Dengue, an Aedes mosquito-borne viral infection, is on the rise with climate and demographic change. In 2023, WHO declared dengue its highest grade of emergency, following the largest number of cases and deaths in recorded history. This emergency highlighted the absence of safe and effective dengue-specific treatments as a gap in the product landscape for care for people with dengue. To accelerate development of dengue-specific treatments for wide implementation and access in all dengue-endemic countries, WHO conducted a landscape analysis of the dengue therapeutics pipeline and convened a global expert and public consultation to develop target product profiles for treatments for non-severe and severe dengue. These target product profiles provide strategic guidance for product developers, regulators, procurement agencies, and funders on the intended use, target populations, and key product characteristics of dengue-specific treatments required to meet public health needs, setting clear targets to drive development of dengue drugs accessible to those who need them the most.
Highway infrastructure spending has large but opposing effects on sectoral CO2 emission intensity in the United States. Using a panel of 50 states over 1993–2019, we show that a one-standard-deviation increase in the highway expenditure share of GDP (i) reduces residential emission intensity by 4.5%, consistent with suburbanisation-driven spatial reorganisation, and (ii) increases transport emission intensity by 2.3%, consistent with induced vehicle travel demand. A formula-based instrument built on predetermined federal highway apportionments confirms both channels, and direct evidence on intermediate outcomes – a shift towards service-sector activity on the residential side, and expanded road capacity and vehicle travel on the transport side – ties each effect to its proposed mechanism. Both effects are robust to controlling for manufacturing structure, electricity prices, climate variables, population density, state-specific trends, and time-varying state policies, and a distributed-lag specification indicates that they accumulate over a three-year horizon. These findings demonstrate that aggregate analyses of fiscal decentralisation and emissions conceal economically important but offsetting sectoral mechanisms.
Electroencephalography is the most commonly used diagnostic tool for epilepsy. However, interpreting electroencephalograms (EEGs) requires expertise that is not widely available. Advances in digital technology and wearables have enabled large-scale EEG recording, generating vast amounts of data that cannot be managed through traditional visual interpretation by experts. Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to augment human expertise and reduce workloads. The application of artificial neural networks in analysing clinical EEG recordings has led to major breakthroughs, bringing AI-based EEG interpretation closer to clinical implementation. In this Review, we summarise the most important research and development results in this field from a clinical perspective. We provide an overview of AI applications in spike and seizure detection; analysis of data from wearable electroencephalographs, patients who are critically ill, and epilepsy surgery; and the automated interpretation of clinical EEGs.
The effects of habitat fragmentation on biodiversity are widely debated. Some studies report positive effects, whereas others link habitat fragmentation to biodiversity loss. “Fragmentation per se” refers to habitat fragmentation independently of habitat loss, or when its effect is controlled, and mainly relates to how habitat patches are spatially distributed (i.e. habitat configuration) and how this organization influences biodiversity. Here we evaluated the habitat amount hypothesis, which postulates that habitat cover is the main factor determining species diversity in fragmented landscapes. We analyzed the effects of landscape structure of a tropical dry forest in the Colombian Caribbean region on the taxonomic and (SES) functional richness of medium- to large-bodied mammals. We assessed 256 landscapes along a gradient of forest cover. We calculated landscape composition (forest cover) and configuration metrics (number of patches and edge density) in multiple nested scales. For each landscape, we estimated species richness, forest-dependent species richness, non-forest-dependent species richness, and the standardized effect size of functional richness. We evaluated the effects of landscape structure using AICc-based model comparison and model averaging. We found that species richness was positively affected by edge density, negatively affected by the number of patches, and moderately positively affected by forest cover. We also found that forest-dependent species richness was positively related to forest cover, whereas non-forest-dependent species richness showed a positive effect of edge density. We also detected a moderate negative effect of the number of patches on the standardized effect size of functional richness. These results indicate that the habitat amount hypothesis is not fully supported and suggest that conservation strategies should prioritize preserving and increasing the total amount of habitat, while also considering landscape configuration in tropical dry forest of the Colombian Caribbean.
The safety of same day discharge after atrial fibrillation ablation remains uncertain because prior evidence relied mainly on heterogeneous observational studies with limited control of confounding. This systematic review and meta-analysis compared structured same day discharge with overnight stay. We searched MEDLINE, Embase, Web of Science, Scopus, CENTRAL, Epistemonikos and LILACS from 1994 to May 2025 for randomized and nonrandomized controlled studies of adults undergoing atrial fibrillation ablation with pulmonary vein isolation. Comparisons were protocolized same day discharge versus overnight hospitalization. Outcomes were all-cause mortality, short term (30-day) unplanned medical contact (readmissions or emergency visits), and procedural complications. Random-effects models generated pooled odds ratios (ORs) with 95
