Fashion companies are extremely sensitive to the new challenge emerging from recent sustainability scandals. Existing literature has debated sustainability extensively by considering practices of ...sustainability that companies should apply. However, little research has focused on the design of a proper sustainability roadmap from a supply chain (SC) perspective to address the steps involved in implementing sustainability practices. The objective of this study is to design a sustainability roadmap for fashion companies. Based on case studies of three tiers of three fashion SCs as an empirical basis, social and environmental sustainability practices were grouped into a five-step roadmap. The main result of the paper is a five-step roadmap, characterised in terms of practices and main goal. The roadmap is then discussed in terms of possible paths of developing, in terms of evolution within a step and among different steps.
A rich research stream investigates the drivers and enablers of supplier sustainability practices, usually classified into suppliers' monitoring and collaboration with suppliers. Differently from ...previous works analysing relationships between supplier sustainability practices and drivers or enablers, this research investigates how well-defined configurations of monitoring and collaboration can be characterised in terms of drivers and enablers. In this way, it intends to advance knowledge by identifying what drivers and enablers are important and distinctive for the different configurations of supplier sustainability practices. A first result is that moving from configurations of plants which less adopt supplier sustainability practices (i.e. non-adopters) to those which invest on monitoring and/or collaboration to a limited extent (i.e. partial adopters) up to the most advanced ones (i.e. full-adopters), the pressure due to cost reduction lessens its relative importance as a driver, while the pressure due to regulations remains essential. Other relevant results are that plant size acts as a barrier for non-adopters, and the alignment between the sustainability project and plant goals results determinant especially for full-adopters. This research also enriches the debate on the opportunity of differentiating between supplier monitoring and collaboration when investigating drivers/enablers, providing evidence of the risk of oversimplifications for some enablers/drivers.
This paper explores sustainability drivers and practices within the Italian fashion industry, a challenging industry with strong impacts on sustainability. More specifically, this research aims to ...identify the different sustainability approaches adopted by Italian fashion suppliers in terms of the internal and external sustainability practices and drivers that trigger sustainability initiatives in relation to each approach. Based on an investigation of twelve case studies, we propose a taxonomy of these approaches by adopting the supplier perspective, a novelty in the sustainability literature. We discovered four types of approaches that we labelled: under-exploited, not-interested, collaborative and developing.
Since the 1990s, many developing countries have restructured their electric power industry. Policies such as breaking up, commercializing and privatizing utilities, allowing for independent power ...producers, installing independent regulators, and introducing competitive wholesale markets were meant to improve the industry's efficiency and service quality. We exploit more than 30 years of data from over 100 countries to investigate the impact of power sector reforms on efficiency (represented by network losses) and access to electricity (represented by connection rates and residential power consumption). Crucially, reforms are likely to be endogenous with respect to sector performance: a crisis in electricity supply might well trigger reform efforts. We deal with endogeneity using reform activity in neighboring countries as an instrument. Our results suggest that reforms strongly and positively impact electricity access. According to our preferred specification, a full reform program would increase connection rates by 20 percentage points and per capita consumption by 62 percent: these are large effects that are stable across a range of robustness checks. Moreover, the effect of improving access is largest in South Asian countries. In contrast to previous studies, we do not find robust evidence to support the theory that reforms reduce network losses.
•We use IV-based regressions to evaluate the impact of power sector reforms.•Poor performance might trigger reform, hence instrumentation is necessary.•Our study covers 108 developing countries between 1982-2016.•Reforms have a positive effect on electricity access, strongest in South Asia.•We find no robust evidence for any impact of reforms on T&D losses.
We study the anisotropy with respect to the local magnetic field of turbulent magnetic fluctuations at magnetofluid scales in the solar wind. Previous measurements in the fast solar wind obtained ...axisymmetric anisotropy, despite that the analysis method allows nonaxisymmetric structures. These results are probably contaminated by the wind expansion that introduces another symmetry axis, namely, the radial direction, as indicated by recent numerical simulations. These simulations also show that while the expansion is strong, the principal fluctuations are in the plane perpendicular to the radial direction. Using this property, we separate 11 yr of Wind spacecraft data into two subsets characterized by strong and weak expansion and determine the corresponding turbulence anisotropy. Under strong expansion, the small-scale anisotropy is consistent with the Goldreich & Sridhar critical balance. As in previous works, when the radial symmetry axis is not eliminated, the turbulent structures are field-aligned tubes. Under weak expansion, we find 3D anisotropy predicted by the Boldyrev model, that is, turbulent structures are ribbons and not tubes. However, the very basis of the Boldyrev phenomenology, namely, a cross-helicity increasing at small scales, is not observed in the solar wind: the origin of the ribbon formation is unknown.
Patients with limited English proficiency (LEP) experience worse health care outcomes compared to English proficient (EP) patients, and professional interpretation is underutilized in clinical ...settings. The objectives of this study were to describe patterns of interpreter use in a pediatric emergency department (ED), to determine factors associated with its use, and to examine differences in outcomes between EP families and those with LEP.
ED encounters for LEP and EP patients were reviewed in a retrospective cohort study design over a 15 month period. Generalized estimating equations were used to compare patient encounters and factors associated with interpreter use.
Interpreter use for families who preferred a non-English language was 45.4%. Use of interpretation was less likely during busier times of day (odds ratio OR 0.85, confidence interval CI 0.78–0.93), with a lower triage acuity (OR 0.66, CI 0.62–0.70), and with each increasing year of patient age (OR 0.97, CI 0.96–0.98). LEP patients who did not receive interpretation were less likely to be admitted than EP patients (OR 0.69, 0.62–0.78). Patients of LEP families, with or without interpretation, were more likely to be transferred to the ICU within 24 hours of admission than patients of EP families (OR 1.76, 1.07–2.90; 1.85, 1.08–3.18) suggesting that an aspect of clinical severity may have been missed in the ED.
Professional interpretation is currently underutilized in this ED for patients with LEP, and important differences in outcomes exist between LEP and EP patients. Factors associated with interpreter use will inform ongoing improvement efforts.
Ethanol is a known vertebrate teratogen that causes craniofacial defects as a component of fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS). Our results show that sea urchin embryos treated with ethanol similarly show ...broad skeletal patterning defects, potentially analogous to the defects associated with FAS. The sea urchin larval skeleton is a simple patterning system that involves only two cell types: the primary mesenchymal cells (PMCs) that secrete the calcium carbonate skeleton and the ectodermal cells that provide migratory, positional, and differentiation cues for the PMCs. Perturbations in RA biosynthesis and Hh signaling pathways are thought to be causal for the FAS phenotype in vertebrates. Surprisingly, our results indicate that these pathways are not functionally relevant for the teratogenic effects of ethanol in developing sea urchins. We found that developmental morphology as well as the expression of some ectodermal and PMC genes was delayed by ethanol exposure. Temporal transcriptome analysis revealed significant impacts of ethanol on signaling and metabolic gene expression, and a disruption in the timing of GRN gene expression that includes both delayed and precocious gene expression throughout the specification network. We conclude that the skeletal patterning perturbations in ethanol-treated embryos likely arise from a loss of temporal synchrony within and between the instructive and responsive tissues.
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•Ethanol perturbs sea urchin skeletal patterning.•Ethanol-mediated phenotypes are not mediated by retinoic acid.•Ethanol desynchronizes specification network gene expression timing.
Tissue-resident memory T (T
) cells are known to be important for the first line of defense in mucosa-associated tissues. However, the composition, localization, effector function, and specificity of ...T
cells in the human kidney and their relevance for renal pathology have not been investigated.
Lymphocytes derived from blood, renal peritumor samples, and tumor samples were phenotypically and functionally assessed by applying flow cytometry and highly advanced histology (multi-epitope ligand cartography) methods.
CD69
CD103
CD8
T
cells in kidneys display an inflammatory profile reflected by enhanced IL-2, IL-17, and TNF
production, and their frequencies correlate with increasing age and kidney function. We further identified mucosa-associated invariant T and CD56
and CD56
natural killer cells likewise expressing CD69 and CD103, the latter significantly enriched in renal tumor tissues. CD8
T
cell frequencies were not elevated in kidney tumor tissue, but they coexpressed PD-1 and TOX and produced granzyme B. Tumor-derived CD8
T
cells from patients with metastases were functionally impaired. Both CD69
CD103
CD4
and CD69
CD103
CD8
T
cells form distinct clusters in tumor tissues in proximity to antigen-presenting cells. Finally, EBV, CMV, BKV, and influenza antigen-specific CD8
T cells were enriched in the effector memory T cell population in the kidney.
Our data provide an extensive overview of T
cells' phenotypes and functions in the human kidney for the first time, pointing toward their potential relevance in kidney transplantation and kidney disease.
Neutrophils are evolutionarily conserved innate immune cells playing pivotal roles in host defense. Zebrafish models have contributed substantially to our understanding of neutrophil functions but ...similarities to human neutrophil maturation have not been systematically characterized, which limits their applicability to studying human disease. Here we show, by generating and analysing transgenic zebrafish strains representing distinct neutrophil differentiation stages, a high-resolution transcriptional profile of neutrophil maturation. We link gene expression at each stage to characteristic transcription factors, including C/ebp-β, which is important for late neutrophil maturation. Cross-species comparison of zebrafish, mouse, and human samples confirms high molecular similarity of immature stages and discriminates zebrafish-specific from pan-species gene signatures. Applying the pan-species neutrophil maturation signature to RNA-sequencing data from human neuroblastoma patients reveals association between metastatic tumor cell infiltration in the bone marrow and an overall increase in mature neutrophils. Our detailed neutrophil maturation atlas thus provides a valuable resource for studying neutrophil function at different stages across species in health and disease.
Mass spectrometry-based omics technologies are increasingly used in perturbation studies to map drug effects to biological pathways by identifying significant molecular events. Significance is ...influenced by fold change and variation of each molecular parameter, but also by multiple testing corrections. While the fold change is largely determined by the biological system, the variation is determined by experimental workflows. Here, it is shown that memory effects of prior subculture can influence the variation of perturbation profiles using the two colon carcinoma cell lines SW480 and HCT116. These memory effects are largely driven by differences in growth states that persist into the perturbation experiment. In SW480 cells, memory effects combined with moderate treatment effects amplify the variation in multiple omics levels, including eicosadomics, proteomics, and phosphoproteomics. With stronger treatment effects, the memory effect was less pronounced, as demonstrated in HCT116 cells. Subculture homogeneity was controlled by real-time monitoring of cell growth. Controlled homogeneous subculture resulted in a perturbation network of 321 causal conjectures based on combined proteomic and phosphoproteomic data, compared to only 58 causal conjectures without controlling subculture homogeneity in SW480 cells. Some cellular responses and regulatory events were identified that extend the mode of action of arsenic trioxide (ATO) only when accounting for these memory effects. Controlled prior subculture led to the finding of a synergistic combination treatment of ATO with the thioredoxin reductase 1 inhibitor auranofin, which may prove useful in the management of NRF2-mediated resistance mechanisms.
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