Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluating the Potential of Landsat Satellite Data to Monitor the Effectiveness of Measures to Mitigate Urban Heat Islands: A Case Study for Stuttgart (Germany)

The urban heat island (UHI) effect is a serious health risk for people living in cities and thus calls for effective mitigation strategies in urban areas. Satellite data enable monitoring of the surface urban heat island (SUHI) over large areas at high spatial resolution. Here we analysed SUHI in the city of Stuttgart (Germany) based on land surface temperature (LST) data from Landsat at 30 m resolution. The overall SUHI in Stuttgart decreased by 1.4 °C between the investigated time periods 2004–2008 and 2016–2020, while the absolute LST increased by 2.5 °C. We identified local hotspots of strong warming and cooling in Stuttgart through the change in SUHI and categorised them based on the predominant land cover change occurring at the hotspot using the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) from Landsat as well as visual information on land cover changes from Google Earth Pro. The establishment of green roofs, as well as albedo changes, are predominantly responsible for cooling spots, while warming spots are mostly associated with the sealing of surfaces. This highlights that vegetation has a dominant influence on SUHI development in Stuttgart. Combining satellite-based LST data with visual information thus provides an effective method to identify local warming and cooling hotspots, which allows monitoring of the success of city policies against heat stress and guides future policy.
COSMOLOGICAL EVOLUTION OF SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES. II. EVIDENCE FOR DOWNSIZING OF SPIN EVOLUTION

The spin is an important but poorly constrained parameter for describing supermassive black holes (SMBHs). Using the continuity equation of SMBH number density, we explicitly obtain the mass-dependent cosmological evolution of the radiative efficiency for accretion, which serves as a proxy for SMBH spin. Our calculations make use of the SMBH mass function of active and inactive galaxies (derived in the first paper of this series), the bolometric luminosity function of active galactic nuclei (AGNs), corrected for the contribution from Compton-thick sources, and the observed Eddington ratio distribution. We find that the radiative efficiency generally increases with increasing black hole mass at high redshifts (z ≳ 1), roughly as η∝M0.5•, while the trend reverses at lower redshifts, such that the highest efficiencies are attained by the lowest mass black holes. Black holes with M• ≳ 108.5 M☉ maintain radiative efficiencies as high as η ≈ 0.3–0.4 at high redshifts, near the maximum for rapidly spinning systems, but their efficiencies drop dramatically (by an order of magnitude) by z ≈ 0. The pattern for lower mass holes is somewhat more complicated but qualitatively similar. Assuming that the standard accretion disk model applies, we suggest that the accretion history of SMBHs and their accompanying spins evolves in two distinct regimes: an early phase of prolonged accretion, plausibly driven by major mergers, during which the black hole spins up, then switching to a period of random, episodic accretion, governed by minor mergers and internal secular processes, during which the hole spins down. The transition epoch depends on mass, mirroring other evidence for “cosmic downsizing” in the AGN population; it occurs at z ≈ 2 for high-mass black holes and somewhat later, at z ≈ 1, for lower mass systems.
Earthquake Catastrophe Bond Pricing Using Extreme Value Theory: A Mini-Review Approach

Earthquake catastrophe bond pricing models (ECBPMs) employ extreme value theory (EVT) to predict severe losses, although studies on EVT’s use in ECBPMs are still rare. Therefore, this study aimed to use a mini-review approach (MRA) to examine the use of EVT and identify the gaps and weaknesses in the methods or models developed. The MRA stages include planning, search and selection, analysis, and interpretation of the results. The selection results showed five articles regarding the application of EVT in ECBPMs. Furthermore, the analysis found the following: First, the generalized extreme value (GEV) could eliminate extreme data in a period. Second, the trigger model using two parameters is better than one, but the study did not discuss the joint distribution of the two parameters. Third, the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) allows negative values. Fourth, Cox–Ingersoll–Ross (CIR) in-coupon modeling is less effective in depicting the real picture. This is because it has a constant volatility assumption and cannot describe jumps due to monetary policy. Based on these limitations, it is hoped that future studies can develop an ECBPM that reduces the moral hazard.
Lorentz noninvariant oscillations of massless neutrinos are excluded

The bicycle model of Lorentz noninvariant neutrino oscillations without neutrino masses naturally predicts maximal mixing and a 1/E dependence of the oscillation argument for muon-neutrino to tau-neutrino oscillations of atmospheric and long-baseline neutrinos, but cannot also simultaneously fit the data for solar neutrinos and KamLAND. Within the Standard Model Extension, we examine all 19 possible structures of the effective Hamiltonian for Lorentz noninvariant oscillations of massless neutrinos that naturally have a 1/E dependence at high neutrino energy. Due to the lack of any evidence for direction dependence, we consider only direction-independent oscillations. Although we find a number of models with a 1/E dependence for atmospheric and long-baseline neutrinos, none can also simultaneously fit solar and KamLAND data.
ALFVÉN-WAVE TURBULENCE AND PERPENDICULAR ION TEMPERATURES IN CORONAL HOLES

Low-frequency Alfvén-wave turbulence causes ion trajectories to become chaotic, or “stochastic,” when the turbulence amplitude is sufficiently large. Stochastic orbits enable ions to absorb energy from the turbulence, increasing the perpendicular ion temperature T⊥i even when the fluctuation frequencies are too small for a cyclotron resonance to occur. In this paper, an analytic expression for the stochastic heating rate is used in conjunction with an observationally constrained turbulence model to obtain an analytic formula for T⊥i as a function of heliocentric distance r, ion mass, and ion charge in coronal holes at 2 R☉ ≲ r ≲ 15 R☉. The resulting temperature profiles provide a good fit to observations of protons and O+5 ions at 2 R☉ ≲ r ≲ 3 R☉ from the Ultraviolet Coronagraph Spectrometer (UVCS). Stochastic heating also offers a natural explanation for several detailed features of the UVCS observations, including the preferential and anisotropic heating of minor ions, the rapid radial increase in the O+5 temperature between 1.6 R☉ and 1.9 R☉, and the abrupt flattening of the O+5 temperature profile as r increases above 1.9 R☉.
Dark aspects of massive spinor electrodynamics

We investigate the cosmology of massive spinor electrodynamics when torsion is non-vanishing. A non-minimal interaction is introduced between the torsion and the vector field and the coupling constant between them plays an important role in subsequential cosmology. It is shown that the mass of the vector field and torsion conspire to generate dark energy and pressureless dark matter, and for generic values of the coupling constant, the theory effectively provides an interacting model between them with an additional energy density of the form ∼ 1/a6. The evolution equations mimic ΛCDM behavior up to 1/a3 term and the additional term represents a deviation from ΛCDM. We show that the deviation is compatible with the observational data, if it is very small. We find that the non-minimal interaction is responsible for generating an effective cosmological constant which is directly proportional to the mass squared of the vector field and the mass of the photon within its current observational limit could be the source of the dark energy.
Evolution of growing black holes in axisymmetric galaxy cores

N-body realizations of axisymmetric collisional galaxy cores (e.g. M32, M33, NGC 205, Milky Way) with embedded growing black holes are presented. Stars which approach the disruption sphere are disrupted and accreted to the black hole. We measure the zone of influence of the black hole and disruption rates in relaxation time-scales. We show that secular gravitational instabilities dominate the initial core dynamics, while the black hole is small and growing due to the consumption of stars. Later, the black hole potential dominates the core, and the loss cone theory can be applied. Our simulations show that central rotation in galaxies cannot be neglected for relaxed systems, and compare and discuss our results with the standard theory of spherically symmetric systems.
Interior Characterization in Multiplanetary Systems: TRAPPIST-1

Interior characterization traditionally relies on individual planetary properties, ignoring correlations between different planets of the same system. For multiplanetary systems, planetary data are generally correlated. This is because the differential masses and radii are better constrained than absolute planetary masses and radii. We explore such correlations and data specific to the multiplanetary system of TRAPPIST-1 and study their value for our understanding of planet interiors. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the rocky interior of planets in a multiplanetary system can be preferentially probed by studying the densest planet representing a rocky interior analog. Our methodology includes a Bayesian inference analysis that uses a Markov chain Monte Carlo scheme. Our interior estimates account for the anticipated variability in the compositions and layer thicknesses of core, mantle, water oceans, and ice layers, as well as a gas envelope. Our results show that (1) interior estimates significantly depend on available abundance proxies and (2) the importance of interdependent planetary data for interior characterization is comparable to changes in data precision by 30%. For the interiors of TRAPPIST-1 planets, we find that possible water mass fractions generally range from 0% to 25%. The lack of a clear trend of water budgets with orbital period or planet mass challenges possible formation scenarios. While our estimates change relatively little with data precision, they critically depend on data accuracy. If planetary masses varied within ±24%, interiors would be consistent with uniform (∼7%) or an increasing water mass fractions with orbital period (∼2%–12%).
Clustering of extremely red objects in Elais-N1 from the UKIDSS DXS with optical photometry from Pan-STARRS 1 and Subaru

We measure the angular clustering of 33415 extremely red objects (EROs) in the Elais-N1 field covering 5.33 deg 2 , which cover the redshift range z = 0.8 to 2. This sample was made by merging the UKIDSS Deep eXtragalactic Survey (DXS) with the optical Subaru and Pan-STARRS PS1 datasets. We confirm the existence of a clear break in the angular correlation function at � 0.02 ◦ corresponding to 1h −1 Mpc at z � 1. We find that redder or brighter EROs are more clustered than bluer or fainter ones. Halo Occupation Distribution (HOD) model fits imply that the average mass of dark matter haloes which host EROs is over 10 13 h −1 M⊙ and that EROs have a bias ranging from 2.7 to 3.5. Compared to EROs at z � 1.1, at z � 1.5 EROs have a higher bias and fewer are expected to be satellite galaxies. Furthermore, EROs reside in similar dark matter haloes to those that host 10 11.0 M⊙ < M∗ < 10 11.5 M⊙ galaxies. We compare our new measurement and HOD fits with the predictions of the GALFORM semi-analytical galaxy formation model. Overall, the clustering predicted by GALFORM gives an encouraging match to our results. However, compared to our deductions from the measurements, GALFORM puts EROs into lower mass haloes and predicts that a larger fraction of EROs are satellite galaxies. This suggests that the treatment of gas cooling may need to be revised in the model. Our analysis illustrates the potential of clustering analyses to provide observational constraints on theoretical models of galaxy formation.
On the Markovian assumption in the excursion set approach: the approximation of Markovian Velocities

The excursion set approach uses the statistics of the density field smoothed on a wide range of scales, to gain insight into a number of interesting processes in nonlinear structure formation, such as cluster assembly, merging and clustering. The approach treats the curve defined by the height of the overdensity fluctuation field when changing the smoothing scale as a random walk. The steps of the walks are often assumed to be uncorrelated, so that the walk heights are a Markov process, even though this assumption is known to be inaccurate for physically relevant filters. We develop a model in which the walk steps, rather than heights, are a Markov process, and correlations between steps arise because of nearest neighbour interactions. This model is a particular case of a general class, which we call Markov Velocity models. We show how these can approximate the walks generated by arbitrary power spectra and filters, and, unlike walks with Markov heights, provide a very good approximation to physically relevant models. We define a Markov Velocity Monte Carlo algorithm to generate walks whose first crossing distribution is very similar to that of TopHat-smoothed LCDM walks. Finally, we demonstrate that Markov Velocity walks generically exhibit a simple but realistic form of assembly bias, so we expect them to be useful in the construction of more realistic merger history trees.
MEETING THE COOL NEIGHBORS. X. ULTRACOOL DWARFS FROM THE 2MASS ALL-SKY DATA RELEASE

Using data from the 2 Micron All Sky Survey All-Sky Point Source Catalogue, we have extended our census of nearby ultracool dwarfs to cover the full celestial sphere above Galactic latitude of 15°. Starting with an initial catalog of 2,139,484 sources, we have winnowed the sample to 467 candidate late-type M or L dwarfs within 20 pc of the Sun. Fifty-four of those sources already have spectroscopic observations confirming them as late-type dwarfs. We present optical spectroscopy of 376 of the remaining 413 sources, and identify 44 as ultracool dwarfs with spectroscopic distances less than 20 pc. Twenty-five of the 37 sources that lack optical data have near-infrared spectroscopy. Combining the present sample with our previous results and data from the literature, we catalog 94 L dwarf systems within 20 pc. We discuss the distribution of activity, as measured by Hα emission, in this volume-limited sample. We have coupled the present ultracool catalog with data for stars in the northern 8 pc sample and recent (incomplete) statistics for T dwarfs to provide a snapshot of the current 20 pc census as a function of spectral type.
Speech Enhancement Using MLP-Based Architecture With Convolutional Token Mixing Module and Squeeze-and-Excitation Network

The Conformer has shown impressive performance for speech enhancement by exploiting the local and global contextual information, although it requires high computational complexity and many parameters. Recently, multi-layer perceptron (MLP)-based models such as MLP-mixer and gMLP have demonstrated comparable performances with much less computational complexity in the computer vision area. These models showed that all-MLP architectures may perform as good as more advanced structures, but the nature of the MLP limits the application of these architectures to the input with a variable length such as speech and audio. In this paper, we propose the cgMLP-SE model, which is a gMLP-based architecture with convolutional token mixing modules and squeeze-and-excitation network to utilize both local and global contextual information as in the Conformer. Specifically, the token-mixing modules in gMLP are replaced by convolutional layers, squeeze-and-excitation network-based gating is applied on top of the convolutional gating module, and additional feed-forward layers are added to make the cgMLP-SE module a macaron-like structure sandwiched by feed-forward layers like a Conformer block. Experimental results on the TIMIT-DNS noise dataset and the Voice Bank-DEMAND dataset showed that the proposed method exhibited similar speech quality and intelligibility to the Conformer with a smaller model size and less computational complexity.
Stability of general-relativistic accretion disks

Self-gravitating relativistic disks around black holes can form as transient structures in a number of astrophysical scenarios such as binary neutron star and black hole-neutron star coalescences, as well as the core collapse of massive stars. We explore the stability of such disks against runaway and nonaxisymmetric instabilities using three-dimensional hydrodynamics simulations in full general relativity using the Thor code. We model the disk matter using the ideal fluid approximation with a {Gamma}-law equation of state with {Gamma}=4/3. We explore three disk models around nonrotating black holes with disk-to-black hole mass ratios of 0.24, 0.17, and 0.11. Because of metric blending in our initial data, all of our initial models contain an initial axisymmetric perturbation which induces radial disk oscillations. Despite these oscillations, our models do not develop the runaway instability during the first several orbital periods. Instead, all of the models develop unstable nonaxisymmetric modes on a dynamical time scale. We observe two distinct types of instabilities: the Papaloizou-Pringle and the so-called intermediate type instabilities. The development of the nonaxisymmetric mode with azimuthal number m=1 is accompanied by an outspiraling motion of the black hole, which significantly amplifies the growth rate of the m=1 mode in some cases. Overall,more » our simulations show that the properties of the unstable nonaxisymmetric modes in our disk models are qualitatively similar to those in the Newtonian theory. « less
Assessing the efficacy of soapberry (Sapindus rarak) crude extract for controlling giant African land snail (Lissachatina fulica)

The giant African land snail ( Lissachatina fulica ) is a major pest that damages agricultural products and the environment, along with raising public health concerns. Although various methods have been applied to control these invasive snails, they have various limitations. The use of plant extracts is an alternative control method that is environmentally friendly and can reduce the use of harmful chemicals. This study was established to evaluate the molluscicidal effects of soapberry crude extract and to develop a molluscicide from it to control the giant African land snail. The soapberry ( Sapindus rarak ) crude extract exerted molluscicidal effects against L. fulica within 4 h. Soapberry concentration of 30% caused snail mortality of nearly 90% in 72 h. This plant extract exerted potential repellent and molluscicidal effects in the laboratory and semi-field experiments, while having no observable toxic effects on the vegetable Brassica rapa L. Thus, S. rarak crude extract at this concentration is suitable for snail control in vegetable plots.
Effect of Corn Starch Granules on Stabilizing the Foam Structure of Ultrasonically Modified Whey Isolate Protein

In this study, the mechanism of ultrasound combined with corn starch granules (CSG) treatment improved the foam properties of whey protein isolates (WPI) and was systematically investigated. The results showed that ultrasound combined with corn starch granules treatment increased foam capacity and stability by 15.38% and 41.40%, respectively. Compared with the control group, corn starch granules enhanced the surface charge (52.38%) and system turbidity (51.43%), which certainly provided the necessary conditions for the improvement of foam stabilization stability. In addition, corn starch granules as microgel particles increased the mechanical properties of the interfacial protein film, thus delaying the instability of foam. This research would provide new insights into the design of new protein-based foam foods in the future food industry.
Subarcsecond SMA observations of the prototype Class 0 object VLA1623 at 1.3 mm: a single protostar with a structured outflow cavity?

We present 1.3-mm subarcsecond SMA observations of the prototypical Class 0 protostar VLA1623. We report the detection of 1.3-mm continuum emission both from the central protostellar component VLA1623 and two additional sources, Knot-A and KnotB, which have been already detected at longer wavelengths. Knot-A and Knot-B are both located along the western cavity wall opened by the protostellar outflow from VLA1623. Our SMA observations moreover show that these two continuum sources are associated with bright, high-velocity 12 CO(2–1) emission, slightly shifted downstream of the outflow propagation direction with respect to the 1.3-mm continuum emission peaks. The alignment of Knot-A and Knot-B along the protostellar outflow cavity, the compactness of their 1.3-mm continuum emission, and the properties of the associated CO emission suggest that these two sources trace outflow features due to shocks along the cavity wall, rather than protostellar objects. While it was considered as one of the best examples of a close protobinary system so far, the present analysis suggests that the prototypical Class 0, VLA1623, is single on the scales a > 100 AU probed by our SMA observations. Moreover, we present here the second robust case of compact millimeter continuum emission produced by interactions between the protostellar jet and the envelope of a Class 0 protostar, which suggests a high occurrence of these outflow features during the embedded phase.