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Abstract Improving total factor carbon emission efficiency (TCE) is the key to achieving carbon emission reduction targets while ensuring economic growth. In this paper, the global Malmquist index based on the SBM model is used to measure TCE of 283 cities in China from 2011 to 2019. On this basis, this paper uses the spatial econometric model and intermediary effect model to empirically analyze the impact of industrial co-agglomeration on TCE and its transmission mechanism. Furthermore, considering the differences in geographical location and resource endowment among regions, this paper analyzes the heterogeneous effect of industrial collaboration agglomeration on TCE in different regions and cities. The results show that: (1) Industrial co-agglomeration can improve TCE, and its main transmission channel is technological innovation. (2) Industrial co-agglomeration has a positive spatial spillover effect. Industrial co-agglomeration in one region can improve the TCE in the surrounding regions. (3) Industrial co-agglomeration of cities with different geographic locations and resource endowments has a heterogeneous effect on TCE. Regarding geographical heterogeneity, the industrial co-agglomeration in the eastern region has the greatest promoting effect on TCE, followed by the central region. However, the impact of industrial co-agglomeration in the western region on TCE is not significant. Regarding resource endowment heterogeneity, the industrial co-agglomeration in non-resource-based cities has a greater promoting effect on TCE than that in resource-based cities.

Aeschynanthus pulcher (Blume) G. Don, the “lipstick plant” is a prized ornamental plant with distinctive flowers. Here, we introduce a novel in vitro regeneration method for A. pulcher using leaf explants and an optimized combination of phytohormone plant growth regulators (PGRs). The optimal conditions for shoot regeneration included 1 mg L−1 polyvinyl pyrrolidone (PVP) plus 3 mg L−1 thidiazuron (TDZ), inducing a response rate of 82.4% and a shoot/explant ratio of 38.6. When the Murashige and Skoog (MS) medium contained indole-3-butyric acid (IBA) alone, leaves first differentiated into adventitious roots and then adventitious shoots. Leaves cultured on MS medium containing 1 g L−1 PVP, 3 mg L−1 TDZ, 5 mg L−1 casein, and 0.1 mg L−1 α-naphthaleneacetic acid (NAA) for 30 d exhibited the highest embryogenic callus (EC) induction rate (95.6%). The optimal shoot proliferation coefficient (21.5) was obtained when shoots derived from EC were cultured on the same medium as that used for EC induction for 5 weeks. The most effective medium for rooting of elongated shoots was MS medium containing 1 g L−1 PVP, 5 mg L−1 casein, 3 mg L−1 6-benzyladenine (BA), and 0.1 mg L−1 NAA, and the number of roots reached 18.8. The regenerated plants grown in a greenhouse had 100% survival following one week of hardening. Overall, our effective and efficient propagation method should result in shortened culture periods and reduced production costs, allowing for the future selective breeding and genetic improvement of A. pulcher.

This study performed a series of comparable experiments (with or without column chromatography) to evaluate whether non-deviated Cu isotope ratios can be obtained directly by Nu Plasma II multi-collector inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (MC-ICP-MS) using standard-sample bracketing with Ga as internal mass bias correction model (C-SSBIN) without column chromatography. Twelve Cu-dominated minerals (copper plate, native copper, chalcopyrite, bornite, chalcocite, digenite, covellite, tetrahedrite, azurite, malachite, atacamite, and cyanotrichite) displayed little drift in δ65Cu values compared with those of minerals with column chromatography, with Δδ65Cuwithout−with ranging from −0.04 to +0.02‰. This means that Cu isotope ratios in Cu-dominated minerals can be achieved without column chromatography, due to the simple matrix and the stability of the machine by using C-SSBIN mode. The acidity and internal standard concentration mismatch effects, as well as the matrix effect, were strictly assessed by Nu Plasma II MC-ICP-MS in a wet-plasma mode in the State Key Laboratory of Continental Dynamics (SKLCD). Finally, a long-term reproducibility of better than ±0.03‰ [n = 38, 2 standard deviations (2s)] were achieved by repeatedly measuring chalcopyrite without column chromatography over 4 months.

Pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) have received increasing attention. However, their transformation products (TPs) and metabolites, sometimes even with environmental concentration and/or toxicity higher than their parent compounds, received attention far from enough. This study gives useful insight on the occurrence, fate and toxicity of PPCP TPs or metabolites in WWTPs, surface water and even drinking water, highlighting the necessity of studying the PPCP TPs formation, occurrence, toxicity and environment risk, and further evaluating the environmental risk caused by PPCPs comprehensively.

Deep learning has achieved great success on robotic vision tasks. However, when compared with other vision-based tasks, it is difficult to collect a representative and sufficiently large training set for six-dimensional (6D) object pose estimation, due to the inherent difficulty of data collection. In this paper, we propose the RobotP dataset consisting of commonly used objects for benchmarking in 6D object pose estimation. To create the dataset, we apply a 3D reconstruction pipeline to produce high-quality depth images, ground truth poses, and 3D models for well-selected objects. Subsequently, based on the generated data, we produce object segmentation masks and two-dimensional (2D) bounding boxes automatically. To further enrich the data, we synthesize a large number of photo-realistic color-and-depth image pairs with ground truth 6D poses. Our dataset is freely distributed to research groups by the Shape Retrieval Challenge benchmark on 6D pose estimation. Based on our benchmark, different learning-based approaches are trained and tested by the unified dataset. The evaluation results indicate that there is considerable room for improvement in 6D object pose estimation, particularly for objects with dark colors, and photo-realistic images are helpful in increasing the performance of pose estimation algorithms.

Pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) are emerging environmental contaminants, whose potential risk for the ecological environment has caused wide attention in recent years. In China, quite a large amount of PPCPs were annually emitted into the environment. Their existence in different matrix has been reported frequently, including river water, sediment and soil. However, the contribution from different sources was seldom reported and still unclear in China. Wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) was usually considered to be the main source to the urban river, but livestock and aquaculture farms were also reported as significant pollution sources of PPCPs due to poor environmental management in China. This study summarized environmental discharges of different PPCPs from various sources and obtained the discharge data through different environment media in Beijing, the statistical source of PPCPs was analyzed in detail. The sources comprised WWTPs, excess sludge, hospital wastewater, municipal untreated wastewater, aquaculture wastewater and landfill leachate. This article helps understand the general situation and the potential risk of PPCPs in Beijing.

Because Pb isotopes can be used for tracing, they are widely used in many disciplines. The detection and analysis of Pb isotopes of bulk samples are usually conducted using thermal ionization mass spectrometer (TIMS) and multiple-collector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (MC-ICP-MS), both of which need external reference materials with known isotopic compositions to correct for the mass discrimination effect produced during analysis. NIST NBS 981 is the most widely used reference material for Pb isotope analysis; however, the isotopic compositions reported by various analytical laboratories, especially those using TIMS, vary from each other. In this study, we statistically evaluated 229 reported TIMS analysis values collected by GeoReM in the last 30 years, 176 reported MC-ICP-MS analysis values, and 938 MC-ICP-MS analysis results from our laboratory in the last five years. After careful investigation, only 40 TIMS results were found to have double or triple spikes. The ratios of the overall weighted averages, 206Pb/204Pb, 207Pb/204Pb, and 208Pb/204Pb, obtained from 40 spiked TIMS reports and 1114 MC-ICP-MS results of NIST NBS 981 isotopes were 16.9406 ± 0.0003 (2s), 15.4957 ± 0.0002 (2s), and 36.7184 ± 0.0007 (2s), respectively.

Routing protocol is an important topic in the wireless sensor networks. For MultiSink wireless sensor networks, the routing protocol designs and implementations are more difficult due to the structure complexity. The paper deals with the problem of a multiple-dimensional tree routing protocol for multisink wireless sensor networks based on ant colony optimization. The proposed protocol is as follows: (1) listening mechanism is used to establish and maintain multidimensional tree routing topology; (2) taking into consideration hops, packet losses, retransmission, and delay account, a distributed ant colony algorithm is proposed. When nodes select routes in the data transmission, the algorithm is utilized to realize the real-time optimization by coordination between nodes. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol can realize the QoS optimization for multisink wireless sensor networks, and its performance is better than the routing protocol of minimum hop numbers.

Author affiliations *Corresponding authors Sulfur isotopes serve as critical tracers for understanding the material sources and cycling in earth science. The in situ sulfur isotope ratio analysis by laser ablation multiple-collector inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-MC-ICP-MS) has been a proven important technique, yet the precision and accuracy of measurement are limited by matrix-matched reference materials. In this study, we investigated three new potential reference materials (pyrite NWU-Py, gypsum NWU-Gy and arsenopyrite NWU-Apy) for sulfur isotope ratio analysis by LA-MC-ICP-MS. The ultra-fine powders of pyrite, gypsum and arsenopyrite were synthesized into a solid block using the fast-hot-pressing sintering method (FHP). The reliability of these reference materials was evaluated by large quantities of sulfur isotope measurements by LA-MC-ICP-MS, with mean δ34S values of 3.48 ± 0.26‰ (2SD, n = 787) for NWU-Py, 18.19 ± 0.32‰ (2SD, n = 290) for NWU-Gy, and -0.19 ± 0.32‰ (2SD, n = 383) for NWU-Apy, which are highly consistent with those obtained from isotope ratio mass spectrometry (IRMS). Furthermore, the F-testing and H-index indicate that the three materials have excellent homogeneity of sulfur isotope compositions. Therefore, NWU-Py, NWU-Gy, and NWU-Apy can serve as bracketing matrix-matched reference materials for in situ sulfur isotope measurement by LA-MC-ICP-MS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study developed a new method for in situ measurement of stable Mo isotope ratio using femtosecond laser ablation connected to a multi-collector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (MC-ICP-MS). We assessed how laser fluence, laser repetition rate, and signal intensity impact Mo isotope mass fractionation, using synthetic molybdenite Mo-H8 as the reference material. Findings reveal that the laser repetition rate has negligible impact on Mo isotope fractionation, while signal intensity and laser fluence slightly influence the precision of d98Mo. Significant signal intensity disparities between samples and reference materials can markedly affect the results of Mo isotopes. We analyzed natural molybdenite samples from various deposits in China with this new method, with the optimal laser parameters including a repetition rate of 10 Hz, a spot size of 20 mm, and a fluence of 1 J cm-2. The d98MoNIST SRM 3134 values for nine natural samples (GD-1, GD-2, YN-1, YN-2, YN-3, SX-1, SX-2, SX-3, and GX-1) align with those obtained by solution nebulization MC-ICP-MS within analytical uncertainty, demonstrating the accuracy of this new in situ Mo isotope analytical method. This new technique offers a reliable alternative to solution nebulization MC-ICP-MS in bulk analysis, enabling precise detection of Mo isotope ratio variations at a finer scale, which provides valuable insights into mineralization processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzing sulfur (S) and molybdenum (Mo) isotope ratios in molybdenite, the most common sulfide mineral, is crucial for studying the genesis of ore deposits. However, it is necessary to prepare matrix-matched reference materials for molybdenite. In this study, we employed two different techniques, the high-temperature-high-pressure (HTHP) technique and the rapid hot-pressing technique, to synthesize molybdenites and assessed their suitability as reference materials for in situ Mo and S isotope analysis in molybdenite. The molybdenites synthesized through HTHP and rapid hot-pressing exhibit smooth surfaces and dense structures, making them suitable as reference materials for in situ Mo and S isotope analysis, respectively. These synthesized molybdenites exhibit homogeneous Mo and S isotope compositions based on a large number of LA-MC-ICP-MS measurements. The mean δ98MoNIST SRM 3134 values of 0.70 ± 0.06‰ (n = 4, 2SD) and 0.70 ± 0.05‰ (n = 4, 2SD) determined by solution nebulization MC-ICP-MS are suggested as recommended δ98Mo/95Mo values for Mo-H8 and Mo-P. The mean δ34SV-CDT value of −0.22 ± 0.10‰ (n = 9, 2SD) determined by elemental analyzer isotope ratio mass spectrometry (EA-IRMS) is suggested as a recommended δ34S/32S value for Mo-H8 and Mo-P. Therefore, we recommend combining ultrafine powders with a high-temperature–high-pressure technique and/or a rapid hot-pressing technique to synthesize reference materials for isotopic analysis of other minerals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]