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Changing energy consumption behavior is a promising strategy to enhance household energy efficiency and to reduce carbon emission. Understanding the role of psychological and demographic factors in the context of energy-conservation behaviors is critical to promote energy-saving behaviors in buildings. This study first proposes a theoretical framework built on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). Based on the collected survey data from 207 families (553 residents) in three communities in Xi’an, a typical city in northwest China, the research examines how three standard TPB predictors, namely attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control, as well as their interactive effects and three socio-demographic factors (i.e., house ownership, education and household income) influence building occupants’ energy-saving intention at home. Through structural equation modeling and keyword analysis, this study reveals that two interaction terms, namely attitude and subjective norms, as well as attitude and perceived behavior control, significantly influence building occupants’ energy-saving intention. Furthermore, this study implies that household income may positively associate with occupants’ energy-saving intention. The model in this study would be conducive to architects and property managers to mitigate severe building energy overuse problem in design and operation stages. Based on a qualitative analysis, the study then discusses the limitations of the study and further research direction. The results of this study would be conducive to building designers and operators to develop customized architectural or informatic interventions and to mitigate the severe energy overuse problem in the residential sector in northwest China.

Fatigue testing of pre‐pitted 2024‐T3 aluminium alloy specimens is performed in laboratory air at 22 °C and 40% RH to characterize the effect of pitting corrosion on fatigue life. Specimens, pre‐corroded in a 0.5 M NaCl solution from 48 to 384 h, have fatigue lives that are reduced by more than one order of magnitude after 384 h pre‐corrosion as compared to those of uncorroded specimens. The reduction in fatigue life is interpreted in terms of the influence of the time of exposure to the corrosive environment or pit size. The crack‐nucleating pit sizes, ranging from 20 to 70 μm, are determined from post‐fracture examinations by scanning electron microscopy. Fatigue lives are estimated using a fracture mechanics approach and are shown to be in good agreement with the actual data. A probabilistic analysis shows that the distribution of fatigue life is strongly correlated to the distribution in nucleating pit size.

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Studies have shown cell鄄 free microRNA (miRNA) circulating in the serum and plasma with specific expression in cancer, indicating the potential of using miRNAs as biomarkers for cancer diagnosis and therapy. This study was to investigate whether plasma miRNA鄄 21 (miR鄄 21) can be used as a biomarker for the early detection of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and to explore its association with clinicopathologic features and sensitivity to platinum鄄 based chemotherapy. We used real鄄 time RT鄄 PCR to investigate the expression of miR鄄 21 in the plasma of 63 NSCLC patients and 30 healthy controls and correlated the findings with early diagnosis, pathologic parameters, and treatment. Thirty鄄 five patients (stages IIIB and IV) were evaluable for chemotherapeutic responses: 11 had partial response (PR); 24 had stable and progressive disease (SD+ PD). Plasma miR鄄 21 was significantly higher in NSCLC patients than in age鄄 and sex鄄 matched controls (P < 0.001). miR鄄 21 was related to TNM stage (P < 0.001), but not related to age, sex, smoking status, histological classification, lymph node status, and metastasis (all P > 0.05). This marker yielded a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve area of 0.775 (95% CI: 0.681 -0.868) with 76.2% sensitivity and 70.0% specificity. Importantly, miR鄄 21 plasma levels in PR samples were several folds lower than that in SD plus PD samples (P = 0.049), and were close to that in healthy controls (P = 0.130). Plasma miR鄄 21 can serve as a circulating tumor biomarker for the early diagnosis of NSCLC and is related to the sensitivity to platinum鄄 base chemotherapy.

The electronic structure of solvated hydroxide complexes ((OH) -H 2 O) n , n ) 1-3, is studied in detail using density functional theory (DFT), MP2, and Born-Oppenheimer-Molecular Dynamics (BOMD) approaches. Several nonlocal functionals of the GGA and LAP families are employed, special attention is paid to the reliability of the LAP functionals in predicting structure, energetics, and proton transfer barriers. It is found that most of these give reasonable energetics of the quite strong hydrogen bonding in hydroxide anions (within a difference of about 2-15% from the experimental solvation enthalpies), provided that basis sets with both polarization and diffuse functions are employed and the basis set superposition error is taken care of. The performance of the various methods for the geometry of the hydroxide complexes is not so uniform, especially for the hydrogen bond distances and the shape of the complex with three water ligands. These differences are reflected also in the calculated vibrational spectra, particularly concerning the vibrations involving the hydrogen bonds. For O 2 H 3 -, the potential energy surface associated with the central proton degrees of freedom is very flat, which leads to an intriguing proton dynamics. The BOMD simulation shows that the proton population profile is rather similar for BP and PP functionals, while the dynamical proton-transfer counting autocorrelation function, is, on the other hand, very sensitive to the choice of functional.

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