Identity formation among teenagers: the role of training camp

The aim of the present study was to examine the impact of jihadi camps on the identity formation of teenagers in Iran. Seventy-six campers participated in the study and were randomly divided into control (n=42) and experimental groups (n=34). The control group does not follow the camp's regular program while the experimental group attended to the camp's regular program. All participants completed the Dellas Identity Status Inventory (DISI) (Dellas and Jernigan, 1987); this questionnaire consists of two subscales of achiever: commitment and exploration. The results revealed statistically significant differences on the experimental and nonexperimental group, in two specific attitude subscales. These findings imply that participation in this particular camp can have a positive influence on teenagers' professional Identity

Total Gastric Necrosis as a Presentation of Aluminum Phosphide Poisoning: A Case Report

Background: Rice pill poisoning is among the most frequent causes of death among poisoners. Despite advances in the treatment of this poisoning, its mortality rate remains high. The symptoms of Aluminum Phosphide (AlP) poisoning are varied and progressive. One of the essential foundations of diagnosis is based on the history of swallowing the pill by the patient or their companions.Case Report: A 20-year-old woman with generalized abdominal pain and a diagnosis of peritonitis was operated. The operative finding was total gastric necrosis. After the operation, the patient’s husband claimed that she had consumed some rice pills, intending to commit suicide. Despite all efforts, she remained in persistent septic shock and multi-organ failure and passed away after surgery.Conclusion: Total gastric necrosis could be among the lethal complications of rice tablet (AlP) poisoning

Satellite TV in Iran and the western cultural assault: From prohibition to conditional freedom

The Islamic Republic of Iran since 1979 has been rallying for supportagainst the Western World usage of modern ways in a widespread"Cultural Assault". In 1990 Satellite TV was introduced and Iranian'sgot the chance to watch Western programs but soon The IslamicRepublic of Iran declared satellite TV as a threat and prohibited itswatching in 1994. Despite government's strong opposition, Iraniancitizen's interest in satellite TV has increased over the last couple ofdecades and the use of satellite TV has become more common.Present article interprets the policies of Iran's system, especially Iran'sbroadcasting, in dealing with satellite TV while exploring its varyingposition through multiple religious regimes in Iran. It argues that thischallenge will continue to be a pressing one in the eyes of the Iraniangovernment

Multi-Type Assessment of Global Droughts and Teleconnections

Several drought indices have been developed based on various processes (e.g., precipitation, soil moisture, vegetation health) that respond differently to modes of climate variability, shadowing their relatability to teleconnections, which in turn, limits drought forecasting. In this study, we advanced the multivariate analysis of droughts by using long-term Terrestrial Water Storage estimates, soil moisture and precipitation data along with normalized difference vegetation index. To this end, we employed a Vine copula approach using Archimedean and Elliptical copula families to generate two novel multivariate drought indices called Combined Standardized Drought Index (CSDI), based on agricultural, meteorological, hydrological and ecological univariate indices (i.e., the Eco-meteo-hydrologic index and the Agro-meteo-hydrologic index) for 33 major river basins across the globe between 1982 and 2015. To overcome the challenges associated with vine copula building blocks, we exhausted the possible choices of vine trees and selected the superior model based on a variety of performance metrics. CSDIs showed an integrated representation of univariate drought indices and revealed a more comprehensive and improved picture of intensity, duration and frequency of droughts. Our composite analysis showed that El Niño and La Niña have a significant impact on the regional drought occurrences across the globe, with highest impacts observed for fall. Results also showed that CSDIs can extract more conclusive anomalies in response to ENSO signals than univariate indices, as they better represent the ecosystem response to teleconnections

A preliminary study of the anti-inflammatory and anti-apoptotic effects of crocin against gastric ischemia-reperfusion injury in rats

O objetivo do presente estudo foi investigar o efeito protetor da crocina em lesões da mucosa gástrica causadas por isquemia-reperfusão (I/R) em ratos. Trinta e dois ratos machos aleatoriamente divididos em grupos de ratos normais, operados como controle, I/R. I/R + pré-tratamento com crocina e crocina sozinha. Para induzir lesões I/R, a artéria celíaca foi grampeada durante 30 minutos e, em seguida, o grampo foi removido para permitir a reperfusão por 3 h. Ratos com pré-tratamento com crocina receberam crocina (15 mg/kg, ip) 30 minutos antes da indução do dano I/R. Amostras de mucosa gástrica foram coletadas para qiuantificar a expressão da proteína da caspase-3, o fator apoptótico, e óxido nítrico sintase induzível (iNOS), uma proteína anti-inflamatória, pela técnica de Western Blot. O pré-tratamento com crocina diminuiu a área total de lesões gástricas e a expressão de níveis de caspase-3 e iNOS induzidas pelo dano I/R. Nossos resultados mostraram o efeito protetor da crocina na mucosa gástrica contra o dano I/R. Este efeito foi mediado, principalmente, por diminuição da expressão das proteínas iNOS e caspase-3.The aim of the present study was to investigate the protective effect of crocin on gastric mucosal lesions caused by ischemia-reperfusion (I/R) injury in rats. Thirty-two male rats were randomly divided into sham, I/R, I/R + crocin pretreatment and crocin alone groups. To induce I/R lesions, the celiac artery was clamped for 30 min, and the clamp was then removed to allow reperfusion for 3 h. Crocin-pretreated rats received crocin (15 mg/kg, i.p.) 30 min prior to the induction of I/R injury. Samples of gastric mucosa were collected to quantify the protein expression of caspase-3, an apoptotic factor, and inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS), a pro-inflammatory protein, by Western blot. Pretreatment with crocin decreased the total area of gastric lesions and decreased the protein expression levels of caspase-3 and iNOS induced by I/R injury. Our findings showed a protective effect of crocin in gastric mucosa against I/R injury. This effect of crocin was mainly mediated by reducing the protein expression of iNOS and caspase-3

A novel workflow for streamflow prediction in the presence of missing gauge observations

Streamflow predictions are vital for detecting flood and drought events. Such predictions are even more critical to Sub-Saharan African regions that are vulnerable to the increasing frequency and intensity of such events. These regions are sparsely gaged, with few available gaging stations that are often plagued with missing data due to various causes, such as harsh environmental conditions and constrained operational resources. This work presents a novel workflow for predicting streamflow in the presence of missing gage observations. We leverage bias correction of the Group on Earth Observations Global Water and Sustainability Initiative ECMWF streamflow service (GESS) forecasts for missing data imputation and predict future streamflow using the state-of-the-art temporal fusion transformers (TFTs) at 10 river gaging stations in the Benin Republic. We show by simulating missingness in a testing period that GESS forecasts have a significant bias that results in poor imputation performance over the 10 Beninese stations. Our findings suggest that overall bias correction by Elastic Net and Gaussian Process regression achieves superior performance relative to traditional imputation by established methods. We also show that the TFT yields high predictive skill and further provides explanations for predictions through the weights of its attention mechanism. The findings of this work provide a basis for integrating Global streamflow prediction model data and the state-of-the-art machine learning models into operational early-warning decision-making systems in resource-constrained countries vulnerable to drought and flooding due to extreme weather events

Impact-based skill evaluation of seasonal precipitation forecasts

DATA AVAILABITY STATEMENT: The data used in this study were obtained from the European Centre for Medium‐Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Copernicus Climate Change Service, specifically from the ERA5 reanalysis data set and C3S seasonal forecasts. These data sets are publicly available through the Copernicus Climate Data Store (CDS) (at https://cds. climate.copernicus.eu) under an Open Data Commons Attribution 4.0 International (ODC‐BY 4.0) license. To access the data, users can register for a free account on the Copernicus Climate Data Store platform and follow the provided guidelines for data retrieval. The specific seasonal model versions used in this study are CMCC‐SPS3.5, DWD‐GCFS2.1, ECCC‐GEM5‐NEMO, UK MetOffice GloSea6, and Météo‐France‐System 8. The MODIS Land Cover data set (Friedl & Sulla‐Menashe, 2022) used to categorize IPCC based on proportion of farmlands are available from the Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Centre (at https://doi.org/10.5067/MODIS/ MCD12Q1.061). The Global Human Settlement Layer data set (Schiavina et al., 2023) used to categorize IPCC based on population density are available from Joint Research Centre Data Catalogue (at doi:10.2905/3c60ddf6‐ 0586‐4190‐854b‐f6aa0edc2a30). The MODIS burned area data sets (Chuvieco et al., 2018) is available from Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (at https://doi.org/10.5285/58F00D8814064B79A0C49662AD3AF537). The data used for categorizing the IPCC regions based on flood affected areas (Tellman et al., 2021) are available from Google Earth Engine Data Catalog (at https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/ catalog/GLOBAL_FLOOD_DB_MODIS_EVENTS_V1).We introduce an impact‐based framework to evaluate seasonal forecast model skill in capturing extreme weather and climate events over regions prone to natural disasters such as floods and wildfires. Forecasting hydroclimatic extremes holds significant importance in an era of increasing hazards such as wildfires, floods, and droughts. We evaluate the performance of five Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) seasonal forecast models (CMCC, DWD, ECCC, UK‐Met, and Météo‐France) in predicting extreme precipitation events from 1993 to 2016 using 14 indices reflecting timing and intensity (using absolute and locally defined thresholds) of precipitation at a seasonal timescale. Performance metrics, including Percent Bias, Kendall Tau Rank Correlation Score, and models' discrimination capacity, are used for skill evaluation. Our findings indicate that the performance of models varies markedly across regions and seasons. While models generally show good skill in the tropical regions, their skill in extra‐tropical regions is markedly lower. Elevated precipitation thresholds (i.e., higher intensity indices) correlate with heightened model biases, indicating deficiencies in modeling severe precipitation events. Our analysis using an impact‐based framework highlights the superior predictive capabilities of the UK‐Met and Météo‐France models in capturing the underlying processes that drive precipitation events, or lack thereof, across many regions and seasons. Other models exhibit strong performance in specific regions and/or seasons, but not globally. These results advance our understanding of an impact‐based framework in capturing a broad spectrum of extreme weather and climatic events, and inform strategic amalgamation of diverse models across different regions and seasons, thereby offering valuable insights for disaster management and risk analysis.https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/23284277Geography, Geoinformatics and MeteorologySDG-11:Sustainable cities and communitiesSDG-13:Climate actio