ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic marked a global disruption of unprecedented scale which was closely associated with human mobility. Since mobility acts as a facilitator for spreading the virus, individuals were forced to reconsider their respective behaviors. Despite numerous studies having detected behavioral changes during the first lockdown period (spring 2020), there is a lack of longitudinal perspectives that can provide insights into the intra-pandemic dynamics and potential long-term effects. This article investigates COVID-19-induced mobility-behavioral transformations by analyzing travel patterns of Berlin residents during a 20-month pandemic period and comparing them to the pre-pandemic situation. Based on quantitative analysis of almost 800,000 recorded trips, our longitudinal examination revealed individuals having reduced average monthly travel distances by â¼20%, trip frequencies by â¼11%, and having switched to individual modes. Public transportation has suffered a continual regression, with trip frequencies experiencing a relative long-term reduction of â¼50%, and a respective decrease of traveled distances by â¼43%. In contrast, the bicycle (rather than the car) was the central beneficiary, indicated by bicycle-related trip frequencies experiencing a relative long-term increase of â¼53%, and travel distances increasing by â¼117%. Comparing behavioral responses to three pandemic waves, our analysis revealed each wave to have created unique response patterns, which show a gradual softening of individuals' mobility related self-restrictions. Our findings contribute to retracing and quantifying individuals' changing mobility behaviors induced by the pandemic, and to detecting possible long-term effects that may constitute a "new normal" of an entirely altered urban mobility landscape.
ABSTRACT
A handful of singular structures and laws can be observed in nature. They are not always evident but, once discovered, it seems obvious how to take advantage of them. In chemistry, the discovery of reproducible patterns stimulates the imagination to develop new functional materials and technological or medical applications. Two clear examples are helical structures at different levels in biological polymers as well as ring and spherical structures of different size and composition. Rings are intuitively observed as holes able to thread elongated structures. A large number of real and fictional stories have rings as inanimate protagonists. The design, development or just discovering of a special ring has often been taken as a symbol of power or success. Several examples are the Piscatory Ring wore by the Pope of the Catholic Church, the NBA Championship ring and the One Ring created by the Dark Lord Sauron in the epic story The Lord of the Rings. In this work, we reveal the power of another extremely powerful kind of rings to fight against the pandemic which is currently affecting the whole world. These rings are as small as ~1 nm of diameter and so versatile that they are able to participate in the attack of viruses, and specifically SARS-CoV-2, in a large range of different ways. This includes the encapsulation and transport of specific drugs, as adjuvants to stabilize proteins, vaccines or other molecules involved in the infection, as cholesterol trappers to destabilize the virus envelope, as carriers for RNA therapies, as direct antiviral drugs and even to rescue blood coagulation upon heparin treatment. "One ring to rule them all. One ring to find them. One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them." J. R. R. Tolkien.