Mosquitoes and birds were sampled for West Nile virus (WNV) in suburban Chicago, USA, in a "hot spot" of arboviral transmission. Viral genetic diversity within this area was similar to that within Illinois and the United States. Diversity was higher among viruses from mosquitoes than from birds, higher among viruses from birds in urban "green spaces" than from birds in residential areas, but lo...

When integrating data from autonomous sources, exact matches of data items that represent the same real world object often fail due to a lack of common keys. Yet in many cases structural information is available and can be used to match such data. As a running example we use residential address information. Addresses are hierarchical structures and are present in many databases. Often they are ...

BACKGROUND: Public health applications using geographic information system (GIS) technology are steadily increasing. Many of these rely on the ability to locate where people live with respect to areas of exposure from environmental contaminants. Automated geocoding is a method used to assign geographic coordinates to an individual based on their street address. This method often relies on stree...

Spatial boundaries are a defining feature of a city’s social and spatial organization. Rivers, highways, and train tracks create excess distance between nearby locations and often mark social separation – they become dividing lines that are well known to residents. Qualitative studies are rich with insight about the local significance of boundaries, but they have been largely ignored in the qua...

extremely low frequency (elf) electromagnetic field (elf-emfs) are widely employed in electrical appliances and different equipment such as television sets, elf-emfs can  affect biological systems by increasing production  ros. the altered balance between ros generation and elimination plays a critical role in a variety of pathologic conditions. ros levels have been observed in several hematopo...

This study focuses on identifying source and frequency of noise pollution in Yazd, Iran. For data collection, we used two approaches: First we selected 55 monitoring stations for 122 km grid network; the distance between two stations was 2 km. Then, at the same time, we measured the sound pressure level (SPL) at main roads; the distance between two monitoring stations in this case was 1 km. Aft...