BACKGROUND: Underground miners exposed to high levels of radon have an excess risk of lung cancer. Residential exposure to radon is at much lower levels, and the risk of lung cancer with residential exposure is less clear. We conducted a systematic analysis of pooled data from all North American residential radon studies. METHODS: The pooling project included original data from 7 North American case-control studies, all of which used long-term alpha-track detectors to assess residential radon concentrations. A total of 3662 cases and 4966 controls were retained for the analysis. We used conditional likelihood regression to estimate the excess risk of lung cancer. RESULTS: Odds ratios (ORs) for lung cancer increased with residential radon concentration. The estimated OR after exposure to radon at a concentration of 100 Bq/m3 in the exposure time window 5 to 30 years before the index date was 1.11 (95% confidence interval = 1.00-1.28). This estimate is compatible with the estimate of 1.12 (1.02-1.25) predicted by downward extrapolation of the miner data. There was no evidence of heterogeneity of radon effects across studies. There was no apparent heterogeneity in the association by sex, educational level, type of respondent (proxy or self), or cigarette smoking, although there was some evidence of a decreasing radon-associated lung cancer risk with age. Analyses restricted to subsets of the data with presumed more accurate radon dosimetry resulted in increased estimates of risk. CONCLUSIONS: These results provide direct evidence of an association between residential radon and lung cancer risk, a finding predicted using miner data and consistent with results from animal and in vitro studies.
The stress-threshold model (Wolpert, 1965; Brown and Moore, 1970) assumes that people do not consider moving unless they experience residential stress. This paper develops a similar model of residential mobility in which residential satisfaction acts as an intervening variable between individual and residence variables and mobility. The model is tested with data from a panel study of Rhode Island residents. The results indicate that residential satisfaction at the first interview is related to the wish to move and to mobility in the year following the interview. Individual and residence characteristics such as age of head duration of residence, home ownership, and room crowding are shown to affect mobility through their effect on residential satisfaction.
Abstract While the impact of urban form on transportation energy use has been studied extensively, its impact on residential energy use has not. This article presents a conceptual framework linking urban form to residential energy use via three causal pathways: electric transmission and distribution losses, energy requirements of different housing stocks, and space heating and cooling requirements associated with urban heat islands. Two of the three can be analyzed with available national data. After we control for other influences, residents of sprawling counties are more likely to live in single‐family detached houses than otherwise comparable residents of compact counties and also more likely to live in big houses. Both lead to higher residential energy use. Because of the urban heat island effect, residents of sprawling counties across the nation on average pay a small residential energy penalty relative to residents of compact counties. Implications for urban planning are explored.
Ecological analysis is a promising approach to the study of urban social stratification, for differences in the residential distributions of occupations groups are found to parallel the differences among them in socio-economic status and recruitment. The occupation groups at the extremes of the socioeconomic scale are the most segregated. Residential concentration in low-rent areas and residential centralization are inversely related to socioeconomic status. Inconsistencies in the ranking of occupation groups according to residential patterns occur at points where there is evidence of status disequilibrium.
As the power system is facing a transition toward a more intelligent, flexible, and interactive system with higher penetration of renewable energy generation, load forecasting, especially short-term load forecasting for individual electric customers plays an increasingly essential role in the future grid planning and operation. Other than aggregated residential load in a large scale, forecasting an electric load of a single energy user is fairly challenging due to the high volatility and uncertainty involved. In this paper, we propose a long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network-based framework, which is the latest and one of the most popular techniques of deep learning, to tackle this tricky issue. The proposed framework is tested on a publicly available set of real residential smart meter data, of which the performance is comprehensively compared to various benchmarks including the state-of-the-arts in the field of load forecasting. As a result, the proposed LSTM approach outperforms the other listed rival algorithms in the task of short-term load forecasting for individual residential households.
While researchers are increasingly re-conceptualizing international migration, far less attention has been devoted to re-thinking short-distance residential mobility and immobility. In this paper we harness the life course approach to propose a new conceptual framework for residential mobility research. We contend that residential mobility and immobility should be re-conceptualized as relational practices that link lives through time and space while connecting people to structural conditions. Re-thinking and re-assessing residential mobility by exploiting new developments in longitudinal analysis will allow geographers to understand, critique and address pressing societal challenges.
Quantum mechanics has journeyed from a strange and controversial idea to the foundation of some of humanity’s most advanced technologies。 Now researchers are pushing its boundaries even further, with potential breakthroughs in energy, medicine, computing, and our understanding of the universe
"I have been waiting a long time to finally get up there
Researchers have proposed that black holes stop evaporating at the last moment, leaving behind tiny remnants that preserve all the information they contain。 The same seven-dimensional geometry behind this idea could also help explain why elementary particles have mass
Engineers at a deep underground research facility noticed something strange during major rainstorms: airflow underground sometimes reversed direction。 Using new sensors and mathematical modeling, they found that water rushing down a shaft was effectively pushing air through the tunnels like a giant piston。 The breakthrough explains a long-standing
Researchers have created an AI-based simulation that makes it much faster to model how neutron star mergers produce many of the universe's heaviest elements。 The new tool could improve predictions of these powerful explosions while helping scientists better connect observations in space with experiments on Earth
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured a spectacular red, white, and blue view of one of the Milky Way's oldest star clusters to celebrate the nation's 250th anniversary。 Hidden within the ancient cluster are clues to how exploding stars helped transform the young universe into one capable of forming planets and, eventually, life
The feud between NightmareEclipse and Microsoft shows no signs of resolving soon
"Clearly, they admire the work that's being done by SpaceX and are trying to replicate it
Rebranded Codex promises independent workflows that can run "for hours if needed
What if consciousness isn’t limited to brains like ours。 Philosophers Eric Schwitzgebel and Jeremy Pober argue that consciousness could arise in many different forms of life, even in beings built from radically different materials than those found on Earth。 Drawing on the vastness of the universe and the likely existence of countless alien civiliza
Astronomers may have witnessed one of the rarest and most dramatic cosmic events ever seen: a long-sought intermediate-mass black hole ripping apart a dense white dwarf star and devouring it。 The Einstein Probe space telescope caught the explosion in its earliest moments, revealing an unusual sequence of intense X-ray flashes unlike anything seen i
"We are delighted to actively help shape the ramp-up of the Ariane 6
Celebrating the United States' 250th anniversary, NASA released a stunning Hubble portrait of Messier 3, an ancient globular cluster with more than 500,000 stars。 The remarkable cluster is helping scientists unravel the Milky Way's past thanks to its rare stars and possible origins in a long ago cosmic merger