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Despite the importance of urban trees, their growth reaction to climate change and to the urban heat island effect has not yet been investigated with an international scope. While we are well informed about forest growth under recent conditions, it is unclear if this knowledge can be simply transferred to urban environments. Based on tree ring analyses in ten metropolises worldwide, we show that, in general, urban trees have undergone accelerated growth since the 1960s. In addition, urban trees tend to grow more quickly than their counterparts in the rural surroundings. However, our analysis shows that climate change seems to enhance the growth of rural trees more than that of urban trees. The benefits of growing in an urban environment seem to outweigh known negative effects, however, accelerated growth may also mean more rapid ageing and shortened lifetime. Thus, city planners should adapt to the changed dynamics in order to secure the ecosystem services provided by urban trees.

\"6 On the other hand, most current citations focus on physical ambiance rather than conduct, restricting our understanding of the fullness of ceremonial worship. [...]the beauty of holiness loses its spiritual richness, especially considering the phrase was used both by Laudian and anti-Laudian writers. [...]the widespread use of the phrase in the early seventeenth century suggests that the beauty of holiness was hardly the exclusive domain of the Laudians. Because scholarship has, at times, taken a myopic view of the \"beauty of holiness\" due to the perceived hegemony of the Laudian movement, it might bear disclaiming that the focus here is on what the phrase itself represented to English Protestants. For Andrewes, Christians should follow suit because the liturgy says to worship ceremoniously. The phrase appears in Book Five (pub. 1597), which focuses on Church ceremony.

Stephen Smith launched a 40-year effort to bring trees to New York City streets in 1872, the year he founded the American Public Health Association (APHA). Smith argued that street trees would mitigate the adverse health effects of Manhattan’s summer heat and help purify the air. The young APHA endorsed Smith’s position and gave trees a prominent role in urban sanitation, but public health turned away from trees and urban reform movements as it adopted a biomedical public health model in the late 19th century. Nevertheless, Smith wrote and campaigned for a successful 1902 law requiring the New York City Parks Department to assume management of street trees in the name of public health. He then led a 1914 campaign to force the department to uphold his law. New York’s street tree program has had an erratic trajectory, but it now generally follows Smith’s vision. Public health could play a bigger role in creating greener cities and mitigating climate change with more field research and the health in all policies approach that Smith used to bring trees to Manhattan’s streets in 1914. ( Am J Public Health. 2025;115(1):66–74. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2024.307856 )

This is a study of the dimensional accuracy of the bone cut surfaces in robotic TKA. One surgeon performed robotic TKA on four cadaveric knees. A novel technique was developed for measuring the dimensional accuracy of both the femoral and tibial cut surfaces. CT scans were used to create a pre-operative plan and generate nominal cut surfaces on the 3D bone model. After TKA, the cut surfaces were then laser scanned. Two femoral components were also scanned and compared to nominal dimensions. Flatness was computed as the standard deviation between each of the cut surfaces and the best-fit plane. The angles between the five femoral best-fit planes were compared to the nominal values. The point-to-point distances between the femoral cut surfaces and the nominal cut planes were computed to estimate the bone-to-implant gap. The cut surfaces had an average flatness of 0.16 ± 0.06 mm with low variability between different cut planes. The femoral cut surfaces had average angular errors of 0.47 ± 0.39°, which are of similar magnitude as the errors found for the implants. The bone-to-implant gap was within ±1 mm for 97.9% of the surface on average. Using a novel methodology, the dimensional accuracy of an active robotic system for TKA was found to be very high for both the femoral and tibial bone cuts. Comparison studies are needed with other robotic systems as well as studies comparing manual and robotic techniques.

ObjectivesTo examine the causal impact of small businesses on street theft and the underlying mechanisms.MethodsThe “Cleanup Holes in the Wall” campaign in Beijing, China, provides a rare opportunity for a natural experiment. Drawing on street view images processed by deep learning algorithms and other big data sources such as court judgments and location-based service (LBS) population, we use difference-in-difference (DID) models to investigate how the disappearance of small businesses leads to changes in the occurrence of theft. We further examine the mechanisms by introducing mediators, including ambient population and social activity.ResultsThe treatment units that experienced a mass loss of small businesses showed a significant reduction in street theft compared to the control units that were less affected by the cleanup campaign. Ambient population and social activity played a mediating role in promoting and deterring crime, respectively, with the former dominating. The results remain robust after including covariates in the models, balancing covariates using the propensity score matching method, and adopting alternative thresholds to classify the treatment group.ConclusionsThere are two competing yet coexisting mechanisms through which small businesses influence street theft. On the one hand, commercial premises provide large numbers of criminal opportunities for potential offenders; on the other hand, they are central to local social control and order. While small businesses exercise a certain amount of natural surveillance power, as a whole, they function primarily as crime generators. Implications for implementing targeted policies tailored to the nature of small businesses are discussed.

DELLA proteins act as master negative regulators in the gibberellin signaling pathway, which controls numerous aspects of plant growth and development. Despite the pivotal role of DELLA proteins, a comprehensive genome-wide analysis of the DELLA gene family in sweet potato ( Ipomoea batatas ) and its related species has yet to be conducted. Here, we performed a comparative analysis of this gene family among six Ipomoea species, including Ipomoea batatas , Ipomoea trifida , Ipomoea triloba , Ipomoea nil , Ipomoea cairica , and Ipomoea aquatica . Among the six Ipomoea species, only I. nil contains five DELLA genes, while the remaining species have three DELLA genes each. The DELLA genes were categorized into three distinct subgroups based on the phylogenetic topology in selected Ipomoea species. Comparative analysis of gene structure and protein motifs revealed that members within the same phylogenetic group exhibit comparable exon/intron and motif organization. The cis -regulatory elements of the DELLA gene in selected Ipomoea species contain unique promoter elements, indicating the presence of species-specific regulatory mechanisms. A multitude of shared cis -regulatory elements related to stress responses were identified in the DELLA gene promoters. Furthermore, a syntenic analysis indicates two groups of syntenic DELLA genes have undergone several rearrangements. The results of the duplication analysis indicated that dispersed duplications contribute to the expansion of the DELLA genes. Moreover, the DELLA genes in sweet potato display an expression pattern that tends to control the growth and development of either the aerial or below-ground parts, and they are responsive to a range of hormones and abiotic stresses. Thus, these findings provide insights into the evolutionary history of DELLA genes within the genus Ipomoea and the functions of sweet potato DELLA genes.

Pine Avenue is a small side street in the Sydney suburb of Earlwood. It terminates abruptly at the Cooks River, a tidal estuary that defines the contours of Sydney’s inner south-west and reifies colonial exploration. While engineered from asphalt, Pine Avenue is also shaped by waters both slow and spectacular: every King Tide, the road floods with brackish water seeping up from underground; during storm surges, an excess of storm water from neighbouring areas can cause the Cooks to breach its banks, pouring itself out onto Pine. Due to the creep of the tide or the inundation of storm water, city-planning regulations dictate that any house constructed on Pine Avenue must match the elevation of the runway at Kingsford Smith Airport, some two kilometres to the east. In this, the tiny thoroughfare becomes a repetition of that larger thoroughfare—one that gives Sydney access to globalisation, mobility and myriad fossil-fuelled desires, and one that, like the microcosm of Pine Avenue, is also built on stolen indigenous land and engineered to mute the whims of the water (Figure 1). Those living on Pine Avenue are especially exposed to the rising sea levels and stronger storm surges of climate change, but each of these Pine Avenue bodies also weathers climate change differently.