China has responded to a national land-system sustainability emergency via an integrated portfolio of large-scale programmes. Here we review 16 sustainability programmes, which invested US$378.5 billion (in 2015 US$), covered 623.9 million hectares of land and involved over 500 million people, mostly since 1998. We find overwhelmingly that the interventions improved the sustainability of China's rural land systems, but the impacts are nuanced and adverse outcomes have occurred. We identify some key characteristics of programme success, potential risks to their durability, and future research needs. We suggest directions for China and other nations as they progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations' Agenda 2030.

Abstract. Tropospheric vertical column densities (VCDs) of NO 2 , SO 2 and HCHO derived from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on AURA and the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment 2 aboard METOP-A (GOME-2A) and METOP-B (GOME-2B) are widely used to characterize the global distributions, trends and dominating sources of these trace gases. They are also useful for the comparison with chemical transport models (CTMs). We use tropospheric VCDs and vertical profiles of NO 2 , SO 2 and HCHO derived from MAX-DOAS measurements from 2011 to 2014 in Wuxi, China, to validate the corresponding products (daily and bi-monthly-averaged data) derived from OMI and GOME-2A/B by different scientific teams. Prior to the comparison, the spatial and temporal coincidence criteria for MAX-DOAS and satellite data are determined by a sensitivity study using different spatial and temporal averaging conditions. Cloud effects on both MAX-DOAS and satellite observations are also investigated. Our results indicate that the discrepancies between satellite and MAX-DOAS results increase with increasing effective cloud fraction and are dominated by the effects of clouds on the satellite products. In comparison with MAX-DOAS, we found a systematic underestimation of all SO 2 (40 to 57 %) and HCHO products (about 20 %), and an overestimation of the GOME-2A/B NO 2 products (about 30 %), but good consistency with the DOMINO version 2 NO 2 product. To better understand the reasons for these differences, we evaluated the a priori profile shapes used in the OMI retrievals (derived from CTM) by comparison with those derived from the MAX-DOAS observations. Significant differences are found for the SO 2 and HCHO profile shapes derived from the IMAGES model, whereas on average good agreement is found for the NO 2 profile shapes derived from the TM4 model. We also applied the MAX-DOAS profile shapes to the satellite rePublished by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union. 5008 Y. Wang et al.: Validation of OMI, GOME-2A and GOME-2B tropospheric NO 2 , SO 2 and HCHO products trievals and found that these modified satellite VCDs agree better with the MAX-DOAS VCDs than the VCDs from the original data sets by up to 10, 47 and 35 % for NO 2 , SO 2 and HCHO, respectively. Furthermore, we investigated the effect of aerosols on the satellite retrievals. For OMI observations of NO 2 , a systematic underestimation is found for large AOD, which is mainly attributed to effect of the aerosols on the cloud retrieval and the subsequent application of a cloud correction scheme (implicit aerosol correction). In contrast, the effect of aerosols on the clear-sky air mass factor (explicit aerosol correction) has a smaller effect. For SO 2 and HCHO observations selected in the same way, no clear aerosol effect is found, probably because for the considered data sets no cloud correction is applied (and also because of the larger scatter). From our findings we conclude that for satellite observations with cloud top pressure (CTP) > 900 hPa and effective ...

Matter state inside neutron stars is an exciting problem in astrophysics, nuclear physics and particle physics. The equation of state (EOS) of neutron stars plays a crucial role in the present multimessenger astronomy, especially after the event of GW170817. We propose a new neutron star EOS "QMF18" from the quark level, which describes well robust observational constraints from free-space nucleon, nuclear matter saturation, heavy pulsar measurements and the tidal deformability of the very recent GW170817 observation. For this purpose, we employ the quark-mean-field (QMF) model, allowing one to tune the density dependence of the symmetry energy and study effectively its correlations with the Love number and the tidal deformability. We provide tabulated data for the new EOS and compare it with other recent EOSs from various many-body frameworks.

Abstract. We characterize the temporal variation and vertical distribution of nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ), sulfur dioxide (SO 2 ), formaldehyde (HCHO) and aerosol extinction based on long-term multi-axis differential optical absorption spectroscopy (MAX-DOAS) observations from May 2011 to November 2014 in Wuxi, China. A new inversion algorithm (PriAM) is implemented to retrieve profiles of the trace gases (TGs) and aerosol extinction (AE) from the UV spectra of scattered sunlight recorded by the MAX-DOAS instrument. We investigated two important aspects of the retrieval process. We found that the systematic seasonal variation of temperature and pressure (which is regularly observed in Wuxi) can lead to a systematic bias of the retrieved aerosol profiles (e.g. up to 20 % for the AOD) if it is not explicitly considered. In this study we take this effect into account for the first time. We also investigated in detail the reason for the differences of tropospheric vertical column densities derived from either the geometric approximation or by the integration of the retrieved profiles, which were reported by earlier studies. We found that these differences are almost entirely caused by the limitations of the geometric approximation (especially for high aerosol loads). The results retrieved from the MAX-DOAS observations are compared with independent techniques not only under cloud-free sky conditions, but also under various cloud scenarios. Under most cloudy conditions (except fog and optically thick clouds), the trace gas results still show good agreements. In contrast, for the aerosol results, only near-surface AE could be still well retrieved under cloudy situations.After applying a quality control procedure, the MAX-DOAS data are used to characterize the seasonal, diurnal and weekly variations of NO 2 , SO 2 , HCHO and aerosols. A regular seasonality of the three trace gases is found, but not for aerosols. Similar annual variations of the profiles of the trace gases appear in different years. Only NO 2 shows a significant seasonality of the diurnal variations. Considerable amplitudes of weekly cycles occur for NO 2 and SO 2 , but not for HCHO and aerosols. The TGs and aerosols show good correlations, especially for HCHO in winter. More pronounced wind direction dependencies, especially for the near-surface concentrations, are found for the trace gases than for the aerosols, which implies that the local emissions from nearby industrial areas (including traffic emissions) dominate the local pollution, while long-distance transport might also considerably contribute to the local aerosol levels.

High-T c superconductors confined to two dimension exhibit novel physical phenomena, such as superconductor-insulator transition. In the Bi 2 Sr 2 CaCu 2 O 8 þ x (Bi2212) model system, despite extensive studies, the intrinsic superconducting properties at the thinness limit have been difficult to determine. Here, we report a method to fabricate high quality single-crystal Bi2212 films down to half-unit-cell thickness in the form of graphene/Bi2212 van der Waals heterostructure, in which sharp superconducting transitions are observed. The heterostructure also exhibits a nonlinear current-voltage characteristic due to the Dirac nature of the graphene band structure. More interestingly, although the critical temperature remains essentially the same with reduced thickness of Bi2212, the slope of the normal state T-linear resistivity varies by a factor of 4-5, and the sheet resistance increases by three orders of magnitude, indicating a surprising decoupling of the normal state resistance and superconductivity. The developed technique is versatile, applicable to investigate other two-dimensional (2D) superconducting materials.

We introduce a generic framework that reduces the computational cost of object detection while retaining accuracy for scenarios where objects with varied sizes appear in high resolution images. Detection progresses in a coarse-to-fine manner, first on a down-sampled version of the image and then on a sequence of higher resolution regions identified as likely to improve the detection accuracy. Built upon reinforcement learning, our approach consists of a model (Rnet) that uses coarse detection results to predict the potential accuracy gain for analyzing a region at a higher resolution and another model (Q-net) that sequentially selects regions to zoom in. Experiments on the Caltech Pedestrians dataset show that our approach reduces the number of processed pixels by over 50% without a drop in detection accuracy. The merits of our approach become more significant on a high resolution test set collected from YFCC100M dataset, where our approach maintains high detection performance while reducing the number of processed pixels by about 70% and the detection time by over 50%.

We study the dark matter (DM) effects on the nuclear matter (NM) parameters characterizing the equation of states of super dense neutron-rich nucleonic matter. The observables of the NM, i.e. incompressibility, symmetry energy and its higher order derivatives in the presence DM for symmetric and asymmetric NM are analysed with the help of an extended relativistic mean field model. The calculations are also extended to β-stable matter to explore the properties of the neutron star (NS). We analyse the DM effects on symmetric NM, pure neutron matter, and NS using NL3, G3, and IOPB-I forces. The binding energy per particle and pressure is calculated with and without considering the DM interaction with the NM systems. The influences of DM are also analysed on the symmetry energy and its different coefficients. The incompressibility and the skewness parameters are affected considerably due to the presence of DM in the NM medium. We extend the calculations to the NS and find its mass, radius and the moment of inertia for static and rotating NS with and without DM contribution. The mass of the rotating NS is considerably changing due to rapid rotation with the frequency in the mass-shedding limit. The effects of DM are found to be important for some of the NM parameters, which are crucial for the properties of astrophysical objects.

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