Influence of Environmental Regulation and Resource Utilization on Research and Development Towards Sustainability: A Perspective of China’s Coal Mining Industry

The multi-directional variation of results among environmental regulation, resource utilization, and Research and Development (R&D) investments continue to gain more popularity but few studies have examined the nexus among these variables in an open economy. To analyze the individual and combined effects of environmental regulation and resource utilization on industrial R&D investments, a panel data of 30 provinces in China from 2008 to 2018 was used. We also examined the mechanism underlying the magnitude of pollution inducement on R&D investment. The results show that environmental regulation significantly and positively promotes R&D investment while resource utilization has an inverse effect. Environmental regulation does not interfere with efficiency and neither does the quest for efficiency in resource utilization weaken the impact of environmental regulation on R&D investment. Only a few provinces are within the rising stages of the inverted n-shaped curve indicating environmental regulation level is still low. Even though there are tighter laws, government needs to continue to put in more stringent environmental policies towards achieving sustainable development.

Epigenetic mediation of the onset of reproduction in a songbird

ABSTRACTClimate change significantly impacts natural populations, particularly phenology traits, like the seasonal onset of reproduction in birds. This impact is mainly via plastic responses in phenology traits to changes in the environment, but the molecular mechanism mediating this plasticity remains elusive. Epigenetic modifications can mediate plasticity and consequently constitute promising candidates for mediating phenology traits. Here, we used genome-wide DNA methylation profiles of individual great tit (Parus major) females that we blood sampled repeatedly throughout the breeding season. We demonstrate rapid and directional variation in DNA methylation within the regulatory region of genes known to play key roles in avian reproduction that are in line with observed changes in gene expression in chickens. Our findings provide an important step towards unraveling the molecular mechanism mediating a key life history trait, an essential knowledge-gap for understanding how natural populations may cope with future climate change.IMPACT SUMMARYNatural populations are increasingly challenged by changing environmental conditions like global increases in temperature. A key way for species to adapt to global warming is via phenotypic plasticity, i.e. the ability to adjust the expression of traits to the environment. We, however, know little about how the environment can interact with an organism’s genetic make-up to shape its trait value. Epigenetic marks are known to vary with the environment and can modulate the expression of traits without any change in the genetic make-up and therefore have the potential to mediate phenotypic plasticity.To study the role of epigenetics for phenotypic plasticity, we here focus on the great tit (Parus major), a species that is strongly affected by global warming and plastic for temperature in an essential phenology trait, the seasonal onset of egg laying. As a first step, we investigated whether great tit females show within-individual and short-term variation in DNA methylation that corresponds to changes in the reproductive state of females. We therefore housed breeding pairs in climate-controlled aviaries to blood sample each female repeatedly throughout the breeding season and used these repeated samples for methylation profiling.We found rapid and directional variation in DNA methylation at the time females prepared to initiate egg laying that is located within the regulatory region of genes that have previously described functions for avian reproduction. Although future work is needed to establish a causal link between the observed temporal variation in DNA methylation and the onset of reproduction in female great tits, our work highlights the potential role for epigenetic modifications in mediating an essential phenology trait that is sensitive to temperatures.

High Order Volumetric Directional Pattern for Video-Based Face Recognition

Describing the dynamic textures has attracted growing attention in the field of computer vision and pattern recognition. In this paper, a novel approach for recognizing dynamic textures, namely, high order volumetric directional pattern (HOVDP), is proposed. It is an extension of the volumetric directional pattern (VDP) which extracts and fuses the temporal information (dynamic features) from three consecutive frames. HOVDP combines the movement and appearance features together considering the nth order volumetric directional variation patterns of all neighboring pixels from three consecutive frames. In experiments with two challenging video face databases, YouTube Celebrities and Honda/UCSD, HOVDP clearly outperformed a set of state-of-the-art approaches.