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To explore whether market-oriented reform can help reduce CO2 emissions, by adopting the spatial panel data model based on the provincial panel data of China during 2001-2017, this article empirically tests the impact of labor market distortion and capital market distortion on CO2 emissions. The main findings are yielded as follows. (1) The labor market distortion and capital market distortion are widespread in China. The high wages caused by the insufficient supply of labor and the low marginal output of labor due to the shortage of human capital stock are the main reason for the positive labor market distortion. The capital market distortion can be put down to the excessive interventions of the government on the allocation of capital. (2) The labor market distortion can enhance CO2 emissions, that is, promoting market-oriented reform in the labor market can curb CO2 emissions. (3) The connection between capital market distortion and CO2 emissions can be described as a U-shaped curve. The complete marketization of the capital market and excessive government intervention in the allocation of capital can both cause an increase in CO2 emissions. (4) Improving the marketization of the labor market is effective for reducing CO2 emissions in almost all provinces. In the central region, the capital market distortion can exacerbate CO2 emissions. However, in the western region, the governmental intervention on the allocation of capital can enable limited funds to more effectively move to environmentally friendly enterprises, and avoid these provinces becoming a pollution refuge. Based on these findings, this article goes into more detail on the policy implications.

In order to promote sustainable economic development in the areas along the Belt and Road in China, it is of great necessity to reduce the negative impact of air pollutants resulting from industrialization and urbanization on the complex and fragile ecological environments of neighboring areas. First, this study estimated the total-factor air environmental efficiency (TFAEE) of 17 provinces along the Belt and Road in China from 2010 to 2017 using a slacks-based measure (SBM) model. Second, the global and local Moran indices were used to test the spatial correlations between TFAEEs. Finally, the spatial factors and spatial spillover effects influencing the TFAEEs were investigated using the spatial Durbin model with spatiotemporal double fixed effects. The results were shown as follows: (1) The total-factor TFAEEs of the areas along the Belt and Road were low and showed significant regional spatial differences during 2010–2017. (2) There was a positive spatial autocorrelation between the TFAEEs of the areas along the Belt and Road, and the spatial distribution generally clustered into High-High and Low-Low concentrations. (3) Economic development and technological innovation played significantly positive effects on TFAEEs of the areas in the Belt and Road, while energy consumption structure had negative effect on it. In addition, although industrial structure and environmental regulation were negatively correlated with TFAEEs, the coefficients were not significant. (4) The positive spatial spillover effect of the TFAEEs of the areas along the Belt and Road was mainly the result of significant environmental regulations and insignificant economic development factors, while the technological innovations, energy consumption structures and industrial structures showed insignificant negative spatial spillover effects.

Urbanization is an important factor affecting energy efficiency. However, the semi-urbanization of population has become an unavoidable problem in the process of urbanization in China. This article aims to investigate the impact of the semi-urbanization of population on energy efficiency and explore the changes in the relationship between urbanization and energy efficiency caused by the existence of a large-scale semi-urbanized population, by utilizing Stochastic Frontier Analysis on the provincial panel data of China during 2001–2017. The main findings can be yielded as follows. ① The formation of the semi-urbanization of population in China is mainly caused by the household registration system and its consequences. ② The nexus between the semi-urbanization of population and energy efficiency can be described as an inverted U-shaped curve. That is, maintaining a moderate number of the semi-urbanized population can help improve energy efficiency, while the growth of the semi-urbanized population is playing a role in suppressing the improvement of energy efficiency. With the growth of the semi-urbanized population, the losses of energy efficiency and the waste of energy resources continue to increase. ③ The highly complete urbanization can promote the improvement of energy efficiency. However, the existence of large-scale semi-urbanized population inhibits the positive effect of urbanization on improving energy efficiency. ④ The growth of the semi-urbanized population can restrain the improvement of energy efficiency in both Eastern Region and Western Region, while the semi-urbanization of population has slightly improved the energy efficiency of Central Region. From the empirical results, it can be concluded that promoting the complete urbanization of the semi-urbanized population can help improve energy efficiency. Based on these findings, this article further explores the policy implications.

In this paper, we study the restricted injective dimensions of complexes. Some new characterizations of the restricted injective dimensions are obtained. In particular, it is shown that the restricted injective dimensions can be computed in terms of the restricted injective resolutions. As applications, we get some results on the behavior of the restricted injective dimensions under change of rings. In addition, a characterization of almost Cohen-Macaulay ring is obtained.

Agarose microspheres with a controllable pore structure were manufactured by varying agarose types and crosslinking degrees. Various agarose could tailor the gel formation of microspheres matrix and thus affect the final pore structures. Small pores in microspheres could be fabricated by agarose with a higher molecular weight, which was demonstrated by the packed column with lower distribution coefficient (Kav) values measured by gel filtration chromatography. Further, higher Kav values also demonstrated that more and larger pores were formed with increasing the crosslinking degree of agarose microspheres. Either using agarose with a high molecular weight or increasing the crosslinking degree would finally lead to the enhancement of the flow rate during flow performance of packed column as necessary for improving separation efficiency. This provides a foundation for high‐resolution chromatography with a controllable separation range as beneficial for downstream process.

Lead-free perovskite dielectric materials for capacitors have received wide concern in recent years, but their energy storage density and efficiency still cannot meet the growing application demand for practical applications. In this work, we prepared a lead-free relaxor ferroelectric ceramic of (1-x)Bi0.47Na0.47Ba0.06TiO3-xSr(Zr0.8Nb0.16)O3, which was synthesized via a normal solid-state route. The microstructure, dielectric properties and energy storage behavior of the ceramics were explored. The ceramics can be well sintered and situated in the region where rhombohedral and tetragonal phases coexist. The addition of Sr(Zr0.8Nb0.16)O3 (SZN) significantly extends the dielectric-temperature plateau between Ts and Tm and reduces the remnant polarization Pr, but the large saturation polarization Ps is still maintained. Besides, the doping of SZN enhances the relaxation of the material and increases the dielectric breakdown strength (DBS) from 50 kV/cm (x = 0) to 100 kV/cm (x = 0.04 and 0.06). Therefore, the ceramic with x = 0.06 exhibits a high discharging efficiency (η) of 71.1% and energy density (W) of 1.56 J/cm3 at 100 kV/cm and shows the superior thermal stability with the changes in recoverable energy density (Wrec) and η of less than 10% and 30% at the temperature range of 25–180 °C and the excellent frequency stability with the variations of Wrec and η of less than 1.8% and 1% at the frequency range of 10 Hz–100 Hz.

Previous studies have shown that significant K isotope fractionation is found in continental weathering, oceanic crust subduction, and plant growth, suggesting that K isotopes could be a potentially important tracer. However, the complicated separation method and analytical conditions limit the precise analysis of potassium isotopes via MC-ICP-MS under “cold” plasma conditions. Here, an improved separation method (single column) permits the complete purification of K from the matrix elements. This method is efficient and convenient and achieves a high yield (99.5 ± 0.6%) and low blank (

Making machines learn like humans is the ultimate goal of artificial intelligence. Few-shot learning attempts to simulate the learning mechanism of humans, which is a task that can learn novel concepts from very few labeled samples. Due to the lack of sufficient labeled training data, existing methods often increase the risk of over-fitting or cause a considerable gap between clean and augmented data. To solve these problems, we present a novel compare network to perform robust few-shot learning in a meta-learned end-to-end manner. Specifically, we argue that it is desirable to learn a robust encoder that can draw inferences about other cases from one example. To this end, we improve the accuracy of few-shot learning by mining the internal mechanism of deep networks, which can leverage label information more effectively. By introducing shift-invariant blocks and a self-attention block in our architecture, all these components are seamlessly integrated into our framework, which can give feedback to each other without data augmentation. Furthermore, we provide ablative analyses of different blocks to help understand how each term contributes to performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can provide more robust results and outperform state-of-the-art few-shot learning methods.

A two-stage treatment process, consisting of a continuous stirred microbial electrochemical system (CSMES) and a tide-type biocathode microbial electrochemical system (TBMES), was developed for simultaneous electricity generation and swine wastewater treatment. Average maximum power densities of 410 ± 14 mW m−2 and 11.2 W m−3 were obtained by the CSMES and TBMES when raw pretreated swine wastewater was employed as the influent. The combined CSMES–TBMES system realized an overall COD removal of 97.7 ± 4.5% and concomitantly achieved the ammonium nitrogen removal of 85.1 ± 3.3% and total nitrogen (TN) removal of 43.8 ± 2.3%. Each unit of this combined system performed respective functions, with the CSMES responsible for COD removal and the TBMES for subsequent nitrogen removal. A net energy production of 2.509 kW h m−3 was achieved by the CSMES–TBMES system, indicating a positive energy recovery performance for the combined system. Compared with previously reported treatment technologies, this combined system showed great superiority for the treatment of high strength swine wastewater, attributed to the high COD removal rate, efficient ammonium and TN removal, and energy recovery capability.

Covalent-organic frameworks (COFs) as porous crystalline materials show promising potential applications. However, developing facile strategies for the construction of COFs directly from amorphous covalent organic polymers (COPs) is still a great challenge. To this end, we report a novel approach for easy preparation of COFs from amorphous COPs through the linkage replacement under different types of reactions. Four COFs with high crystallinity and porosity were constructed via the linkage substitution of polyimide-linked COPs to imine-linked COFs as well as imine-linked COPs to polyimide-linked COFs. The realization of the linkage substitution would significantly expand the research scope of COFs.

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a major cause of blindness, and there is a lack of effective treatment at present. Rho-associated coiled-coil containing serine/threonine protein kinases (ROCKs) have recently been suggested as potential targets for the DR treatment. We herein report the discovery of 4H-chromen-4-one derivatives as a new class of ROCK inhibitors. Structure-activity relationship analyses led to the identification of the most active compound, 4-(dimethylamino)-N-(3-{2-[(4-oxo-4H-chromen-7-yl)oxy]acetamido}phenyl) (12j). This compound showed excellent kinase selectivity for ROCK I and ROCK II against 387 other kinases. In retinal explants, compound 12j protected retinal neurons from high glucose-induced oxidative stress and apoptosis-mediated cell death. Furthermore, 12j administration suppressed the improper proliferation of Muller cells and promoted the regression of vascular vessels in retinal explants cultured in a high glucose microenvironment. Collectively, our data suggest that 12j could be a potential lead compound for the treatment of DR, hence deserving further in-depth studies.

This paper adopts data envelopment analysis, namely the range adjusted measure (RAM) which is based on the additive structure, to measure the technical efficiency and productivity change. Note that we distinguish among energy and non-energy inputs in the analysis. The Luenberger productivity indicator is decomposed for the provinces of China for the period of 2006–2015. Specifically, we seek to identify the key directions for energy conservation and emission reduction by analyzing the environmental productivity change decomposition. The results show that sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide emissions from primary energy consumption along with primary energy consumption are important variables contributing to atmospheric environmental inefficiency in Chinese provinces. Furthermore, static efficiency scores associated with energy consumption and atmospheric emission (sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide emissions) are lower for Hebei, Shandong, Henan and Shanxi in North China, whereas Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Guangdong and Fujian show higher values of this kind of efficiency. Atmospheric emissions contribute to the growth in the atmospheric environmental productivity to a higher extent if compared to energy consumption. Therefore, Chinese energy policy should address the environmental regulation of energy consumption.

The field of covalent organic frameworks (COFs) has been developed significantly in the past decade on account of their important characteristics and vast application potential. On the other hand, the discovery of novel synthetic methodology is still a challenging task to further promote the preparation of COFs. Herein, an interesting protocol for the conversion of amorphous nonporous covalent organic polymers (COPs) to COFs was established, affording four COFs with high crystallinity and porosity. Specifically, imine-linked amorphous COP-1 was successfully converted to COF-1-4 by replacing one type of linker with other organic building blocks. The realization of this conversion provides a facile method for constructing COFs from COPs. Ministry of Education (MOE) This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (21771138) and the Natural Science Foundation of Tianjin (16JCYBJC19700). This research is also supported by the Singapore Academic Research Fund (RG5/16, RG11/17 and RG114/17).

In recent years, the problem of overheating in summer has been of great concern. Pavements are continuously exposed to solar radiation, and because of high temperatures, pavement temperatures reach 60 to 70 °C. This potential low-grade heat has been unused. Cement-based composites with thermoelectric properties can convert this low-grade heat to useful electrical energy. The importance of this green technology for generating renewable energy and sustainable development has been widely accepted and noticed. However, the power factor of current cement-based composites is too low, and harvesting low-grade heat on a large scale and at low cost requires improving the thermoelectric properties of cement-based composites. In this paper, we present a method to increase the electrical conductivity of ZnO and thus improve the thermoelectric properties of cement-based composites by defect engineering, obtaining a high power factor of 224 μWm-1 K-2 at 70 °C, a record value recently reported for thermoelectric cement-based composites. Zinc oxide powder was treated with a reducing atmosphere to increase the content of oxygen defects and thus improve the electrical conductivity. Pretreated ZnO powder of 5.0 and 10.0 wt % expanded graphite were added to the cement matrix. The ZnO/expanded graphite cement-based composites were made and tested for their thermoelectric properties using a dry pressing process, which exhibited excellent thermoelectric properties. The result showed high conductivity (12.78 S·cm-1), a high Seebeck coefficient (-419 μV/°C), a high power factor (224 μWm-1 K-2), and a high figure of merit value (8.7 × 10-3), which facilitate future large-scale applications. Using the cement-based composites to lay a road of 1 km in length and 10 m in width, 35.2 kW·h of electricity can be collected in 8 h. This study will inspire how to improve thermoelectric performance of cement-based composites.

With various attention mechanisms were proposed, the application of attention mechanisms in the different deep learning tasks has occurred. Meanwhile, most practices and experiments demonstrate that the attention mechanism can help convolutional networks to capture the critical features and raise the performance of the CNNs. In image fusion field, few methods including attention mechanisms are used to integrate the images containing different modalities. In this paper, so, we utilize three types of attention mechanisms which are self-attention, dual attention and multi-scale attention to add into the basic network of image fusion for developing the performance of the fused images. Since the traditional convolutional neural networks and generative adversarial networks (GAN) have some shortcomings, the modified GAN is treated as the basic network. Besides, the dilated convolution is used into the basic network because it can enlarge the convolutional map and receptive field of the kernels under the same kernel size condition. By the experimental comparison, the multi-scale attention is the best practice for infrared and visible image fusion. And the extensive experimental results show that our method can enhance the contrast of the fused image and preserve more thermal and detail information.

Water body extraction can help eco-environmental policymakers to intuitively grasp surface water resources. Remote sensing technology can accurately and quickly extract surface water information, which is of great significance for monitoring surface water changes. Fengyun satellite images have the advantages of high time resolution and multispectral bands. This provides important image data suitable for high-frequency surface water monitoring. Based on Fengyun 3 medium resolution spectral imager (FY-3/MERSI) data, 7 methods were applied in this study, which include single-band threshold method, water body index method, knowledge decision tree classification method, supervised classification method, unsupervised classification method, spectral matching based on discrete particle swarm optimization (SMDPSO), and improved spectral matching based on discrete particle swarm optimization with linear feature enhancement (SMDPSO+LFE). These methods were used to extract the land surface water of Poyang Lake, check the samples from the Landsat image with similar times to the FY-3 images, and calculate the classification accuracy via the confusion matrix. The results showed that the overall classification accuracy (OA) of the SMDPSO+LFE is 97.64%, and the Kappa coefficient is 0.95. To analyze the stability of the surface water extracted by SMDPSO+LFE in different regions, this paper selected eight test sites with different surface water types, landscapes, and terrains to extract surface water. Based on an analysis of the land surface water results at the eight test sites, every OA in the eight sites was higher than 94.5%, the Kappa coefficient was greater than 0.88. In conclusion, the SMDPSO+LFE is found to be the most suitable method among the 7 methods and effectively distinguish between different surface water bodies and backgrounds with good stability.

The government and the market are the two main means for resource allocation, and both play important roles in economic development and environmental protection. Based on the theoretical mechanism analysis, this study empirically investigated the relationship between government intervention, market development, and China's provincial pollution emission efficiency by using the static panel OLS, system generalized method of moments (SYS-GMM), and panel threshold effect model during the period 2000-2017. The results show that the impact of government intervention on China's provincial pollution emission efficiency shows a non-linear U-shaped curve relationship, and there is a positive correlation between market development and provincial pollution emission efficiency in China. Government intervention and market development are complementary, rather than a substitute for each other, in promoting China's provincial pollution emission efficiency. When government intervention is set as the threshold variable, the impact of government intervention on China's provincial pollution emission efficiency shows the feature of "promotes first, then inhibits." However, when market development is set as the threshold variable, government intervention is only conducive to the improvement of China's provincial pollution emission efficiency at a moderate marketization level. Lastly, some policy implications related to the government and the market in enhancing China's provincial pollution emission efficiency are presented.

Improving the green total-factor productivity (GTFP) is a key measure to coordinate industrial development and environmental protection in China. This study adopts the biennial Malmquist-Luenberger (BML) productivity index to estimate the GTFP change of China's 34 industrial subsectors covering the period 2005-2015. Subsequently, fixed-effect panel quantile regression is applied to analyze the heterogeneous effects of eight selected influencing factors on China's industrial GTFP change. The results show that China's overall industrial GTFP exhibited an increasing trend during the study period and varied greatly in different sub-sectors. Moreover, technological innovation rather than efficiency promotion was the main contributor to the improvement of industrial GTFP in China. The impact of the scale structure (SS) was significantly positive across the quantiles and maintained a slightly downward trend. The impact of the property rights structure (PTS) was significantly negative and showed an increasing trend across the quantiles. The impact of the energy intensity (EI) slightly increased and was significantly negative at most quantiles. The energy consumption structure (ECS) exhibited an increasing trend and had a significantly negative effect at the middle quantiles. Technological innovation (TI) exerted a significantly positive effect and displayed a downward trend across the quantiles, and it was the most important factor to drive industrial GTFP growth. The "pollution halo" hypothesis and the Porter hypothesis were both verified with a certain range from the analysis of foreign direct investment (FDI) and environmental regulation (ER), as well as the interaction between ER and TI. Our results stress the importance of the heterogeneous effects of these influencing factors on different quantile subsectors when formulating the related measures and policies.

Biocathode microbial electrochemical systems (MESs) that remove nitrogen compounds out of wastewater are of special interest for practice. High energy-input for aeration is one of the barriers that hinder their application on a wider scope. A trickling-bed biocathode MES (TB-MES) was developed by integrating biotrickling filters with a biocathode MES. By recirculating the catholyte and sprinkling it through a spray nozzle, the system was able to achieve a reoxygenation process, which could facilitate the creation of an aerobic and anoxic environment. At an optimal recirculation rate of 200 mL min&minus, 1, the TB-MES removed 87.2 &plusmn, 2.7% of ammonium nitrogen and 79.7 &plusmn, 2.5% of total nitrogen (TN), and simultaneously achieved a maximum power density of 3.8 &plusmn, 0.3 Wm&minus, 3. Comparable performances were achieved when treating domestic wastewater, which were 84.6 &plusmn, 2.4%, 70.1 &plusmn, 4.2%, and 3.2 &plusmn, 0.2 W m&minus, 3 for ammonium nitrogen removal, TN removal, and maximum power density. Pyrosequencing analysis revealed Nitrosomonas was more abundant in the upper portion of the carbon fiber brush biocathode (CFBup, 20.4%) and Azoarcus was more abundant in the lower portion (CFBbottom, 12.6%), which was probably caused by the difference in dissolved oxygen concentration in different parts of the biocathode. The TB-MES shows great promise for domestic wastewater treatment by employing biotrickling filters for oxygen supply in biocathode MES.

The strain SCPG-7 was isolated from saline soil in a cotton field. It is confirmed that the strain SCPG-7 is Pseudomonas sp. by means of the analysis of its phenotypic features and 16S rRNA sequence. SCPG-7 was capable of dissolving mineral tri-calcium phosphate (Ca3(PO4)2) and tri-magnesium phosphate (Mg3(PO4)2). In contrast, no showing iron phosphate (FePO4) or aluminum phosphate (AlPO4) solubilizing activities were detected by this experimental approach. The ratio of the dissolved P diameter to the colony diameter was 1.86. To study the phosphate dissolving mechanisms of the strain, we analyzed the changes of the pH value, the soluble phosphate content, the concentration of alkaline phosphatase, and the production of organic acid in the insoluble phosphate liquid medium. 2-keto-D-gluconicacid, α-ketoglutaric acid, succinic acid, etc. were characterized by LC-MS/MS in NBRIP medium. The concentration of 2-keto-D-gluconicacid increased to 88.6 mg/L after being cultured for 216 h. The strain decreased the pH value of the medium from 7.4 to 4.7 and the released soluble phosphate up to 516 mg/L, which proved the production of organic acids and alkaline phosphatase to be mechanism for solubilizing P. Under low phosphorus stress, Pseudomonas global regulatory protein PhoB regulates the transcription of the alkaline phosphatase gene. IAA and siderophore were secreted by SCPG-7. After treatment with SCPG-7, the individual plant height and dry weight of pepper increased by 23.3 and 31.2%, respectively, compared to the control group. The results show that the strain SCPG-7 has the potential to convert insoluble inorganic phosphorus to plant-available phosphorus. It can enhance soil phosphorus release through biological pathways, thereby increasing crop yield, and providing germplasm resources for the development of biological fertilizers.

Due to the construction and operation of China's South-North Water Transfer Project (SNWTP), it is necessary to conduct broader research on the underlying trends and factors of the water-use performance in the SNWTP's cities from the perspective of “resource-economy-environment” system. This paper attempts to identify the optimal paths and measures for improving the water-use performance as measured by the Luenberger productivity indicator and its decomposition. The results show that sewage discharge, free-of-charge water use and leakage are the crucial variables that constitute major contributions to the overall inefficiency value associated with urban water use in the SNWTP. The static efficiencies of water consumption indicate better performance of the cities of the middle route if opposed to those of the eastern route. The results suggest that the cities that receive water from both of eastern and middle routes, have better performance in water use than other cities, while the static efficiency in the other water-consuming areas on the eastern and middle routes do not differ in this regard. The results also indicate that the water-use productivity for the SNWTP follows a downward trend during 2006–2014.

Although China’s urbanization process requires corresponding infrastructure development, it has reached a consensus that wastewater transportation and wastewater treatment capacity are not satisfactory in China. We use an input-oriented non-radical Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model to investigate the construction efficiencies of urban sewers and wastewater treatment capacity in China’s 70 megacities during 2006–2012. The results show that in 2012, the average construction efficiency of urban sewers is 0.76, more than the average construction efficiency of wastewater treatment capacity that is 0.68. During the sample period, Hefei, Liuzhou, Shenzhen, and Wuxi present better construction efficiencies than other cities, while Jilin, Wenzhou, and Xianyang have relatively lower construction efficiencies. 26 cities should develop infrastructure for both urban sewers and wastewater treatment capacity. The growth rates of both urban sewers and wastewater treatment capacity are lower than those of urban population in Xiamen. More attentions should be paid by relevant government agencies.

In this study, a facile and environment-friendly method for the preparation of bovine serum albumin (BSA) capped fluorescent Cu nanoclusters (BSA-CuNCs) was adopted. The as-prepared BSA-CuNCs were characterized by ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy (UV-Vis), fluorescent spectroscopy, Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The fluorescence excitation and emission wavelength of BSA-CuNCs appeared at 325 and 406 nm, respectively. The as-synthesized BSA-CuNCs can be utilized as a bi-functional nanomaterial for pH sensing and dopamine (DA) detection with good performance. The fluorescence intensity decreased linearly with decrease in pH from 12 to 5 and increased linearly with increase in DA concentration from 0.5 to 50 μM. TEM measurements proved that the decrease in the pH value resulted in the aggregation of BSA-CuNCs, leading to color change and the quenching of fluorescence. The FT-IR spectra, fluorescent spectra, UV-Vis spectra and zeta potential measurements demonstrated that DA can be combined with Cu2+ and the Cu2+ would be removed from the surface of BSA-CuNCs. As a result, the fluorescence was recovered owing to the formation of the highly stable compound CuH2(DA)2. The pH value of five water samples was determined by the proposed method with relative errors of less than 0.91%. Furthermore, DA in human urine samples was also analyzed by BSA-CuNCs with good recoveries ranging from 90.4% to 104.7% using the standard addition method. It is believed that the bi-functional BSA-CuNCs will show great potential in bio-systems.

Economic development and sustainable ecological and environmental development generally target different goals, and there are trade-offs and game-like behaviors between implementers and donors in reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD+) program. This paper analyzed the effects of evolutionary behaviors of REDD+ implementers and donors with respect to environmental service payments. Within a theoretical analysis framework, the evolutionary stable strategies of the implementers and donors under different contractual payments for ecosystem services (PES) scenarios are analyzed to explore contractual REDD+ payments through evolutionary game models. On this basis, anon-parametric local regression approach is used to analyze arrange of market-based contractual PES schemes in five REDD+ countries (Congo, Brazil, Ecuador, Nepal and Uganda). The results show the following: First, when the opportunity costs are less than the environmental benefits, some middle and high income developing countries are sufficiently incentivized to conserve forests, even without formal contractual PES scheme. This conservation occurs regardless of whether the industrialized countries will pay for the ecosystem services. Second, when the opportunity costs are greater than the environmental benefits, developing countries will generally not take the initiative to conserve forests when industrialized countries do not pay for the associated ecosystem services. Third, when there are enough contractual PES fines, developing countries will conserve forests, and the industrialized countries will pay for the ecosystem services. Finally, contractual PES fines are related to the costs of reducing emissions. Nepal has the largest marginal effect, and Uganda has the smallest. These results have implications for REDD+ program design and implementation: market-based contractual PES scheme should be given priority to regulate behavior of industrialized countries and developing countries in the PES scheme. Developing a targeted and differentiated contractual PES scheme requires an accounting of emission reduction costs in different countries.

Herein, we report the discovery of a series of thieno[2,3-d]pyrimidin-4(3H)-one derivatives as a new class of ROCK inhibitors. Structure-activity relationship studies of these compounds led to the identification of the most potent compound, 3-(3-methoxybenzyl)-6-(1H-pyrrolo[2,3-b]pyridin-4-yl)thieno[2,3-d]pyrimidin-4(3H)-one (8k), which showed IC50 values of 0.004 μM and 0.001 μM against ROCK Ⅰ and ROCK Ⅱ, respectively. In vitro, 8k significantly reduced the phosphorylation level of ROCK downstream signaling protein and induce changes in cell morphology and migration. Overall, this study provides a promising lead compound for drug discovery targeting ROCKs.

To better deal with large-scale image retrieval problem, deep hashing models based on convolutional neural network (CNN) have been widely used as effective methods, which can map similar images to compact binary hash codes with smaller hamming distance. Despite their positive results, CNN-based methods have few limitations, which are unable to understand the spatial relationship between features. To overcome this challenge, in this paper, a novel deep supervised hashing method was proposed based on capsule networks. Our method, referred to as CapsHash, can learn discriminative hash codes and capsule vectors at the same time. Moreover, we introduce a novel compound loss function that has two parts: classification hashing loss and margin loss. This compound loss function can greatly improve the discriminative ability of binary codes and further improve the image retrieval performance. Extensive experiments under different scenarios demonstrate that our CapsHash method can preserve the instance-level similarity and outperform previous state-of-the-art hashing approaches. To the best of our knowledge, CapsHash is the first method about the application of capsule networks in the deep supervised hashing domain.

Since convolutional neural networks (CNNs) were used in image fusion field, they have showed state-of-the-art quality beyond traditional methods. However, the existing CNN fusion models have a high computational cost and require high memory capacity, which is impractical for embedded applications or mobile platforms. Inspired by the efficiency of the lightweight network architecture of SqueezeNet, MobileNet, and ShuffleNet, we propose a tiny fusion method for image fusion, which significantly decreasing the number of operations and memory needed while retaining the same fusion quality. Extensive experimental results indicate that tiny deep neural network architectures can be designed for real-time image fusion that are well suited for embedded scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first lightweight network architecture for image fusion.

In person re-identification (re-ID), most state-of-the-art models extract features by convolutional neural networks to do similarity comparison. Feature representation becomes the key task for person re-ID. However, the learned features are not good enough based on a single-path and single-loss network because the learned objective only achieves one of the multiple minima. To improve feature representation, we propose a multi-path and multi-loss network (MPMLN) and concatenate multi-path features to represent pedestrian. Subsequently, we design MPMLN based on ResNet-50 and construct an end-to-end architecture. The backbone of our proposed network shares the local parameters for multiple paths and multiple losses. It has fewer parameters than multiple independent networks. Experimental results show that our MPMLN achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the public Market1501, DukeMTMC-reID and CUHK03 person re-ID benchmarks.

Real-time object detection is of great significance to embedded mobile platforms. We propose a lightweight object detection network for embedded devices, which we call ShuffleSSD. The ShuffleNet V2 network is used as the backbone, which can effectively reduce the size of the model. In the proposed lightweight detection model, a single shot multi-box detector is adopted and a receptive field block is integrated to obtain high-quality detection results. The evaluation is performed on the public object detection data set (PASCAL VOC) and compared to the most advanced real-time object detection network. The experimental results show that the proposed network has higher detection accuracy than MobileNet-SSD, with smaller network parameters. It is more suitable for real-time object detection on embedded devices.

Convolutional neural network (CNN) is an efficient algorithm in deep learning. Aiming at the field of military target recognition, this paper constructs a dataset for military target recognition in battlefield, which contains ten kinds of targets. The characteristics of the dataset are described and analyzed. Three classical CNN models (AlexNet, VGGNet and ResNet) and two learning strategies (dropout and data augmentation) are evaluated on the dataset. Under the same condition of the dataset and the same super-parameter setting, the effects of different models are presented and analyzed. The experimental results show that the mean average precisions of ResNet and VGGNet are better than AlexNet, and the accuracies of both ResNet and VGGNet are over 90% with only thousands of training images. At the same time, the dropout and data augmentation strategies have a strong effect for improving the performance.

A digital holographic microscopic chromatography-based approach with considerably improved accuracy, simplified configuration and performance stability is proposed to measure three dimensional refractive index of special optical fibers. Based on the approach, a measurement system is established incorporating a modified Mach–Zehnder interferometer and lab-developed supporting software for data processing. In the system, a phase projection distribution of an optical fiber is utilized to obtain an optimal digital hologram recorded by a CCD, and then an angular spectrum theory-based algorithm is adopted to extract the phase distribution information of an object wave. The rotation of the optic fiber enables the experimental measurements of multi-angle phase information. Based on the filtered back projection algorithm, a 3D refraction index of the optical fiber is thus obtained at high accuracy. To evaluate the proposed approach, both PANDA fibers and special elliptical optical fiber are considered in the system. The results measured in PANDA fibers agree well with those measured using S14 Refractive Index Profiler, which is, however, not suitable for measuring the property of a special elliptical fiber.

An incentive mechanism is key to succeed the investments in Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation programs. However, the diversification of determinants makes it difficult to establish one mode to best incentive stakeholders. This paper compares various incentive modes in benefiting stakeholders by simulating dynamic game models. It analyzes the profit-making of developers and landholders based on four incentive modes. The modes are preferential tax for developers, incentive of carbon offsets for developers, investment incentive for developers, and incentive of reducing emissions for landholders. This paper compares the effects of incentive modes on benefit distribution of stakeholders and contributes to a new dynamic game framework. The results show that: (i) the effects of incentives of carbon offsets for developers and incentives of reducing emissions for landholders are almost same for the stakeholders; (ii) a preferential tax can only make developers unilaterally benefit, and will not change landholder welfare; (iii) investment incentives for developers can make landholders' profits be increased, while the effects of incentives on developers' profits are uncertain. Finally, the numerical simulation is used to verify these hypotheses. The core implication is that for the design of REDD+ incentives, the government should combine various incentive modes to fulfill different objectives in policy making.

REDD+ reference levels directly impact the benefits which a country may receive. However, the existing “Compensation Reduction” (CR) and “Compensated Successful Efforts” (CSE) are only considered from a unilateral perspective of outputs or inputs. The combination of these two approaches is considered to estimate the REDD+ reference levels through the Zero-Sum-Gains Data Envelopment Analysis in this paper. The agricultural labor force and agricultural land area are used as input variables, and the gross agricultural production and carbon emissions from deforestation are considered as output variables. The REDD+ reference levels of 89 countries are calculated and classified through the Zero-Sum-Gains DEA model. The results demonstrate that the REDD+ reference levels are estimated efficiently through the Zero-Sum-Gains DEA model, and all countries with deforestation are in the Zero-Sum-Gains DEA frontier, indicating the overall Pareto optimality has been achieved. The empirical results also indicate that the use of Zero-Sum-Gains DEA model is more beneficial for Latin American and the Caribbean, while the countries that may see a revenue drop in REDD+ are in Africa, Asia and Oceania. Consequently, the final REDD+ reference levels should take into account both efficiency and fairness by selecting the appropriate fairness-efficiency weighting factor.

We propose the generation of novel composite vortex beams by coaxial superposition of Laguerre–Gaussian (LG) beams with common waist position and waist parameter. Computer-generated holography by conjugate-symmetric extension is applied to produce the holograms of several composite vortex beams. Utilizing the holograms, fantastic light modes including optical ring lattice, double dark-ring and double bright-ring composite vortex beams etc. are numerically reconstructed. The generated composite vortex beams show diffraction broadening with some of them showing dynamic rotation around beam centers while propagating. Optical experiments based on a computer-controlled spatial light modulator (SLM) verify the numerical results. These novel composite vortex beams possess more complicated distribution and more controllable parameters for their potential application in comparison to conventional optical ring lattice.

In this work, nitrogen-doped carbon nanoparticle (N-CNP) modulated turn-on fluorescent probes were developed for rapid and selective detection of histidine. The as synthesized N-CNPs exhibited high fluorescence quantum yield and excellent biocompatibility. The fluorescence of N-CNPs can be quenched selectively by Cu(II) ions with high efficiency, and restored by the addition of histidine owing to the competitive binding of Cu(II) ions and histidine that removes Cu(II) ions from the surface of the N-CNPs. Under the optimal conditions, a linear relationship between the increased fluorescence intensity of N-CNP/Cu(II) ion conjugates and the concentration of histidine was established in the range from 0.5 to 60 μM. The detection limit was as low as 150 nM (signal-to-noise ratio of 3). In addition, the as-prepared N-CNP/Cu(II) ion nanoprobes showed excellent biocompatibility and were applied for a histidine imaging assay in living cells, which presented great potential in the bio-labeling assay and clinical diagnostic applications.

Controlling the morphology of α-Al 2 O 3 plate-like powders is essential, asmulti-morphological α-Al 2 O 3 platelets are needed in various applications. The α-Al 2 O 3 platelets investigated in this work, were prepared via conventional solid-state reaction using gibbsite and pseudo-boehmite as the starting materials; nano-TiO 2 , nano-SiO 2 , silica gel, and the mixtures of nano-SiO 2 and nano-TiO 2 were used as morphology modifiers during the synthesis. The effect of the type and amount of modifiers used, on the morphology of the platelets was determined via scanning electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, and measurements of the specific surface area. The results indicated that nano-TiO 2 resulted in small and thick platelets. In fact, nano-TiO 2 led to increased crystallinity and accelerated phase transformation to α-Al 2 O 3 , and additions of ≥2.00 wt% resulted in severe aggregation of the α-Al 2 O 3 particles. Conversely, addition of nano-SiO 2 led to significant increases in the diameter and reductions in the thickness of the α-Al 2 O 3 platelets; for equal additions, liquid silica gel, which has excellent mobility, was more effective in controlling the morphology than solid SiO 2 . Additions of up to 1.00 wt% of the nano-SiO 2 resulted in an incomplete α phase transformation, owing to SiO 2 inhibition of the transformation to α-Al 2 O 3 . Moreover, simultaneous additions of nano-TiO 2 and nano-SiO 2 led to competing effects on the morphology of the α-Al 2 O 3 particles, as evidenced by changes in the specific surface area.

LISICON-type Li3V2(PO4)3 (LVP) is a promising candidate of cathode material for the next generation of lithium ion batteries. Nevertheless, the poor conductivity restricts its practical applications. Carbon coating can improve the deficiency to some extent, but the practical application of LVP is still hindered because of its inert reaction kinetics, unstable electrode structure and side-reaction. Thereby, it is still very insufficient to obtain the satisfied electrochemical performance by the simple modification of carbon coating. Herein, LVP/C@RuO2 composites are designed and characterized. The RuO2/C hybrid layer consists of RuO2 nanoparticles embedded in amorphous carbon. Benefitting from this unique design, the electronic conductivity, Li+ migration rate and structural stability can be remarkably improved. As a result, LVP/C-5 delivers a high initial capacity of 167.8 mAh g−1 at 0.2 C and superior long-term cycling performance of 81.2 mAh g−1 after 1000 cycles at 10 C. Moreover, LVP/C-5 exhibits good thermal stability (55 °C), giving a high reversible capacity of 116 mAh g−1 after 350 cycles at 5 C. More importantly, the LVP/C@RuO2 possesses a facile technical procedure, excellent electrochemical property, and shows significant potential to apply in large-scale production. Our study provides a potential reference for optimizing electrochemical properties through low dosage of carbon and low metallic oxide amount.

In order to respond to rapid urbanization, understanding the relationships between urbanization and ecosystem services (ESs) is of practical importance to move toward sustainable urban development. In this study, an emergy-GIS based method is proposed to evaluate ESs. Spatiotemporal emergy values of water retention (WR), air purification (AP), carbon sequestration (CS), soil conservation (SC), and biodiversity conservation (BC) were quantified and relationships among these ESs were analyzed by taking China’s largest city, Shanghai, as a case. The decoupling analysis was conducted to study the relationship between urbanization and ESs. Results show that the total value of regulating ESs had declined by 8.24% from 2005 to 2010. Chongming had the largest value of ESs, followed by Pudong. There is a synergetic relationship among AP, CS, and SC, while a tradeoff appears between WR and other services. Irregular “U” shape relationships between the decrease of ESs and urbanization indicators were observed. Results from decoupling analysis show that ESs experienced weak decoupling from urbanization in most districts. Finally, policy implications were raised based on the study results.

The surface Cs–O activation process directly determines quantum efficiency and stability of negative-electron-affinity photocathodes. To investigate the effects of excessive Cs and O supply on activation and to explore a more effective Cs–O activation recipe, Cs–O activation experiments of GaAs(100) photocathodes are carried out based on the current-driven solid Cs and O dispensers. By a comparison of differences in activation photocurrent, quantum efficiency, and photocurrent decay, it is found that the recipe of excessive O and non-excessive Cs is not suitable for activating GaAs photocathodes, while the recipe of continuous and completely excessive Cs along with intermittent and non-excessive O can achieve the most excellent photoemission performance, including the highest quantum efficiency in the long-wave threshold region and best stability under intense light irradiation after activation. Furthermore, this improved activation recipe with the least Cs–O alternating cycles is easier to operate. Combined with density functional calculations and dipole layer model, it is found that the activation recipe of completely excessive Cs and non-excessive O can form effective dipoles to the greatest extent, and avoid the direct interaction between As atoms and O atoms to form As–O–Ga oxides on the GaAs(100) reconstructed surface.

Room-temperature sodium ion batteries (SIBs) are considered as a potential candidate to substitute the high-cost lithium ion batteries due to the high abundance of sodium resources; however, it is still a challenge to develop high power/energy density and stable cathode materials for SIBs. Recently, Na3(VPO4)2O2F (NVPOF) expresses strong competitiveness under high working voltage in sodium storage field because of its eximious structural stability and high energy density. Nevertheless, the intrinsically poor electronic conductivity hinders its electrochemical performance. Herein, 1 D carbon nanotube (CNT) and 2 D polyaniline (PANI) are utilized as self-templates to prepare NVPOF@CNT/PANI polyhedrons via a facile and cost-efficient synthetic route. The highly conductive CNT/PANI scaffold can offer a quick electron transfer pathway. Benefiting from this unique design, NVPOF@CNT/PANI shows excellent electrochemical performance：delivering a high specific capacity of 125.3 mAh g−1 at 0.5 C, excellent rate property of 62.7 mAh g−1 at 20 C, and long lifespan of 2000 cycles with the capacity of 44.1 mAh g−1 at 10 C. This work for NVPOF gives a promising method to prepare the high-performance cathode material for sodium-ion battery, and this approach can also extend to optimize other battery materials.

Although the deep learning technology effectively improves the effect of person re-identification (re-ID) in video surveillance, there is still a lack of efficient framework in practical, especially in terms of computational cost, which usually requires GPU support. So this paper explores to solve the actual running performance and an effective person re-ID framework is proposed. A tiny network is designed for person detection and a triplet network is adopted for training feature extraction network. The motion detection and person detection is combined to speed up the whole process. The proposed framework is tested in practice and the results show that it can run in real-time on an ordinary PC machine. And the accuracy achieves 91.6% in actual data set. It has a good guidance for person re-ID in actual application.

To address the issue of background subtraction include shadow challenge, an online robust principal component analysis (RPCA) method with box constraint (BC-RPCA) has been proposed to detect moving object and accelerate the RPCA like method. First of all, the BC-RPCA method considers the input image sequences as low rank background, sparse foreground and moving shadow. Then the Augmented Lagrangian method is used to convert the box constraint into the objective function and rank-1 modification for thin SVD is also employed to accelerate the solver via alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Finally, the experiments demonstrated the proposed method works effectively and has low computational complexity during real-time application.

In recent years, air pollution situation becomes more severe and has seriously threatened sustainable economic development and public health in China. Combining the improved slacks-based measure (SBM) model, global Malmquist-Luenberger (GML) productivity index and panel Tobit model, this paper investigates the regional differences, dynamic evolution and influencing factors of China’s provincial air pollution emission efficiency over the period 2006–2015 under the total-factor framework. Our results show that: (1) China’s total-factor air pollution emission efficiency is relatively low and exhibits significant regional differences; (2) technological progress is the main contributor to ameliorate China’s provincial total-factor air pollution emission efficiency; (3) the total-factor air pollution emission efficiency gap between the higher- and the lower-efficient provinces will probably widen in the future; (4) China’s provincial total-factor air pollution emission efficiency is significantly positive related to the level of economic development, industrial structure optimization, technological innovation and foreign direct investment (FDI), is significantly negative related to the energy consumption structure. The above results indicate that China has made remarkable achievements in improving regional total-factor air pollution emission efficiency. However, there is considerable potential for further improvement. Policy options for China’s regional total-factor air pollution emission efficiency improvement include but not limited to optimizing industrial and energy consumption structure, promoting environmental technology innovation, strengthening cooperation and exchange between different regions, deepening the reform of energy market and energy pricing mechanism, actively introducing foreign investment, and further improving environmental regulation level.

China currently suffers from severe environmental issues, particularly with regard to its primary energy consumption. To address the complexity of energy flows, this study integrated a multi-regional input–output method and complex network theory to conduct an in-depth investigation of the functional and structural evolution of energy interaction patterns in the Chinese economy for 2007, 2010, and 2012. Results show that economic scale and trading frequency increased in the regional energy network, while sectoral energy connections remained stable from 2007 to 2012. A time-series analysis demonstrates that Guangdong (R19) was the most vital region for bridging the entire regional energy network and that it was located at the center of energy flow transfers. Sectoral investigation indicates that infrastructure construction remained dominant in the current Chinese economy. Any disruption that occurred in the construction sector may exceed supply capacity, and this would lead to energy crises in the embodied energy flow network. Regions were disaggregated and aggregated during the investigated period because of changes in spatial heterogeneity. Sectoral community analysis explores an evident process for industrial differentiation. The findings of this study provide a new angle through which to understand spatial heterogeneity and industrial structure in a time series manner.

Background The existing techniques for simultaneous encryption and compression of images refer lossy compression. Their reconstruction performances did not meet the accuracy of medical images because most of them have not been applicable to three-dimensional (3D) medical image volumes intrinsically represented by tensors. Methods We propose a tensor-based algorithm using tensor compressive sensing (TCS) to address these issues. Alternating least squares is further used to optimize the TCS with measurement matrices encrypted by discrete 3D Lorenz. Results The proposed method preserves the intrinsic structure of tensor-based 3D images and achieves a better balance of compression ratio, decryption accuracy, and security. Furthermore, the characteristic of the tensor product can be used as additional keys to make unauthorized decryption harder. Conclusions Numerical simulation results verify the validity and the reliability of this scheme.

For large-scale image retrieval, high dimensional features make the retrieval system inefficiency. In this paper, we propose a framework of deep feature hash codes for content-based image retrieval system. In this framework, we firstly extract image features by a pre-trained convolutional neural networks model. Secondly, we use different hashing methods for binary feature extraction. Finally, we use the best binary encoding features to build a content-based image retrieval system. The experimental results demonstrate that with the decrease of feature dimension, our method not only does not reduce the retrieval precision, but also can improve the retrieval accuracy in some cases. The retrieval accuracy of 256 bits binary features can surpass the traditional method of 256 dimensional (4096 bits) features. Once the feature bits are 16 times lower, the storage space will decrease 16 times and the retrieval efficiency will be greatly increased. Therefore, our method can effectively improve the speed and precision of content-based image retrieval system.

Background Synthetic antioxidants and antimicrobials are losing ground to their natural counterparts and therefore, the food industry has motivated to seek other natural alternatives. Apple pomace, a by-product in the processing of apples, is rich in polyphenols, and plant polyphenols have been used as food additives owing to their strong antioxidant and antimicrobial properties. The goal of this study was to screen the individual polyphenols with antioxidant and antimicrobial activities from the extracts (methanol, ethanol, acetone, ethyl acetate, and chloroform) of Golden Delicious pomace. Results First, the polyphenolic compounds (total phenol content, TPC; total flavonoids, TFD; total flavanols, TFL) and antioxidant activities (AAs) with four assays (ferric reducing antioxidant power, FRAP; 1,1-diphenyl-2-picryhydrazyl radical scavenging capacity assay, DRSC; hydroxyl radical averting capacity assay, HORAC; oxygen radical absorbance capacity assay, ORAC) were analyzed. The results showed a significant positive correlation (P

For large-scale image retrieval, high-dimensional image representations derived from pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) make the retrieval system inefficiency. In this paper, we propose to combine nonlinear dimension reduction and hashing method for efficient image retrieval. We firstly extract 4096-dimension features by a pre-trained CNNs model. Secondly, we use t-Distributed Stochastic NeighborEmbedding (t-SNE) to reduce the deep features to 1024-dimension. Finally, we use Sparse Projection (SP) to build 256 bits binary encoding features for image retrieval. We assess the performance of our proposed method with the Oxford5k, Paris6k and Holidaysdatasets. The experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve the state-of-the-art accuracy on common benchmarks.

Graphene oxide (GO) is an oxidized derivative of graphene used in biotechnology and medicine. The safety of GO is uncertain, so we evaluated its toxicity in male rats. Rat tail veins were injected with 2.5, 5, or 10 mg/kg GO for seven days and behavioral patterns, pathology, and tissue morphology were assessed. Data show that behaviors were not altered according to an open field test and a functional observational battery test, but histopathological analysis indicated that GO caused inflammation of the lung, liver, and spleen. GO also reduced cholesterol, high density lipoprotein (HDL), and low density lipoprotein (LDL). No other organs were modified. Thus, high concentrations of GO are toxic for the lung, liver, and spleen, but the mechanism by which this occurs requires more study.