Metropolization has emerged as a prominent feature of 21st-century urbanization. To gain a comprehensive understanding of global urbanization patterns and pathways, as well as to interpret their consequences and implications, we aimed to provide a comparative characterization on urban transformation in metropolitan areas of developed and developing countries. Here, we quantified and compared the urban growth rates, growth modes, urban landscape metrics, and the co-evolution of urban land and population in 21 representative metropolitan areas across the United States, Europe, and China from 1985 to 2020, using remotely sensed impervious-surface dynamic dataset and patch-based analyses. The results showed that each metropolitan area has experienced substantial urban expansion with different scales and growth rates. Developing China possessed a relatively lower urbanization level but urbanized faster compared to the developed counterparts. Spatially, with infilling expansion increasing and even dominating, American and European metropolitan areas developed into more compact central urban cores, demonstrating the coalesced trajectories. Chinese metropolitan areas showed point-axis urban development mainly via edge-expansion in concentric rings. Furthermore, the horizontal co-evolution of urban area and population generally showed stable economies of scale in the United States and Europe whereas transitioned from diseconomy to economy of scale in China, evidencing that the century-long urbanization journey traversed by developed countries can be completed by emerging-developing ones within several decades. Temporally, the urban expansion greatly outpaced population growth in all metropolitan areas except London, signifying that urban land use efficiency is still a grand challenge in the Metropolitan Century. Effective metropolitan governance should be tailored to spatial configuration for efficient urban land use and intercity coordinated development towards a sustainable urban future, particularly for developing countries with emerging metropolization.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of the study was to evaluate the baseline data of women with breast cancer (BC) undergoing treatment in an intercontinental comparison.
METHODS: This study included 99,571 women with BC from Europe (70,834), Asia (18,208), and Latin America (10,529) enrolled between 2017 and 2021, based on data from IQVIA\'s Oncology Dynamics database. This source is supplied with information by means of a cross-sectional partially retrospective survey collecting anonymized data on inpatients and outpatients treated by a representative panel of oncologists. A multivariable logistic regression model was used to investigate the probability of metastases.
RESULTS: The data available in Asia (98%) and Latin America (100%) were hospital data, while in Europe, patients were treated both in hospitals and in office-based practices (62%, 38%). The mean age in Asia and Latin America (57 ± 13) was lower than in Europe (61 ± 13; p < 0.001). Lobular BC was diagnosed twice as often in Europe compared to Asia and Latin America (15.2%, 9.8%, 8.0%). The number of patients with metastasized hormone receptor-positive (HR +) BC was significantly higher in Europe and Latin America than in Asia (76%, 68%; p < 0.001). The highest number of women with metastasized BC was reported in Europe (26% compared to 14% and 20%, respectively, in Asia and Latin America). Across the continents, the percentage of women with BC who experienced metastases was 51-61% for bone, 30-39% for lung and 25-32% for liver, followed by 3-6% for skin and 3% for brain.
CONCLUSIONS: Women with BC treated in Europe tend to be significantly older and more likely to develop metastases than women in Asia and Latin America, except for lung metastases.

OBJECTIVE: Although patterns of biodiversity across the globe are well studied, there is still a controversial debate about the underlying mechanisms and their generality across biogeographic scales. In particular, it is unclear to what extent diversity patterns along environmental gradients are directly driven by abiotic factors, such as climate, or indirectly mediated through biotic factors, such as resource effects on consumers.
METHODS: Andes, Southern Ecuador; Mt. Kilimanjaro, Tanzania.
METHODS: We studied the diversity of fleshy-fruited plants and avian frugivores at the taxonomic level, that is, species richness and abundance, as well as at the level of functional traits, that is, functional richness and functional dispersion. We compared two important biodiversity hotspots in mountain systems of the Neotropics and Afrotropics. We used field data of plant and bird communities, including trait measurements of 367 plant and bird species. Using structural equation modeling, we disentangled direct and indirect effects of climate and the diversity of plant communities on the diversity of bird communities.
RESULTS: We found significant bottom-up effects of fruit diversity on frugivore diversity at the taxonomic level. In contrast, climate was more important for patterns of functional diversity, with plant communities being mostly related to precipitation, and bird communities being most strongly related to temperature.
CONCLUSIONS: Our results illustrate the general importance of bottom-up mechanisms for the taxonomic diversity of consumers, suggesting the importance of active resource tracking. Our results also suggest that it might be difficult to identify signals of ecological fitting between functional plant and animal traits across biogeographic regions, since different species groups may respond to different climatic drivers. This decoupling between resource and consumer communities could increase under future climate change if plant and animal communities are consistently related to distinct climatic drivers.