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In China, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used for broadcast application of agricultural inputs such as pesticides, fertilizers, and seeds. UAVs have the potential for site-specific precision agriculture, facilitating precise management of fertilization, plant protection, and irrigation to reduce environmental footprint of farming. There has been research on the use of UAVs in agriculture, but less is known about UAV-based precision agriculture, particularly pattern management. To close these research gaps, this paper conducted structured in-depth interviews with 18 experts from various fields related to UAVs in Chinese agriculture to study the status quo, drivers, and barriers of adopting UAVs, focusing on UAV-based precision agriculture, particularly pattern management. The results show that the adoption of UAVs in China is influenced by farmers’ production characteristics, farmers’ perceptions about UAVs, and social factors. UAV-based precision agriculture is at the initial stage in China, and the promotion of this approach still needs to overcome technical barriers such as improving the accuracy of crop measurements, developing real-time UAV positioning systems, and enhancing the response time of variable-rate spraying systems, as well as socio-economic barriers like farmers’ limited UAV-related knowledge, small farm sizes, and lack of technical assistance.

BIVV003 is a gene-edited autologous cell therapy in clinical development for the potential treatment of sickle cell disease (SCD). Hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) are genetically modified with mRNA encoding zinc finger nucleases (ZFN) that target and disrupt a specific regulatory GATAA motif in the BCL11A erythroid enhancer to reactivate fetal hemoglobin (HbF). We characterized ZFN-edited HSC from healthy donors and donors with SCD. Results of preclinical studies show that ZFN-mediated editing is highly efficient, with enriched biallelic editing and high frequency of on-target indels, producing HSC capable of long-term multilineage engraftment in vivo, and express HbF in erythroid progeny. Interim results from the Phase 1/2 PRECIZN-1 study demonstrated that BIVV003 was well-tolerated in seven participants with SCD, of whom five of the six with more than 3 months of follow-up displayed increased total hemoglobin and HbF, and no severe vaso-occlusive crises. Our data suggest BIVV003 represents a compelling and novel cell therapy for the potential treatment of SCD., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Distrust in science has been linked to scepticism over vaccines and climate change. Using data from nationally representative surveys administered in eight key countries for global efforts to mitigate climate change and COVID-19 (Australia, Brazil, China, India, Japan, South Africa, the UK and US), we find that distrust in scientists was an important predictor variable for most sceptics, who were sceptical of one issue but not both, in February 2021, when most countries had experienced their first wave of the pandemic. However, the association was significantly weaker among the segment of hardcore sceptics who were both climate sceptics and antivaxxers. We demonstrate that these individuals tended to possess many of the typical sceptic characteristics such as high distrust in social institutions and rightward political orientation, which are (collectively) suggestive of an underlying sceptic mindset rather than a specific distrust of scientists. Our results suggest that different types of sceptics necessitate different strategies to dispel scepticism., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2024 Clulow, Reiner. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)