The purpose of this study is to develop a comprehensive understanding of young consumers' attitudes, perceptions and behavioural intentions towards the consumption of environmentally sustainable textile and apparel products. A total of 701 responses were collected from students attending large universities in the US, South Korea and China. An extended model of planned behaviour was developed and tested based on structural equation modeling approach. The results indicate that consumers' product knowledge, perceived consumer effectiveness and perceived personal relevance significantly affect young consumers' attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control, thereby affecting purchase intentions for environmentally sustainable textiles and apparel. The research findings will benefit both environmental and economic enhancement efforts among policymakers, educators and industry professionals, enabling them to formulate strategies to ensure better communication with consumers to promote desirable consumption behaviour.

Antiferromagnetic spintronics is an emerging research field which aims to utilize antiferromagnets as core elements in spintronic devices 1,2 . A central motivation toward this direction is that antiferromagnetic spin dynamics is expected to be much faster than ferromagnetic counterpart because antiferromagnets have higher resonance frequencies than ferromagnets 3 . Recenttheories indeed predicted faster dynamics of antiferromagnetic domain walls (DWs) than ferromagnetic DWs 4-6 . However, experimental investigations of antiferromagnetic spin dynamics have remained unexplored mainly because of the immunity of antiferromagnets to magnetic fields. Furthermore, this immunity makes field-driven antiferromagnetic DW motion impossible despite rich physics of field-driven DW dynamics as proven in ferromagnetic DW studies. Here we show that fast field-driven antiferromagnetic spin dynamics is realized in ferrimagnets at the angular momentum compensation point TA. Using rare-earth-3d-transition metal ferrimagnetic compounds where net magnetic moment is nonzero at TA, the field-driven DW mobility remarkably enhances up to 20 km s −1 T −1 . The collective coordinate approach generalized for ferrimagnets 7 and atomistic spin model simulations 6,8 show that this remarkable enhancement is a consequence of antiferromagnetic spin dynamics at TA. Our finding allows us to investigate the physics of antiferromagnetic spin dynamics and highlights the importance of tuning of the angular momentum compensation point of ferrimagnets, which could be a key towards ferrimagnetic spintronics.Encoding information using magnetic DW motion is essential for future magnetic memory devices, such as racetrack memories 9,10 . High-speed DW motion is a key prerequisite for making the racetrack feasible. However, velocity breakdown due to the angular precession of DW, referred to as the Walker breakdown 11 , generally limits the functional performance in ferromagnet-based DW devices.Recently, it was reported that the DW speed boosts up significantly in antiferromagnets due to the suppression of the angular precession 4-6 . However, the immunity of antiferromagnets to magnetic fields yields notorious difficulties in creating, manipulating, and detecting antiferromagnetic DWs, compared to ferromagnetic ones. One possibility to avoid these difficulties is offered by the synthetic

The development of high-efficiency solid-state excitonic photovoltaic solar cells compatible with solution processing techniques is a research area of intense interest, with the poor optical harvesting in the red and near-IR (NIR) portion of the solar spectrum a significant limitation to device performance. Herein we present a solid-state solar cell design, consisting of TiO 2 nanotube arrays vertically oriented from the FTOcoated glass substrate, sensitized with unsymmetrical squaraine dye (SQ-1) that absorbs in the red and NIR portion of solar spectrum, and which are uniformly infiltrated with p-type regioregular poly(3-hexylthiophene-2,5-diyl) (P3HT) that absorbs higher energy photons. Our solidstate solar cells exhibit broad, near-UV to NIR, spectral response with external quantum yields of up to 65%. Under UV filtered AM 1.5G of 90 mW/cm 2 intensity we achieve typical device photoconversion efficiencies of 3.2%, with champion device efficiencies of 3.8%.The best performing bulk heterojunction solar cells (η ∼ 6%) employ an optimized blend of a polymeric donor and a fullerene acceptor. 1,2 The fullerene acceptor absorbs very little light and is primarily used in blends to provide an efficient interface for exciton dissociation. Various efforts toward efficiency improvement in these devices are directed toward the development of low band gap polymers to absorb a broad swathe of the solar spectrum, 3-6 lowering the molecular energy levels of the semiconducting polymer to enhance the open circuit voltage of the organic solar cells, 1,7 and the control of the blended film morphology for enhanced exciton harvesting. [8][9][10][11][12] In the best performing solid-state dyesensitized solar cells (SS-DSSCs), η ∼ 5%, the only photon absorber is a dye, while the electron and hole transport functions are performed, respectively, by a disordered nanoparticulate TiO 2 network and a transparent small molecule spiro-OMeTAD. [13][14][15][16] To achieve higher efficiency devices, research efforts have focused on improved porefilling by the hole transporter, the use of higher mobility hole transporters and the synthesis of dyes with a broader and more-intense absorption spectrum.Red/NIR radiation (650-1000 nm) accounts for approximately 33% of the solar energy arriving at the surface of the Earth, while UV-visible radiation (350-650 nm) accounts for about 40%. Hence a key issue toward achieving higher efficiency organic solar cells is in the development of red and NIR absorbing molecules to utilize more of the solar spectrum. As an approach for efficiently utilizing visible to NIR solar radiation, herein we describe an inorganic-organic hybrid solar cell, see Figure 1a, where electron transporting TiO 2 nanotube arrays, sensitized with red and NIR light absorbing organic dye, are used in combination with hole transporting and visible light absorbing regioregular P3HT. [17][18][19] It should be noted that this low band gap organic dye should not block transmission of the high-energy photons of near-UV-visible range pa...

Many waxes including plant waxes and animal waxes were evaluated for the gelation ability toward soybean oil (SBO) and compared with hydrogenated vegetable oils, petroleum waxes and commercial non-edible gelling agents to understand factors affecting the gelation ability of a gelator. Sunflower wax (SW) showed the most promising results and all SW samples from three different suppliers could make a gel with concentrations as low as 0.5 wt%. Candelilla wax and rice bran wax also showed good gelation properties, which, however, varied with different suppliers. Gelation ability of a wax is significantly dependant on its purity and detailed composition. A wax ester with longer alkyl chains has significantly better gelation ability toward SBO than that with shorter alkyl chains indicating that the chain length of a component in a wax such as wax ester is an important factor for gelation ability. The SW-SBO organogel showed increased melting point with increased SW content, showing the melting point range from about 47 to 65°C with 0.5-10 wt% SW. The effects of cooling rate on crystal size and firmness of a gel were investigated. The dependence of firmness on cooling rate was so significant that the desired texture of an organogel could be achieved by controlling the cooling rate in addition to controlling the amount of gelling agent. This research reveals that a small amount of food grade plant waxes including SW may replace a large amount of the hardstock containing trans-fat or saturated fat.

No abstract

Terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) is a culture-independent method of obtaining a genetic fingerprint of the composition of a microbial community. Comparisons of the utility of different methods of (i) including peaks, (ii) computing the difference (or distance) between profiles, and (iii) performing statistical analysis were made by using replicated profiles of eubacterial communities. These samples included soil collected from three regions of the United States, soil fractions derived from three agronomic field treatments, soil samples taken from within one meter of each other in an alfalfa field, and replicate laboratory bioreactors. Cluster analysis by Ward's method and by the unweighted-pair group method using arithmetic averages (UPGMA) were compared. Ward's method was more effective at differentiating major groups within sets of profiles; UPGMA had a slightly reduced error rate in clustering of replicate profiles and was more sensitive to outliers. Most replicate profiles were clustered together when relative peak height or Hellingertransformed peak height was used, in contrast to raw peak height. Redundancy analysis was more effective than cluster analysis at detecting differences between similar samples. Redundancy analysis using Hellinger distance was more sensitive than that using Euclidean distance between relative peak height profiles. Analysis of Jaccard distance between profiles, which considers only the presence or absence of a terminal restriction fragment, was the most sensitive in redundancy analysis, and was equally sensitive in cluster analysis, if all profiles had cumulative peak heights greater than 10,000 fluorescence units. It is concluded that T-RFLP is a sensitive method of differentiating between microbial communities when the optimal statistical method is used for the situation at hand. It is recommended that hypothesis testing be performed by redundancy analysis of Hellinger-transformed data and that exploratory data analysis be performed by cluster analysis using Ward's method to find natural groups or by UPGMA to identify potential outliers. Analyses can also be based on Jaccard distance if all profiles have cumulative peak heights greater than 10,000 fluorescence units.

Highly ordered vertically oriented TiO(2) nanotube arrays fabricated by electrochemical anodization offer a large surface area architecture with precisely controllable nanoscale features. These nanotubes have shown remarkable properties in a variety of applications including, for example, their use as hydrogen sensors, in the photoelectrochemical generation of hydrogen, dye-sensitized and solid-state heterojunction solar cells, photocatalytic reduction of carbon dioxide into hydrocarbons, and as a novel drug delivery platform. Herein we consider the development of the various nanotube array synthesis techniques, different applications of the TiO(2) nanotube arrays, unresolved issues, and possible future research directions.

Dye-sensitized solar cells based on co-sensitization of organic dyes having complementary spectral absorption in the visible region resulted in a panchromatic response, which exhibited 86% incident monochromatic photon-to-current conversion efficiency in the visible region; the optimized cell gave a short circuit current density of 15.5 mA cm(-2), an open circuit voltage of 685 mV and a fill factor of 0.70 corresponding to an overall conversion efficiency of 7.43% under solar simulated light irradiation of 100 mW cm(-2).