No abstract

Anaerobic digestion is one of the most sustainable and promising technologies for the management of organic residues. China plays an important role in the world's biogas industry and has accumulated rich and valuable experience, both positive and negative. The country has established relatively complete laws, policies and a subsidy system; its world-renowned standard system guarantees the implementation of biogas projects. Its prefabricated biogas industry has been developed, and several biogas-linked agricultural models have been disseminated. Nonetheless, the subsidy system in China's biogas industry is inflexible and cannot lead to marketization, unlike that of its European counterpart. Moreover, the equipment and technology levels of China's biogas industry are still lagging and underdeveloped. Mono-digestion, rather than co-digestion, dominates the biogas industry. In addition, biogas upgrading technology is immature, and digestate lacks planning and management. China's government subsidy is reconsidered in this work, resulting in the recommendation that subsidy should be based on products (i.e., output-oriented) instead of only input subsidy for construction. The policy could focus on the revival of abandoned biogas plants as well.Sustainability 2020, 12, 1490 2 of 21 effectively and widely implemented in countries where governments and institutions are involved in the subsidy, planning, design, construction, operation, and maintenance of biogas plants [7,8]. A number of countries in Asia and Africa have launched massive campaigns to popularize biogas technology via government support and international aid (Table 1) [9,10]. Globally, it is estimated that 50 million micro-digesters (family size), 132,000 biogas engineering projects (about 15,000 in Europe [11]) and 700 biogas upgrading plants are operating [12]. Promotion of biogas technology has several opportunities and obstacles. Numerous studies have focused on these aspects to discuss the country scenario. Many case and field studies have aimed to assess biogas technology to verify its multiple benefits [13,14] and identify potential barriers [8,[15][16][17][18][19][20][21]. However, these studies are limited to individual country scenarios. The progress and prospect of the biogas industry in different nations vary widely. Nearly no crosswise comparisons have been made for different countries. The current study intends to fill this gap.China leads the world in domestic biogas technology. With the expansion of the biogas industry, lessons learned, whether positive or negative, would be valuable and abundant for countries whose biogas industry is still at the initial stage, including nations mainly in South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Meanwhile, along with the development of medium-and large-scale biogas plants (MLBPs), progress is not trouble-free [22]. (According to the Chinese biogas standard NY/T 667-2011 Classification of Scale for Biogas Engineering, the thresholds of medium-scale and large-scale biogas plant are 300 m 3 and 500 m...

There is increasing evidence that antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) stems from brain abnormalities. However, there are only a few studies investigating brain structure in ASPD. The aim of this study was to find regional coherence abnormalities in resting-state functional MRI of ASPD. Thirty-two ASPD individuals and 34 controls underwent a resting-state functional MRI scan. The regional homogeneity (ReHo) approach was used to examine whether ASPD was related to alterations in resting-state neural activity. Support vector machine discriminant analysis was used to evaluate the sensitivity/specificity characteristics of the ReHo index in discriminating between the ASPD individuals and controls. The results showed that, compared with controls, ASPD individuals show lower ReHo in the right cerebellum posterior lobe (Crus1) and the right middle frontal gyrus, as well as higher ReHo in the right middle occipital gyrus (BA 19), left inferior temporal gyrus (BA 37), and right inferior occipital gyrus (cuneus, BA 18). All alternation regions reported a predictive accuracy above 70%. To our knowledge, this study was the first to study the change in regional activity coherence in the resting brain of ASPD individuals. These results not only elucidated the pathological mechanism of ASPD from a resting-state functional viewpoint but also showed that these alterations in ReHo may serve as potential markers for the detection of ASPD.

To explore the salience network (SN) functional alterations in schizophrenia and depression, resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) data from 29 patients with schizophrenia (SCH), 28 patients with depression (DEP) and 30 healthy controls (HC) were obtained. The SN was derived from data-driven group independent component analysis (gICA). ANCOVA and post hoc tests were performed to discover the FC differences of SN between groups. The ANCOVA demonstrated a significant group effect in FC with right inferior and middle temporal gyrus (ITG and MTG), left caudate, and right precentral gyrus. Post-hoc analyses revealed an opposite altered FC pattern between SN and right ITG and MTG for both patient groups. The DEP group showed a reduced FC between SN and right ITG and MTG compared with HC whereas the SCH group showed an increased FC. In addition, the SCH group showed decreased FC between SN and left caudate, and enhanced FC between SN and right precentral gyrus compared to the other two groups. Our findings suggest distinct FC of SN in schizophrenia and depression, supporting that the resting-state FC pattern of SN may be a transdiagnostic difference between depression and schizophrenia and may play a critical role in the pathogenesis of these two disorders.