Category: Featured Database

Author: Gavalda-Navarro, Aleix; Villarroya, Joan; Cereijo, Ruben; Giralt, Marta; Villarroya, Francesc Description: In recent years, brown adipose tissue (BAT) has been recognized not only as a main site of non-shivering thermogenesis in mammals, but also as an endocrine organ. BAT secretes a myriad of regulatory factors. These so-called batokines exert local autocrine and paracrine effects, as well as endocrine actions targeting tissues and organs at a distance. The endocrine batokines include peptide factors, such as fibroblast growth factor-21 (FGF21), neuregulin-4 (NRG4), phospholipid transfer protein (PLTP), interleukin-6, adiponectin and myostatin, and…

Author: Crockett, Joseph L.; Westerling, A. Leroy Description: Extensive drought in the western United States (WUS) during the twenty-first century and associated wildfire and tree mortality incidence has highlighted the potential for greater area of severity within widespread droughts. To place recent WUS droughts into a historical context, the authors analyzed gridded daily climate (temperature, precipitation, and climatic water deficit) data to identify and characterize the spatiotemporal evolution of the largest WUS droughts of the last 100 years, with an emphasis on severe cores within drought extents. Cores of droughts…

Author: Swain, Daniel L.; Langenbrunner, Baird; Neelin, J. David; Hall, Alex Description: Mediterranean climate regimes are particularly susceptible to rapid shifts between drought and flood–of which, California’s rapid transition from record multi-year dryness between 2012 and 2016 to extreme wetness during the 2016-2017 winter provides a dramatic example. Projected future changes in such dry-to-wet events, however, remain inadequately quantified, which we investigate here using the Community Earth System Model Large Ensemble of climate model simulations. Anthropogenic forcing is found to yield large twenty-first-century increases in the frequency of wet extremes,…

Author: Cheng, Linyin; Hoerling, Martin; Liu, Zhiyong; Eischeid, Jon Description: Although the link between droughts and heat waves is widely recognized, how climate change affects this link remains uncertain. Here we assess how, and by how much, human-induced climate change affects summertime hot drought compound events over the contiguous United States. Results are derived by comparing hot drought statistics in long simulations of a coupled climate model (CESM1) subjected to year-1850 and year-2000 radiative forcings. Within each climate state, a strong and nonlinear dependency of heat-wave intensity on drought severity…

Author: Pendergrass, Angeline G.; Knutti, Reto; Lehner, Flavio; Deser, Clara; Sanderson, Benjamin M. Description: Understanding changes in precipitation variability is essential for a complete explanation of the hydrologic cycle’s response to warming and its impacts. While changes in mean and extreme precipitation have been studied intensively, precipitation variability has received less attention, despite its theoretical and practical importance. Here, we show that precipitation variability in most climate models increases over a majority of global land area in response to warming (66% of land has a robust increase in variability of…

Author: Williams, A. Park; Cook, Edward R.; Smerdon, Jason E.; Cook, Benjamin I.; Abatzoglou, John T.; Bolles, Kasey; Baek, Seung H.; Badger, Andrew M.; Livneh, Ben Description: Severe and persistent 21st-century drought in southwestern North America (SWNA) motivates comparisons to medieval megadroughts and questions about the role of anthropogenic climate change. We use hydrological modeling and new 1200-year tree-ring reconstructions of summer soil moisture to demonstrate that the 2000-2018 SWNA drought was the second driest 19-year period since 800 CE, exceeded only by a late-1500s megadrought. The megadrought-like trajectory of…

Author: Boger, Dale L. & Weinreb, Steven M. Description: Organic Chemistry: A Series of Monographs, Volume 47: Hetero Diels-Alder Methodology in Organic Synthesis focuses on the use of hetero Diels-Alder reactions as pivotal steps in natural product total syntheses. The publication first offers information on N-sulfinyl compounds and sulfur diimides and imino dienophiles. Discussions focus on sulfur dioxide and related compounds, selenium dioxide, sulfur diimide cycloadditions, regiochemical, stereochemical, and mechanistic aspects, iminium salts and neutral imines, oximino compounds, and intramolecular cycloadditions. The text then takes a look at nitroso and…

Author: Koubi, Vally; Bohmelt, Tobias; Spilker, Gabriele; Schaffer, Lena Description: Migration is likely to be a key factor linking climate change and conflict. However, our understanding of the factors behind and consequences of migration is surprisingly limited. We take this shortcoming as a motivation for our research and study the relationship between environmental migration and conflict at the micro level. In particular, we focus on environmental migrants’ conflict perceptions. We contend that variation in migrants’ conflict perception can be explained by the type of environmental event people experienced in their…

Author: Marchiori, Luca; Maystadt, Jean-Francois; Schumacher, Ingmar Description: This paper analyzes the effects of weather anomalies on migration in sub-Saharan Africa. We present a theoretical model that demonstrates how weather anomalies induce rural-urban migration that subsequently triggers international migration. We distinguish two transmission channels, an amenity channel and an economic geography channel. Based on annual, cross-country panel data for sub-Saharan Africa, we present an empirical model that suggests that weather anomalies increased internal and international migration through both channels. We estimate that temperature and rainfall anomalies caused a total net…

Author: Piguet, Etienne; Kaenzig, Raoul; Guelat, Jeremie Description: Climate change and environmental hazards affect the entire world, but their interactions with–and consequences on–human migration are unevenly distributed geographically. Research on climate and migration have their own geographies which do not necessarily coincide. This paper critically confronts these two geographies by presenting the first detailed mapping of research in the field of environmentally induced migration. After a brief review of the geography of research on climate change, the paper presents an overview of nearly 50 years of case studies on the…