateau and its surrounding areas, as well as for disaster risk prevention and control
Do large language models know basic facts about journal articles?
No full textPurpose
There is an increase in the use of large language models (LLMs) in information science, including evaluating academic journal articles. Despite this, it is unclear whether they “know” about articles in the sense of being able to answer simple questions about individual papers without web searches.
Design/methodology/approach
In this study, 4 questions were asked of ChatGPT 4o-mini about 64,055 academic journal articles (excluding reviews) from 2021, identified by their titles and abstracts, with uncited and highly cited articles also assessed by ChatGPT 4.1 and 5 open weight LLMs.
Findings
The results were mostly incorrect, even for the most cited articles from that year. In particular, ChatGPT 4o-mini and the open weights LLMs had almost no knowledge of an article’s first author affiliation, rarely knew the publishing journal and usually guessed the publication year wrong, although ChatGPT 4o-mini was 42% correct for Physical Review B. Even ChatGPT 4.1 could only identify a small majority of the journals for the top cited papers of the year.
Practical implications
Smaller LLMs’ lack of basic knowledge about articles suggests that when they are asked to evaluate them without web searches, they will rarely cheat by eliciting citation information or journal reputation but will instead answer based on the article text because they may not associate online criticisms with individual articles.
Originality/value
This is the first investigation of the ability of LLMs to recall basic facts about journal articles
Residential vertical urbanisation: the intertwining of law and financialisation
Get PDF‘Vertical urbanisation’, a new form of housing densification, has accelerated in the 21st century and now dominates the skylines of many global cities. Tall residential buildings are more complex than lower-rise multi-occupied buildings due to their sophisticated infrastructures and technologies, co-dependent spatial relationships, mixed uses and density of occupation. They are also more legally complex, especially when individual units are sold using legal forms such as condominium, strata title or leasehold (multi-owned properties) rather than remaining in single ownership with apartments being rented out. This means that property rights in residential towers are distributed among multiple parties, forming an intricate web of legal relationships of different and often conflicting interests. This article demonstrates that an understanding of the various ways in which law operates at all stages of high-rise development and management can make an important contribution to urban theory. However, there has been little theoretical or empirical research into the roles of law(s) in shaping these physical and social spaces. Using primarily English developments for illustration, we show how different laws (in this case, the laws of England and Wales) interact with housing financialisation at various scales, from the global to the home, to shape the production, materialisation, safety and maintenance of residential towers and their surrounding neighbourhoods, as well as the lived experiences of residents and their neighbours. Our grounded analytical approach provides a framework for future empirical research investigating residential towers, in England and elsewhere, that will contribute new understandings to urban development and theory
“We do the best we can with the information we have” Science reporting referencing retracted papers in the UK and Finland
Get PDFPurpose
The purpose of this study is to investigate the practical difficulties for journalists reporting scientific research that is later retracted and to examine how retracted research is framed in online news.
Design/methodology/approach
This article reports two studies involving content analysis and interviews. It integrates macro-level quantitative insights (online news article framing and content) with micro-level qualitative data (journalists’ professional constraints). The content analysis used a sample of 73 online news stories reporting on 21 high-attention retracted articles identified from the Retraction Watch database and Altmetric.com. The qualitative component involved semi-structured interviews with 10 UK and 10 Finnish journalists to explore their lived experiences and decision-making processes about the potential for research to be retracted.
Findings
While factual neutral reporting was the most prevalent frame, it was closely followed by Sensationalism in descriptors and frames reflecting distrust in science. Media narratives typically focus on individual wrongdoing and data fraud, often overlooking systemic causes of retraction. The interviews revealed a universal absence of a systematic monitoring process for retractions among journalists in both countries. This deficit is due to time pressures, a lack of financial incentives for retrospective checks and a reliance on luck or informal networks to detect retractions. Consequently, updating news stories following a retraction is rare, and when updates occur, they often fail to explain in plain language how the retraction influences the original claims.
Research limitations/implications
The reliance on Altmetric.com introduced a potential bias towards English-language sources and countries, and the inclusion of blogs in the “news media” classification may overrepresent alternative narratives. The findings reveal a critical gap between the academic community’s self-correction and the capacity for similar journalistic responsiveness, contributing to the persistent circulation of misleading scientific information.
Originality/value
This study is the first to systematically investigate the challenges of dealing with retractions from the perspective of science journalism. By comparing the UK and Finnish contexts, it shows that different structural pressures lead to the same practical outcome: a reliance on fortune to correct the public record
Can we queer nostalgia? Fabulating more just futures through the speculative arts
Get PDFIn this article, the authors draw on queer theory and their speculative artistic practice to imagine and activate nostalgia otherwise. They analyse a song they composed about the unconventional Doctor Who character Alpha Centauri to explore how it might queer the temporal contour of nostalgia’s affect. Rather than invoking myths about the past to secure an oppressive future, as they argue normative nostalgia does, they take up José Muñoz’s (2009) account of queerness as a “forward-dawning futurity.” They consider how both the songwriting process and the song itself might reorient nostalgia’s affect toward a queerer, more hopeful future-past for Alpha Centauri and, hopefully, for themselves. Through analysing this work, the authors activate the concept of homo-nostalgia to indicate the twin pull of nostalgia towards both homogeneity and (homo)normativity. Their findings suggest that it might be impossible to queer nostalgia, while still keeping a glimmer of hope that things could have been otherwise
Synergistic reinforcement of Diels–Alder cycloadducts with hydrogen bonding interactions in recyclable dual-dynamic polyurethane networks
Get PDFHere we report a facile, efficient strategy to prepare dual-dynamic networks (DDNs) comprising both thermally reversible Diels–Alder (DA) covalent bonds and non-covalent hydrogen bonds which combine excellent mechanical properties and creep resistance with facile processability at mild temperatures. A series of DDNs was synthesised via the copolymerisation of maleimide-terminated poly(ε-caprolactone urethane) or poly(1,4-butadiene urethane) prepolymers with multifunctional furan crosslinkers containing ester, urethane or urea functional groups. The mechanical properties of the resulting DDNs are enhanced by increasing the strength of crosslinker hydrogen bonding or reducing the polarity of the bismaleimide backbone, achieving a broad range of tensile strength (11.7–26.5 MPa), elongation (210–690%) and toughness (14.4–75.7 MJ m−3) values. DDNs comprising crosslinkers with stronger hydrogen bonding groups produced higher gel transition temperatures (Tgel), creep-resistance and tensile strength, implying synergistic network reinforcement. Furthermore, DDNs comprising the non-polar poly(1,4-butadiene) also presented improved creep resistance. For these materials, rubbery plateaus extended over broader temperature ranges resulting in higher Tgel up to 150 °C. Poly(ε-caprolactone) conferred networks with superior Young's modulus, tensile strength, toughness and flexibility. We have shown that materials can be thermally reprocessed multiple times whilst maintaining high stress recovery efficiencies and display rapid healing abilities under mild temperatures. This work highlights the crucial role of crosslinked network reinforcement via hydrogen bonding interactions to design high-performance yet recyclable polymer networks with tailored properties
Comparing and combining TSPO-PET tracers in tauopathies
Get PDFPurpose
Neuroinflammation is a key pathological driver in neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP). Positron emission tomography (PET) with tracers targeting the translocator protein (TSPO) enables the in vivo quantification of microgliosis. TSPO tracers have shown similar disease-specific patterns across cohorts. However, direct quantitative comparisons between commonly used TSPO-PET tracers in tauopathies have not been performed. Here, we apply a TSPO-PET standardization pipeline across clinically matched AD cohorts and PSP cohorts, to quantify, compare and combine multi-centre TSPO-PET data.
Methods
Patients with PSP were scanned with either [11C]PK11195 or [18F]GE-180 at one of two centres, while patients with AD and control participants were scanned with either [11C]PK11195, [18F]GE-180 or [11C]PBR28 at one of three centres. A standardised pre-processing pipeline was implemented and participant standardised uptake volume ratio (SUVR) values were z-scored using tracer-specific control participant values. In a data-driven approach, dissimilarity analyses were employed to assess differences between tracers across clinically matched cohorts.
Results
In PSP, dissimilarity analysis suggested that [11C]PK11195 and [18F]GE-180 binding patterns were comparable following standardisation. In AD, comparability across tracers was less robust, with [11C]PK11195 and [18F]GE-180 being most comparable, followed by [18F]GE-180 vs. [11C]PBR28, then by [11C]PK11195 vs. [11C]PBR28.
Conclusion
The pipeline was effective at harmonising TSPO-PET tracers and standardising the regional quantification of neuroinflammation in clinically matched cohorts of PSP, while the standardisation pipeline results were less robust across AD cohorts
Single genome amplification and molecular cloning of HIV-1 populations in acute HIV-1 infection: implications for studies on HIV-1 diversity and evolutionary rate
Get PDFBackground
Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) is one of the fastest-evolving human pathogens. Understanding HIV-1 transmission, within-host adaptation, and evolutionary dynamics is pivotal for development of interventions and vaccines. HIV-1 infection is generally caused by a single transmitted founder virus (TFV), and TFV sequences are typically obtained using single genome amplification (SGA). However, suboptimal sample quality can cause sequencing failures, representing considerable losses considering the scarcity of acute HIV-1 infection (AHI) samples. Sequencing failures may be mitigated by molecular cloning (MC), which can be less vulnerable to sample quality but more susceptible to polymerase chain reaction (PCR) errors. Here, we explore the feasibility of supplementing SGA with MC data using samples from clinical and research cohorts to determine whether sequence diversity and evolutionary rate estimates are comparable between the techniques.
Methods
Plasma samples were selected from participants with documented AHI from an East African research cohort (the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, 2006–2011) and a clinical cohort from Sweden (1983–2011). SGA and MC sequencing were done on the HIV-1 env V1-V3 region (~940 base pairs). Within-host sequence diversity was determined from maximum likelihood phylogenetic trees, and evolutionary rate by Bayesian phylogenetic analysis. Highlighter plots, Hamming distances, and assessment of star phylogenies were used to quantify TFVs.
Results
One hundred participants (median age 30.3 years, 15% female), contributing 350 samples from four longitudinal time points, 10–540 days post-infection, met the inclusion criteria. SGA succeeded on 90% of research cohort and 48% of clinical cohort samples. Comparative analysis of linked SGA and MC data from 10 samples indicated that approximately eight sequences were necessary for diversity estimates. Consistently higher sequence diversity was observed among MC relative to SGA sequences (median [IQR]: 0.009 [0.003, 0.015] and 0.004 [0.001, 0.012] substitutions/site, P = .002), whereas evolutionary rates were comparable between the two methods (0.016 [0.012, 0.019] and 0.011 [0.008, 0.020] substitutions/site/year, P = .232). Five participants with samples obtained within 45 days post-infection were eligible for TFV quantification, and all found to have one TFV using both techniques.
Conclusion
MC data is a suitable supplement for SGA-based HIV-1 studies to preserve the value of precious samples for analysis of evolutionary rate, but not for sequence diversity
New insight into the reactivity of steel slags: Effect of post-milling duration
Get PDFIncorporating steel slag, a residue derived from the metallurgical industry, into cementitious systems offers a sustainable route for resource recovery and carbon footprint reduction. Milling has been reported to address the low cementitious reactivity of steel slag, which remains a significant barrier to its widespread adoption. However, the influence of storage duration after milling on steel slag performance has not been systematically evaluated. To investigate the effects of post-milling duration as an independent factor, two types of steel slag, derived from a basic oxygen furnace and an electric arc furnace processes, were milled using planetary ball milling and stored under controlled environmental conditions for 1 h, 1 day, 4 days, 7 days, 3 months, and 1 year. The results showed that prolonged storage caused significant particle agglomeration, detected by particle size analysis, and a slight reduction in reactivity after 1 year, as determined by the Rapid, Reliable Relevant (R3) reactivity test for supplementary cementitious materials. Replacing 30% of cement with steel slags stored for different times (1 h vs. 1 year) changed the properties of the blends. Compared with freshly milled slag, slag stored for 1 year caused a slight delay in cement hydration, as evidenced by calorimetry results. Consequently, blends containing 1-year-stored slag exhibited prolonged setting times and reduced apparent viscosity compared with the 1-h slag–cement blends. The compressive strength of blended cements was also negatively affected by long-term storage, and the amount of hydration products, such as portlandite, was slightly reduced in 28-day composites containing 1-year-stored slag
Assistive robotics for healthy aging: a foundational phenomenological co-design exercise
Get PDFBackground:
Assistive robotics for helping older people live well and stay independent has, to date, failed to fulfill its promise: there are few assistive robots in everyday use. In part, this failing can be attributed to inadequate or missing co-design activities that would ensure that these technologies and any services that incorporate them are developed with prospective end users, addressing their actual needs and wants, and not merely for them, and based on lazy assumptions about heterogeneous user groups.
Objective:
This exercise aimed to address some of these limitations by taking a “phenomenological snapshot” of what it means to be an older person in the current sociotechnological context, and making this snapshot, along with the co-design materials developed, available to the wider assistive robotics community to provide solid foundational evidence for steering the development of assistive robotics in more productive directions.
Methods:
Two rounds of co-design workshops have been conducted with older people and their caregivers, based on an innovative methodology that used personas and speculative designs to explore sensitive everyday difficulties faced by participants and highlight some of their general wishes for and concerns about assistive robotics. The data collected during the workshops were analyzed, and key themes were extracted.
Results:
Analysis of the workshop data gives access to the lived experience of older people and their caregivers, and their opinions about domestic robotics and assistive technologies more generally. The findings are organized thematically as everyday difficulties, the daily problems faced by older people; ideas for aging better, older people’s own suggestions for how their lives could be improved; and living with technology, their preferences and requirements for assistive robots, along with their concerns about what the introduction of robots might mean, both for themselves and for society more widely.
Conclusions:
We believe that our findings provide solid foundational evidence for the development of assistive robotics for older people. We are in the process of disseminating these results through various channels to the wider assistive robotics community; ultimately, the success of our activities will be demonstrated only through the development of acceptable, useful, and viable assistive robotics for older people
Data sources:
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