Seasonality in the Anthropocene: on the construction of Southeast Asia’s 'haze season'

The widespread burning of tropical peatlands across regions of Malaysia and Indonesia is now considered an annual event in equatorial Southeast Asia. The fires cause poor air quality (‘haze’) across the region, affecting the health of millions, but little has been written about how people in Southeast Asia make sense of this recurring phenomenon. In this paper, we investigate the emergent social construction of the ‘haze season’. Borrowing from anthropology literature, we define ‘seasons’ as a social construct that enables societies to organise their livelihoods around the expectation of recurring phenomena. The construction of ‘haze season’, in turn, reflects ongoing deliberation and contestation of the societal perception of and reaction to the causes and effects of haze. To do that, we analysed more than 35,000 news articles published in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore to investigate the timing of haze season reporting and key themes associated with the season. Deploying keyness analysis and structural topic modelling (STM), we find a strong distinction between the themes of articles written about the ‘haze season’ and articles that simply refer to the haze problem alone. Articles that mention ‘haze’ but not ‘haze season’ focus on the root causes of the haze crisis – peatland fires in Indonesia, oil palm plantations, deforestation – as well as geopolitical cooperation to prevent fires (e.g., through ASEAN). We found that the ‘haze season’ articles have a strong association with the effects of the haze crisis, particularly during the haze season months (June to October), suggesting that seasonality plays a role in adaptation behaviour. Outside of the haze season months, articles focus more on haze mitigation and associated political action. As a season that has emerged entirely as the result of human activity, affecting hundreds of millions of people over a spatial extent of millions of square kilometres, we argue that the ‘haze season’ is a ‘Season of the Anthropocene’. We suggest that we should expect more seasons of the Anthropocene as environmental crises and our response to those crises become more acute through this century

Advantages of GaN Based Light-Emitting Diodes with a P-InGaN Hole Reservoir Layer

A p-type InGaN hole reservoir layer (HRL) was designed and incorporated in GaN based light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to enhance hole injection efficiency and alleviate efficiency droop. The fabricated LEDs with p-type HRL exhibited higher light output power, smaller emission energy shift and broadening as compared to its counterpart. Based on electrical and optical characteristics analysis and numerical simulation, these improvements are mainly attributed to the alleviated band bending in the last couple of quantum well and electron blocking layer, and thus better hole injection efficiency. Meanwhile, the efficiency droop can be effectively mitigated when the p-InGaN HRL was used

The market challenge of wind turbine industry-renewable energy in PR China and Germany

This paper presents the role of global Industry 4.0 technology management in the growth of the wind turbine industry. The article begins with a brief overview of the Industry 4.0 wind turbine industry development, focusing on factors shaping this development. The legal policies are identified as one of the significant factors, especially in PR China and Germany. A detailed secondary data analysis of the country-specific systems is presented, followed by the analysis of patents and companies in both countries to understand better how the development, management and transfer of technology affected the different factors and the global patterns. An effective approach of acquiring technology for local enterprises as well as market development entry mode for the foreign technology holding companies are both identified. Accessing technology through licensing, entering joint ventures, or acquiring knowledge-intensive companies can be identified as common and often successful industry approaches. To develop, obtain, or maintain competitive advantages in the wind turbine industry, we suggest that the governments issue relevant legislation and regulations to support the upgrading of the industry, and the enterprises can access and manage the technology through the approaches mentioned above

A Recurrent Mutation in PARK2 Is Associated with Familial Lung Cancer

PARK2, a gene associated with Parkinson disease, is a tumor suppressor in human malignancies. Here, we show that c.823C>T (p.Arg275Trp), a germline mutation in PARK2, is present in a family with eight cases of lung cancer. The resulting amino acid change, p.Arg275Trp, is located in the highly conserved RING finger 1 domain of PARK2, which encodes an E3 ubiquitin ligase. Upon further analysis, the c.823C>T mutation was detected in three additional families affected by lung cancer. The effect size for PARK2 c.823C>T (odds ratio = 5.24) in white individuals was larger than those reported for variants from lung cancer genome-wide association studies. These data implicate this PARK2 germline mutation as a genetic susceptibility factor for lung cancer. Our results provide a rationale for further investigations of this specific mutation and gene for evaluation of the possibility of developing targeted therapies against lung cancer in individuals with PARK2 variants by compensating for the loss-of-function effect caused by the associated variation

Localized delivery of CRISPR/dCas9 via layer-by-layer self-assembling peptide coating on nanofibers for neural tissue engineering

The clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR) systems have a wide variety of applications besides precise genome editing. In particular, the CRISPR/dCas9 system can be used to control specific gene expression by CRISPR activation (CRISPRa) or interference (CRISPRi). However, the safety concerns associated with viral vectors and the possible off-target issues of systemic administration remain huge concerns to be safe delivery methods for CRISPR/Cas9 systems. In this study, a layer-by-layer (LbL) self-assembling peptide (SAP) coating on nanofibers is developed to mediate localized delivery of CRISPR/dCas9 systems. Specifically, an amphiphilic negatively charged SAP− is first coated onto PCL nanofibers through strong hydrophobic interactions, and the pDNA complexes and positively charged SAP+-RGD are then absorbed via electrostatic interactions. The SAP-coated scaffolds facilitate efficient loading and sustained release of the pDNA complexes, while enhancing cell adhesion and proliferation. As a proof of concept, the scaffolds are used to activate GDNF expression in mammalian cells, and the secreted GDNF subsequently promotes neurite outgrowth of rat neurons. These promising results suggest that the LbL self-assembling peptide coated nanofibers can be a new route to establish a bioactive interface, which provides a simple and efficient platform for the delivery of CRISPR/dCas9 systems for regenerative medicine.Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)Ministry of Education (MOE)Accepted versio

Functional Characterization of CLPTM1L as a Lung Cancer Risk Candidate Gene in the 5p15.33 Locus

Cleft Lip and Palate Transmembrane Protein 1-Like (CLPTM1L), resides in a region of chromosome 5 for which copy number gain has been found to be the most frequent genetic event in the early stages of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). This locus has been found by multiple genome wide association studies to be associated with lung cancer in both smokers and non-smokers. CLPTM1L has been identified as an overexpressed protein in human ovarian tumor cell lines that are resistant to cisplatin, which is the only insight thus far into the function of CLPTM1L. Here we find CLPTM1L expression to be increased in lung adenocarcinomas compared to matched normal lung tissues and in lung tumor cell lines by mechanisms not exclusive to copy number gain. Upon loss of CLPTM1L accumulation in lung tumor cells, cisplatin and camptothecin induced apoptosis were increased in direct proportion to the level of CLPTM1L knockdown. Bcl-xL accumulation was significantly decreased upon loss of CLPTM1L. Expression of exogenous Bcl-xL abolished sensitization to apoptotic killing with CLPTM1L knockdown. These results demonstrate that CLPTM1L, an overexpressed protein in lung tumor cells, protects from genotoxic stress induced apoptosis through regulation of Bcl-xL. Thus, this study implicates anti-apoptotic CLPTM1L function as a potential mechanism of susceptibility to lung tumorigenesis and resistance to chemotherapy