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Background: Falls are the second leading cause of unintentional injury deaths worldwide. Falls not only causes Mortality, but also Morbidity resulting in disabilities and loss of productivity. Death due to falls not only occurs in victims falling from a height but also in Ground level falls. Aim: To study the age and sex distribution, place, surface, time, and outcome of fatal accidental Ground Level Falls. Methods: The present study was carried out as a descriptive study in which medico legal autopsies of 115 victims of ground level fall victims were included. Lettule's method of en masse removal of viscera and dissection of organs was used for conducting medico legal autopsy. The Collected data was entered in MS excel and analysed. Conclusion: The current study revealed that most victims of ground level falls were more than 50 years of age and indoor falls were more common than outdoor falls.62% of the victims had suffered head injury. Effective fall prevention programmes should be framed to reduce the number of people who fall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change has aggravated the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, particularly in flood-related hazards. Cities nowadays face significant challenges in stormwater management from frequent heavy rainfalls. Traditional urban drainage systems can no longer cope with large amounts of surface runoff; cities are searching for new ways to deal with urban stormwater. Green roofs and other nature-based solutions have been widely used for stormwater management by combining water purification and retention functions but have not yet fully solved the flood problems. This article aims to (1) explore the different aspects of urban water management, particularly the urban stormwater topic, and (2) identify the existing solutions and discuss the potential and barriers to integrated solutions implementation. By introducing the concept of four domains and finding the overlapping area to investigate, we analyzed different solutions to reduce rainwater runoff from the roof and ground level, aiming at building and district scales. This paper proves that further research direction could constitute an integrated system to work together for urban stormwater management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Salt marshes are transitional zones between ocean and land, which act as natural buffers against coastal hazards. The survival of salt marshes is governed by the rate of organic and inorganic deposition, which strongly depends on vegetation characteristics, such as height and density. Vegetation also favours the dissipation of wind waves and storm surges. For these reasons, an accurate description of both ground elevation and vegetation characteristics in salt marshes is critical for their management and conservation. For this purpose, airborne LiDAR (light detection and ranging) laser scanning has become an accessible and cost‐effective tool to map salt marshes quickly. However, the limited horizontal resolution (~1 m) of airborne‐derived point clouds prevents the direct extraction of ground elevation, vegetation height and vegetation density without the coupling with imagery datasets. Instead, due to the lower flight altitude, UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle)‐borne laser scanners provide point clouds with much higher resolution (~5 cm). Although methods for estimating ground level and vegetation characteristics from UAV LiDAR have been proposed for flat ground, we demonstrate that a sloping ground increases prediction errors. Here we derive a new formulation that improves the estimation by employing a correction based on a LiDAR‐derived estimate of local ground slope. Our method directly converts the 3D distribution of UAV LiDAR‐derived points into vegetation density and height, as well as ground elevation, without the support of additional datasets. The proposed formulation is calibrated by using measured density and height of Spartina alterniflora in a marsh in Sapelo Island, Georgia, USA, and successfully tested on an independent dataset. Our method produces high‐resolution (40 × 40 cm2) maps of ground elevation and vegetation characteristics, thus capturing the large gradients in the proximity of tidal creeks. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addition to high-energy hadrons, which include neutrons, protons, and pions above 20 MeV, thermal neutrons (ThNs) are a major concern in terms of soft error rate (SER) for electronics operating in the large hadron collider (LHC) accelerator at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Most of the electronic devices still contain Boron-10 inside their structure, which makes them sensitive to ThNs. The LHC radiation environment in different tunnel and shielded areas is analyzed through measurements and FLUKA simulations, showing that the ThN fluence can be considerably higher than the high-energy one, up to a factor of 50. State-of-the-art commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components such as SRAM, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA), and Flash memories of different technologies are studied to derive the expected single-event upset (SEU) rate due to ThNs, relative to the high-energy hadron contribution. We find that for the studied parts and most of the accelerator applications, ThNs are the dominating source of upsets with respect to the high energy particles yielding even to neglect the latter in some cases. Indeed, they can induce, in electronics, up to more than 90% of the total upsets. The estimation is performed also for ground-level and avionic applications, and although in general, ThNs are not the main source of SER, in Flash memories they can play the same role as high energy neutrons. Related radiation hardness assurance (RHA) considerations for the qualification of components and systems against ThNs are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The ground level 3H 6 of Tm3+ ions in a number of crystals has been examined through the matrix elements of spin – orbit interaction. The latter have been determined comparable with the separation between 3H 6 and the first excited level 3F 4. The normalized ratios of spin – orbit interactions relative to the free ion value of Tm IV as a function of the scalar crystal field parameter N v have been found to vary analogous to the nephelauxetic effect. The relationships between maximum splitting of 3H 6 , spin-orbit coupling constant, crystal-field parameters and the N v have been also studied for the presented 42 stoichiometric or doped crystals containing Tm3+. The compounds include halogenides, organic complexes, oxides, oxohalides, and semiconductors. Highlights • Matrix elements of spin-orbit interaction (SOIs) for 3H 6 of Tm3+ are evaluated. • Effect due to the SOIs has been found similar to the nephelauxetic effect. • Results are presented and analyzed for a number of different crystals. • Systematic trends in variations of physical quantities have been discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High concentrations of ozone (O3) at ground level in urban and industrial regions worldwide have long been a major air pollution issue, notably during daytime because sunlights induce the photochemical production of ozone. After a review of actual techniques to clean O3 pollution in urban and industrial regions, I present a fog geoengineering scheme for abating ozone pollution at ground level by enhancing ambient moisture locally through spraying water mist into the atmosphere. This scheme is based on my results showing that ozone levels decrease with air relative humidity. For instance, the mean O3 concentrations decrease from 70.0 to 21.2 ppbv when relative humidity increases from below 40% to more than 80%, in Hangzhou city at midday times (11:00-16:00) without precipitation, during the "ozone season" from May to October of 2017. The mechanism of fog geoengineering is that atmosphere moisture inhibits O3 formation by lowering air temperature, decreasing the chain length of peroxy radical chemical amplifiers (HO2, RO2, and RC(O)O2), and decreasing the chain length of NO2 by enhancing particle water, and destroys the existing O3 photo-chemically by water vapor through catalytic O3 destruction cycle. Ozone mitigation by fog geoengineering has several advantages such as being a nature-like process, quick response, technological feasibility, efficacy, relatively low cost, and cooling effects. The proposed fog geoengineering to decrease the local O3 at ground level could potentially be on avenue for addressing heavy O3 pollution during the hot summer in megacities globally as expected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]