Accordingly, E. occidentalis could be used for biomonitoring in arid areas subjected to industrial and traffic pollution. T. aphylla would be a good alternative when native species are a priority.Continuous monitoring and early warning together represent an important mitigation strategy for harmful algal blooms (HAB). The coast of Texas experiences periodic blooms of three HAB dinoflagellates Karenia brevis, Dinophysis ovum, and Prorocentrum texanum. A plankton image data set acquired by an Imaging FlowCytobot over a decade of operation was used to train and evaluate two new automated image classifiers. A 112 class, random forest classifier (RF_112) and a 112 class, convolutional neural network classifier (CNN_112) were developed and compared with an existing, 54 class, random forest classifier (RF_54) already in use as an early warning notification system. Both 112 class classifiers exhibited improved performance over the RF_54 classifier when tested on three different HAB species with the CNN_112 classifier producing fewer false positives and false negatives in most of the cases tested. For K. brevis and P. texanum, the current threshold of 2 cells.mL-1 was identified as the best threshold to minimize the number of false positives and false negatives. For D. ovum, a threshold of 1 cell.mL-1 was found to produce the best results with regard to the number of false positives/negatives. A lower threshold will result in earlier notification of an increase in cell concentration and will provide state health managers with increased lead time to prepare for an impending HAB.Hospital wastewaters contain high concentrations of pharmaceutical residues and other chemicals, and may present an important source for NDMA (N-nitrosodimethylamine) and its precursors in the aquatic environment. The present study evaluates the contribution of hospital wastewater to NDMA environmental load and identifies important sources within the hospital itself. For this purpose, wastewaters from five large hospitals in Israel were analyzed, and concentrations of NDMA were found in the range of 20.7-56.7 ng/L, which are similar to NDMA concentrations typically detected in domestic wastewater. The relative contribution of day surgery, oncology, laboratories, and central kitchen (in Sheba hospital) to the daily load of NDMA was calculated as 20.2%, 8.2%, 10%, and 43.2%, respectively. In addition, NDMA concentration in Sheba's mixed wastewater stream, measured throughout a complete working day, was highest at 1400. This suggests the possible impact of lunchtime on NDMA concentration, and emphasizes the dominant contribution of central kitchen waste. Finally, formation potential of NDMA in the mixed stream was 7300 ng/L, in the upper range of domestic wastewater, but could be decreased by 70% during subsequent aerobic biological wastewater treatment.How to satisfy food production sustainably in the rapid urbanizing process is a vital problem for major grain-producing areas. Taking two national grain-producing regions in China, Shandong and Dongting Lake Region as examples, this study uses step-by-step prediction and a double-objective linear programming model to analyze the dilemma of land scarcity, food demand, and environmental load. It is found that food demand by 2030 will induce partial regional cropland deficiency and heterogeneous agro-environmental risk among cities.  https://www.selleckchem.com/products/gsk-2837808A.html  The double-objective linear programming model finds possible solutions in different scenarios on the premise of keeping the current cropland area unchanged, the upper threshold of crop yield by 2030 will be 2539.06 × 104 t in Dongting and 7175.13 × 104 t in Shandong, respectively. On the condition of guaranteeing food self-sufficiency and minimizing the environmental load, the lower threshold of arable land area should be 99.47 × 104 ha in Dongting and 436.85 × 104 ha in Shandong. Pollutant reduction will be realized by reallocation of agro-production task and optimized practices. The food carbon impact can be reduced by up to 1.27 kg CO2 eq/kg. This study contributes to feasible pathways towards adequate agro-production, lessened land scarcity, and minimal environmental risk for rapid urbanizing cities in a sustainable way.Geopolitical risks have been widely linked to oil price movements in the past. Our study as an addition to this debate shows that geopolitical threats particularly play a significant role in the volatility experienced in global oil markets with attendant policy suggestions. In this study, we employed the newly developed geopolitical threats index to examine whether threats of war, terrorism, and ethnic and political violence within and between countries are powerful enough to predict volatility in global oil prices. Monthly data on global geopolitical threats index and global prices of crude were drawn upon for causality between the periods 199001 and 202004. To this effect, two volatility indices were constructed using the deviations of Brent and WTI prices from their Hodrick-Prescott filters. The ability of the geopolitical threats index to predict volatilities was examined through a battery of causality methodologies-Granger causality test in frequency domain, nonparametric test for nonlinear causality, leveraged bootstrap causality test, and Fourier Toda-Yamamoto causality test. Through various causality methodologies, we were able to ensure robustness against various problems associated with the classical linear Granger causality testing approach and ascertain that geopolitical threats are powerful and useful predictors of volatility in global oil prices.While many individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience difficulties with language processing, non-linguistic semantic processing may be intact. We examined neural responses to an implicit semantic priming task by comparing N400 responses-an event-related potential related to semantic processing-in response to semantically related or unrelated pairs of words or pictures. Adults with ASD showed larger N400 responses than typically developing adults for pictures, but no group differences occurred for words. However, we also observed complex modulations of N400 amplitude by age and by level of autistic traits. These results offer important implications for how groups are delineated and compared in autism research.