In this study, the potential production of bamboo by the GVL/H2O system for ethanol production was investigated.

This research investigates how household medical expenditure affects Chinese citizens having more children. We examined the causal relationship and found a negative influence of household medical expenditure on the willingness to have more children, confirming that increasing household expenditure on medical care may specifically decrease the high willingness. Chinese policymakers should adopt appropriate and effective strategies to mitigate the potential negative effects of household medical expenditure on the birthrate. These analyses emphasize the importance of promoting economic growth, increasing public health expenditure, and increasing medical security in the context of population imbalance and the trend of a rapidly aging society in order to encourage people to have more children, thereby slowing population decline.

The structure of materials is closely related to their electrochemical properties. MnMoO4 materials are of good stability using for supercapacitors but their specific capacitance performance is not very excellent. In...

Crystallographic texturing enables the design of piezoelectric polycrystals that outperform traditional random polycrystals by exhibiting outstanding piezoelectric properties. In this work, phase-field modeling and computer simulation were employed to study the effect of crystallographic texture on the piezoelectric properties of ferroelectric polycrystals at the domain level. Domain evolutions for single crystal, random polycrystal, and textured polycrystal are systematically simulated. The simulations reveal that the [001]-textured polycrystal can fully exploit the intrinsic anisotropic properties of piezoelectric materials by exhibiting a piezoelectric coefficient that is as large as that of single crystal while being much larger than that of random polycrystal. To better understand the mechanism of piezoelectricity enhancement by crystallographic texturing, a theoretical analysis based on Landau theory is provided. In comparison with random polycrystal, the textured polycrystal manifests a flatter energy landscape and thus possesses a higher piezoelectric coefficient.

DNA methylation of three cultivars, each of the fruit tree species pear, plum and apple, was analyzed by the methylation-sensitive amplified polymorphism (MSAP) marker. All three fruit tree cultivars were found to contain apparently lower levels of methylation at the 5’-CCGG sites than all other plant species, such as rice and wheat, studied by the same method. Sequencing of the representative loci isolated from the MSAP profiles indicated that both protein-coding genes and transposable elements (TEs) were involved in low methylation. Gel blotting using isolated MSAP fragments and fragment mixtures representing two major types of TEs (copia- and gypsy-like) as hybridization probes confirmed the unexpected low DNA methylation levels at the 5’-CCGG sites in these three fruit tree genomes. Our results suggest that the three asexually propagated perennial fruit trees may indeed contain unusual lower levels of DNA methylation, especially in TEs at the 5’-CCGG sites. Additionally, our results may also suggest that the often used MSAP marker, which targets only one kind of specific methylation-sensitive sites recognized by a pair of isoschizomers (e.g., 5’-CCGG by HpaII/MspI), is not always representative of other cytosine sites (e.g., CHH) or CG sites other than those of 5’-CCGGs in some plant species.