Disorienting Politics mines 21st-century media artifacts—including films like The Martian and TV/streaming media shows such as Firefly and House of Cards—to make visible the economic, cultural, ...political, and ecological entanglements of China and the United States. Describing these transpacific entanglements as “Chimerica”—coined by economic historians to reference the symbiosis of China and America—Yang examines how Chimerican media, originating in the US but traversing national boundaries in their production, circulation, and consumption, co-create the figure of rising China and extend a political imagination beyond the conventional ground of the nation. Examining how Chimerican media are shaped by and perpetuate uneven power relations, Disorienting Politics argues that the pervasive tendency among wide-ranging cultural producers to depict the Chinese state as a racialized Other in American media life diminishes the possibility of engaging transpacific entanglements as a basis for envisioning new political horizons. Such othering of China not only results in overt racism against people of Asian descent, Yang argues, but also impacts the wellbeing of people of color more generally. This interdisciplinary book demonstrates the ways in which race is embedded in geopolitics even when the subject of discussion is not the people, but the (Chinese) state. Bridging media and cultural studies, Asian and Asian American studies, geography, and globalization studies, Disorienting Politics calls for a relational politics that acknowledges the multifarious interconnectivity between people, places, media, and environment.
Whether an economy can be categorized as middle-income or not is an empirical issue. We apply the World Bank’s standard to divide middle-income economies into trapped middle-income economies and ...graduated middle-income economies, and compare them with high-income economies. This paper tests how financial system development positively impacts a nation’s economic development among the above-mentioned three groups of economies. We combine models and methodology from previous studies (King and Levine, 1993a; Levine and Zervos, 1998; Rousseau and Wachtel, 2000, 2002; Xu, 2000). Augmenting these models with new measures and relations of financial development, we find that (1) consistent with previous studies, financial development contributes significantly to economic growth through channels of physical capital stock and total factor productivity; (2) there is Granger causality between equity market development and economic growth for all three groups of economies, although some stronger and some weaker; (3) there is a reverse causality between economic growth and equity market development in high-income economies, which is not detected in other economies; (4) strong evidence of Granger causality and feedback between banking system development and inflation is found only in the trapped middle-income economies.
Omics-based technologies, which have developed rapidly over the last few decades, have generated increasing evidence demonstrating pervasive divergent transcription from RNA polymerase II (Pol II) ...promoters of eukaryotic genome, and indeed have raised considerable discussion as to their potential physiopathological function. Unlike many other long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs), promoter antisense RNAs (PAS RNAs) were initially considered to be merely passive transcription by-products of active promoters. However, recent studies have begun to reveal their critical importance in a broad spectrum of biological processes. In this Review, I summarize recent technological advances that enable accurate detection of PAS RNA and discuss the mechanisms of PAS RNA biogenesis emphasizing the functional importance of its structure enabling the diverse functions of PAS RNA in transcription and chromatin regulation.
Given the rise of communication campaigns to prevent and reduce the use of electronic nicotine delivery systems among minors nationwide, it is important to examine whether certain preventive messages ...will spill over to affect current adult smokers' support for and compliance with vaping regulations. Drawing upon the Moral Foundations Theory, the current study experimentally examined the effects of moral frames on current adult smokers' support for vape-free policies and marketing restrictions. An online sample of current smokers (N = 630) was randomly assigned to a 3 (moral frames in vaping prevention : care, purity, non-moral control) × 2 (priming of anti-smoking messages: yes or no) between-subject survey experiment. Compared with non-moral framed messages, smokers exposed to both care and purity framed messages were more likely to support vape-free policies in public places. Such effects were stronger for smokers with higher pre-treatment endorsement of the purity value, driven less by anger or disgust but more by smokers' updating of both self-oriented and secondhand harm perceptions. Moral frames, especially those appealing to care and purity moral values, are thus promising messaging strategies for vaping prevention communication campaigns in terms of increasing current smokers' support for vape-free policies. The results also help improve our understanding of the moral roots of health policy opinions and the potential of deploying moral framing to improve message design for health campaigns.
Solitons are self-sustained wavepackets that occur in many physical systems. Their recent demonstration in optical microresonators has provided a new platform for the study of nonlinear optical ...physics with practical implications for miniaturization of time standards, spectroscopy tools, and frequency metrology systems. However, despite its importance to the understanding of soliton physics, as well as development of new applications, imaging the rich dynamical behavior of solitons in microcavities has not been possible. These phenomena require a difficult combination of high-temporal-resolution and long-record-length in order to capture the evolving trajectories of closely spaced microcavity solitons. Here, an imaging method is demonstrated that visualizes soliton motion with sub-picosecond resolution over arbitrary time spans. A wide range of complex soliton transient behavior are characterized in the temporal or spectral domain, including soliton formation, collisions, spectral breathing, and soliton decay. This method can serve as a visualization tool for developing new soliton applications and understanding complex soliton physics in microcavities.
Microresonator soliton dual-comb spectroscopy Suh, Myoung-Gyun; Yang, Qi-Fan; Yang, Ki Youl ...
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
11/2016, Volume:
354, Issue:
6312
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Measurement of optical and vibrational spectra with high resolution provides a way to identify chemical species in cluttered environments and is of general importance in many fields. Dual-comb ...spectroscopy has emerged as a powerful approach for acquiring nearly instantaneous Raman and optical spectra with unprecedented resolution. Spectra are generated directly in the electrical domain, without the need for bulky mechanical spectrometers. We demonstrate a miniature soliton-based dual-comb system that can potentially transfer the approach to a chip platform. These devices achieve high-coherence pulsed mode locking. They also feature broad, reproducible spectral envelopes, an essential feature for dual-comb spectroscopy. Our work shows the potential for integrated spectroscopy with high signal-to-noise ratios and fast acquisition rates.
Lead halide perovskite nanocrystals (NCs) have demonstrated great potential as appealing candidates for advanced optoelectronic applications. However, the toxicity of lead and the intrinsic ...instability toward moisture hinder their mass production and commercialization. Herein, to solve such thorny problems, novel lead‐free Cs2AgBiBr6 double perovskite NCs fabricated via a simple hot‐injection method are reported, which exhibit impressive stability in moisture, light, and temperature. Such materials are then applied into photocatalytic CO2 reduction, achieving a total electron consumption of 105 µmol g−1 under AM 1.5G illumination for 6 h. This study offers a reliable avenue for Cs2AgBiBr6 perovskite nanocrystals preparation, which holds a great potential in the further photochemical applications.
Stable lead‐free Cs2AgBiBr6 double perovskite nanocrystals with a cubic shape and an average size of 9.5 nm are successfully synthesized via the hot‐injection route, and are employed as photocatalysts to convert CO2 into solar fuels (CO and CH4). This work offers a reliable avenue for Cs2AgBiBr6 perovskite nanocrystals preparation, which holds a great potential in the further photochemical applications.
Besides its mathematical importance, the Möbius topology (twisted, single-sided strip) is intriguing at the molecular level, as it features structural elegance and distinct properties; however, it ...carries synthetic challenges. Although some Möbius-type molecules have been isolated by synthetic chemists accompanied by extensive computational studies, the design, preparation, and characterization of stable Möbius-conjugated molecules remain a nontrivial task to date, let alone that of molecular Möbius strips assembling into more complex topologies. Here we report the efficient synthesis, crystal structure, and theoretical study of a catenane consisting of two fully conjugated nanohoops exhibiting Möbius topology in the solid state. This work highlights that oligoparaphenylene-derived nanohoops, a family of highly warped and synthetically challenging conjugated macrocycles, can not only serve as building blocks for interlocked supermolecular structures, but also represent a new class of compounds with isolable Möbius conformations stabilized by non-covalent interactions.
Capsaicin in chili peppers bestows the sensation of spiciness. Since the discovery of its receptor, transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 （TRPV1） ion channel, how capsaicin activates this channel ...has been under extensive investigation using a variety of experimental techniques including mutagenesis, patch-clamp recording, crystallography, cryo-electron microscopy, computational docking and molecular dynamic simu- lation. A framework of how capsaicin binds and acti- vates TRPV1 has started to merge： capsaicin binds to a pocket formed by the channel＇s transmembrane seg- ments, where it takes a ＂tail-up, head-down＂ configu- ration. Binding is mediated by both hydrogen bonds and van der Waals interactions. Upon binding, cap- saicin stabilizes the open state of TRPV1 by ＂pull-and- contact＂ with the $4-$5 linker. Understanding the ligand-host interaction will greatly facilitate pharma- ceutical efforts to develop novel analgesics targeting TRPV1.
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