Based on a content analysis of 533 Chinese listed companies, this study examines how corporate environmental performance affects not only the level of detail of a company's environmental disclosures, ...but also what information is disclosed. The results show that (1) both poor and good performers have more disclosure than the median (i.e., “mixed”) performers, which provides empirical evidence to support a nonlinear relationship between corporate environmental performance and environmental disclosure; (2) poor performers disclose more soft information on environmental performance than good performers, and good performers disclose more solid information; and (3) although poor performers increase disclosure after being exposed as environmental violators, they avoid disclosing negative environmental information, such as the violation and the associated penalties. This study provides additional evidence for a nonlinear relationship between environmental performance and disclosure in emerging markets, and suggests environmental disclosure may not be a valid signal to differentiate good performers from poor performers in contemporary China.
•Both poor and good performers have more disclosure than the mixed performers.•Good performers disclose more solid information.•Poor performers avoid disclosing negative environmental information.
This article provides empirical evidence on how the pressures of corporate political capital and stakeholders' affect firms' willingness to embrace green innovation. Using a theoretical framework ...combining the stakeholder theory with the resource-based views (RBV), we investigate the effects of firms' political capital and stakeholders' pressures on corporate green innovation using a survey to 791 private manufacturing firms in China. Our results reveal that: (1) political capital plays a significant but negative role in firms' green product and process innovation performance; (2) both regulations and suppliers positively promote green innovation in product and process; (3) consumers are positively related to green product innovation but negatively related to green process innovation; and (4) competitions do not have any significant effects on both green product and green process innovation. Furthermore, political factors and stakeholders' contingent roles in institutional context should synthetically be considered to initiate green innovation.
The objectives of this study were to propose a clinical prognostic scoring system applicable for intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (ICC) and to evaluate the prognostic validity of the American Joint ...Committee on Cancer (AJCC) 7th edition staging system.
Retrospective univariate and multivariate survival analyses were conducted for 344 patients with ICC who underwent hepatectomy. A simple clinical prognostic scoring system (Fudan score) was developed based on the independent predictors. The prognostic validity was assessed in 74 patients with unresected tumors and compared with the AJCC 6th and 7th edition systems.
In the training set, serum alkaline phosphatase level, carbohydrate antigen 19-9 level, tumor boundary type, tumor size, and number of intrahepatic tumors were independent predictive factors of survival in ICC and were incorporated into the Fudan score. Three hundred forty-four patients were categorized into four subsets with 5-year overall survival rates of 48.6%, 25.6%, 10.3%, and 0.0% for low-, intermediate-, high-, and extremely high-risk groups, respectively. The discriminative ability of the Fudan score was better than that of the AJCC staging system and well applied in the unresected patient set.
A Fudan score based on clinical factors may provide a relatively accurate prognostic prediction for ICC patients regardless of resection status.
The standard diagnosis of rotavirus gastroenteritis is based on the demonstration of rotavirus antigen in stools using an enzyme immunoassay (EIA). In this study, a one-step quantitative RT-PCR ...(Q-PCR) was used for sensitive detection of rotavirus in diarrheal stools. The primers and TaqMan probe for the Q-PCR were selected from a highly conserved region of the non-structural protein 3 (NSP3) of rotavirus. After validation, the test was applied to study rotavirus EIA positive (
N
=
25) and EIA negative (
N
=
143) stool specimens from cases of acute gastroenteritis of all degrees of severity in a prospective follow-up cohort of infants from 2 months to 2 years of age. Q-PCR detected all 25 EIA positive rotavirus antigens and seven additional cases that were rotavirus EIA negative, i.e. 28% more rotavirus positive cases than identified by EIA. It is concluded that Q-PCR using primers targeted at NSP3 is a rapid and sensitive method for diagnosing acute rotavirus gastroenteritis.
ABSTRACT We report the first detection in the interstellar medium (ISM) of the Z-isomer of cyanomethanimine (HNCHCN), an HCN dimer proposed as precursor of adenine. We identified six transitions of ...Z-cyanomethanimine, along with five transitions of E-cyanomethanimine, using IRAM 30m observations towards the Galactic Centre quiescent molecular cloud G + 0.693. The Z-isomer has a column density of (2.0 ± 0.6) × 1014 cm−2 and an abundance of 1.5 × 10−9. The relative abundance ratio between the isomers is Z/E∼6. This value cannot be explained by the two chemical formation routes previously proposed (gas phase and grain surface), which predicts abundances ratios between 0.9 and 1.5. The observed Z/E ratio is in good agreement with thermodynamic equilibrium at the gas kinetic temperature (130−210 K). Since isomerization is not possible in the ISM, the two species may be formed at high temperature. New chemical models, including surface chemistry on dust grains and gas-phase reactions, should be explored to explain our findings. Whatever the formation mechanism, the high abundance of Z-HNCHCN shows that precursors of adenine are efficiently formed in the ISM.
Glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) is a key enzyme that generates NADPH to maintain reduced glutathione (GSH), which scavenges reactive oxygen species (ROS) to protect cancer cell from ...oxidative damage. In this study, we mainly investigate the potential roles of G6PD in colorectal cancer (CRC) development and chemoresistance. We discover that G6PD is overexpressed in CRC cells and patient specimens. High expression of G6PD predicts poor prognosis and correlated with poor outcome of oxaliplatin-based first-line chemotherapy in patients with CRC. Suppressing G6PD decreases NADPH production, lowers GSH levels, impairs the ability to scavenge ROS levels, and enhances oxaliplatin-induced apoptosis in CRC via ROS-mediated damage in vitro. In vivo experiments further shows that silencing G6PD with lentivirus or non-viral gene delivery vector enhances oxaliplatin anti-tumor effects in cell based xenografts and PDX models. In summary, our finding indicated that disrupting G6PD-mediated NADPH homeostasis enhances oxaliplatin-induced apoptosis in CRC through redox modulation. Thus, this study indicates that G6PD is a potential prognostic biomarker and a promising target for CRC therapy.
The mechanism for carbon dioxide reduction (CO2RR) to carbon monoxide (CO) at immobilized cobalt phthalocyanine (CoPc) in aqueous electrolytes has been widely debated. In this work, we investigated ...the mechanism of CO2RR to CO on CoPc via experimental reaction kinetics coupled with model fitting. Unexpectedly, reactant order dependences and Tafel slopes deviate from commonly expected values and change depending on the testing conditions. For example, (1) the effect of bicarbonate deviates from power law kinetics and transitions from inhibitory to promotional with increasingly reductive potential, and (2) the CO2 order dependence deviates from unity at more-reductive potentials. We propose a kinetic model, chosen from more than 15 candidate models, that is able to quantitatively fit all of the experimental data. The model invokes (1) catalyst poisoning via bicarbonate electrosorption, (2) mixed control between concerted proton–electron transfer (CPET) and sequential electron transfer-proton transfer (ET-PT), and (3) both water and bicarbonate as kinetically relevant proton donors. The proposed model also predicts that the relative importance of the above factors changes depending on the reaction conditions, highlighting the potential downfalls of broadly applying reaction mechanisms that were inferred from kinetic data collected in a narrow range of testing conditions. This study emphasizes the importance of cohesively using kinetic data collected over a wide range of operating conditions to test and formulate kinetic models of electrocatalytic reactions.
The debate on the relationship between corporate or industrial environmental performance (EP) and financial performance (FP) has yet to be resolved, and studies need to examine the possible ...moderating effects on the EP-FP link. We argue that industrial EP has a positive effect on FP and that industrial munificence and resource slack can moderate the EP-FP link. Using a dataset from Chinese industrial firms, we examine the direct effect of industrial EP on FP and the indirect effects of industrial munificence and resource slack on the EP-FP link. Our results show that improving corporate or industrial-level EP significantly influences FP and that slack resources play a significant role on the EP-FP link. However, we found no significant moderating effect of industrial munificence on the link.
•Industrial environmental performance has a significant influence on financial performance.•Resource slack plays a moderating role on environmental performance.•Resource slack plays a moderating role on financial performance.
Abstract
The Tafel slope is a key parameter often quoted to characterize the efficacy of an electrochemical catalyst. In this paper, we develop a Bayesian data analysis approach to estimate the Tafel ...slope from experimentally-measured current-voltage data. Our approach obviates the human intervention required by current literature practice for Tafel estimation, and provides robust, distributional uncertainty estimates. Using synthetic data, we illustrate how data insufficiency can unknowingly influence current fitting approaches, and how our approach allays these concerns. We apply our approach to conduct a comprehensive re-analysis of data from the CO
2
reduction literature. This analysis reveals no systematic preference for Tafel slopes to cluster around certain "cardinal values” (e.g. 60 or 120 mV/decade). We hypothesize several plausible physical explanations for this observation, and discuss the implications of our finding for mechanistic analysis in electrochemical kinetic investigations.
ABSTRACT
Theories of a pre-RNA world suggest that glycolonitrile (HOCH2CN) is a key species in the process of ribonucleotide assembly, which is considered as a molecular precursor of nucleic acids. ...In this Letter, we report the first detection of this pre-biotic molecule in the interstellar medium by using ALMA data obtained at frequencies between 86.5 GHz and 266.5 GHz toward the Solar-type protostar IRAS16293–2422 B. A total of 15 unblended transitions of HOCH2CN were identified. Our analysis indicates the presence of a cold (T$\rm _{ex}$ = 24 ± 8 K) and a warm (T$\rm _{ex}$ = 158 ± 38 K) component meaning that this molecule is present in both the inner hot corino and the outer cold envelope of IRAS16293 B. The relative abundance with respect to H2 is (6.5 ± 0.6) × 10−11 and ≥(6 ± 2) × 10−10 for the warm and cold components, respectively. Our chemical modelling seems to underproduce the observed abundance for both the warm and cold component under various values of the cosmic ray ionization rate (ζ). Key gas phase routes for the formation of this molecule might be missing in our chemical network.
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