Graphical AbstractA recent study reported that longevity in Caenorhabditits elegans can be inherited over several generations. This is probably achieved through the following epigenetic mechanism: inherited demethylated histones at some central loci, such as miRNA, transcription factors or signaling regulators affect the expression of certain genes leading to the longevity phenotype.

A terahertz frequency-modulated continuous wave imaging radar system is developed for high-resolution 3D imaging recently. Aiming at the problems of long data acquisition periods and large sample sizes for the developed imaging system, an algorithm based on compressed sensing is proposed for THz FMCW radar 3D imaging in this paper. Firstly, the FMCW radar signal model is built, and the conventional range migration algorithm is introduced for THz FMCW radar imaging. Then, compressed sensing is extended for THz FMCW radar 3D (...) imaging, and the Newton smooth L0-norm algorithm is presented for sparse measurement data reconstruction. Both simulation and measurement experiments demonstrate the feasibility of reconstructing THz images from measurements even at the sparsity rate of 20%. (shrink)

Proteolysis-targeting chimeric molecules represent an emerging technique that is receiving much attention for therapeutic intervention. The mechanism is based on the inhibition of protein function by hijacking a ubiquitin E3 ligase for protein degradation. The hetero-bifunctional PROTACs contain a ligand for recruiting an E3 ligase, a linker, and another ligand to bind with the protein targeted for degradation. Thus, PROTACs have profound potential to eliminate “undruggable” protein targets, such as transcription factors and non-enzymatic proteins, which are not limited to physiological (...) substrates of the ubiquitin-proteasome system. These findings indicate great prospects for PROTACs in the development of therapeutics. However, there are several limitations related to poor stability, biodistribution, and penetrability in vivo. This review provides an overview of the main PROTAC-based approaches that have been developed and discusses the promising opportunities and considerations for the application of this technology in therapies and drug discovery. The hetero-bifunctional PROTAC molecules contain a ligand for recruiting an E3 ligase linked with a ligand to bind with the protein targeted for degradation. Thus, PROTACs have profound potential to eliminate “undruggable” disease-causing proteins, which are not limited to physiological substrates of the ubiquitin-protease system, suggesting great prospects for therapeutic development. (shrink)

Since students' academic success is tied to their academic motivation and engagement, determining the predictors of these two variables seems critical. So, several inquiries have inspected the role of students' emotional and personal variables in their academic motivation and engagement. Nonetheless, the function of L2 enjoyment as an important emotional factor has remained elusive. Moreover, no inquiry has reviewed this issue neither systematically nor theoretically. To fill these lacunas, this review study aims to explain definitions, dimensions, and theoretical frameworks of (...) L2 enjoyment, student academic motivation, and student academic engagement. This study also intends to outline the positive consequences of L2 enjoyment for students' academic engagement and motivation. Relying on the theoretical and empirical evidence, the positive role of L2 enjoyment in raising EFL students' engagement and motivation was firmly affirmed. Finally, the implications of the findings are discussed. (shrink)

Given the centrality of learners’ individual differences in their academic achievement, a plethora of research has been done on various individual difference variables and their associations with learners’ increased achievement. Yet, the role of creativity and self-efficacy in EFL learners’ academic achievement has not been extensively studied. Further, no review inquiry has simultaneously probed into the consequences of these two individual difference variables for learners’ academic achievement. This study strives to fill this underappreciated gap by addressing the positive consequences of (...) creativity and self-efficacy for EFL learners’ academic achievement. The desirable consequences of creativity and self-efficacy beliefs were clarified using the available evidence. Finally, the conclusions and consequences of the findings are discussed. (shrink)

Although violence has always been in governments’ toolkit against civil society organizations (CSOs), there has been a global trend where governments set legal and logistical barriers to non-violently repress CSOs, especially INGOs (International Non-Governmental Organizations) since the mid-2000s. During this period, states present variations in CSO repression, ranging from moderate regulation to violent expulsion. Why do countries vary the repression? I argue that different levels of repression are based on governments’ perceived repression effectiveness in reducing INGOs’ threats. For better illustration, (...) I propose the effectiveness-perception framework, where repression effectiveness comes from the interaction between regime type and local trust in INGOs, while the perception of effectiveness is rooted in the domestic political structure. To conduct empirical tests, I create a latent variable, local trust, to measure threats of INGOs conditional on local communities. Relying on the sample from 1996 to 2012, I find that consolidated democracies and autocracies, compared to middling countries, are more likely to adjust the repression levels based on local trust in INGOs. I expect the finding to produce some strategy-relevant insights for INGOs’ survival in the current political environment. (shrink)

One of the popular theories in psychology that potentially contributes to the development of teaching and learning programs is brain dominance. According to this theory, the brain is categorized into two hemispheres based on personal traits and cognitive styles. It is interesting to investigate the correlation between brain dominance and second language learning. Therefore, this study set out to examine the correlation between brain dominance and the development of English reading, and speaking skills. For this purpose, the required data were (...) randomly gathered from 230 sophomore students in four different universities and were analyzed through a Pearson Chi-Square test, a Kruskal–Wallis test, and a Mann–Whitney test. Findings evidenced a significant correlation between brain dominance and reading skills. Three categories of brain dominance groups differ in reading skills in which moderate right-brain shows the highest score. Concerning the speaking skills, however, the results documented no significant correlation between brain dominance and speaking skills. Three groups of brain dominance were not significantly different in three aspects of speaking skills, including accuracy, fluency, and comprehensibility. The study concludes by proposing a range of implications and some avenues for further research. (shrink)

Is relational crafting always beneficial? Despite the increasing research on the positive outcomes of relational crafting, some evidence still indicates its dysfunctional consequences. The current study proposed a double-edged sword effect of relational crafting on job well-being, including work dynamics and emotional exhaustion, with an integrative perspective from the resource loss and resource acquisition perspectives based on the job demands-resources model and the conservation of resources theory. By conducting a two-stage questionnaire survey on 323 employees, the results demonstrate that: On (...) the one hand, relational crafting induces emotional exhaustion through increased work load; On the other hand, relational crafting also displays positive effect on increasing work dynamics and decreasing emotional exhaustion by fostering supervisor-subordinate guanxi. By analyzing the double-edged sword effect of subordinates’ relational crafting on job well-being from the two processes of resource loss and resource acquisition effects, a more complete influencing mechanism between relational crafting and job well-being is constructed, which improves the understanding of relational crafting, enriches the literature on proactive behavior and provides a more integrated theoretical basis for researchers and managers. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has influenced the tourism industry in various ways, including tourists’ travel motivations and intentions. Unlike previous studies that have focused on the dark side of the pandemic, this study adds the dimension of perceptions of positive information on COVID-19 to the Theory of Planned Behavior to explore their influence on travel motivation and intention. A total of 470 valid questionnaires were collected from a sample of Chinese university students. The results showed that the students’ perceptions of positive (...) COVID-19 information positively impacted their travel intentions through the variables of perceived behavioral control, travel attitudes, and travel motivations. Perceived behavioral control was the mediating variable that most explained the impact of perceptions of positive COVID-19 information on travel motivation and intention. This study contributes to the understanding of the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on tourism and of university students’ travel motivations and intentions. It also offers implications for the tourism industry to formulate relevant recovery strategies during and after the pandemic. (shrink)

BackgroundThe concept of career identity is integral to nursing practices and forms the basis of the nursing professions. Positive career identity is essential for providing high-quality care, optimizing patient outcomes, and enhancing the retention of health professionals. Therefore, there is a need to explore potential influencing variables, thereby developing effective interventions to improve career identity.ObjectivesTo investigate the relationship between moral distress, moral courage, and career identity, and explore the mediating role of moral courage between moral distress and career identity among (...) nurses.DesignA quantitative, cross-sectional study.MethodsA convenient sample of 800 nurses was recruited from two tertiary care hospitals between February and March 2022. Participants were assessed using the Moral Distress Scale-revised, Nurses’ Moral Courage Scale, and Nursing Career Identity Scale. This study was described in accordance with the STROBE statement.Ethical considerationResearch ethics approval was obtained from the researcher’s university and hospital where this study was conducted prior to data collection.FindingsMoral distress is negatively associated while moral courage is positively associated with career identity among nurses. Moral courage partially mediates the relationship between moral distress and career identity ( β = −0.230 to −0.163, p < 0.01).DiscussionThe findings reveal a relationship between moral distress, moral courage, and career identity among nurses.ConclusionBy paying attention to nurses’ moral distress and courage, healthcare providers can contribute to the development of effective interventions to improve career identity, and subsequently performance, among nurses. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered the first global “Infodemic” in the era of social media. Understanding how governments deal with the negative impacts of the infodemic has become a priority. This paper uses the theoretical framework of the Elaboration Likelihood Model to explore mechanisms for alleviating panic associated with the infodemic. It considers, in particular, the quality of information circulated on Government Social Media as the central route and local government trust as the peripheral route. An empirical study was conducted using (...) data from a focus group interview and a questionnaire survey collected within the first three weeks following the citywide lockdown of Wuhan, China. The results show that as: Quality of GSM information does not significantly reduce public panic, but local government trust significantly increases people’s pandemic prevention knowledge; Pandemic prevention knowledge is a critical mediator between information quality of GSM and public panic, as well as local government trust and public panic; and Information quality of GSM significantly increases people’s trust in local governments. This paper contributes to the literature on infodemic and government social media and provides implications for practice. (shrink)

Although the dominant view in the literature suggests that work-related anxiety experienced by employees affects their behavior and performance, little research has focused on how and when leaders’ workplace anxiety affects their followers’ job performance. Drawing from Emotions as Social Information theory, we propose dual mechanisms of cognitive interference and emotional exhaustion to explain the relationship between leader workplace anxiety and subordinate job performance. Specifically, cognitive interference is the mechanism that best explains the link between leader workplace anxiety and follower (...) task performance, while emotional exhaustion is the mechanism that best explains the link between leader workplace anxiety and follower contextual performance. Additionally, we examine how follower epistemic motivation serves as a boundary condition for the effect of leader anxiety on follower performance outcomes. Results from a 2-wave study of 228 leader-follower dyads in a high-tech company mostly supported our theoretical model. We conclude the study with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of our findings. (shrink)

Social desirability bias (SDB) is one of the main concerns in self-reported studies that measures explicit attitudes such as ethics research. Although SDB was introduced since the early 1950s, little effort has been made to understand the necessity of including an SDB scale in studies of sensitive topics such as ethics. The purpose of this paper was to (1) identify whether current ethics-related studies considered SDB when conducting their research and (2) ascertain whether SDB was a significant variable in such (...) studies. This investigation takes the form of a systematic review of articles published within the last 20 years in well-known business ethics journals (2000–2019). We found that (a) only 13.67% of ethics research measured SDB; (b) although the majority of the reviewed articles were from the West, researchers in Asia have also made significant progress in recent years in measuring SDB in their studies; (c) SDB was used mainly as a control variable and as such researchers preferred scales with fewer items; and (d) SDB was unavoidable even when using online surveys. Based on our findings, we attempt to provide an overview of SDB in ethics research and encourage ethics researchers who adopt self-reported surveys to include an SDB measurement in their studies to control SDB. (shrink)

Included with this letter, please find a list of corrections to the chapter "Lao Zi's Political Philosophy." The Jilin People's Publishing House did not show us the page proofs of the book Lao Zi Tong prior to publication, and as a consequence it contains a large number of typos. In the chapter "Lao Zi's Political Philosophy" alone there are 63 errors and deletions, some of which are serious and may make an accurate English translation difficult. For instance, "si hu" has (...) been typeset as "xiong [vicious beast] hu" throughout. "Si" means rhinoceros, and "si hu" thus means rhinoceros and tiger. Compare the passage "the rhinoceros finds no place to cast its horn; the tiger finds no place to put its claws." We hope that the translation can be checked against the list of corrections. (shrink)

The term "political philosophy" refers to the abstract, fundamental, and guiding principles and basic theorems for observing, handling, and dealing with political problems and political struggles. Its meaning is analogous to, say, "military philosophy." Naturally, these theorems are connected to and integrated with specific political viewpoints, just as "military philosophy" is connected to and integrated with specific military strategies and military tactics. This kind of integration does not hinder in any way our study of political philosophies in history, just as (...) it does not hinder our study of any particular "military philosophy.". (shrink)

The effects of psycholinguistic variables on reading development are critical to the evaluation of theories about the reading system. Although we know that the development of reading depends on both individual differences (endogenous) and item-level effects (exogenous), developmental research has focused mostly on average-level performance, ignoring individual differences. We investigated how the development of word recognition in Chinese children in both Chinese and English is affected by (a) item-level, exogenous effects (word frequency, radical consistency, and curricular grade level); (b) subject-level, (...) endogenous individual differences (orthographic awareness and phonological awareness); and (c) their interactive effect. We tested native Chinese (Putonghua)-speaking children (n = 763) in grades 1 to 6 with both Chinese character and English word identification (lexical) decision tasks. Our findings show that (a) there were effects of both word frequency and age of acquisition in both Chinese and English, but these item-level effects generally weakened with increasing age; (b) individual differences in phonological and orthographic awareness each contributed to successful performance; and (c) in Chinese, item-level effects were weaker for more proficient readers. We contend that our findings can be explained by theoretical models that incorporate cumulative learning as the basis for development of item-level effects in the reading system. (shrink)

John Swales’ 1986 article ‘Citation analysis and discourse analysis’ was the first to apply citation analysis to describe in-text citations in the field of discourse analysis. Howard White’s 2004 article ‘Citation analysis and discourse analysis revisited’ was written by an information scientist and primarily focused on citation analysis and discourse analysis. Here, we cast a wider net by conducting a bibliometric analysis of discourse analysis to sketch its scientific landscape between 1978 and 2018. Our findings show that discourse analysis has (...) emerged as a major, and increasingly distinctively sociological, contribution to the analysis of language in social life. It is evident that discourse analysts are increasingly interested in such topics as corpus linguistics, digital conversation analysis, discursive news values approach, membership categorization analysis, multimodal analysis and social media. It is a general trend that the United States is no longer the only dominating publication powerhouse in the field. Countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia and China are wielding a growing share of research output. (shrink)