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Opinion polarization and political segregation are key societal concerns, especially on social media. Although these phenomena have been traditionally attributed to homophily—preference for like-minded individuals—recent work in social psychology suggests that acrophily—preference for extreme rather than moderate opinions—might play a role as well. In this work, we introduce a methodology to estimate the degree of preference for connecting with users who hold strong opinions on social media. Our framework is composed of four phases: (i) opinion estimation, (ii) opinion thresholding, (iii) network construction, and (iv) acrophily estimation. We apply it to study the climate change debate on Reddit and find that users show higher-than-expected acrophilic patterns, especially if they are climate skeptics or have extreme opinions. Acrophilic patterns are stable over time, while polarization gradually leaves space for pluralism.

ABSTRACTClimate change, characterized by an increase in extreme climatic events, poses a significant threat to forest productivity worldwide, potentially compromising its critical role in regulating the global carbon cycle. The response of forest productivity to compound events, such as hotter droughts, can be strongly modulated by functional traits. Forests dominated by acquisitive tree species (prioritizing resource acquisition) may be more vulnerable than forests dominated by conservative species (prioritizing efficiency and stress tolerance). Meanwhile, functional diversity could enhance ecosystem resistance. Although projections indicate that hotter droughts will increasingly hamper forest productivity, most studies focus solely on drought intensity, neglecting duration and frequency. To assess the effects of hotter droughts, we analyzed how their intensity, frequency, and duration influence forest productivity over time, and evaluated the role of functional identity and diversity in modulating forest responses. We analyzed forest productivity from 1985 to 2018 in a Mediterranean region of central Spain using generalized linear mixed models. Our estimates were based on biomass data resulting from integrating LiDAR, multispectral imagery, and forest inventory records from 748 plots. Our results indicated that the negative effects of the increased vapor pressure deficit and drought dimensions on forest productivity have intensified over time. Under extreme drought conditions, forests with higher functional diversity and dominated by moderately conservative species experienced smaller declines in productivity, whereas forests dominated by highly conservative species showed increasingly negative responses. This result may reflect repeated drought effects resulting in long stomatal closure periods and carbon starvation. Our findings highlight the increasing and negative impact of hotter droughts over time on Mediterranean forests. Altogether, the stabilizing role of functional diversity and identity in drought tolerance traits, such as cavitation resistance, should be considered in models addressing long‐term climate change impacts on forest mitigation potential.

The monitoring of wildlife through advanced tracking technologies is crucial for ecological research, conservation efforts, and the study of animal behavior. However, most existing tracking devices are primarily designed for positional data collection, with limited integration of biologically relevant sensors. This work presents the design, development, and evaluation of a low-power, multisensor tracking device tailored for long-term wildlife monitoring. Our device integrates a comprehensive set of sensors and novel methodologies to acquire additional information about animals, including monitoring heart rate and respiration in free-ranging individuals. We optimize energy consumption through an advanced power management system, leveraging energy harvesting to ensure long-term operational sustainability. We validate the system with extensive laboratory tests on energy efficiency and data accuracy. This research paves the way for next-generation wildlife tracking devices capable of supporting more comprehensive studies in conservation biology and environmental monitoring.

This paper examines the occurrence of price bubbles in wholesale day-ahead electricity markets and investigates the impact of geopolitical and climate risk on such extreme price movements. The empirical analysis is executed for twelve major European electricity markets, namely APX (Netherlands), BPX (Belgium), EEX (Germany), EPX (United Kingdom), GME (Italy), NordPool (Finland, Norway and Sweden), OMEL (Portugal), OPCOM (Romania) and POWERNEXT (France). Our findings reveal that the probability of price bubbles increases with higher geopolitical risk and elevated air temperatures, while it decreases with greater precipitation and stronger wind speed. Specifically, a one-unit increase in geopolitical risk raises the probability of price explosiveness by 8.23%. These results underscore the urgent need for European countries to accelerate renewable energy deployment, enhance power system flexibility, and strengthen electricity market integration. Such measures are critical to achieving cli...

Concentrating solar power (CSP) plants are seen as a key technology to achieve the needed energy transition since its use together with a thermal energy storage (TES) system ensures electricity dispatchability decreasing CSP plants environmental impact and life cycle costs. Latent TES using phase change materials (PCMs) has risen as a very interesting storage technology for such applications. Nevertheless, the selection of the adequate TES system and PCM, is one of the problems researchers and practitioners face to implement such technology. This paper presents a full characterization of fifteen PCMs suitable to work in the temperature range 400-600 ◦C. Melting temperature, melting enthalpy, degradation temperature, and solid-state thermal conductivity are presented, complemented with corrosion behaviour tests against stainless steel and Alloy 20. Moreover, the findings obtained in the characterization of the selected fifteen PCMs highlight the need of these analyses, as notable differences were observed compared to the available data, particularly in thermal stability and thermal conductivity. Furthermore, the compatibility test reveals that out of the fifteen selected PCMs, only two PCMs (binary mixtures of carbonates) are potentially compatible with stainless-steel 314 and Alloy 20 fibres under environmental conditions (air atmosphere). Finally, the results presented will allow researchers and practitioners to have very detailed data on the characterisation of those PCMs. This work was partially funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación - Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) (PID2021-123511OB-C31 - MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER, UE, and RED2022-134219-T). This work is partially supported by ICREA under the ICREA Academia programme. The authors would like to thank the Catalan Government for the quality accreditation given to their research group (2021 SGR 01615). GREiA is certified agent TECNIO in the category of technology developers from the Government of Catalonia. This paper is part of the RYC2023-044196-I, funded by MCIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and FSE+. Franklin R. Martinez Alcocer thanks the National Doctorate Scholarship for foreign students ANID 2021 Folio 21211932 for the financial support in the research. S. Ushak acknowledges to ANID/PUENTE N° 1523A0006 and ANID/FONDECYT REGULAR N° 1231721 projects.

The present work aimed to design, develop, and validate a soiling chamber to reproduce the deterioration of PV module efficiency due to dust deposition. Two locations with different soiling accumulation characteristics are chosen to validate the chamber under various atmospheric conditions and assess its accuracy. Specifically, the chamber results are compared with the performance of PV modules mounted in two outdoor conditions for one year. In addition, dust samples from the two locations were analysed using a scanning electron microscope (SEM) to ascertain the elemental compositions to comprehend the behaviour of dust deposition or variations in deposition patterns at the two locations. The newly constructed soiling chamber emulates soiling in a controlled environment based on historical data of rainfall, temperature, humidity, wind speed, and particulate concentration, considering also the changing seasons and conditions. The deposition density emulated in the soiling chamber is similar to that on the outside exposed samples, with a maximum variation in dust deposition of only 0.08 g/m2. Furthermore, an emulated module’s mean dust density is 2.367 g/m2, with a standard deviation of just 0.002 g/m2. This controlled indoor soiling chamber can emulate a long-term outdoor soil cycle in a few hours for any geographical location.

This letter has developed an electrical circuit analogy-based maximum latency calculation (MLC) method of the internet data center (IDC) in power-communication network. Firstly, by analogy with the circuit model, the basic concepts to describe information flow are defined, including information current, information resistance, information conductivity, and information voltage. Based on these concepts, the information processing model considering both channel blocking and user priority is established. By analogy with the electrical circuit, the information flow calculation laws are introduced to calculate the maximum latency of IDCs. Verification results show that the maximum latency of IDCs in power-communication network can be accurately calculated by the proposed MLC method.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the crowdfunding campaigns success and long-term corporate failure are affected by the campaigns and firms’ environmental orientation, as well as by the regional innovation level. This study reveals that environmental orientations (of both campaigns and firms) are linked with higher campaign success, while only firm environmental orientation is linked with a lower probability of long-term corporate failure. Additionally, we find that regional levels of innovation are negatively linked with the probability of campaign success.