ABSTRACT
Controlling air pollution in the Jing-jin-ji urban agglomeration (JJJUA), the most seriously polluted area in China, is related to the integrated development strategy for the region. Based on the national and regional implementation of air pollution control measures in recent years, the hierarchical cross-regional multi-directional linkage (HCML) air pollution prevention and control model was applied in this study. The effect of air pollution control was evaluated by monitoring the pollutants, SO2, NO2, PM10, PM2.5, O3, and CO, at 112 monitoring sites in 13 cities in 2014-2015. The results can be summarized as follows:â The HCML model is an interrelated framework at the horizontal and vertical level. Under the efforts provided by the central, urban agglomeration, and city governments, this multi-level governance model serves as an effective tool to resolve the issues related to air pollution beyond the borders of municipalities. Environmental regulations on certain industries, energy consumption structure, car ownership and usage, and air quality supervision and warning systems are well established under this governance model. â¡ The air quality of the JJJUA has improved significantly in the past two years. The concentrations of air pollutants significantly decreased, with the exception of O3, and high pollution ranges significantly reduced from north to south. The annual average concentrations of PM2.5, PM10, SO2, NO2, and CO decreased by 17.84%, 14.61%, 37.55%, 4.82%, and 16.18%, respectively. The number of days meeting the air quality standards increased for all pollutants except NO2. Based on the current situation and unsolved problems of air pollution, the JJJUA area needs certain measures including diversifying the governance subjects, joint legislation (beyond municipalities) on air pollution to regulate pollution discharge, enhancing public awareness on air pollution and its health impacts, carefully examining sources of air pollution in winter to reduce pollution, and to better understand the sources of ozone and adopt effective control measures.
ABSTRACT
Licking is a repetitive behavior controlled by a central pattern generator. Even though interlick intervals (ILIs) within bursts of licks are considered fairly regular, the conditions that affect their variability are unknown. We analyzed the licking pattern in rats that licked water, 10% sucrose solution, or 10% ethanol solution, in 90-min recording sessions after 4h of water deprivation. The histograms of ILIs indicate that licking typically occurred at a preferred ILI of about 130-140ms with evidence of bimodal or multimodal distributions due to occasional licking failures. We found that the longer the pause between bursts of licks, the shorter was the first ILI of the burst. When bursts of licks were preceded by a pause >4 s, the ILI was the shortest (~110ms) at the beginning of the burst, and then it increased rapidly in the first few licks and slowly in subsequent licks. Interestingly, the first ILI of a burst of licks was not significantly different when licking any of the 3 solutions, but subsequent licks exhibited a temporal pattern characteristic of each solution. The rapid deceleration in intraburst licking rate was due to an increase from ~27ms to ~56ms in the tongue-spout contact duration while the intercontact interval was only slightly changed (80-90ms). Therefore, the contact duration seems to be the major factor that increases the variability in the ILIs and could be another means for the rat to adjust the amount of fluid ingested in each individual lick.
