Ensuring equitable access to healthcare services safeguards individual wellbeing and enhances society’s overall happiness. This study investigates the complex relationships between spatial hospital accessibility, spatial inequality, and urban wellbeing, focusing on the physical dimension of access measured by travel time. Using geospatial and economic data from 13,776 hospitals, this study reveals that inequality in hospital accessibility, as measured by the Gini coefficient, significantly and negatively impacts urban happiness. Additionally, the results reveal a nonlinear, inverted U-shaped relationship between hospital accessibility and city-level happiness, indicating an optimal threshold beyond which marginal benefits decline. Additionally, the results indicate a key mediating mechanism: unequal access drives population out-migration and reduces the permanent resident population. This outcome, in turn, partially transmits adverse effects to city-level wellbeing. These findings demonstrate substantial spatial and contextual heterogeneity, underscoring the need for policymakers to tailor urban health policies that prioritize enhancing accessibility and ensure equitable distribution to foster sustainable demographic stability and overall urban wellbeing.
Awe, a self-transcendent emotion, has been theoretically posited as a precursor to wise reasoning. However, direct empirical evidence supporting this relationship and the underlying mechanism has been limited. In four studies (N = 3700), we examined the relationship between awe and wise reasoning, as well as the mediating effect of self-transcendence, employing cross-sectional, longitudinal, and experimental designs. We consistently found that awe had a lagged effect on (Study 1), enhanced (Studies 2 & 3), and was associated with (Study 4) wise reasoning. Furthermore, self-transcendence mediated this relationship (Studies 3 & 4). The impact of awe on wise reasoning and mediating effect of self-transcendence could not solely be attributed to awe’s predominantly positive nature, and the mediation model was established beyond the influence of self-smallness (Studies 3–4). These findings contribute to understanding the emotional trigger of wise reasoning, the cognitive implications of awe, and its role in promoting wise conflict resolution.
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria (ARB) and antibiotic-resistant genes (ARGs) pose global threats to human health and ecological safety. Activation of percarbonate (PC) by eco-friendly bismuth oxyiodide (BiOI) is a promising ARB/ARGs removal technique, yet its efficiency is hindered by the insufficient exposure of reactive Bi sites. Herein, we provide a facile protocol to fabricate BiOI with remarkable PC activation efficiency (BOI-C) for the ultrafast ARB/ARGs removal via modulating reactive Bi sites through introducing optimal Bi3-oxygen vacancy (OV) sites on the unsaturated facets. We show that BOI-C with optimal amount of Bi3-OV site can efficiently activate 50 µM PC to rapidly disinfect 7-log ARB to the limit of detection within only 4 min. Moreover, this reaction system can effectively degrade the released ARG and suppress the horizontal gene transfer process, greatly decreasing the risks of ARG dissemination. Negligible toxic halogen-containing disinfection byproducts is generated during the disinfection process, indicating the outstanding ecological safety of BOI-C/PC system. The reaction system can also effectively disinfect ARB under complex water chemistries including a broad pH range (3–9), high ionic strengths (up to 150 mM), copresence of natural organic matter (up to 10 mg L−1), and diverse actual water samples including tap water, lake water, groundwater and aquaculture tailwater. Furthermore, it can also be assembled into a filtration system for successive ARB disinfection, demonstrating the feasibility for practical application. The catalytic system also exhibits excellent ARB disinfection performance across various bacterial strains and effective degradation performance towards different types of emerging organic pollutants, suggesting its universal decontamination capability. Combining in-situ characterizations and theoretical calculations, we reveal that Bi3-OV sites on the unsaturated facets of BOI-C facilitate the p-p interaction with peroxy O atoms of PC molecules and trigger the electron transfer as well as the subsequent cleavage of peroxy bonds, generating abundant CO3•− for the ultrafast ARB disinfection. The results of this study show that BOI-C/PC system can be employed to effectively remove antibiotic resistance in real water.
Rural in-migrants often introduce distinctive architectural aesthetics, driving gentrification processes in rural areas. While this new aesthetic influences local residents' architectural preferences, the factors related to these preferences remain unclear. This study investigates how interactions with rural in-migrants are associated with locals' architectural tastes and identifies other socio-cultural factors. We developed an innovative two-dimensional matrix framework for assessing architectural preferences in rural in-migration contexts, integrating rural in-migration theory with acculturation theory and validated through phototesting techniques. Through a theory-building case study, we focused on 3 villages in Dali, China, which share similar cultural backgrounds but exhibit different architectural changes in response to rural in-migration. We surveyed 335 locals and 218 migrants across these villages in 2021.
The results show that increased social interactions between locals and migrants are significantly associated with strengthened local preferences for locality-based architectural styles over globalized ones, accompanied by a narrowing of the aesthetic distance between the two groups. These findings suggest that cultural interaction processes may reinforce rather than replace local aesthetic preferences. However, this effect varies among locals due to differences in community characteristics, urban experience, future residential intentions, age, education, and marital status. This study shows that local residents demonstrate agency in cultural adaptation rather than remain passive recipients, suggesting potential pathways for communities to resist marginalization in the gentrification process.
