Xin Fang

Global warming and other climate issues seriously threaten global sustainable development. As citizen environmental behavior can have a positive impact on the environment, it is of great theoretical significance and practical reference value to study the impact of psychological distance theory on citizen environmental behavior. This study obtained 2,633 related studies from 1980 to 2020 from the Web of Science as research objects, and used CiteSpace, VOSviewer, Netdraw, and other software programs to perform a bibliometric analysis, which can show the complex relationship implied in the citation, intuitively grasp the development context and hot frontier in this field, and help scholars better study citizen environmental behavior. The results and conclusions are as follows. The related research covered three periods: infancy, growth, and outbreak. Chronologically, the relevant research evolved from building models to analyze the impact of environmental enrichment on human environmental behavior, to studying the motivation behind citizen environmental behavior, and finally to paying attention to sustainable development. A cluster analysis of high-frequency keywords identified three research hotspots: “drivers of psychological distance of environmental change perception on citizen environmental behavior,” “impact of social distance on adolescents’ behavior,” and “construal level theory and citizen green behavior.” Based on these findings, possible future research directions were identified, including changing from a single theory to a combination of multiple theories to comprehensively study citizen environmental protection behavior; analyzing the motivation of citizen environmental behavior and summarizing the general motivation of environmental behavior according to its internal relationship; and determining how to narrow the global psychological distance, strengthen the awareness of the community of human destiny, and explore the establishment of an efficient global climate cooperation mechanism.

This paper explores expatriates’ ethical evaluations of and responses to guanxi in China through the lens of integrative social contracts theory. We conducted in-depth interviews with 14 expatriate managers who had spent, on average, 6.5 years working and living in China. Based on the content analysis of these interviews, we identified two different uses of guanxi: defensive and competitive. In general, the respondents found defensive guanxi moral in the Chinese context, while they considered competitive guanxi immoral. Based on our findings, we identified fair competition as the substantive hypernorm that governed most respondents’ ethical evaluations of guanxi. The study has implications for all scholars who seek to utilize integrative social contracts theory to study the relationship between informal networks and corruption in developing countries.

© The Author 2016.Charge density wave formation, a key physics issue for materials, arises from interactions among electrons and phonons that can also lead to superconductivity and other competing or entangled phases. The prototypical system TiSe 2, with a particularly simple transition and no Kohn anomalies caused by electron-phonon coupling, is a fascinating but unsolved case after decades of research. Our angle-resolved photoemission measurements of the band structure as a function of temperature, aided by first-principles calculations, reveal a hitherto undetected but crucial feature: a electronic order in each layer sets in at ∼232 K before the widely recognized three-dimensional structural order at ∼205 K. The dimensional crossover, likely a generic feature of such layered materials, involves renormalization of different band gaps in two stages.

© 2016 American Chemical Society.Charge density wave formation in solids is a critical phenomenon involving the collective reorganization of the electrons and atoms in the system into a wave structure, and it is expected to be sensitive to the geometric constraint of the system at the nanoscale. Here, we study the CDW transition in TiSe2, a quasi-two-dimensional layered material, to determine the effects of quantum confinement and changing dimensions in films ranging from a single layer to multilayers. Of key interest is the characteristic length scale for the transformation from a two-dimensional case to the three-dimensional limit. Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements of films with thicknesses up to six layers reveal substantial variations in the energy structure of discrete quantum well states; however, the temperature-dependent band gap renormalization converges at just three layers. The results indicate a layer-dependent mixture of two transition temperatures and a very-short-range CDW interaction within a three-dimensional framework.

© 2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.A single molecular layer of titanium diselenide is a promising material for advanced electronics beyond graphene - a strong focus of current research. Such molecular layers are at the quantum limit of device miniaturization and can show enhanced electronic effects not realizable in thick films. We show that single-layer TiSe2 exhibits a charge density wave transition at critical temperature TC =232±5 K, which is higher than the bulk TC =200±5 K. Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements reveal a small absolute bandgap at room temperature, which grows wider with decreasing temperature T below TC in conjunction with the emergence of ordering. The results are rationalized in terms of first-principles calculations, symmetry breaking and phonon entropy effects. The observed Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer behaviour of the gap implies a mean-field CDW order in the single layer and an anisotropic CDW order in the bulk.

© 2015 by The American Association of Immunologists, Inc. Acute respiratory distress syndrome is a devastating disorder characterized by increased alveolar permeability with no effective treatment beyond supportive care. Current mechanisms underlying ARDS focus on alveolar endothelial and epithelial injury caused by products of innate immune cells and platelets. However, the role of adaptive immune cells in ARDS remains largely unknown. In this study, we report that expansion of Ag-specific abTh17 cells contributes to ARDS by local secretion of IL-17A, which in turn directly increases alveolar epithelial permeability. Mice with a highly restrictive defect in Ag-specific αβTh17 cells were protected from experimental ARDS induced by a single dose of endotracheal LPS. Loss of IL-17 receptor C or Ab blockade of IL-17A was similarly protective, further suggesting that IL-17A released by these cells was responsible for this effect. LPS induced a rapid and specific clonal expansion of αβTh17 cells in the lung, as determined by deep sequencing of the hypervariable CD3RβVJ region of the TCR. Our findings could be relevant to ARDS in humans, because we found significant elevation of IL-17A in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid from patients with ARDS, and rIL-17A directly increased permeability across cultured human alveolar epithelial monolayers. These results reveal a previously unexpected role for adaptive immune responses that increase alveolar permeability in ARDS and suggest that abTh17 cells and IL-17A could be novel therapeutic targets for this currently untreatable disease.

Copyright © 2015 by The American Association of Immunologists, Inc. Previous studies demonstrated that bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells reduce the severity of acute lung injury in animal models and in an ex vivo perfused human lung model. However, the mechanisms by which MSCs reduce lung injury are not well understood. In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that human MSCs promote the resolution of acute lung injury in part through the effects of a specialized proresolving mediator lipoxin A4. Human alveolar epithelial type II cells and MSCs expressed biosynthetic enzymes and receptors for LXA 4. Coculture of human MSCs with alveolar epithelial type II cells in the presence of cytomix significantly increased the production of LXA 4 by 117%. The adoptive transfer of MSCs after the onset of LPS-induced acute lung injury in mice led to improved survival, and blocking the LXA 4 receptor with WRW4, a LXA 4 receptor antagonist, significantly reversed the protective effect of MSCs on both survival and the accumulation of pulmonary edema. LXA 4 alone improved survival in mice, and it also significantly decreased the production of TNF-α and MIP-2 in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid. In summary, these experiments demonstrated two novel findings: human MSCs promote the resolution of lung injury in mice in part through the proresolving lipid mediator LXA 4, and LXA 4 itself should be considered as a therapeutic for acute respiratory distress syndrome.

Background Despite advances in supportive care, moderate-severe acute respiratory distress syndrome is associated with high mortality rates, and novel therapies to treat this condition are needed. Compelling pre-clinical data from mouse, rat, sheep and ex vivo perfused human lung models support the use of human mesenchymal stem cells as a novel intravenous therapy for the early treatment of ARDS. Methods This article describes the study design and challenges encountered during the implementation and phase 1 component of the START trial, a phase 1/2 trial of bone marrow-derived human MSCs for moderate-severe ARDS. A trial enrolling 69 subjects is planned. Results This report describes study design features that are unique to a phase 1 trial in critically ill subjects and the specific challenges of implementation of a cell-based therapy trial in the ICU. Conclusions Experience gained during the design and implementation of the START study will be useful to investigators planning future phase 1 clinical trials based in the ICU, as well as trials of cell-based therapy for other acute illnesses. Trial registration Clinical Trials Registration: NCT01775774 and NCT02097641. © 2014 Liu et al.; licensee Springer.