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The state of the art of the policy advisory system research: mapping of performance, themes and key actors of the field
No full textThe rainfall observers
Get PDFOver the past three centuries, thousands of people across the British and Irish Isles have regularly recorded rainfall, often every day for decades. Their efforts allow us to reconstruct long‐term trends and variations in rainfall with high spatial detail for the whole of the UK since 1836, and longer for certain regions. Here we recognise some of the individuals who made particularly important contributions in the earliest years of organised rainfall monitoring
The influence of cereboost on mood, cognitive function, and simulated driving in professional race car drivers
No full textIntroduction: Race car driving is a physically and cognitively demanding sport requiring rapid decision-making under extreme conditions. While physical training and hydration strategies have been explored, few studies have
investigated nutritional interventions to enhance cognitive or driving performance. This study examined the effects of Cereboost, an American Ginseng extract, on mood, cognitive function, and simulated driving performance in professional race car drivers.
Methods: Fifty-eight licensed drivers completed a four-phase, within-subjects protocol (baseline, acute, chronic, and acute-on-chronic) involving 200 mg/day Cereboost supplementation. Assessments included validated mood
questionnaires, cognitive testing via the Senaptec Sensory Station (spatial memory and split attention), and 30-minute sessions in a professional-grade racing simulator. Statistical analyses included ANOVA with Holm-Bonferroni corrections.
Results: Cereboost had no statistically significant effects on mood or cognitive function after correction for multiple comparisons. However, acute-on-chronic supplementation significantly improved simulated driving performance, with a 3-second reduction in lap time and faster throttle
application in corners (adjusted P = 0.000003, Cohen’s d = –1.274). Participants reported subjective improvements in mental acuity (97%) and driving performance (94%).
Conclusion: While Cereboost did not significantly alter mood or cognitive test outcomes, sustained supplementation enhanced simulated driving performance in professional drivers. These findings suggest potential benefits of nootropic supplementation for motorsport performance, warranting further investigation in on-track settings
Critical habitat thresholds for effective pollinator conservation in agricultural landscapes
No full textBiodiversity in human-dominated landscapes is declining, but evidence-based conservation targets to guide international policies for such landscapes are lacking. We present a framework for informing habitat conservation policies based on the enhancement of habitat quantity and quality and define thresholds of habitat quantity at which it becomes effective to also prioritize habitat quality. We applied this framework to insect pollinators, an important part of agroecosystem biodiversity, by synthesizing 59 studies from 19 countries. Given low habitat quality, hoverflies had the lowest threshold at 6% semi-natural habitat cover, followed by solitary bees (16%), bumble bees (18%), and butterflies (37%). These figures represent minimum habitat thresholds in agricultural landscapes, but when habitat quantity is restricted, marked increases in quality are required to reach similar outcomes
The finance-growth nexus and public-private ownership of banks in Brazil since 1870
No full textHow does finance affect economic growth? And does ownership matter? This paper investigates whether and how deposits in public vis-a-vis in private banks affect economic growth. It uses the power-ARCH framework with annual time series for Brazil from 1870 to 2018. There are three main findings: (a) the indirect impact of domestic financial development on economic growth is negative, whereas that of international financial development is positive, (b) the direct short-run effect of public and private banks is negative, while only for the latter does the positive direct long-run effect dominate, and (c) the indirect and direct short-run effect of public ownership banks is greater in size than that of private ownership banks
The fourth monocular depth estimation challenge
Get PDFThis paper presents the results of the fourth edition of the Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge (MDEC), which focuses on zero-shot generalization to the SYNS-Patches benchmark, a dataset featuring challenging environments in both natural and indoor settings. In this edition, we revised the evaluation protocol to use least-squares alignment with two degrees of freedom to support disparity and affineinvariant predictions. We also revised the baselines and included popular off-the-shelf methods: Depth Anything v2 and Marigold. The challenge received a total of 24 submissions that outperformed the baselines on the test set; 10 of these included a report describing their approach, with most leading methods relying on affine-invariant predictions. The challenge winners improved the 3D F-Score over the previous edition’s best result, raising it from 22.58% to 23.05%
The role of environmental and biotic drivers in shaping mosquito communities and distributions
Get PDFMosquito-borne diseases (MBDs) pose significant public health risks, driven by environmental changes and species interactions. This thesis takes a community-based approach to
understand how multiple drivers—both biotic and abiotic—shape mosquito distributions
across local and continental scales, using advanced Joint Species Distribution Models (JS-DMs).
In Chapter 2, I analyse mosquito communities in managed UK wetlands, showing how
habitat modifications, such as changes in vegetation structure, impact mosquito populations.
The study highlights that biotic interactions, including predator-prey dynamics, play a crucial
role alongside environmental factors in determining community composition.
Chapter 3 scales up to a European dataset, exploring how environmental factors (e.g.,
temperature, precipitation) and biotic interactions drive mosquito communities. Importantly,
biotic interactions remain influential at large scales, challenging the assumption that environmental variables dominate. This underlines the need to integrate species interactions into
disease modelling.
In Chapter 4, I enhance JSDMs by incorporating species traits and phylogenetic data.
Traits like thermal tolerance and host preferences improve predictions of mosquito distribution, while phylogenetic relationships provide insights into how evolutionary history shapes
community dynamics. These findings offer a deeper understanding of how species traits
influence disease risk.
The thesis emphasises that community-based approaches provide a richer understanding
of mosquito ecology than single-species models. This is crucial for improving vector
surveillance and disease control strategies, particularly in anticipating how community
composition impacts disease transmission. Future research should focus on understanding
how communities may shape MBD potential, expanding our biological knowledge of lesser
studied mosquito species, and interrogating the impact of traits and biotic interactions across
different scales in their impact on shaping mosquito communities.
This research advances the field by integrating multiple ecological drivers and species
interactions, offering a more comprehensive framework for predicting mosquito distributions
and vector-borne disease risks across mixed scales and environmental conditions
Exploring the nexus of solar adoption, sustainability, and rural community development through the role of white commercial farmers: the case of Mkushi, Zambia
Get PDFPersistent rural energy poverty, weak institutional service delivery, and socio-environmental vulnerability continue to constrain equitable development in many rural settings. While decentralised solar technologies offer promising alternatives, their uptake remains uneven and poorly understood, particularly regarding the role of unconventional actors such as white commercial farmers (WCFs). This study addresses a critical research gap by exploring whether, and in what ways, WCFs facilitate solar photovoltaic (PV) adoption, foster environmental sustainability, and contribute to rural community development. Using a multi-sited qualitative case study in Mkushi and surrounding rural districts, the study engaged 16 in-depth semi-structured interviews with WCFs, 1 focus group discussion and 3 interviews with key stakeholders from the energy sector and government policy institutions. Findings reveal that WCFs are not passive economic agents but actively engage in energy transitions and socio-environmental governance. Their contributions span community infrastructure provision, informal solar finance, and conservation-oriented agricultural practices. WCFs also act as intermediaries between local communities and external actors, although their efforts are often constrained by affordability barriers, policy fragmentation, and institutional inertia. The study recommends strengthening cross-sector collaboration to integrate WCFs into national solar strategies, incentivising off-grid systems through land and infrastructure partnerships, and securing solar investments through community-driven security solutions. Furthermore, environmental stewardship programmes should be scaled and linked to energy policy through participatory frameworks. This research provides new insights into the intersecting domains of decentralised energy, agrarian development, and environmental transitions, offering practical and theoretical contributions to more inclusive and context-responsive rural energy policy
A Bayesian model of distance perception from ocular convergence
Get PDFOcular convergence is one of the critical cues from which to estimate the absolutedistance to objects in the world, because unlike most other distance cues a one-to-one mapping exists between absolute distance and ocular convergence. However,even when accurately converging their eyes on an object, humans tend to underesti-mate its distance, particularly for more distant objects. This systematic bias in dis-tance perception has yet to be explained and questions the utility of vergence as anabsolute distance cue. Here we present a probabilistic geometric model that showshow distance underestimation can be explained by the visual system estimating themost likely distance in the world to have caused an accurate, but noisy, ocular con-vergence signal. Furthermore, we find that the noise in the vergence signal neededto account for human distance underestimation is comparable to that experimentallymeasured. Critically, our results depend on the formulation of a likelihood functionthat takes account of the generative function relating distance to ocular convergence
Fundamental sensor response time limitations of practical air temperature measurement
No full textAir temperature measurements in naturally ventilated thermometer screens underpin the instrumental climate record. Increasing automation is, however, revealing limitations. One is through thermometer time response, especially in light winds or calm conditions, often at the daily temperature minimum. The exponential time response τ_63 for thermometers enclosed within a Stevenson screen is a key parameter, but poorly known. Here, τ_63 is evaluated in a practical experimental situation against the World Meteorological Organization (WMO)’s recommended sensor τ_63≤20 s. We find τ_63 increases with sensor diameter d, with only a d=2 mm sensor meeting WMO expectations, even then requiring ambient wind speeds ≥3 ms^(-1). Typical d=4 mm sensors never meet the criterion when either force- or naturally ventilated, with τ_63≥20 mins in a naturally ventilated arrangement under calm conditions. Inadequate τ_63 will lead to underestimation of the diurnal temperature range or other local changes derived from daily temperature maxima and minima