Feature Article

This study investigated impacts of urban forms on the future thermal environment over Beijing, the capital city of China. Beijing is experiencing remarkable urban expansion and is planned to undergo the transformation of urban forms from single-centric (compact-city)to poly-centric city (dispersedcity). Impacts of urban forms on the future thermal environment were compared and evaluated by conducting numerical experiments based on a regional atmospheric model coupled with a singlelayer urban canopy model as well as future climate forcing output from a global climate model.

To understand the impact of the odd-even policy in Delhi researchers will need to take into account prevailing weather conditions of not just Delhi, but also its outskirts and neighbouring states.

This paper analyses the phenomenon of jobless growth in India and the United States through the lens of employment elasticity. We decompose the level and change of aggregate employment elasticity in terms of sectoral elasticities, relative growth and employment shares. Estimates of these decompositions are presented with employment and output data from relevant sources for both economies. In India, the agricultural sector was the key determinant of both the level and change of aggregate elasticity till the early 2000s.

The Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, a central government scheme of subsidies for low-income housing, is singularly unimaginative and poorly thought-through. It is unlikely to deliver worthwhile results. The promised funds could be far more effectively deployed if used differently. This article examines the scheme's deficiencies and suggests options that should be explored. It also considers the Model Tenancy Act of April 2015 and the National Urban Rental Housing Policy (Draft) released in October 2015.

The extremely liberal regime ushered in by the Electricity Act 2003 allowed a few existingprivate captive thermal generators to make handsome profits, particularly in certain regions with perceived advantages in terms of availability of coal and water. But the majority of proposed projects were abandoned without cost to the communities of the area they were to be located in. Of the rest, only a few are operational with partial capacity, while others are under construction with delayed schedules or have gone into limbo.

Based on two detectors separated by about 3,000 km and using ultra-stable lasers, a new observatory known as the Advanced LIGO has detected gravitational waves generated by the coalescence of two black holes, that turned into a new black hole with the release of about five solar masses of energy in a few milliseconds at a distance of over a billion light years, thus confirming one of the last untested predictions of the General Theory of Relativity.

Phylogeny is an ecologically meaningful way to classify plants and animals, as closely related taxa frequently have similar ecological characteristics, functional traits and effects on ecosystem processes. For bacteria, however, phylogeny has been argued to be an unreliable indicator of an organism’s ecology owing to evolutionary processes more common to microbes such as gene loss and lateral gene transfer, as well as convergent evolution.

Recent Mediterranean droughts have highlighted concerns that climate change may be contributing to observed drying trends, but natural climate variability in the region is still poorly understood. We analyze 900 years (1100–2012) of Mediterranean drought variability in the Old World Drought Atlas (OWDA), a spatiotemporal tree ring reconstruction of the June-July-August self-calibrating Palmer Drought Severity Index.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) Monographs Programme identifies chemicals, drugs, mixtures, occupational exposures, lifestyles and personal habits, and physical and biological agents that cause cancer in humans and has evaluated about 1000 agents since 1971. Monographs are written by ad hoc Working Groups (WGs) of international scientific experts over a period of about 12 months ending in an eight-day meeting.

Chikungunya and dengue infections are spatio-temporally related. The current review aims to determine the geographic limits of chikungunya, dengue and the principal mosquito vectors for both viruses and to synthesise current epidemiological understanding of their co-distribution. Three biomedical databases (PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science) were searched from their inception until May 2015 for studies that reported concurrent detection of chikungunya and dengue viruses in the same patient.