Coupling Relationship between Rural Settlement Patterns and Landscape Fragmentation in Woodlands and Biological Reserves: A Case of Nanshan National Park

Exploring the influence of settlement patterns on the landscape fragmentation in woodlands and biological reserves is key to achieving ecologically sustainable development. In this research, we chose the Nanshan National Park in Hunan Province, China, as a case study, to explore the influence mechanisms. First, we identified the biological...

Improve the long-term property of heat-cured mortars blended with fly ash by internal curing

Due to the satisfactory property and high productivity, heat-cured concretes have been widely used in engineering practice. However, heat curing process also brings some drawbacks that are detrimental to the long-term property of this material. To address this issue, lightweight fine aggregate (LWFA) was employed to provide internal curing ...

A multi-axis robot-based bioprinting system supporting natural cell function preservation and cardiac tissue fabrication

Despite the recent advances in artificial tissue and organ engineering, how to generate large size viable and functional complex organs still remains as a grand challenge for regenerative medicine. Three-dimensional bioprinting has demonstrated its advantages as one of the major methods in fabricating simple tissues, yet it still faces...

Quantifying the hierarchy of public transport networks

Public transport networks constitute critical infrastructure in urban systems. Public transport networks are characterised by their hierarchical structure, yet methods to quantify their underlying hierarchy are lacking. We propose a metric for quantifying the hierarchy in public transport networks which incorporates topological as well as...

Random Graphs with Time-Varying Fitness

The random graph is a mathematical model simulating common daily cases, such as ranking and social networks. Generally, the connection between different users in the network is established through preference, and this phenomenon leads to a power-law behaviour of the degree sequence of the random graph. Other than studying this feature, the...

Kemeny's constant and the effective graph resistance

Kemeny's constant and its relation to the effective graph resistance has been established for regular graphs by Palacios et al. [1]. Based on the Moore–Penrose pseudo-inverse of the Laplacian matrix, we derive a new closed-form formula and deduce upper and lower bounds for the Kemeny constant. Furthermore, we generalize the relation between...

Degree and Principal Eigenvectors in Complex Networks

The largest eigenvalue ? 1 of the adjacency matrix powerfully characterizes dynamic processes on networks, such as virus spread and synchronization. The minimization of the spectral radius by removing a set of links (or nodes) has been shown to be an NP-complete problem. So far, the best heuristic strategy is to remove links/nodes based on the...