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This document is an editorial note from the journal Sustainability. It discusses the importance of studying geotechnical disaster risk mitigation and sustainable development in complex geological environments. The note highlights the challenges faced in this field, such as limited monitoring technologies and incomplete warning systems. The document also provides an overview of the research papers included in a special issue of the journal, which cover topics such as geotechnical disaster detection, mechanisms and deformation analysis of geotechnical hazards, monitoring and early warning systems, and the relationship between geotechnical disasters and environmental sustainability. The authors conclude by emphasizing the need for a deeper understanding of complex geological environments, technological innovation, and international cooperation in this field. [Extracted from the article]

Wind speed exacerbates challenges associated with rock stability, introducing factors such as heightened erosion and the possibility of particle loosening. This increased sensitivity to erosion can result in material displacement, thereby compromising the overall stability of rock layers within the open-pit mining site. Therefore, accurate wind speed predictions are crucial for understanding the impact on rock stability, ensuring the safety and efficiency of open-pit mining operations. While most existing studies on wind speed prediction primarily focus on making overall predictions from the entire wind speed sequence, with limited consideration for the stationarity characteristics of the sequence, This paper introduces a novel approach for effective monitoring and early warning of geotechnical hazards. Our proposed method involves dividing wind speed data into stationary and non-stationary segments using the sliding window average method within the threshold method, validated by the Augmented Dickey-Fuller test. Subsequently, we use temporal convolutional networks (TCN) with dilated causal convolution and long short-term memory to predict the stationary segment of wind speed, effectively improving prediction accuracy for this segment. For the non-stationary segment, we implement complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (CEEMDAN) to reduce sequence complexity, followed by TCN with an attention mechanism (ATTENTION) to forecast wind speed one step ahead. Finally, we overlay the predictions of these two segments to obtain the final prediction. Our proposed model, tested with data from an open-pit mining area in western China, achieved promising results with an average absolute error of 0.14 knots, mean squared error of 0.05 knots2, and root mean squared error of 0.20 knots. These findings signify a significant advancement in the accuracy of short-term wind speed prediction. This advancement not oniy enables the rapid assessment and proactive response to imminent risks but also contributes to geotechnical hazard monitoring in open-pit mining operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-altitude rockfalls, as one of the major geological disasters in mountains, is highly concerned about the study of failure mechanisms and disaster prevention and mitigation. In August 2020, the Babaoshan cliff in Yanhe County, Guizhou collapsed and falling rocks hit agricultural vehicles on the road and damaged residents' houses below. Based on on-site investigation, three rockfall types of tension-rotating, tension-shear-falling, compression-shear exist in the study area, and the compression-shear rockfall can conform to the chain law of rockfall. The paper used the dynamic analysis software Rocpro-3D to simulate and invert the movement characteristics and impact range of rockfall at Babaoshan cliff. The results show that: 1) the hazardous zone, which is about 95 m wide and 175 m long, was formed by the rockfall at R1 and covered localized roads and houses below, with the covered probability of 20%, 17% respectively; 2) the terrains on the rockfall paths in two rockfall disaster events are mainly characterized by stepped shape and overall flat angle respectively, and the behaviors are mainly characterized by ejection and rolling respectively, meanwhile, the times to reach the road and houses were 17 s and 24.3 s, respectively, in addition, the protruding rock mass below the rockfall location gives the falling rock horizontal velocity and good movement space, which will make the falling rock move further away; 3) the different rockfall directions reflect different terrain combinations, simulation inversions reveal that different terrain combinations have significant control over the distance and shape of the rockfall trajectories. And, it was found that the more times a falling rock is rebounded, the greater the energy obtained; 4) the probabilities of falling rocks at H1, H2, H3 invading residential areas are respectively 8.67%, 20%, 19.33%, meanwhile invading road zone are respectively 10.67%, 15.33%, 9.33%. At least one point or several points stopped within the zone of the affected houses in the rockfall disaster event 2 in three prediction of the rockfall impact range, which indicates that there is a great risk that this house will continue to be affected by disasters after rockfalls occur within the steep cliff area above. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aiming at the complex structure and high power consumption of the existing 2FSK demodulation circuit, this paper designs a simple structure and low power 2FSK demodulation circuit. A CMOS transistor matrix circuit is used to demodulate the 2FSK signals of 1200HZ and 2200HZ. The function model is established by using Matlab, and the number of sampling points is determined according to the simulation results and design requirements, and then the size of CMOS transistor matrix circuit is determined. The circuit uses Cadence software for functional verification, and HSPICE software is used for power consumption analysis. The simulation results meet the design requirements of low power consumption and achieve the desired demodulation effect.

A high level of oxidized low-density lipoproteins (oxLDLs) is an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) protected endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) from injury caused by ox-LDLs, and whether the endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS)/nitric oxide (NO) pathway was involved in this process. EPCs were isolated from human peripheral blood and characterized. In order to evaluate the effect of IGF-1 on EPCs, cells were incubated with ox-LDLs (100 mg/ml) for 24 h to induce a model of EPC dysfunction in vitro, which demonstrated a decrease in the number of EPCs, concomitant with increased apoptosis and decreased proliferation rates. IGF-1 dose-dependently increased the number of EPCs. Concurrently, IGF-1 decreased the levels of apoptosis of EPCs and improved EPCs proliferation following ox-LDLs challenge. In addition, IGF-1 significantly increased NO levels in ox-LDLs-treated EPCs, accompanied by an upregulation in eNOS expression. The protective effects of IGF-1 on EPCs and NO production were abolished by L-NAME, a specific eNOS inhibitor. These results suggested that IGF-1 protects EPCs from dysfunction induced by oxLDLs through a mechanism involving the eNOS/NO pathway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]