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The increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration elevates atmospheric temperature and enhances water storage capacity. This could lead to more extreme precipitation events, while simultaneously, higher temperatures may cause land and soil to dry out. Such alterations create ambiguous expectations regarding the direction of hydrological changes in the following decades. This work quantifies streamflow changes on flood discharges in South America based on the MGB‐SA hydrodynamic‐hydrological model forced with the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) ensemble of climate projections. Future projections indicate that floods are expected to increase in magnitude and become up to five times more frequent in Southern Brazil, a region recently impacted by unprecedented flooding. In contrast, ecosystems such as the Amazon and the Pantanal will likely experience less frequent floods in the coming decades. These projections have relevant implications not only for flood risk in populated areas but also for ecological dynamics. Plain Language Summary Global warming is a phenomenon that is increasing the planet's temperature. This increase leads to more water retained in the atmosphere, potentially increasing precipitation. However, the temperature rise might also increase the evapotranspiration of water in the soil. All these alterations in the water cycle affect river flows and floods. In this work, we quantified the alterations for South America's large rivers using climate projections from CMIP6 and the hydrological model MGB‐SA. Rainfall projections show an increase of 20% in 5 years return period (RP) rainfall and up to 60 % in 100 years RP rainfall. In the following decades, floods might be up to five times more frequent in Southern Brazil, a region recently affected by unprecedented floods. In contrast, the Amazon and Pantanal basins show projections of less frequent floods, which might negatively affect its ecosystem. Key Points CMIP6 projects a rise in maximum daily rainfall across most of South America, though flood flows will not uniformly increase Projections show flood intensification over Southern Brazil, a region recently affected by disastrous floods Amazon, Pantanal, and Bananal wetlands may have decreased flood events, negatively impacting ecosystems

A comparison of methodologies was carried out to develop an operational flow forecasting system for a mountainous catchment. The case studied was the Boi River, which is located in a small mountainous catchment in southern Brazil. This catchment is part of a conservation unit well known for the beautiful landscapes and ecotourism activities carried out in that place. Among the activities, the Boi River trail can be highlighted, which is carried out following the riverbed. For this reason, the development of an alert system for this basin can help in determining the trail's closure in situations where the water flow is strong and could present risks to tourists’ safety. Thereby, the aim of this study was to assess two distinct scenarios for the development of the forecasting system. First, the flow forecasts were performed using SOPREVA and considered a horizon of 1 day (short-term forecasts). The second scenario considered medium-term forecasts (1–10 days horizon) and utilized the HEC-RTS as a basis for developing the forecast system. In both cases, the forecasts were based on the ensemble precipitation estimates of GEFS. The obtained results showed that the actual alarm rates were 0.77 and 0.86 for SOPREVA and HEC-RTS, respectively, when considering a horizon of one day in advance. The evaluation of the medium-term forecasts presented good results of this system for horizons up to 3 days in advance. Finally, the results of both considered scenarios showed that the systems could be used as a basis for management of the Boi River trail.

Background This study reviewed the impact of pre-operative chemoradiotherapy or post-operative chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy on total mesorectal excision (TME) for ultralow rectal cancers that required either low anterior resection with peranal coloanal anastomosis or abdomino-perineal resection (APR). We examined surgical complications, local recurrence and survival. Methods Of the 1270 patients who underwent radical resection for rectal cancer from 1994 till 2007, 180 with tumors within 4 cm with either peranal coloanal anastomosis or APR were analyzed. Patients were compared in groups that had surgery only (Group A), pre-operative chemoradiotherapy (Group B), and post-operative therapy (Group C). Results There were 115 males and the mean age was 65.43 years (range 30-89). APR was performed in 134 patients while 46 had a sphincter-preserving resection with peranal coloanal anastomosis. The mean follow-up period was 52.98 months (range: 0.57 to 178.9). There were 69, 58 and 53 patients in Groups A, B, and C, respectively. Nine patients in Group B could go on to have sphincter-saving rectal resection. The overall peri-operative complication rate was 43.4% in Group A vs. 29.3% in Group B vs. 39.6% in Group C, respectively. The local recurrence rate was significantly lower in Group B (8.6.9% vs. 21.7% in Group A vs. 33.9% in Group C) p < 0.05 . The 5-year cancer-specific survival rates for Group A was 49.3%, Group B was 69.9% and Group C was 38.8% ( p = 0.14). Conclusion Pre-operative chemoradiation in low rectal cancer is not associated with a higher incidence of peri-operative complications and its benefits may include reduction local recurrence.

The regional distribution of white matter (WM) abnormalities in schizophrenia remains poorly understood, and reported disease effects on the brain vary widely between studies. In an effort to identify commonalities across studies, we perform what we believe is the first ever large-scale coordinated study of WM microstructural differences in schizophrenia. Our analysis consisted of 2359 healthy controls and 1963 schizophrenia patients from 29 independent international studies; we harmonized the processing and statistical analyses of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data across sites and meta-analyzed effects across studies. Significant reductions in fractional anisotropy (FA) in schizophrenia patients were widespread, and detected in 20 of 25 regions of interest within a WM skeleton representing all major WM fasciculi. Effect sizes varied by region, peaking at (d=0.42) for the entire WM skeleton, driven more by peripheral areas as opposed to the core WM where regions of interest were defined. The anterior corona radiata (d=0.40) and corpus callosum (d=0.39), specifically its body (d=0.39) and genu (d=0.37), showed greatest effects. Significant decreases, to lesser degrees, were observed in almost all regions analyzed. Larger effect sizes were observed for FA than diffusivity measures; significantly higher mean and radial diffusivity was observed for schizophrenia patients compared with controls. No significant effects of age at onset of schizophrenia or medication dosage were detected. As the largest coordinated analysis of WM differences in a psychiatric disorder to date, the present study provides a robust profile of widespread WM abnormalities in schizophrenia patients worldwide. Interactive three-dimensional visualization of the results is available at www.enigma-viewer.org.

Providing reliable estimates of streamflow and hydrological fluxes is a major challenge for water resources management over national and transnational basins in South America. Global hydrological models and land surface models are a possible solution to simulate the terrestrial water cycle at the continental scale, but issues about parameterization and limitations in representing lowland river systems can place constraints on these models to meet local needs. In an attempt to overcome such limitations, we extended a regional, fully coupled hydrologic–hydrodynamic model (MGB; Modelo hidrológico de Grandes Bacias) to the continental domain of South America and assessed its performance using daily river discharge, water levels from independent sources (in situ, satellite altimetry), estimates of terrestrial water storage (TWS) and evapotranspiration (ET) from remote sensing and other available global datasets. In addition, river discharge was compared with outputs from global models acquired through the eartH2Observe project (HTESSEL/CaMa-Flood, LISFLOOD and WaterGAP3), providing the first cross-scale assessment (regional/continental  ×  global models) that makes use of spatially distributed, daily discharge data. A satisfactory representation of discharge and water levels was obtained (Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency, NSE > 0.6 in 55 % of the cases) and the continental model was able to capture patterns of seasonality and magnitude of TWS and ET, especially over the largest basins of South America. After the comparison with global models, we found that it is possible to obtain considerable improvement on daily river discharge, even by using current global forcing data, just by combining parameterization and better routing physics based on regional experience. Issues about the potential sources of errors related to both global- and continental-scale modeling are discussed, as well as future directions for improving large-scale model applications in this continent. We hope that our study provides important insights to reduce the gap between global and regional hydrological modeling communities.

We introduce a new catchment dataset for large-sample hydrological studies in Brazil. This dataset encompasses daily time series of observed streamflow from 3679 gauges, as well as meteorological forcing (precipitation, evapotranspiration, and temperature) for 897 selected catchments. It also includes 65 attributes covering a range of topographic, climatic, hydrologic, land cover, geologic, soil, and human intervention variables, as well as data quality indicators. This paper describes how the hydrometeorological time series and attributes were produced, their primary limitations, and their main spatial features. To facilitate comparisons with catchments from other countries, the data follow the same standards as the previous CAMELS (Catchment Attributes and MEteorology for Large-sample Studies) datasets for the United States, Chile, and Great Britain. CAMELS-BR (Brazil) complements the other CAMELS datasets by providing data for hundreds of catchments in the tropics and the Amazon rainforest. Importantly, precipitation and evapotranspiration uncertainties are assessed using several gridded products, and quantitative estimates of water consumption are provided to characterize human impacts on water resources. By extracting and combining data from these different data products and making CAMELS-BR publicly available, we aim to create new opportunities for hydrological research in Brazil and facilitate the inclusion of Brazilian basins in continental to global large-sample studies. We envision that this dataset will enable the community to gain new insights into the drivers of hydrological behavior, better characterize extreme hydroclimatic events, and explore the impacts of climate change and human activities on water resources in Brazil. The CAMELS-BR dataset is freely available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3709337 (Chagas et al., 2020).

The complete nucleotide sequence of a Beijing isolate of Wisteria vein mosaic virus was determined to be 9695 nucleotides in length excluding the poly(A) tail. Sequence analysis predicted a single large open reading frame of 9279 nucleotides potentially encodes a polyprotein of 3092 amino acids. Phylogenetic analysis based on the genomic and deduced amino acid sequences support the current status of Wisteria vein mosaic virus (WVMV) as a distinct virus of the genus Potyvirus and a member of the Bean common mosaic virus (BCMV) subgroup. Sequence comparisons of WVMV and other members of the BCMV subgroup showed that WVMV is most closely related to both soybean mosaic virus and watermelon mosaic virus.

Human ear morphology, a complex anatomical structure represented by a multidimensional set of correlated and heritable phenotypes, has a poorly understood genetic architecture. In this study, we quantitatively assessed 136 ear morphology traits using deep learning analysis of digital face images in 14,921 individuals from five different cohorts in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Through GWAS meta-analysis and C-GWASs, a recently introduced method to effectively combine GWASs of many traits, we identified 16 genetic loci involved in various ear phenotypes, eight of which have not been previously associated with human ear features. Our findings suggest that ear morphology shares genetic determinants with other surface ectoderm-derived traits such as facial variation, mono eyebrow, and male pattern baldness. Our results enhance the genetic understanding of human ear morphology and shed light on the shared genetic contributors of different surface ectoderm-derived phenotypes. Additionally, gene editing experiments in mice have demonstrated that knocking out the newly ear-associated gene ( Intu ) and a previously ear-associated gene ( Tbx15 ) causes deviating mouse ear morphology.

Poor \"Avid radio listener but not in Hongkong\" -- you are obviously on the wrong wavelength!

In this trial, patients with CKD (with or without type 2 diabetes) were randomly assigned to receive dapagliflozin or placebo. The primary composite outcome — a sustained decline in the estimated GFR of at least 50%, end-stage kidney disease, or death from renal or cardiovascular causes — was less frequent with dapagliflozin.