The role of complexity for digital twins of cities.

We argue that theories and methods drawn from complexity science are urgently needed to guide the development and use of digital twins for cities. The theoretical framework from complexity science takes into account both the short-term and the long-term dynamics of cities and their interactions. This is the foundation for a new approach that treats cities not as large machines or logistic systems but as mutually interwoven self-organizing phenomena, which evolve, to an extent, like living systems.

Climate bonds: Are they invested efficiently?

Achieving a Net-Zero goal is heavily reliant on transitioning to green methods, making it a top priority. Our research, which used the Generalized Least Squares (GLS) panel method, found that each Macro-region should invest at least 2% more per capita annually in Climate Bonds, a type of green bond. Although some studies have questioned the effectiveness of Climate Bonds, our focus is on their efficient use in countries that produce more fossil fuels.

Plastic impurities in biowaste treatment: environmental and economic life cycle assessment of a composting plant.

The study focuses on an Italian composting plant and aims to investigate the impact of the presence of plastic impurities in the collected biowaste on the environmental and economic performance of the plant. The study is divided into two main steps: firstly, a material flow analysis was conducted to quantify the number of impurities (e.g.

Air-conditioning adoption and electricity demand highlight climate change mitigation-adaptation tradeoffs.

We elucidate mid-century climate change impacts on electricity demand accounting for endogenous adoption of residential air-conditioning (AC) in affluent, cooler countries in Europe, and in poorer, hotter states in India. By 2050, in a high-warming scenario (SSP585) AC prevalence grows twofold in Europe and fourfold in India, reaching around 40% in both regions. We document a mitigation-adaptation tradeoff: AC expansion reduces daily heat exposures by 150 million and 3.

The transition from animal to human culture-simulating the social protocell hypothesis.

The origin of human cumulative culture is commonly envisioned as the appearance (some 2.0-2.5 million years ago) of a capacity to faithfully copy the know-how that underpins socially learned traditions.

Pulse, Shunt and Storage: Hydrological Contraction Shapes Processing and Export of Particulate Organic Matter in River Networks.

Unlabelled: Streams and rivers act as landscape-scale bioreactors processing large quantities of terrestrial particulate organic matter (POM). This function is linked to their flow regime, which governs residence times, shapes organic matter reactivity and controls the amount of carbon (C) exported to the atmosphere and coastal oceans. Climate change impacts flow regimes by increasing both flash floods and droughts.

Moral suasion and charitable giving.

We investigate the effect of moral suasion on charitable giving. Participants in an online experiment choose between two allocations, one of which includes a donation to a well-known charity organization. Before making this choice, they receive one of several messages potentially involving a moral argument from another participant.

Benthic Microbial Communities in a Seasonally Ice-Covered Sub-Arctic River (Pasvik River, Norway) Are Shaped by Site-Specific Environmental Conditions.

The Pasvik River experiences chemical, physical, and biological stressors due to the direct discharges of domestic sewage from settlements located within the catchment and runoff from smelter and mine wastes. Sediments, as a natural repository of organic matter and associated contaminants, are of global concern for the possible release of pollutants in the water column, with detrimental effects on aquatic organisms. The present study was aimed at characterizing the riverine benthic microbial community and evaluating its ecological role in relation to the contamination level.

Pulmonary toxicity and gene expression changes after short-term inhalation exposure to surface-modified copper oxide nanoparticles.

Copper oxide nanoparticles (CuO NPs) have previously been shown to cause dose-dependent pulmonary toxicity following inhalation. Here, CuO NPs (10 nm), coated with polyethylenimine (PEI) or ascorbate (ASC) resulting in positively or negatively charged NPs, respectively, were evaluated. Rats were exposed nose-only to similar exposure dose levels of ASC or PEI coated CuO NPs for 5 consecutive days.

The Metabolic Regimes at the Scale of an Entire Stream Network Unveiled Through Sensor Data and Machine Learning.

Unlabelled: Streams and rivers form dense networks that drain the terrestrial landscape and are relevant for biodiversity dynamics, ecosystem functioning, and transport and transformation of carbon. Yet, resolving in both space and time gross primary production (GPP), ecosystem respiration (ER) and net ecosystem production (NEP) at the scale of entire stream networks has been elusive so far. Here, combining Random Forest (RF) with time series of sensor data in 12 reach sites, we predicted annual regimes of GPP, ER, and NEP in 292 individual stream reaches and disclosed properties emerging from the network they form.

Does Whistleblowing on Tax Evaders Reduce Ingroup Cooperation?

Whistleblowing is a powerful and rather inexpensive instrument to deter tax evasion. Despite the deterrent effects on tax evasion, whistleblowing can reduce trust and undermine agents' attitude to cooperate with group members. Yet, no study has investigated the potential spillover effects of whistleblowing on ingroup cooperation.

Modeling the emergence of affective polarization in the social media society.

Rising political polarization in recent decades has hampered and gridlocked policymaking, as well as weakened trust in democratic institutions. These developments have been linked to the idea that new media technology fosters extreme views and political conflict by facilitating self-segregation into "echo chambers" where opinions are isolated and reinforced. This opinion-centered picture has recently been challenged by an emerging political science literature on "affective polarization", which suggests that current polarization is better understood as driven by partisanship emerging as a strong social identity.

Chemical Derivatization of Commercially Available Condensed and Hydrolyzable Tannins.

Novel valorization routes for tannins were opened by the development of a simple, straightforward, robust, and flexible approach to the selective functionalization of condensed and hydrolyzable tannins. Irrespective of the different degrees of polymerization, different commercial tannins were efficiently functionalized by the generation of an ether linkage bound to a short linker carrying the desired functional group. Functionalizations could be realized at varying degrees of technical loadings, i.

Trust in the Health System and COVID-19 Treatment.

COVID-19 continues to spread across the globe at an exponential speed, infecting millions and overwhelming even the most prepared healthcare systems. Concerns are looming that the healthcare systems in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are mostly unprepared to combat the virus because of limited resources. The problems in LMICs are exacerbated by the fact that citizens in these countries generally exhibit low trust in the healthcare system because of its low quality, which could trigger a number of uncooperative behaviors.

Political Narratives and the US Partisan Gender Gap.

Social scientists have devoted considerable research effort to investigate the determinants of the Partisan Gender Gap (PGG), whereby US women (men) tend to exhibit more liberal (conservative) political preferences over time. Results of a survey experiment run during the COVID-19 emergency and involving 3,086 US residents show that exposing subjects to alternative narratives on the causes of the pandemic increases the PGG: relative to a baseline treatment in which no narrative manipulation is implemented, exposing subjects to either the (claiming that COVID-19 was caused by a lab accident in Wuhan) or the (according to which COVID-19 originated in the wildlife) makes women more liberal. The polarization effect documented in our experiment is magnified by the political orientation of participants' state of residence: the largest PGG effect is between men residing in Republican-leaning states and women living in Democratic-leaning states.

Sulfited Tannin Capsules: Novel Stimuli-Responsive Delivery Systems.

Microcapsules of sulfited tannin (ST-MCs) were generated for the first time via the sonochemical method. Their stability profile was assessed and set in the general context of tannin microcapsules (TMCs) generated under the same experimental conditions. The analytical data gathered in this work indicate an excellent stability of TMCs over time as well as under high temperature and pressure, which is a major milestone toward the meaningful applications of TMCs in industrial, pharmaceutical, and biomedical applications in which sterilization of TMCs might be a prerequisite.

Controlling systemic risk: Network structures that minimize it and node properties to calculate it.

Evaluation of systemic risk in networks of financial institutions in general requires information of interinstitution financial exposures. In the framework of the DebtRank algorithm, we introduce an approximate method of systemic risk evaluation which requires only node properties, such as total assets and liabilities, as inputs. We demonstrate that this approximation captures a large portion of systemic risk measured by DebtRank.

An Analytical Toolbox for Fast and Straightforward Structural Characterisation of Commercially Available Tannins.

Both condensed and hydrolysable tannins represent versatile natural polyphenolic structures exhibiting a broad range of activities that could be exploited in various fields including nutraceutics, cosmesis, consumer care, household and pharmaceutical applications. Various tannins are commercially available nowadays for use in such application fields. We have analysed a representative selection of commercially available condensed and hydrolysable tannins for structural features and purity.

Functionalized Organosolv Lignins Suitable for Modifications of Hard Surfaces.

Two different organosolv lignins (OSLs), that is, wheat straw and corn stover OSLs, were chemically and enzymatically functionalized. Functional groups were attached via the formation of stable ether bonds exploiting the reactivity of free phenolic OH groups along the lignin backbone. The functional groups introduced a range from compact charged and chargeable building blocks for the generation of surface-active lignins to oligomeric and polymeric species used in lignin block-copolymer productions.

Characterization of Organosolv Birch Lignins: Toward Application-Specific Lignin Production.

Organosolv pretreatment represents one of the most promising biomass valorization strategies for renewable carbon-based products; meanwhile, there is an overall lack of holistic approach to how extraction conditions affect the suitable end-usages. In this context, lignin extracted from silver birch ( L.) by a novel hybrid organosolv/steam-explosion treatment at varying process conditions (EtOH %; time; catalyst %) was analyzed by quantitative NMR (H-C HSQC; C NMR; P NMR), gel permeation chromatography, Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR), Pyr-gas chromatography-mass spectroscopy (GC/MS), and thermogravimetric analysis, and the physicochemical characteristics of the lignins were discussed regarding their potential usages.

Sensor-based localization of epidemic sources on human mobility networks.

We investigate the source detection problem in epidemiology, which is one of the most important issues for control of epidemics. Mathematically, we reformulate the problem as one of identifying the relevant component in a multivariate Gaussian mixture model. Focusing on the study of cholera and diseases with similar modes of transmission, we calibrate the parameters of our mixture model using human mobility networks within a stochastic, spatially explicit epidemiological model for waterborne disease.

Generation and application of river network analogues for use in ecology and evolution.

Several key processes in freshwater ecology are governed by the connectivity inherent to dendritic river networks. These have extensively been analyzed from a geomorphological and hydrological viewpoint, yet structures classically used in ecological modeling have been poorly representative of the structure of real river basins, often failing to capture well-known scaling features of natural rivers. Pioneering work identified optimal channel networks (OCNs) as spanning trees reproducing all scaling features characteristic of natural stream networks worldwide.

Lignin Fractionation in Segmented Continuous Flow.

Lignins were fractionated in a segmented continuous flow fractionation (SCFF) approach using isocratic or gradient elution profiles of different solvent systems at various flow rates and temperatures against adjustable pressure regimes. Superior control of parameters such as temperature and pressure in combination with the possibility of freely combinable solvent gradients allowed facile fractionation and generation of industrially interesting fractions differing in molecular weight properties and/or in physicochemical properties in a process that could be fully remotely controlled for automation and performance. Scale-up of the process was possible in linear and parallel mode.

Carbohydrate determination in honey samples by ion chromatography-mass spectrometry (HPAEC-MS).

Honey is a complex mixture of carbohydrates, in which the monosaccharides glucose and fructose are the most abundant compounds. Currently, more than 20 oligosaccharides have been identified in different varieties of honey normally at quite low concentration. A method was developed and validated using high-performance anion-exchange chromatography coupled to a mass spectrometry detector to investigate the composition of carbohydrates in honey samples.

Later retirement, job strain, and health: Evidence from the new State Pension age in the United Kingdom.

This paper examines the impact of raising the State Pension age on women's health. Exploiting a UK pension reform that increased women's State Pension age for up to 6 years since 2010, we show that raising the State Pension age leads to an increase of up to 12 percentage points in the probability of depressive symptoms, alongside an increase in self-reported medically diagnosed depression among women in a lower occupational grade. Our results suggest that these effects are driven by prolonged exposure to high-strain jobs characterised by high demands and low control.