Does Environmental Economics lead to patentable research?

In this feasibility study, the impact of academic research from social sciences and humanities on technological innovation is explored through a study of citations patterns of journal articles in patents. Specifically we focus on citations of journals from the field of environmental economics in patents included in an American patent database (USPTO). Three decades of patents have led to a small set of journal articles (85) that are being cited from the field of environmental economics. While this route of measuring how academic research is validated through its role in stimulating technological progress may be rather limited (based on this first exploration), it may still point to a valuable and interesting topic for further research.Comment: 10 pages, 4 table

Quantitative proteomic analysis of sphere-forming stem-like oral cancer cells.

IntroductionThe purpose of this study is to identify target proteins that may play important functional roles in oral cancer stem-like cells (CSCs) using mass spectrometry-based quantitative proteomics.MethodsSphere-formation assays were performed on highly invasive UM1 and lowly invasive UM2 oral cancer cell lines, which were derived from the same tongue squamous cell carcinoma, to enrich CSCs. Quantitative proteomic analysis of CSC-like and non-CSC UM1 cells was carried out using tandem mass tagging and two-dimensional liquid chromatography with Orbitrap mass spectrometry.ResultsCSC-like cancer cells were found to be present in the highly invasive UM1 cell line but absent in the lowly invasive UM2 cell line. Stem cell markers SOX2, OCT4, SOX9 and CD44 were up-regulated, whereas HIF-1 alpha and PGK-1 were down-regulated in CSC-like UM1 cells versus non-CSC UM1 cells. Quantitative proteomic analysis indicated that many proteins in cell cycle, metabolism, G protein signal transduction, translational elongation, development, and RNA splicing pathways were differentially expressed between the two cell phenotypes. Both CREB-1-binding protein (CBP) and phosphorylated CREB-1 were found to be significantly over-expressed in CSC-like UM1 cells.ConclusionsCSC-like cells can be enriched from the highly invasive UM1 oral cancer cell line but not from the lowly invasive UM2 oral cancer cell line. There are significant proteomic alterations between CSC-like and non-CSC UM1 cells. In particular, CBP and phosphorylated CREB-1 were significantly up-regulated in CSC-like UM1 cells versus non-CSC UM1 cells, suggesting that the CREB pathway is activated in the CSC-like cells

Energy and sustainable urban transport development in China: Challenges and solutions

This paper presents an overview of urban road transport development and challenges in energy consumption in China. It relates sustainable urban road transport development with energy consumption and environmental management. It analyzes the main challenges related to urban road transport development: energy security, low efficiency in energy utilization, and unsustainable environmental management. It also discusses necessary technological and policy initiatives to deal with these challenges: e.g., promoting the development and dissemination of cleaner vehicle technologies, substitution of LPG, CNG, LNG and biofuels for gasoline and diesel, strengthening regulations on vehicle emissions, expediting public transport development, and the effective management of the soaring private car

Enabling sustainable urban road transport in China: A policy and institutional perspective

This paper is an effort to investigate the approach to sustainable urban road transport in Chinese mega cities with an emphasis on policy and institutional perspectives. The study links the major “unsustainabilities” of China’s urban road transport with those deficiencies in urban road transport planning and management and China’s auto industry policy, and gives some suggestions and recommendations for policy change and adjustment. The paper also provides some examples of successful experiences from foreign cities in urban road transport development from which Chinese cities can learn

A Sparse Representation Image Denoising Method Based on Orthogonal Matching Pursuit

Image denoising is an important research aspect in the field of digital image processing, and sparse representation theory is also one of the research focuses in recent years. The sparse representation of the image can better extract the nature of the image, and use a way as concise as possible to express the image. In image denoising based on sparse representation, the useful information of the image possess certain structural features, which match the atom structure. However, noise does not possess such property, therefore, sparse representation can effectively separate the useful information from noise to achieve the purpose of denoising. Aiming at image denoising problem of low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) image, combined with Orthogonal Matching Pursuit and sparse representation theory, this paper puts forward an image denoising method. The experiment shows that compared with the traditional image denoising based on Symlets, image denoising based on Contourlet transform, this method can delete noise in low SNR image and keep the useful information in the original image more efficiently