Flash droughts refer to a type of droughts that have rapid intensification without sufficient early warning. To date, how will the flash drought risk change in a warming future climate remains unknown due to a diversity of flash drought definition, unclear role of anthropogenic fingerprints, and uncertain socioeconomic development. Here we propose a new method for explicitly characterizing flash drought events, and find that the exposure risk over China will increase by about 23% ± 11% during the middle of this century under a socioeconomic scenario with medium challenge. Optimal fingerprinting shows that anthropogenic climate change induced by the increased greenhouse gas concentrations accounts for 77% ± 26% of the upward trend of flash drought frequency, and population increase is also an important factor for enhancing the exposure risk of flash drought over southernmost humid regions. Our results suggest that the traditional drought-prone regions would expand given the human-induced intensification of flash drought risk.

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1 Technical Efficacy: Stage 1 J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2018;48:1069-1079.

Potassium‐based dual ion batteries (K‐DIBs) with potassium cation (K+) intercalation graphitic anodes have been investigated for their potential in large‐scale energy storage applications owing to their merits of low cost and environmental friendly. Nonetheless, graphite anodes are plagued by volume expansion from the large K+ ions and the co‐intercalation of solvent molecules during the charging. Accordingly, organic materials stand out for the flexible adjustable structures and abundant active sites, which can accommodate cations by multiple functional groups without structural collapse. However, K‐DIBs based on organic anodes have rarely been investigated. Herein, 3D porous dipotassium terephthalate nanosheets are synthesized via a freeze‐dry method as the K‐DIB anode, which can reversibly store K+ ions at a fast rate with a high specific capacity and robust stability due to the sufficient redox active sites and diffusion pathways of K+ ions in the 3D porous structure. Consequently, a novel K‐DIB configuration combining this fast kinetics organic anode and environmental friendly expanded graphite (EG) cathode is constructed (pK2TP//EG), which exhibits a high specific capacity (68 mAh g‐1 at 2 C), good rate performance up to 20 C, and long cycling life with a capacity retention ~100% after 2000 cycles, which is the best performance observed among reported K‐DIBs.

Abstract. Hydrological drought is not only caused by natural hydroclimate variability but can also be directly altered by human interventions including reservoir operation, irrigation, groundwater exploitation, etc. Understanding and forecasting of hydrological drought in the Anthropocene are grand challenges due to complicated interactions among climate, hydrology and humans. In this paper, five decades of naturalized and observed streamflow datasets are used to investigate hydrological drought characteristics in a heavily managed river basin, the Yellow River basin in north China. Human interventions decrease the correlation between hydrological and meteorological droughts, and make the hydrological drought respond to longer timescales of meteorological drought. Due to large water consumptions in the middle and lower reaches, there are 118-262 % increases in the hydrological drought frequency, up to 8-fold increases in the drought severity, 21-99 % increases in the drought duration and the drought onset is earlier. The non-stationarity due to anthropogenic climate change and human water use basically decreases the correlation between meteorological and hydrological droughts and reduces the effect of human interventions on hydrological drought frequency while increasing the effect on drought duration and severity. A set of 29-year (1982-2010) hindcasts from an established seasonal hydrological forecasting system are used to assess the forecast skill of hydrological drought. In the naturalized condition, the climate-model-based approach outperforms the climatology method in predicting the 2001 severe hydrological drought event. Based on the 29-year hindcasts, the former method has a Brier skill score of 11-26 % against the latter for the probabilistic hydrological drought forecasting. In the Anthropocene, the skill for both approaches increases due to the dominant influence of human interventions that have been implicitly incorporated by the hydrological postprocessing, while the difference between the two predictions decreases. This suggests that human interventions can outweigh the climate variability for the hydrological drought forecasting in the Anthropocene, and the predictability for human interventions needs more attention.

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ObjectiveTo assess the differences in ovarian transcriptomes in Shan Ma ducks between their peak and late stages of egg production, and to obtain new transcriptomic data of these egg-producing ducks.MethodsThe Illumina HiSeq 2000 system was used for high throughput sequencing of ovarian transcriptomes from Shan Ma ducks at their peak or late stages of egg production.ResultsGreater than 93% of the sequencing data had a base quality score (Q score) that was not less than 20 (Q20). From ducks at their peak stage of egg production, 42,782,676 reads were obtained, with 4,307,499,083 bp sequenced. From ducks at their late stage of egg production, 45,316,166 reads were obtained, with 4,562,063,363 bp sequenced. A comparison of the two datasets identified 2,002 differentially expressed genes, with 790 upregulated and 1,212 downregulated. Further analysis showed that 1,645 of the 2,002 differentially expressed genes were annotated in the non-redundant (NR) database, with 646 upregulated and 999 downregulated. Among the differentially expressed genes with annotations in the NR database, 696 genes were functionally annotated in the clusters of orthologous groups of proteins database, involving 25 functional categories. One thousand two hundred four of the differentially expressed genes with annotations in the NR database were functionally annotated in the gene ontology (GO) database, and could be divided into three domains and 56 categories. The three domains were cellular component, molecular function, and biological process. Among the genes identified in the GO database, 451 are involved in development and reproduction. Analysis of the differentially expressed genes with annotations in the NR database against the Kyoto encyclopedia of genes and genomes database revealed that 446 of the genes could be assigned to 175 metabolic pathways, of which the peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor signaling pathway, insulin signaling pathway, fructose and mannose metabolic pathways, gonadotropin releasing hormone signaling pathway and transforming growth factor beta signaling pathway were significantly enriched.ConclusionThe differences in ovarian transcriptomes in Shan Ma ducks between their peak and late stages of egg production were elucidated, which greatly enriched the ovarian transcriptomic information of egg-producing ducks.