Analysis of water resource benefits due to power grid interconnections using the virtual water method

The global water demand and supply situation is becoming increasingly severe due to water shortage and uneven distribution of water resources.The highest water demand in the energy sector is attributable to power generation.With cross-country and cross-continental power grid interconnections becoming a reality,electricity trading across countries and the creation of new opportunities for re-allocation of water resources are possible.This study expands the concept of virtual water and proposes a generalized virtual water flow in an interconnected power grid system to accurately estimate water resource benefits of clean power transmission from both the production and the consumption sides.By defining the water scarcity index as a price mechanism indicator,the benefits of water resources allocation through power grid interconnections are evaluated.Taking the Africa-Asia-Europe interconnection scenario as an example,the total water saving would amount to 88.95 million m^3 by 2030 and 337.8 million m^3 by 2050.This result shows that grid interconnections could promote the development of renewable energy and expand the benefits of available water resources.

Technology advance and discounting of the historical emission responsibilities

Solving the dispute over historical greenhouse gases emission responsibility is critical for the future climate agreement.This article borrows the methodology from the carbon budget proposal,but further develops this approach by proposing discount of the historical responsibility due to the technology advance.Firstly,it studies the Annex I countries'mitigation and financial responsibilities of the historical emission in the carbon budget proposal;furthermore,it analyzes the results and implications of the discount approach.Results show that the discount method significantly reduces the burden of the mitigation and financial responsibilities of the Annex I countries.Thus,we claim that the discount approach is a systematic,pragmatic,and fair approach to solve the historical responsibility dispute and financial problems for the post-2020international climate institutions.

Clinical Features of Spontaneous Remission in the Classic Fever of Unknown Origin:A Retrospective Study

Objective To summarize the clinical features of spontaneous remission in classic fever of unknown origin(FUO).Methods Medical records of 121 patients diagnosed with FUO at admission in Peking Union Medical College Hospital between January 2018 and June 2018 were reviewed retrospectively.Patients who were discharged without etiological diagnoses were followed for 2 years.The clinical features and outcomes of these patients were summarized.Multivariate logistic regression was used to analyze related factors of spontaneous remission of FUO.Results After excluding 2 patients who lost to follow-up,the etiology of 119 FUO patients were as follows:infectious diseases in 30(25.2%)cases,connective tissue diseases in 28(23.5%)cases,tumor diseases in 8(6.7%)cases,other diseases in 6(5.0%)cases,and unknown diagnoses in 47(39.5%)cases.Totally,41 patients experienced spontaneous remission of fever(the median time from onset to remission was 9 weeks,ranging from 4 to 39 weeks).In patients with spontaneous remission in FUO,lymphadenopathy was less common clinical manifestation,the levels of inflammatory markers including leukocyte count,neutrophil count,neutrophil ratio,C-reactive protein,and ferritin were lower,and the proportion of CD8 positive T lymphocytes expressing CD38 was lower.Multivariate logistic regression analysis of factors with a P-value<0.05 in univariate analysis shown that white blood cell count(OR:0.S45,95%CI:0.306-0.971,P=0.039),neutrophil count(OR:2.074,95%CI:1.004-4.284,P=0.049),and proportion of neutrophils(OR:0.928,95%Cl:0.871-0.990,P=0.022)were independent significant factors associated with spontaneous remission in FUO.Conclusions This study suggested that most patients discharged with undiagnosed classic FUO would remit spontaneously.Thus,for patients with stable clinical conditions,follow-up and observation could be the best choice.Patients with lower level of some inflammatory factors may have a high likelihood of spontaneous remission in classic FUO.

Highly Regional Genes:graph-based gene selection for single-cell RNA-seq data

Gene selection is an indispensable step for analyzing noisy and high-dimensional single-cell RNA-seq(scRNA-seq)data.Compared with the commonly used variance-based methods,by mimicking the human maker selection in the 2D visualization of cells,a new feature selection method called HRG(Highly Regional Genes)is proposed to find the informative genes,which show regional expression patterns in the cell-cell similarity network.We mathematically find the optimal expression patterns that can maximize the proposed scoring function.In comparison with several unsupervised methods,HRG shows high accuracy and robustness,and can increase the performance of downstream cell clustering and gene correlation analysis.Also,it is applicable for selecting informative genes of sequencing-based spatial transcriptomic data.