The impact of the belt and road initiative on green innovation and innovation modes: Empirical evidence from Chinese listed enterprises

Under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), promoting green innovation in enterprises has been the central focus of the developmental strategy for China and countries along the Belt and Road to ensure sustainable development in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) related to the environment and development. This paper examines the driving factors and heterogeneous mechanisms of the BRI in green technology innovation, especially in collaborative vs. independent innovation modes, utilizing a multi-period difference-in-difference model (DID) and micro-level panel data of Chinese listed enterprises spanning from 2007 to 2021. We find that the BRI has significantly stimulated the number of green innovations of participating enterprises, primarily through the adoption of collaborative innovation mode, and the BRI policies are more likely to induce green innovation behavior of enterprises with high research and development (R&D), high quality of environmental information disclosure, and non-state-owned enterprises (SOEs), as well as in heavy-polluting industries. The implementation of the BRI has led to increased support from the government, financial institutions, and scientific research organizations to the participating enterprises, which helps alleviate their financial constraints and enhance patent transformation efficiency, and thus facilitate green innovation. These results are robust across different regression specifications. This study contributes to the existing literature on BRI’s environmental impact and green innovation with firm-level evidence, and has important policy implications for the Chinese government when promoting green innovation and internationalization of Chinese enterprises

Phylogenetic structure and formation mechanism of shrub communities in arid and semiarid areas of the Mongolian Plateau

The mechanisms of species coexistence within a community have always been the focus in ecological research. Community phylogenetic structure reflects the relationship of historical processes, regional environments, and interactions between species, and studying it is imperative to understand the formation and maintenance mechanisms of community composition and biodiversity. We studied the phylogenetic structure of the shrub communities in arid and semiarid areas of the Mongolian Plateau. First, the phylogenetic signals of four plant traits (height, canopy, leaf length, and leaf width) of shrubs and subshrubs were measured to determine the phylogenetic conservation of these traits. Then, the net relatedness index (NRI) of shrub communities was calculated to characterize their phylogenetic structure. Finally, the relationship between the NRI and current climate and paleoclimate (since the Last Glacial Maximum, LGM) factors was analyzed to understand the formation and maintenance mechanisms of these plant communities. We found that desert shrub communities showed a trend toward phylogenetic overdispersion; that is, limiting similarity was predominant in arid and semiarid areas of the Mongolian Plateau despite the phylogenetic structure and formation mechanisms differing across habitats. The typical desert and sandy shrub communities showed a significant phylogenetic overdispersion, while the steppified desert shrub communities showed a weak phylogenetic clustering. It was found that mean winter temperature (i.e., in the driest quarter) was the major factor limiting steppified desert shrub phylogeny distribution. Both cold and drought (despite having opposite consequences) differentiated the typical desert to steppified desert shrub communities. The increase in temperature since the LGM is conducive to the invasion of shrub plants into steppe grassland, and this process may be intensified by global warming

Extraction and Recovery of Spatio-Temporal Structure in Latent Dynamics Alignment with Diffusion Models

In the field of behavior-related brain computation, it is necessary to align raw neural signals against the drastic domain shift among them. A foundational framework within neuroscience research posits that trial-based neural population activities rely on low-dimensional latent dynamics, thus focusing on the latter greatly facilitates the alignment procedure. Despite this field's progress, existing methods ignore the intrinsic spatio-temporal structure during the alignment phase. Hence, their solutions usually lead to poor quality in latent dynamics structures and overall performance. To tackle this problem, we propose an alignment method ERDiff, which leverages the expressivity of the diffusion model to preserve the spatio-temporal structure of latent dynamics. Specifically, the latent dynamics structures of the source domain are first extracted by a diffusion model. Then, under the guidance of this diffusion model, such structures are well-recovered through a maximum likelihood alignment procedure in the target domain. We first demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method on a synthetic dataset. Then, when applied to neural recordings from the non-human primate motor cortex, under both cross-day and inter-subject settings, our method consistently manifests its capability of preserving the spatiotemporal structure of latent dynamics and outperforms existing approaches in alignment goodness-of-fit and neural decoding performance

InstructMol: Multi-Modal Integration for Building a Versatile and Reliable Molecular Assistant in Drug Discovery

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence in drug discovery encounters challenges with generalization and extensive training, yet Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promise in reshaping interactions with complex molecular data. Our novel contribution, InstructMol, a multi-modal LLM, effectively aligns molecular structures with natural language via an instruction-tuning approach, utilizing a two-stage training strategy that adeptly combines limited domain-specific data with molecular and textual information. InstructMol showcases substantial performance improvements in drug discovery-related molecular tasks, surpassing leading LLMs and significantly reducing the gap with specialized models, thereby establishing a robust foundation for a versatile and dependable drug discovery assistant

Dir-MUSIC Algorithm for DOA Estimation of Partial Discharge Based on Signal Strength represented by Antenna Gain Array Manifold

Inspection robots are widely used in the field of smart grid monitoring in substations, and partial discharge (PD) is an important sign of the insulation state of equipments. PD direction of arrival (DOA) algorithms using conventional beamforming and time difference of arrival (TDOA) require large-scale antenna arrays and high computational complexity, which make them difficult to implement on inspection robots. To address this problem, a novel directional multiple signal classification (Dir-MUSIC) algorithm for PD direction finding based on signal strength is proposed, and a miniaturized directional spiral antenna circular array is designed in this paper. First, the Dir-MUSIC algorithm is derived based on the array manifold characteristics. This method uses strength intensity information rather than the TDOA information, which could reduce the computational difficulty and the requirement of array size. Second, the effects of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and array manifold error on the performance of the algorithm are discussed through simulations in detail. Then according to the positioning requirements, the antenna array and its arrangement are developed, optimized, and simulation results suggested that the algorithm has reliable direction-finding performance in the form of 6 elements. Finally, the effectiveness of the algorithm is tested by using the designed spiral circular array in real scenarios. The experimental results show that the PD direction-finding error is 3.39{\deg}, which can meet the need for Partial discharge DOA estimation using inspection robots in substations.Comment: 8 pages,13 figures,24 reference

Thumb function and appearance following treatment of Wassel type III duplication thumbs

AbstractObjectiveThe purpose of our study is to evaluate thumb function and appearance after surgical correction of Wassel type III thumbs polydactyly.MethodsWe have reconstructed 28 cases of Wassel type III duplication thumbs, in which the duplicated digits were equal or almost equal in size by ablation of a radial digit. The extra thumb is osteotomized at the bifurcation level and excised except for the distal bone fragment supporting the nail bed and fillet flap. Meanwhile, the nail of the retained thumb should be reserved completely, and if the nail has relatively poor appearance it should be repaired by nail lengthening surgery. Eighteen cases were followed up for more than 3 years and were available for assessment using the Japanese Society for Surgery of the Hand evaluation form. The average age at follow-up was 5 years. The size of the nail and distal phalanx was measured to assess the growth of the thumb.ResultsAn average functional point was 12 points (maximum 14 points) and the cosmetic score averaged 3.6 (maximum 4 points) after the assessment. Slightly small nails without a central ridge were deemed acceptable. Second revision surgery is seldom. Long-term results after surgical reconstruction for duplication thumbs were excellent, and all patients and parents were satisfied with the cosmetic and functional results.ConclusionsThis procedure is a helpful and effective way to provide functional and aesthetical thumb for Wassel type III duplication thumbs

Interspecific hybridization with African marigold (Tagetes erecta) can improve flower-related performance in French marigold (T. patula)

The present research was intended for interspecific hybridization between two male sterile African marigold lines and six self-lines of French marigolds. The results show that as indicated by the full seed number per capitulum, the pollen amount of French marigold pollen influenced the authentic compatibilities reckoned for the 10 cross combinations configured to some amount. Based on the field performance of these interspecific hybrids, it is known that the parental French marigold’s single-petaled and silvery flower type may well be improved to a heavy-petaled type while the flower colour remains the same or changes to a lighter version with the same hue. Furthermore, the progeny of certain crossings exceeded the male parents in terms of growth, leaf, and flower-related features, particularly plant height, crown breadth, flower number per plant, and ligulate flower quantity. The most remarkable finding was that, compared to the parental French marigold, most of the hybrid combinations' progeny could blossom 0-11 days earlier. Finally, we identified two excellent hybrid combinations that may be used as a reference for future breeding and commercialization of new marigold varieties

Cross Compatibility Analysis to Identify Suitable Parents of Tagetes erecta and T. patula for Heterotic Hybrid Breeding

Seven interspecific crosses of Tagetes erecta × T. patula were conducted in this study. The cross compatibility index, seed setting rate, germination rate, phenotype, ploidy level, heterosis over male parent and field performance were tested. The results showed that different cross compatibility indices of Tagetes vary greatly, from 10.44~114.41, which is far less than that of the intraspecific hybridization S-121 × I-506 index. The seed setting rate of each cross ranged from 15.67% to 49.0%, and the cross S-121 × TP-512 scored the highest seed setting rate, which was higher than that of the intraspecific cross S-121 × I-506 (35.85%). Compared with the male parent, F1 has higher plant height, wider crown width, larger flower diameter and more ray florets and earlier bloom with two exceptions. The S-121 of T. erecta was diploid. All of the male parents of T. patula were tetraploids, and the combinations were triploids. The traits of plant height, plant width, flower size and number of ray florets showed positive heterosis over the male parents, and the days leading to flowering showed both positive and negative ones. Finally, S-121 × TP-379 and S-121 × TP-512 were selected as the two best combinations. This study confirmed that the two species of marigold could be crossed for better F1 varieties with improved performance