Trade Liberalization and Trade Performance of Environmental Goods: Evidence from Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Members

In this article, we study the impact of trade liberalization, including reductions in both tariff and nontariff trade barriers, on environmental goods (EGs) exports. Using bilateral trade data from 20 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation members, we find that tariff reduction in an exporting country has a larger positive impact on its exports of EGs than tariff reduction in an importing country. Our results also show that a lower nontariff barrier in an importing country increases its imports of EGs. A considerable amount of heterogeneity also exists in subsample results based on countries’ income levels

Enhancing Hydrogen Generation Through Nanoconfinement of Sensitizers and Catalysts in a Homogeneous Supramolecular Organic Framework.

Enrichment of molecular photosensitizers and catalysts in a confined nanospace is conducive for photocatalytic reactions due to improved photoexcited electron transfer from photosensitizers to catalysts. Herein, the self-assembly of a highly stable 3D supramolecular organic framework from a rigid bipyridine-derived tetrahedral monomer and cucurbit[8]uril in water, and its efficient and simultaneous intake of both [Ru(bpy)3 ]2+ -based photosensitizers and various polyoxometalates, that can take place at very low loading, are reported. The enrichment substantially increases the apparent concentration of both photosensitizer and catalyst in the interior of the framework, which leads to a recyclable, homogeneous, visible light-driven photocatalytic system with 110-fold increase of the turnover number for the hydrogen evolution reaction

Probing dynamics of dark energy with latest observations

We examine the validity of the $\Lambda$CDM model, and probe for the dynamics of dark energy using latest astronomical observations. Using the $Om(z)$ diagnosis, we find that different kinds of observational data are in tension within the $\Lambda$CDM framework. We then allow for dynamics of dark energy and investigate the constraint on dark energy parameters. We find that for two different kinds of parametrisations of the equation of state parameter $w$, a combination of current data mildly favours an evolving $w$, although the significance is not sufficient for it to be supported by the Bayesian evidence. A forecast of the DESI survey shows that the dynamics of dark energy could be detected at $7\sigma$ confidence level, and will be decisively supported by the Bayesian evidence, if the best fit model of $w$ derived from current data is the true model.Comment: 4.5 pages, 3 figures, 1 table; references adde

Beyond HAT Adaptor: TRRAP Liaisons with Sp1-Mediated Transcription

The members of the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase-related kinase (PIKK) family play vital roles in multiple biological processes, including DNA damage response, metabolism, cell growth, mRNA decay, and transcription. TRRAP, as the only member lacking the enzymatic activity in this family, is an adaptor protein for several histone acetyltransferase (HAT) complexes and a scaffold protein for multiple transcription factors. TRRAP has been demonstrated to regulate various cellular functions in cell cycle progression, cell stemness maintenance and differentiation, as well as neural homeostasis. TRRAP is known to be an important orchestrator of many molecular machineries in gene transcription by modulating the activity of some key transcription factors, including E2F1, c-Myc, p53, and recently, Sp1. This review summarizes the biological and biochemical studies on the action mode of TRRAP together with the transcription factors, focusing on how TRRAP-HAT mediates the transactivation of Sp1-governing biological processes, including neurodegeneration

Investigation of Detonative Combustion Characteristics

AbstractThe pressure and deflagration-to-detonation transition (DDT) characteristics of acetylene and oxygen flame were studied in a detonation tube. The pressure history and the flame velocity along the tube were measured with high frequency pressure transducers and ion probes. By analyzing the data recorded in the experiment, the detonation wave pressure, post-wave pressure and DDT distance were obtained, together with the effects of the initial pressure varying from 2 104 Pa to 105 Pa, equivalence ration from 0.3 to 1.0, and mixture concentration from 60% to 100%. It was found that the detonation pressure was decreased respectively with the decrease of initial pressure, equivalence ratio and mixture concentration, but the DDT distance was enlarged. The DDT distance was found particularly sensitive to mixture concentration

EHA: Entanglement-variational Hardware-efficient Ansatz for Eigensolvers

Variational quantum eigensolvers (VQEs) are one of the most important and effective applications of quantum computing, especially in the current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era. There are mainly two ways for VQEs: problem-agnostic and problem-specific. For problem-agnostic methods, they often suffer from trainability issues. For problem-specific methods, their performance usually relies upon choices of initial reference states which are often hard to determine. In this paper, we propose an Entanglement-variational Hardware-efficient Ansatz (EHA), and numerically compare it with some widely used ansatzes by solving benchmark problems in quantum many-body systems and quantum chemistry. Our EHA is problem-agnostic and hardware-efficient, especially suitable for NISQ devices and having potential for wide applications. EHA can achieve a higher level of accuracy in finding ground states and their energies in most cases even compared with problem-specific methods. The performance of EHA is robust to choices of initial states and parameters initialization and it has the ability to quickly adjust the entanglement to the required amount, which is also the fundamental reason for its superiority.Comment: 16 pages, 21 figure