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The international engineering education community has reached a consensus regarding the need to enhance engineering students' awareness of and capability to provide sustainable services in their future careers. Based on a modified college impact model, this study analyzed the impacts of curricular emphasis, curricular instruction, and sustainability-related career self-efficacy on the sustainability-related career expectations of engineering students and investigated the moderating effects of gender on the relationships among the research variables. The results show that both curricular emphasis and curricular instruction have direct positive effects on the sustainability-related career expectations of engineering students; sustainability-related career self-efficacy plays a partial mediating role in this process; and gender significantly moderates the influence of curricular emphasis and curricular instruction on sustainability-related career expectations. The findings of this study provide empirical evidence that can be used by higher education institutions and engineering educators to enhance the belief of engineering students in their ability to solve sustainability-related issues in their future careers and promote the diversification of engineering education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of the evolution of regional typology of archaeological cultures is essential in understanding the trajectory of cultural evolution from a temporal and spatial perspective. In this paper, we focused on the Taihu Lake region, one of the six major regional typologies of Neolithic archaeological cultures in China. By utilizing archaeological site data from the Neolithic Era in this region, our study investigates the evolution of typologies in archaeological cultures at both regional and sub-regional scales. From a broad perspective, quantitative methods were used to explore the cultural evolution process in the Taihu Lake region. The degree of social integration and intercultural inheritance can be reflected through the size of the site and the superimposition of cultural layers. In addition, climate and environmental data were combined to investigate its driving factors. Moreover, GIS (Geographic Information System) analysis methods were used to cluster and partition the cultures in the Taihu Lake region. By identifying distinct groups of sites, it is possible to deconstruct and analyze the interior of the cultures to study their distribution patterns and to explore the exchanges and expansions within the cultures. By integrating both research approaches, our study provides a comprehensive analysis of the evolutionary characteristics of the regional typology of archaeological cultures within the Taihu Lake region. These findings contribute to the development of quantitative methods for studying the evolutionary trajectory of archaeological cultural systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: The cabbage flea beetle (CFB; Phyllotreta striolata) is a significant pest of cruciferous vegetables in the world. CFB causes severe destruction of Chinese flowering cabbage (CFC; Brassica campestris L. ssp. chinensis var. utilis), a key leafy vegetable in South China. In practice, the current control approach of CFB is to kill adults by spraying chemical insecticides, but the control efficacy is not sufficient because the adults have a strong tolerance to insecticides; on the other hand, the larvae living in soil are not influenced by pesticides. It is urgent to develop sustainable technology to control CFB. Here, we provide a new technology to control larvae and adults through seed pelletization and stem–leaf spraying using Metarhizium anisopliae. This study provides new insights into the application of mycoinsecticides and the IPM of flea beetle. (1) Background: The cabbage flea beetle (CFB; Phyllotreta striolata) seriously damages the production of Chinese flowering cabbage (CFC; Brassica campestris L. ssp. chinensis var. utilis), which is a key leafy vegetable in South China. A large number of chemical insecticides have been sprayed to control this pest; as a result, residues and resistances are becoming an issue. It is necessary to develop biocontrol technologies to address this issue. (2) Methods: Fungal strains were selected based on bioactivity against CFB, and CFC seed pelletization with fungal conidia was subject to evaluation of control efficacy against CFB. The effective mixture of fungus and chemical insecticide was determined based on safety and joint toxicology tests. (3) Results: The screening of 103 strains from 14 genera identified the Metarhizium anisopliae strain MaGX19S02 (Ma) as the one with the highest virulence. The LC50s of Ma to CFB adult and second instar larvae on day 9 post-treatment were 3.04 × 106 and 27.2 × 106 spores/mL, respectively. In the pot test, the pelletization of CFC seeds with Ma conidia (50/25/12.5 mg in 1 g seed with 4 g fillers) demonstrated significant CFB mortalities (45–82%) 20 days after the larvae were introduced. In the field test, the seed pelletization achieved 57–81% control efficacy 14 days after sowing. Furthermore, the combination of Ma with chlorfenapyr (Chl) demonstrated a synergistic effect against CFB; based on this result, we prepared the mixture formulation of 20% Ma-Chl wettable powder (WP). The assessment of the effects of 20% Ma-Chl WP (500× diluent) against CFB revealed 93.33% mortality in the pot test and 61.3% control efficacy in the field test on day 7 post-treatment. (4) Conclusions: The findings demonstrate the potential of Ma to control CFB in the field. Seed pelletization with Ma conidia effectively controlled CFB larvae and protected CFC seedlings, wherein a mixture formulation of 20% Ma-Chl WP had substantial efficacy in controlling CFB adults. Our research provides new methods for CFB biocontrol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water is a precious resource of paramount importance on Earth, playing a critical role in the evolution of life [[1]]. This emerging ISVG technology for water purification fits within the scope of the Special Issue entitled "Advanced Materials for Energy Conversion and Water Sustainability", which holds the potential to enhance thermal utilisation efficiency, thereby playing a positive role in addressing real-world issues such as the energy crisis and water scarcity. Interfacial solar vapour generation (ISVG) systems effectively absorb and convert solar radiation into heat, concentrating the heat at the interface where evaporation takes place. [Extracted from the article]

Archaeological site text is the main carrier of archaeological data at present, which contains rich information. How to efficiently extract useful knowledge from the massive unstructured archaeological site texts is of great significance for the mining and reuse of archaeological information. According to the site information (such as name, location, cultural type, dynasty, etc.) recorded in the Chinese archaeological site text, this paper combines deep learning and natural language processing techniques to study the information extraction method for automatically obtaining the spatio-temporal information of sites. The initial construction of the corpus of Chinese archaeological site text is completed for the first time, and the corpus is input into the Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory with Conditional Random Fields (BiLSTM-CRF) entity recognition model and Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Units with Dual Attention (BiGRU-Dual Attention) relationship extraction model for training. The F1 values of BiLSTM-CRF model and BiGRU-Dual Attention model on the test set reach 87.87% and 88.05%, respectively. The study demonstrates that the information extraction method proposed in this paper is feasible for the Chinese archaeological site texts, which promotes the establishment of knowledge graphs in archaeology and provides new methods and ideas for the development of information mining technology in archaeology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploring a novel approach for the synthesis of oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) catalysts with inexpensive and high-activity is desirable. Herein, we report a bubble templating method to synthesize the graphene-like mesoporous carbon sheets with point defects as ORR/HER bifunctional electrocatalysts. The typical product shows excellent ORR performance including the positive onset potential (740 mV) and high diffusion-limiting current density (4.07 mA cm−2). Along with small Tafel slopes, the overpotential is determined to be about −453 and −378 mV at 10 mA cm−2 in both alkaline and acidic media, which suggests a good candidate for HER reaction as well. The superior catalytic activities are derived from the abundant point defects on the mesoporous carbon sheets surface, especially the existence of pyridinic and pyrrolic nitrogen species. This study may be an alternative route to prepare the novel functional materials for the applications of ORR and HER. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]