Can Agricultural Cooperatives Promote Chinese Farmers' Adoption of Green Technologies?

Green technologies are important for achieving green and high-quality agricultural development. The Chinese government has issued various policies to explicitly encourage the adoption of green technologies. However, incentives for Chinese farmers to adopt green technologies remain insufficient. This study examines whether participation in agricultural cooperatives can help break the barriers to Chinese farmers' adoption of green technologies. It also examines the potential mechanisms by which cooperatives can mitigate the lack of incentives for farmers to adopt agricultural green technologies. Using data from a study on farmers in four Chinese provinces, we found that cooperative participation significantly increases farmers' adoption behavior for both green technologies with effective market incentives (e.g., commercial organic fertilizer technologies) and those without such incentives (e.g., water-saving irrigation technologies).

Optical fiber bio-sensor for phospholipase using liquid crystal.

A cost-effective and label-free optical fiber sensor was proposed to detect phospholipase A2 (PLA2) in nM concentration. The sensor is made of an alkoxysilane-modified side-polished fiber (SPF) coated with 4'-pentyl-4-cyanobiphenyl (5CB) and self-assembled phospholipid (L-DLPC). It is found that the relative transmission optical power (RTOP) of the fiber sensor decreases due to the 5CB realignment and redistribution induced by the PLA2 hydrolysis of L-DLPC. The response-time at 5 dB RTOP variation exhibits an exponential dependence on PLA2 concentration, allowing us to detect the PLA2 by the 5 dB-response time. This detection method can reduce the detection time. Compare with the traditional copper-grid sensor, the proposed novel fiber sensor has a lower detection limit (<1 nM). Furthermore, the sensor has good repeat-ability and specificity.The sensor's RTOP variation for PLA2 detection at 1 nM is ~21 times higher than that for five other enzymes (trypsin, amylase, thrombin, glucose oxidase, pepsin) at 1000 nM and lipase at 50 nM. This confirms the sensor's excellent PLA2 specificity. The fiber sensor provides a potential way to be incorporated into micro-flow chips to quantitatively detect biological molecules in a real-time and online manner.

Graphene-based tunable Imbert-Fedorov shifts and orbital angular momentum sidebands for reflected vortex beams in the terahertz region.

Upon reflection, a light beam embedded with m-order orbital angular momentum (OAM) will undergo the Imbert-Fedorov (IF) shift, which induces OAM sidebands. The energies of the neighboring {-m-1} and {-m+1} sideband modes of the reflected beam are always equal. Controllable OAM sidebands are theoretically achieved by introducing a monolayer graphene in a three-layer structure composed of air, hexagonal boron nitride, and metal. By modulating the Fermi energy of graphene, the OAM-dependent IF shift can be tuned from positive to negative values, and the OAM sideband modes can be suppressed or enhanced, since the reflectivity for perpendicular and parallel polarizations vary with the Fermi energy. These findings provide an alternative method for the control of optical OAM in the terahertz region.