Satellite mapping reveals extensive industrial activity at sea.

The world's population increasingly relies on the ocean for food, energy production and global trade1-3, yet human activities at sea are not well quantified4,5. We combine satellite imagery, vessel GPS data and deep-learning models to map industrial vessel activities and offshore energy infrastructure across the world's coastal waters from 2017 to 2021. We find that 72-76% of the world's industrial fishing vessels are not publicly tracked, with much of that fishing taking place around South Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa. We also find that 21-30% of transport and energy vessel activity is missing from public tracking systems. Globally, fishing decreased by 12 ± 1% at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and had not recovered to pre-pandemic levels by 2021. By contrast, transport and energy vessel activities were relatively unaffected during the same period. Offshore wind is growing rapidly, with most wind turbines confined to small areas of the ocean but surpassing the number of oil structures in 2021. Our map of ocean industrialization reveals changes in some of the most extensive and economically important human activities at sea.

Use of social media to establish vapers puffing behaviour: Findings and implications for laboratory evaluation of e-cigarette emissions.

The recent growth in e-cigarette use has presented many challenges to Public Health research, including understanding the potential for e-cigarettes to generate toxic aerosol constituents during use. Recent research has established that the way e-cigarettes are puffed influences the magnitude of emissions from these devices, with puff duration the dominant driving force. Standardised puffing machine methods are being developed to harmonise testing approaches across laboratories, but critical to their success is the degree with which they accurately reflect vapers real-world puffing behaviours (topography). Relatively limited data is available examining the way vapers puff, with significant inconsistencies between studies. Here we report the creation and analysis of a large database of public-domain vaping videos to establish e-cigarettes puffing behaviour in near natural settings. Over 300 videos containing 1200 puffing events from 252 vapers were obtained from social media sources, divided approximately equally amongst cigalike, Ego and Advanced Personal Vapouriser ("APV", also referred to as "boxmod") types of e-cigarettes. Analysis showed that similar mean puff durations were found for all three categories of vaping devices. This includes direct-to-lung as well as mouth-to-lung puffing behaviours. A 3 s puff duration, as used in the recently published ISO puffing standard ISO 20,768:2018, appears appropriate for average behaviours. However, the wide diversity of puffing durations observed amongst vapers means it may be challenging to identify a simple yet comprehensively representative single machine-puffing regimen for laboratory studies. A puff duration of around 5.6 s appears to represent 95th percentile puffing behaviours amongst vapers and may be an appropriate choice for scientists and regulators seeking an additional more intense puffing regime. A range of new behavioural patterns have been identified whose impact on aerosol exposure need to be considered. Public-domain video records of vapers provides valuable and accessible insights into real-world use behaviours. It is freely available, and constantly updated with new material, and therefore provides a valuable resource for scientists seeking to understand real-world vaping behaviours.

Revealing the global longline fleet with satellite radar.

Because many vessels use the Automatic Identification System (AIS) to broadcast GPS positions, recent advances in satellite technology have enabled us to map global fishing activity. Understanding of human activity at sea, however, is limited because an unknown number of vessels do not broadcast AIS. Those vessels can be detected by satellite-based Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery, but this technology has not yet been deployed at scale to estimate the size of fleets in the open ocean. Here we combine SAR and AIS for large-scale open ocean monitoring, developing methods to match vessels with AIS to vessels detected with SAR and estimate the number of non-broadcasting vessels. We reveal that, between September 2019 and January 2020, non-broadcasting vessels accounted for about 35% of the longline activity north of Madagascar and 10% of activity near French Polynesia and Kiribati's Line Islands. We further demonstrate that this method could monitor half of the global longline activity with about 70 SAR images per week, allowing us to track human activity across the oceans.

Faculty of Prehospital Care, Royal College of Surgeons Edinburgh guidance for medical provision for wilderness medicine.

To support leaders and those involved in providing medical care on expeditions in wilderness environments, the Faculty of Pre-Hospital Care (FPHC) of The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh convened an expert panel of leading healthcare professionals and expedition providers. The aims of this panel were to: (1) provide guidance to ensure the best possible medical care for patients within the geographical, logistical and human factor constraints of an expedition environment. (2) Give aspiring and established expedition medics a 'benchmark' of skills they should meet. (3) Facilitate expedition organisers in selecting the most appropriate medical cover and provider for their planned activity. A system of medical planning is suggested to enable expedition leaders to identify the potential medical risks and their mitigation. It was recognised that the scope of practice for wilderness medicine covers elements of primary healthcare, pre-hospital emergency medicine and preventative medicine. Some unique competencies were also identified. Further to this, the panel recommends the use of a matrix and advisory expedition medic competencies relating to the remoteness and medical threat of the expedition. This advice is aimed at all levels of expedition medic, leader and organiser who may be responsible for delivering or managing the delivery of remote medical care for participants. The expedition medic should be someone equipped with the appropriate medical competencies, scope of practice and capabilities in the expedition environment and need not necessarily be a qualified doctor. In addition to providing guidance regarding the clinical competencies required of the expedition medic, the document provides generic guidance and signposting to the more pertinent aspects of the role of expedition medic.