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Despite the breakthrough achievements in understanding structural and functional alterations of brain connectivity in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the exact nature and type of such alterations are not yet clear due to conflicting reports of hyper-connectivity, hypo-connectivity, and—in some cases—combinations of both. In this work, we bring order to the debate using a network comparison technique to capture mesoscopic-scale differential patterns of functional connectedness. In particular, we leverage recent algorithmic advances in extracting contrast subgraphs to identify maximally different mesoscopic connectivity structures between two sets of networks from typically developed individuals and ASD subjects across different developmental stages. A significantly larger connectivity among occipital cortex regions and between the left precuneus and the superior parietal gyrus was found in ASD subjects. At the same time, reduced connectivity characterized the superior frontal gyrus and the temporal lobe regions. More importantly, our results reconcile within a single framework multiple previous separate observations about functional connectivity alterations in ASD.

Recently, China has undergone rapid urbanization in terms of population and urban land growth. However, there are notable lags in the people-oriented dimensions of urbanization, including urban social services, environmental services, and socioeconomic equity, which are crucial for achieving SDG11 (sustainable cities and communities). Here, considering the complex dimensions of urbanization, we examined 16 people-oriented urbanization indicators across four dimensions, namely, economic, social, environmental, and equity dimensions, from 2005 to 2020, and their relationships with population/land urbanization at multiple scales (national, regional, and urban agglomeration scales), and among different city sizes, via the paired t test and the evenness index. Notably, between 2005 and 2020, these urbanization indicators of China showed an overall upward trend, with changes ranging from 1.09 to 53.95 times. Among the 16 people-oriented urbanization indicators, the economic and social indicators lagged behind the land and population urbanization, whereas the environmental indicators caught up. The evenness index among these indicators showed a U-shaped change pattern, which indicated that people-oriented urbanization was coming up with population/land urbanization since the implementation of China new-type urbanization plan in 2014 until 2020. In the future, increasing investment in social service systems and implementing place-based coordination strategies are necessary to make cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable.

Ship emissions represent a significant environmental issue, directly connected to the fuel consumption and highly investigated in the last decade. Fuel consumption of a vessel is a key factor in the research of ship energy efficiency, its environmental impact, optimization and economic performance. Fuel consumption is mainly evaluated by available mathematical models, and the estimated value is used in further calculations, thus the results conceal an error. Evaluating the average fuel consumption also disables the possibility to analyze the fuel usage in different operating modes. Further, both technical and operational optimization aim at reducing fuel consumption. To achieve a quality improvement of a ship’s system, the input data on consumption needs to have minimal errors. This paper presents different methods of fuel monitoring and evaluation as well as the development of a modern fuel measurement system for fishing vessels. A short overview of fuel consumption models is given and the focus is shifted to fuel monitoring devices. Fuel monitoring devices are effective tools for determining the exact consumption and investigating the energy efficiency of vessels. The application of flow meters and fuel level sensors in the Croatian fishing fleet is presented and an example of measurements collected by the devices is included.

BACKGROUND: The strawberry tortrix, Acleris comariana (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae), is a destructive pest of strawberry in Denmark and southern Sweden. The efficacy of pheromone‐based communication disruption of the species was examined in crop fields in southern Sweden. Due to the high cost of purchasing or synthesizing the pheromone (E)‐11,13‐tetradecadienal, lower quantities were applied per ha compared to similar mating disruption studies on other tortricid pests. RESULTS: When treating 1 ha within fields with 14 or 1.4 g of pheromone and using rubber septa as dispensers, trap catches were reduced by ≥98% versus control areas. When treating whole fields with 0.45-0.90 g/ha and using 1 g SPLAT droplets as dispensers, the effect on trap catch was less pronounced (63-95% reduction vs control fields). A corresponding reduction in larval numbers following the treatment was not achieved. Additional experiments revealed that males are more attracted to SPLAT droplets compared to trap lures, and aggregate near SPLAT droplets, indicating that low catches in traps were due to induced allopatry, a form of competitive disruption. In addition, female‐baited traps were outcompeted when placed close to septum‐baited traps. Pest densities were high, and the lack of control effect could be attributed to high encounter rates between the sexes despite the female competitive disadvantage, making mating disruption less efficient. CONCLUSION: Our data show the potential for pheromone‐based control of A. comariana as part of integrated pest management, but the method needs optimization regarding density and strength of dispensers and ways to reduce the initial density of the pest to levels where competitive mechanisms of mating disruption can be efficient. © 2025 The Author(s). Pest Management Science published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society of Chemical Industry.

Cased-hole ultrasonic pitch-catch logging serves as a critical quantitative detection method in cement bond evaluation, primarily employed for the quantitative assessment of bonding quality at both casing-cement and cement-formation interfaces. Conventional reverse time migration (RTM) with coupled acoustic field cross-correlation imaging conditions often generates significant artifacts near real reflection interfaces. These artifacts arise from the complex characteristics of formation interface reflections in actual acquisitions, containing multiple seismic phases, which consequently interfere with accurate identification of the true cement-annulus-formation interface. To address this challenge, this study proposes a Helmholtz decomposition-based methodology. The approach establishes an improved RTM imaging method for cased-hole ultrasonic flexural waves through wavefield decoupling of both forward and backward propagated wavefields at each timestep, incorporating decoupled wavefield auto-correlation and cross-correlation operations. Synthetic case studies demonstrate that the auto-correlation RTM results of decoupled S-wave fields exhibit enhanced energy concentration at theoretical reflection interfaces when the annular medium is conventional cement, accompanied by significant reductions in imaging artifacts and noise. Therefore, the proposed decoupled wavefield RTM method provides an effective solution for high-precision imaging of cement-annulus-formation interfaces in cased-hole measurement environments.

Izzie just loves when her mama blows her kisses to catch. Smooch kisses, zig-zag kisses, and even triple decker kisses! But even though she runs and leaps for it, Izzie misses a kiss! Her heart sinks as she watches it zip higher and higher into the sky. When Mama lets Izzie in on a sweet secret she realizes that her mama's love will always come to find her, no matter what! This silly and tender story is a universal one of a parent's love.

While there have been recent improvements in reducing bycatch in many fisheries, bycatch remains a threat for numerous species around the globe. Static spatial and temporal closures are used in many places as a tool to reduce bycatch. However, their effectiveness in achieving this goal is uncertain, particularly for highly mobile species.We evaluated evidence for the effects of temporal, static, and dynamic area closures on the bycatch and target catch of 15 fisheries around the world. Assuming perfect knowledge of where the catch and bycatch occurs and a closure of 30% of the fishing area, we found that dynamic area closures could reduce bycatch by an average of 57% without sacrificing catch of target species, compared to 16% reductions in bycatch achievable by static closures. The degree of bycatch reduction achievable for a certain quantity of target catch was related to the correlation in space and time between target and bycatch species. If the correlation was high, it was harder to find an area to reduce bycatch without sacrificing catch of target species. If the goal of spatial closures is to reduce bycatch, our results suggest that dynamic management provides substantially better outcomes than classic static marine area closures. The use of dynamic ocean management might be difficult to implement and enforce in many regions. Nevertheless, dynamic approaches will be increasingly valuable as climate change drives species and fisheries into new habitats or extended ranges, altering species-fishery interactions and underscoring the need for more responsive and flexible regulatory mechanisms.

The surge in popularity of live video streaming has spurred the development of various bitrate adaptation techniques, all aimed at enhancing user Quality of Experience (QoE). Compared to streaming Video-on-Demand, achieving low-latency live video streaming under fluctuating network conditions poses additional challenges. It requires finding the balance between rebuffering avoidance and latency, as a small client buffer is required to achieve low latency. Video players can also employ playback speed control to help optimize this balance. Specifically, when client buffer occupancy is high and hence latency is high, the player may increase playback speed to reduce the latency; and conversely, when client buffer occupancy is low and hence the risk of rebuffering is high, the player may reduce playback speed to increase buffer occupancy. Based on this rationale, a variety of playback speed control methods have been proposed. This paper evaluates, using a real-world testbed, the effectiveness of various playback speed control mechanisms when applied to a set of bitrate adaptation algorithms, with the evaluation also encompassing variations in target latency and network conditions. Our findings show a lack of coordination between adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithms and playback speed control mechanisms. This leads us to conclude that there is a need for new playback speed control methods designed in conjunction with ABR algorithms.

We study a Stackelberg game between an attacker and a defender on large Active Directory (AD) attack graphs where the defender employs a set of honeypots to stop the attacker from reaching high-value targets. Contrary to existing works that focus on small and static attack graphs, AD graphs typically contain hundreds of thousands of nodes and edges and constantly change over time. We consider two types of attackers: a simple attacker who cannot observe honeypots and a competent attacker who can. To jointly solve the game, we propose a mixed-integer programming (MIP) formulation. We observed that the optimal blocking plan for static graphs performs poorly in dynamic graphs. To solve the dynamic graph problem, we re-design the mixed-integer programming formulation by combining m MIP (dyMIP(m)) instances to produce a near-optimal blocking plan. Furthermore, to handle a large number of dynamic graph instances, we use a clustering algorithm to efficiently find the m-most representative graph instances for a constant m (dyMIP(m)). We prove a lower bound on the optimal blocking strategy for dynamic graphs and show that our dyMIP(m) algorithms produce close to optimal results for a range of AD graphs under realistic conditions.