Global warming is predicted to have adverse effects on crop productivity and will present an enormous challenge to sustainable development and food security, especially in dryland regions. Prior studies have identified that adapted crop cultivars could effectively act to offset the effects of...

In this study, a novel dual-nozzle ejector enhanced vapor-compression cycle (DEVC) for solar assisted air-source heat pump systems is proposed. In DEVC, the use of the dual-nozzle ejector for recovering the expansion losses is a very promising approach to improve the cycle performance. A...

Rain-fed maize production in semi-arid areas of the Loess Plateau in China is constrained by low temperatures and water limitations during the early growth stage. Traditionally, gravel mulching was an effective strategy to increase soil temperature and moisture and, therefore, crop production;...

This paper presents a novel method for the analysis of nonlinear text quality in Chinese language. Texts produced by university students in China were represented as scale-free networks (word adjacency model), from which typical network features such as the in/outdegree, clustering coefficient...