Reducing heat exposure from personal cooling strategies to green city construction in China's tropical city.

With rapid industrialization and urbanization, the risk of summer heat exposure for urban dwellers has increased. The use of air conditioners (ACs) has become the most common personal cooling strategy, but further increasing fossil fuel consumption. As sustainable and affordable cooling strategies, urban parks can reduce heat exposure and substitute a part of air conditioners use. This study evaluates the heat exposure reduction from personal cooling to urban parks based on satellite images, questionnaire surveys, and network analysis in Liuzhou, one tropical city in China. We found that residents with lower income had a higher risk of heat exposure. Among the respondents, 85 % of residents chose to use ACs to alleviate high temperatures in summer, and 81.8 % among them were willing to access park cooling area (PCA) to cool off instead of using ACs. About one third parks could serve as potential alternatives (with temperatures <28 °C) to air conditioning, reducing carbon emissions by 175.93 tons per day during the hot summer and offsetting 2.5 % of urban fossil fuel carbon emissions. The design of parks should give more consideration to elder people and provide a good cooling platform for various social income groups. Future planning should also focus on accessibility to enable residents to fully utilize the parks. Building parks within 34.10 ha would provide a more efficient use of land. This research guides sustainable, high-quality growth in industrial cities and might contribute to promotion of low-carbon cities and social equity.

Climate gentrification along with parks' cooling performance in one of China's tropical industrial cities.

Industrialization processes have promoted economic development at the cost of climate change and heat hazards. Urban parks are effective nature-based cooling strategies, but may also bring about climate gentrification. Our study explored climate gentrification along with park cooling performance based on land surface temperature retrieved from satellite images and housing prices in Liuzhou, one of China's tropical industrial cities. We found that urban parks were with average cooling distance of 166.17 ± 11.69 m, cooling intensity of 2.85 ± 0.28 °C, covering about five times park area. The cooling lapse was 3.97 ± 0.40 °C/km. The climate gentrification was related to different accessibility to park cooling area. Residents in the urban center had better access to park cooling range than those outside the second ring road. Housing prices went up near cooling range of urban parks. To abate climate gentrification, measures should be taken, such as improving parks' cooling performance and building affordable houses. This study has significant implications for quality, efficiency and equity of park construction, and also provides suggestions for urban heat mitigation and sustainable urban development.

Intelligence correlates with the temporal variability of brain networks.

Intelligence is the ability to recognize and understand objective things, and use knowledge and experience to solve problems. Highly intelligent people show the ability to switch between different thought patterns and shift their mental focus. This suggests a link between intelligence and the dynamic interaction of brain networks. Thus, we investigated the relationships between resting-state dynamic brain network remodeling (temporal variability) and scores on the Wechsler Adult Intelligent Scale using a large dataset comprising 606 individuals. We found that performance intelligence was associated with greater temporal variability in the functional connectivity patterns of the dorsal attention network. High variability in these areas indicates flexible connectivity patterns, which may contribute to cognitive processes such as attention selection. In addition, performance intelligence was related to greater temporal variability in the functional connectivity patterns of the salience network. Thus, this study revealed a close relationship between performance intelligence and high variability in brain networks involved in attentional choice, spatial orientation, and cognitive control.