2026-10-08

7 arXiv categories· 96 journals· 4154 candidates — 3 worth your time· 73 without an open abstract

Headline

Microplastic policy in Malaysia, pedestrian spatial models, and Nepal's urban health portal

Today, together

tag shift
no tag ran above its 30-day average
shares references
no items share references today counted over the 3 papers published above
on the same shoulders
no foundation work was cited by four of the day's papers counted over the 73 of this day's 76 named papers whose reference lists we have — standing on the same older work is not the same as being about the same thing
first appearance
Hospital Pulau Pinang; International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development; National University of Malaysia; and 3 more none of them on a paper we published in the 118 days before this issue

Two counts, not one counted twice: every row here but “on the same shoulders” counts the papers published above, and that one counts every paper this day named — those and the ones under Also published today, whose abstracts we could not read.

published: Discover Cities

Muhammad Zakwan Anas Abd Wahid, Amirah Sariyati Mohd Yahya, Mohamad Syazmin Sulaiman, et al.
Discover Cities

Hospital Pulau Pinang

Microplastics and Plastic Pollution · Coastal and Marine Management · Waste Management and Recycling · Hospital Pulau Pinang · University of Malaya · National University of Malaysia

Comparative policy analysis of urban microplastic pollution and water quality management toward sustainable environmental governance in Malaysian cities

This study conducts a comparative policy analysis of microplastic pollution governance across global, regional, and national frameworks, focusing on Malaysian cities like Penang, Kuala Lumpur, and Johor Bahru. It synthesizes existing contamination data, noting concentrations from 0.14 particles/L in coastal surface waters to 29,174 pieces/kg in urban sediments, and identifies four systemic governance challenges including legislative fragmentation and infrastructure deficits. To address these, the study designs an integrated urban environmental governance framework proposing municipal monitoring protocols and legislative amendments to the Environmental Quality Act 1974.

Why it matters — It establishes a structured policy pathway for developing nations to transition from fragmented waste management to targeted microplastic regulation, addressing a critical governance gap in a country that ranks third globally in marine plastic contributions but lacks dedicated urban microplastic legislation.

Caveat: The study relies on a qualitative policy review and secondary contamination data from different environmental media, which limits direct quantitative comparisons of microplastic concentrations across sites.

Discover Cities · doi

published: Discover Cities

Sampurna Kakchapati, Neelu Sharma, Jijeebisha Baral, et al.
Discover Cities

International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development

Smart Cities and Technologies · Urban and Rural Development Challenges · Public Health Policies and Education · International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development · Nepal Development Research Institute · North Yorkshire County Council

Study protocol for developing an integrated urban health data portal to strengthen urban health systems in Nepal

This study protocol outlines a mixed-methods implementation project to build an integrated urban health data portal in two wards of Budhanilkantha municipality, Nepal. The researchers will conduct stakeholder interviews, policy reviews, social mapping, a door-to-door household census, and health facility assessments to generate granular, geocoded ward-level data. These primary datasets will be linked with existing routine health and administrative databases using common identifiers to feed into interactive dashboards and GIS mapping tools.

Why it matters — It establishes a proof-of-concept framework for combining routine administrative data with primary local data, enabling municipal governments in low- and middle-income countries to make spatial, equity-focused decisions that address rapid urban growth and health disparities.

Caveat: The protocol describes an ongoing implementation study limited to only two wards within a single municipality, meaning the portal's operational feasibility and utility have not yet been tested at scale.

Discover Cities · doi

preprint

Lars Sickert Karam, Rui M. Castro, Maarten Schoukens, et al.
arXiv physics.soc-ph

Point processes and geometric inequalities · Evacuation and Crowd Dynamics · Urban Design and Spatial Analysis

Adjusting for Social Groups in Spatial Point Process Models for Waiting Pedestrian Configurations

The study refits an inhomogeneous Gibbs point process model of waiting pedestrians at a train station by first grouping individuals based on pairwise distances and contact durations, then replacing each group with a single 'macro-pedestrian' at its centroid. This grouping adjustment was tested on empirical pedestrian configuration data to evaluate its impact on distance-based summary statistics.

Why it matters — It demonstrates that failing to account for social groups distorts spatial interaction models, and shows that grouping individuals into macro-pedestrians yields a larger, more realistic interaction range and improves nearest-neighbor statistics.

Caveat: The centroid-based distance simplification likely overstates the repulsion between pedestrian entities, and the model was only tested on a single train station dataset.

arXiv · pdf

Also published today

These appeared today in journals we track. Their abstracts are not openly available, so we cannot summarise them.