Assessing the implementation of Sustainable Development Goals through switching cost

An increasing number of corporations are adapting their strategies to include projects aimed at achieving United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Nonetheless, the implementation of these projects revives a fifty-year old question about the impact of sustainable activity on corporate financial performance and sustainability outcomes. This paper proposes the analysis of the Switching Costs of sustainable projects as a way to identify areas of improvement for corporate strategies, thus responding to the urgent need for models and assessment tools able to achieve financial and sustainability objectives as claimed by both practice and academia. A conceptual framework relating the Switching Costs of sustainable projects to sustainability and corporate financial performance has been developed and applied in this research to a case-study company, Walmart Mexico and Central America. This paper addresses the challenge of recognising, collecting and gauging the effect of the changes, particularly those of an intangible nature, generated by the sustainable projects

Coherent spin mixing dynamics in a spin-1 atomic condensate

We study the coherent off-equilibrium spin mixing inside an atomic condensate. Using mean field theory and adopting the single spatial mode approximation (SMA), the condensate spin dynamics is found to be well described by that of a nonrigid pendulum, and displays a variety of periodic oscillations in an external magnetic field. Our results illuminate several recent experimental observations and provide critical insights into the observation of coherent interaction-driven oscillations in a spin-1 condensate.Comment: 6 pages, 5 eps figures, update the discussion of the experimental result

Drought Tolerance Dissection and Molecular Breeding in Alfalfa

Drought stress is one of the leading impediments that limit the productivity of global alfalfa (Medicago sativa). The underlying molecular and genetic mechanisms for drought tolerance in alfalfa remain largely unclear. In order to fully reveal the transcriptional changes of alfalfa in response to abiotic stress, the alfalfa transcriptome database under mannitol (simulated drought stress), NaCl (simulated salt stress), or exogenous ABA application was built via various RNA-seq technologies. Through further screening of the transcriptome database, a number of genes significantly induced by drought stress, such as the Nuclear Transport Factor 2-like (MsNTF2L), Drought-Induced Unknown Protein 1 (MsDIUP1), and MsNST1, were identified. These three genes were transferred into alfalfa by overexpression and RNAi techniques, and their physiological characteristics and transcriptional level response were synthetically studied. Alfalfa MsNTF2L-OE plants have been approved by the Ministry of Agriculture of China to carry out the field test in Gansu Province. Furthermore, we constructed a GWAS population and obtained 50 excellent plants with strong drought tolerance and high hay-yield. These studies provide a theoretical foundation for drought-tolerant molecular breeding of alfalfa