Bioinspired Passive Tactile Sensors Enabled by Reversible Polarization of Conjugated Polymers.

Tactile perception plays a vital role for the human body and is also highly desired for smart prosthesis and advanced robots. Compared to active sensing devices, passive piezoelectric and triboelectric tactile sensors consume less power, but lack the capability to resolve static stimuli. Here, we address this issue by utilizing the unique polarization chemistry of conjugated polymers for the first time and propose a new type of bioinspired, passive, and bio-friendly tactile sensors for resolving both static and dynamic stimuli. Specifically, to emulate the polarization process of natural sensory cells, conjugated polymers (including poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(styrenesulfonate), polyaniline, or polypyrrole) are controllably polarized into two opposite states to create artificial potential differences. The controllable and reversible polarization process of the conjugated polymers is fully in situ characterized. Then, a micro-structured ionic electrolyte is employed to imitate the natural ion channels and to encode external touch stimulations into the variation in potential difference outputs. Compared with the currently existing tactile sensing devices, the developed tactile sensors feature distinct characteristics including fully organic composition, high sensitivity (up to 773 mV N-1), ultralow power consumption (nW), as well as superior bio-friendliness. As demonstrations, both single point tactile perception (surface texture perception and material property perception) and two-dimensional tactile recognitions (shape or profile perception) with high accuracy are successfully realized using self-defined machine learning algorithms. This tactile sensing concept innovation based on the polarization chemistry of conjugated polymers opens up a new path to create robotic tactile sensors and prosthetic electronic skins.

Research on the Influence Mechanism of Rational Consumers' Food Safety Supervision Satisfaction.

As emerging food safety incidents have gained widespread concerns, research on consumers' attitudes towards this issue is crucial to create effective solutions. To this end, in accordance with relevant data of consumers in 13 cities with subordinate districts, Jiangsu province, this paper divided different consumer groups by their experience so as to study their degree of satisfaction towards food safety and corresponding influencing factors. According to the descriptive statistics and the building of the cumulative logistic regression model, the results therefrom showed that consumers with direct or indirect experience have separate attitudes towards food safety which cannot be changed by changing consumers' personal characteristics. Moreover, the two groups are divided in their demands in food production and consumption along with exceptions on policy implementation, etc. Finally, suggestions to improve consumers' satisfaction are given in at the end of the paper.

Market Returns, External Pressure, and Safe Pesticide Practice-Moderation Role of Information Acquisition.

The main objective of this study is to examine how market returns and external pressure influence farmers' standardized pesticide application and to investigate the moderating role of information acquisition. Data were collected from 986 farmers following a multi-stage sampling method from five major agricultural provinces in China. A hierarchical regression analysis was performed to test the hypothesis. The results show that market returns and information acquisition of pesticide application had a significant and positive influence on standardized pesticide application. Also, interaction effects were found between acquisition of policy information and market returns, and also between acquisition of pesticide application information and external pressure. The policy implication is that the improvement of market returns of safe agricultural products is a potential way to improve farmers' pesticide usage behaviors. Policy information and pesticide application information should be widely provided to farmers in order to facilitate the transition to standardized pesticide application.

Determinants of Breeding Farmers' Safe Use of Veterinary Drugs: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis.

As food safety has attracted the widespread attention of society, the quality safety of agricultural products has become an important part of food safety and also confronts multiple challenges. In fact, the safe use of veterinary drugs in the production process has become one of important guarantees for the quality safety of agricultural products. It's of great significance to regulate the breeding farmers' safe use of veterinary drugs and to create a safe and healthy production environment for agricultural products. A field survey of individual and large-scale swine breeding farmers in four typical provinces including Henan, Shandong, Jiangxi and Guizhou generated 397 questionnaires. This field survey conducted the internal and external classification of breeding farmers' safe use of veterinary drugs and defined the breeding farmers' safe use of veterinary drugs in the light of dosage, type and standardized operation of veterinary drugs. Based on Lewin's behavior theory, the survey used the structural equation modeling method to systematically examine the generation path of breeding farmers' safe use of veterinary drugs. The comprehensive analysis reveals that breeding farmers' knowledge about veterinary drugs, the attitudes toward the government supervision and the market environment of breeding activities all exert some effects on breeding farmers' use of veterinary drugs. Some suggestions and countermeasures for breeding farmers' safe use of veterinary drugs are provided as follows: First, more efforts should be pumped into publicity and instruction so that breeding farmers can have a better understanding of veterinary drugs. Second, preferential policies should be formulated to encourage the breeding farmers' participation in the industrial organizations of swine breeding farmers, and advocate the industrial organizations' active provision of different technical trainings. Third, the communication and cooperation platform should be created among breeding farmers, slaughter and processing plants and supermarkets, the poultry insurance market should be regulated, and the insurance purchase process should be improved. Fourth, when more subsidies for harm-free and environment-friendly veterinary drugs are provided, more serious punishments should be imposed on the unsafe use of veterinary drugs to offer policy support for the breeding farmers' standardized use of veterinary drugs.

Perceived Risk, Expected Benefits and Pig Farmers' Behaviors of Veterinary Drug Usage.

To guarantee the pork quality and safety and the steady development of the pig-breeding industry in China, it is important to control veterinary drugs usage in the pig farming sector. In order to develop an effective intervention that control veterinary drug usage, it is important to perform an in-depth analysis of those factors that can affect the standardized use of veterinary drugs in the pig-breeding process. In this paper, hierarchical regression analysis is used to examine how perceived risk, expected benefits, and self-efficacy influence on the standardized use of veterinary drugs. Data were collected using a multi-stage sampling method from four provinces in China. The results show that expected benefit and self-efficacy have positive impacts on the standardized use of veterinary drugs. Self-efficacy significantly moderated the positive relationships between expected benefits and the negative relationships between perceived risk and standardized use of veterinary drugs.