Comparing the International Knowledge Flow of China’s Wind and Solar Photovoltaic (PV) Industries: Patent Analysis and Implications for Sustainable Development

Climate-relevant technologies, like wind and solar energy, are crucial for mitigating climate change and for achieving sustainable development. Recent literature argues that Chinese solar firms play more active roles in international knowledge flows, which may better explain their success in international markets when compared to those of Chinese wind firms; however, empirical evidence remains sparse. This study aims to explore to what extent and how do the international knowledge flows differ between China’s wind and solar photovoltaic (PV) industries? From a network perspective, this paper develops a three-dimensional framework to compare the knowledge flows in both explicit and tacit dimensions: (i) inter-country explicit knowledge clusters (by topological clustering of patent citation network); (ii) inter-firm explicit knowledge flow (patent citation network of key firms); and, (iii) inter-firm tacit knowledge flow (by desktop research and interviews). The results show that China’s PV industry has stronger international knowledge linkages in terms of knowledge clustering and explicit knowledge flow, but the wind power industry has a stronger tacit knowledge flow. Further, this study argues that the differences of global knowledge links between China’s wind and solar PV industries may be caused by technology characteristics, market orientation, and policy implementation. This suggests that these industries both have strong connections to global knowledge networks, but they may involve disparate catch-up pathways that concern follower-modes and leader-modes. These findings are important to help us understand how China can follow sustainable development pathways in the light of climate change

Serum Zinc-α2-Glycoprotein Levels Were Decreased in Patients With Premature Coronary Artery Disease

Objectives: To explore serum zinc-α2-glycoprotein (ZAG) changes in patients with or without premature coronary artery disease (PCAD) and its association with several cardiovascular risk factors.Methods: A total of 3,364 patients who were undergone coronary angiography in Peking Union Medical College Hospital were screened. According to the degree of coronary artery stenosis, the number of 364 patients with PCAD (age <55 years in males and <65 years in females) and 126 age and gender matched patients without premature coronary artery disease (NPCAD) were recruited in our present study. In addition, 182 age and gender matched healthy controls were also enrolled. Serum ZAG levels were determined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) method.Results: Serum ZAG were significantly lower in the PCAD (8.03 ± 1.01 vs. 8.78 ± 1.89 μg/mL, p < 0.05) and NPCAD groups (8.28 ± 1.61 vs. 8.78 ± 1.89 μg/mL, p < 0.05), respectively, when compared with the controls. Multiple regression analysis showed that PCAD was independently associated with serum ZAG levels (B = −0.289, p = 0.002). The probability of PCAD in subjects with low tertile ZAG levels was 2.48-fold higher than those with high tertile levels after adjusting for other confounders [OR = 3.476, 95% CI 1.387–8.711, p = 0.008]. This phenomenon was more likely to be observed in male subjects with BMI <24 kg/m2. The receiver operating curve (ROC) analysis showed a weak diagnostic performance of serum ZAG for PCAD (AUC = 0.659, 95% CI 0.612–0.705, p < 0.05). At the cutoff value of 7.955 μg/mL serum ZAG, the sensitivity and specificity for differentiating patients with PCAD from controls were 50.5 and 78.0%, respectively. The combination of ZAG with other clinical variables including age, gender, BMI, SBP, FBG, TC, HDL-C, Cr, and Urea had significantly improved the diagnosis accuracy with a sensitivity of 82.6%, a specificity of 95.0%, and AUC of 0.957 (95% CI, 0.940–0.975, p < 0.05).Conclusion: Serum ZAG levels were firstly found to be decreased in Chinese PCAD patients. Subjects with lower ZAG levels were more likely to have PCAD, especially for male subjects with BMI <24 kg/m2. ZAG might be the potential diagnostic biomarkers for PCAD patients, and the combination of ZAG and clinical variables had higher discriminative performance

Serum and Adipose Tissue mRNA Levels of ATF3 and FNDC5/Irisin in Colorectal Cancer Patients With or Without Obesity

Objectives: To explore the activating transcription factor 3 (ATF3) and fibronectin type III domain-containing protein 5 (FNDC5)/irisin protein levels in serum and mRNA levels in subcutaneous and visceral white adipose tissue (sWAT and vWAT) in normal-weight (NW) and overweight/obese (OW/OB) patients with colorectal cancer (CRC).Methods: 76 CRC patients and 40 healthy controls were recruited. Serum ATF3 and irisin levels were detected by using ELISA kits, and the mRNA expression levels in sWAT and vWAT were measured by performing RT-qPCR.Results: The serum ATF3 levels were greater by 37.2%, whereas the irisin levels were lower by 23.3% in NW+CRC patients compared with those in healthy controls. CRC was independently associated with both ATF3 and irisin levels. The probability of CRC greater by 22.3-fold in individuals with high ATF3 levels compared with those with low ATF3 levels, whereas the risk of CRC in subjects with high irisin levels was lower by 78.0% compared to the risk in those with low irisin levels after adjustment for age, gender, BMI, and other biochemical parameters. Serum ATF3 and irisin could differentiate CRC patients from controls with receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve areas of 0.745 (95% CI, 0.655–0.823) and 0.656 (95% CI, 0.561–0.743), respectively. The combination of ATF3 and irisin exhibited improved diagnosis value accuracy with ROC curve areas of 0.796 (95% CI, 0.710–0.866) as well as 72.6% sensitivity and 80.0% specificity.Conclusion: Increased ATF3 and reduced irisin levels were observed in sera from CRC patients. Individuals with high ATF3 and low irisin levels were more likely to have CRC. ATF3 and irisin represent potential diagnostic biomarkers for CRC patients

Inflammation-mediated fibroblast activation and immune dysregulation in collagen VII-deficient skin

Inflammation is known to play a critical role in all stages of tumorigenesis; however, less is known about how it predisposes the tissue microenvironment preceding tumor formation. Recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa (RDEB), a skin-blistering disease secondary to COL7A1 mutations and associated with chronic wounding, inflammation, fibrosis, and cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC), models this dynamic. Here, we used single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNAseq) to analyze gene expression patterns in skin cells from a mouse model of RDEB. We uncovered a complex landscape within the RDEB dermal microenvironment that exhibited altered metabolism, enhanced angiogenesis, hyperproliferative keratinocytes, infiltration and activation of immune cell populations, and inflammatory fibroblast priming. We demonstrated the presence of activated neutrophil and Langerhans cell subpopulations and elevated expression of PD-1 and PD-L1 in T cells and antigen-presenting cells, respectively. Unsupervised clustering within the fibroblast population further revealed two differentiation pathways in RDEB fibroblasts, one toward myofibroblasts and the other toward a phenotype that shares the characteristics of inflammatory fibroblast subsets in other inflammatory diseases as well as the IL-1-induced inflammatory cancer-associated fibroblasts (iCAFs) reported in various cancer types. Quantitation of inflammatory cytokines indicated dynamic waves of IL-1α, TGF-β1, TNF, IL-6, and IFN-γ concentrations, along with dermal NF-κB activation preceding JAK/STAT signaling. We further demonstrated the divergent and overlapping roles of these cytokines in inducing inflammatory phenotypes in RDEB patients as well as RDEB mouse-derived fibroblasts together with their healthy controls. In summary, our data have suggested a potential role of inflammation, driven by the chronic release of inflammatory cytokines such as IL-1, in creating an immune-suppressed dermal microenvironment that underlies RDEB disease progression

Newton hard thresholding pursuit for sparse LCP via a new merit function

Solutions to the linear complementarity problem (LCP) are naturally sparse in many applications such as bimatrix games and portfolio section problems. Despite that it gives rise to the hardness, sparsity makes optimization faster and enables relatively large scale computation. Motivated by this, we take the sparse LCP into consideration, investigating the existence and boundedness of its solution set as well as introducing a new merit function, which allows us to convert the problem into a sparsity constrained optimization. The function turns out to be continuously differentiable and twice continuously differentiable for some chosen parameters. Interestingly, it is also convex if the involved matrix is positive semidefinite. We then explore the relationship between the solution set to the sparse LCP and stationary points of the sparsity constrained optimization. Finally, Newton hard thresholding pursuit is adopted to solve the sparsity constrained model. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the problem can be efficiently solved through the new merit function

Cushioning energy absorption of regular polygonal paper corrugation tubes under axial drop impact

The paper corrugation tube is an attractive and innovative mode of cushioning protection and energy absorption for the general protection and packaging technology of military and civil products. The aims of this paper focus on the dynamic compression characteristics of four kinds of regular polygonal paper corrugation tubes under the conditions of axial drop impacts, and the influence rules of structural parameters and load parameters on the dynamic cushioning energy absorption. The results show that, the tube direction has a crucial effect on the deformation mode of the paper corrugation tubes, the deformation of X-direction paper corrugation tubes has a stable accordion mode, but that of Y-direction paper corrugation tubes is a mixture of steady progressive buckling and other non-ideal modes. The X-direction paper corrugation tubes have lower peak stress, stable and controllable deformation mode with multiple folds, and higher total energy absorption, unit area energy absorption, specific energy absorption and stroke efficiency than the Y-direction paper corrugation tubes. Moreover, the change of cross-section shape of X-direction paper corrugation tubes has no obvious influence on the total energy absorption, while the total energy absorption of Y-direction paper corrugation tube obviously rises with the increase of the number of cross-section edges of the tubes, but the unit area energy absorption, specific energy absorption and stroke efficiency decrease with the increase of the number of cross-section edges of the tubes. Moreover, the increase of the number of cross-section edges of the tubes made the total energy absorption of Y-direction tubes rise, while the total energy absorption of X-direction tubes has no obvious change. But the unit area energy absorption, specific energy absorption and stroke efficiency decrease with the increase of the number of cross-section edges of the tubes. Furthermore, the tube length, impact block mass and impact energy have also important influence on the cushioning energy absorption of the paper corrugation tubes under axial drop impact

The Supercapacitor Degradation State Diagnostic System Based on LabVIEW

In this thesis, we design and implement the degradation state diagnostic system for supercapacitor. In order to detect the degradation degree of supercapacitor, it is necessary to test the changes of the parameters that include capacitance, ESR (equivalent series resistance) and the leakage current between the terminals of supercapacitor. The way to obtain these parameters is to measure the voltage and current value by the data acquisition card, and then transmit to the software of LabVIEW calculating the values. By comparing the values of capacitance and ESR with the original value separately, the degradation state of the supercapacitor can be estimated

Biochar and Cropping Systems Changed Soil Copper Speciation and Accumulation in Sweet Corn and Soybean

In order to explore the effects of biochar and cropping systems on soil copper (Cu) speciation and copper accumulation in sweet corn (Zea mays L. var. Rugosa Bonaf.) and soybean (Glycine max (L.) Merr.), three ratios of biochar (C0, 0%, C1, 2%, C2, 5% by mass ratio, (w/w)) and three cropping systems (monocropped sweet corn, MC; monocropped soybean, MS; sweet corn–soybean intercropping, CS) were studied under three Cu levels (Cu0, 0 mg·kg−1, Cu1, 200 mg·kg−1, and Cu2, 400 mg·kg−1) in a pot experiment. The following results were obtained: (1) Compared with C0, adding biochar (C1, C2) could significantly reduce the Cu concentration in sweet corn, and C2 significantly reduced the Cu concentration in soybean under Cu1 and Cu2; the Cu concentrations in sweet corn and soybeans under Cu1 were lower than 10 mg·kg−1. (2) Compared with MC or MS, C2 significantly reduced the Cu concentration (below the detection limit) in sweet corn and the Cu concentration (1.65 mg·kg−1) in soybean straw in CS under Cu1. The Cu concentration in sweet corn ears and soybean straw in CS under Cu2 also decreased significantly, reaching 1.84 and 10.36 mg·kg−1, respectively. (3) Compared with C0, C2 significantly reduced the soil acid-soluble Cu concentration under Cu1 and Cu2, but significantly increased soil oxidated Cu concentration. (4) Compared with MC, the concentration of soil acid-soluble Cu was significantly decreased in CSC1 under Cu2. Under Cu1, the concentrations of reducible Cu were significantly increased in CSC1 and CSC2, and the oxidizable Cu concentration was increased in CSC2. In conclusion, sweet corn–soybean intercropping combined with biochar 5% (w/w) is beneficial to reducing the concentration of acid-soluble Cu, and increases the concentration of oxidizable Cu in copper-contaminated soil. Under Cu1 (200 mg·kg−1), the Cu concentrations in sweet corn and soybean were lower than 10 mg·kg−1, which meets the national food safety standard of China. Under Cu2 (400 mg·kg−1), the Cu concentration in sweet corn was lower than 10 mg·kg−1, but it was higher than 10 mg·kg−1 in soybean