The retail landscape is transforming at an unprecedented speed and scale, thereby driving an unparalleled growth in last-mile delivery. The already rapidly growing online sales have been further fueled by the coronavirus pandemic. However, the share of online sales varies greatly among different retail sectors. In grocery retail, the share of online sales is still relatively low even though it is

OBJECTIVE: The aim of the study was to investigate the associations of total sleep time (TST) and occupational stress based on the Brief Job Stress Questionnaire (BJSQ) with cholesterol levels in an occupational cohort of Japanese office workers. METHODS: The present study is a secondary analysis of a subset of participants from a randomized controlled trial. Participants were 179 employees from 5

Sepsis is a life-threatening complication of infection that is characterised by a dysregulated inflammatory state and disturbed hemostasis. Platelets are the main regulators of hemostasis, and they also respond to inflammation. The human pathogen Streptococcus pyogenes can cause local infection that may progress to sepsis. There are more than 200 different serotypes of S. pyogenes defined accordin

Understanding the interactions of climate-vegetation and human-vegetation has been a critical issue and increasingly attracting attention from scientific community in the field of global change research. This study investigated the heterogeneous impacts of climate change and anthropogenic activities on vegetation change by applying the trend analysis and Geodetector approach. The spatial and tempo

Water resources in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA region) face over-exploitation and over-pollution due to population growth, climate change and the lack of advanced water governance approaches. These challenges become more serious in transboundary river basins and may lead to conflict between riparian countries. The main objective of this paper is to assess water resources and needs at th

More than 1 in 7 people in Europe live in a household whose income is below the national poverty line, but more than 30% of people consider themselves to live in poverty. This study provides evidence on the causal relationship between education and various dimensions of poverty. I construct a novel database comprising compulsory schooling reforms in 32 European countries and use them as instrument

Low-molecular-weight (MW) polyols are organic osmolytes influencing water activity. We have investigated the effects of polyol molecules (glycerol and sorbitol) on the optical and triplet excitation dynamics of light-harvesting complex 2 (LH2) from Rhodobacter (Rba.) sphaeroides in buffer-detergent solutions. The resonance Raman spectroscopy demonstrated that, on increasing glycerol and sorbitol v

To make well-informed decisions on the implementation of solar energy on roofs within the urban environment, a new method was developed and described that could support such decision-making. This method takes both the mutual shading and shading from external objects into account. The method consists of the following six steps: 1) construction of the scene, 2) performance of annual solar irradiatio

The reversible solid oxide cell (RSOC) is an attractive technology to mutually convert power and chemicals at elevated temperatures. However, its development has been hindered mainly due to the absence of a highly active and durable fuel electrode. Here, we report a phase-transformed CoFe-Sr3Fe1.25Mo0.75O7−δ (CoFe-SFM) fuel electrode consisting of CoFe nanoparticles and Ruddlesden-Popper-layered S

Background: Accumulating evidence suggests that prenatal chemical exposure triggers epigenetic modifications that could influence health outcomes later in life. In this study, we investigated whether DNA methylation (DNAm) levels at the glutamate ionotropic receptor NMDA type subunit 2B (GRIN2B) gene underlies the association between prenatal exposure to an endocrine disrupting chemical (EDC), bis

Proper irrigation scheduling and agricultural water management require a precise estimation of crop water requirement. In practice, reference evapotranspiration (ETo) is firstly estimated, and used further to calculate the evapotranspiration of each crop. In this study, two new coupled models were developed for estimating daily ETo. Two optimization algorithms, the shuffled frog-leaping algorithm

This study analyses the influence of environmental and individual conditions on the quality and the speed of entrepreneurial re-entries in emerging economies after a business failure. We propose a conceptual framework supported by the institutional economic theory to study the influence of environmental conditions; and human and social capital to study the influence of individuals’ skills, experie