Search Results (553)

Background/Objectives: Embryo implantation is a highly regulated, multistep process requiring precise synchronization between a developmentally competent blastocyst and a receptive endometrium. Despite advances in reproductive medicine, implantation failure remains a major limiting factor in assisted reproductive technology (ART), particularly in cases of recurrent implantation failure (RIF). This review aims to summarize current knowledge on the molecular, cellular, and immunological mechanisms governing embryo–endometrial interaction and to evaluate contemporary strategies for optimizing implantation outcomes. Methods: This narrative review synthesizes the current literature on embryo implantation, including studies addressing uterine receptivity, etiological factors contributing to implantation failure, and emerging diagnostic and therapeutic approaches. The review integrates findings from molecular biology, clinical ART practices, and bioengineering-based models. Key areas include transcriptomic tools such as endometrial receptivity analysis, time-lapse imaging, artificial-intelligence-based embryo selection, and advanced in vitro models (e.g., microfluidic “womb-on-a-chip” systems and three-dimensional embryo–endometrial platforms). The literature was identified through major biomedical databases, following a structured but non-systematic approach. Results: Implantation success is dependent on a complex interplay of hormonal regulation, gene expression, immune modulation, and embryo quality. Disruption of uterine receptivity during the window of implantation is a critical contributor to infertility and RIF. Multiple factors—including genetic abnormalities, maternal age, lifestyle influences, immunological imbalance, uterine pathology, and chronic endometrial conditions—are implicated in implantation failure. Emerging technologies, such as AI-assisted embryo selection, transcriptomic profiling, and advanced in vitro implantation models, provide enhanced insight into implantation dynamics and offer potential for improved clinical outcomes. Conclusions: Advances in understanding embryo implantation and the development of innovative diagnostic and therapeutic technologies hold significant promise for improving reproductive success. However, further research, validation, and standardization are required before these approaches can be fully integrated into routine clinical practice. A more personalized and mechanism-based approach to implantation may ultimately enhance ART outcomes and reduce the burden of infertility. Full article

As Chinese manufacturing enterprises became more deeply integrated into global value chains, they faced increasingly restrictive U.S. export controls that limited their access to foreign technologies and critical intermediate inputs. Using firm-level data from Chinese listed manufacturing firms over 2006–2015 and the U.S. Entity List, this paper systematically examines the impact of export controls on China’s export technology complexity and explores the underlying mechanisms. The study shows that U.S. export controls significantly reduce manufacturing enterprises’ export technological complexity. The negative effect is more pronounced among enterprises in eastern China, state-owned enterprises, large enterprises, and enterprises operating in high-technology industries. Mechanism analysis shows that export controls suppress the growth of export technological complexity by increasing transaction costs and disrupting supply chains. Although the disruption of innovation chains may stimulate firms’ indigenous innovation, the overall effect of export controls remains negative. Our findings provide theoretical and practical insights for China’s strategies to respond to export controls, enhance the technology complexity of manufacturing exports, and strengthen its position in the global value chain. Full article

Firms increasingly face disruptions arising from technological change, supply chain instability, and uncertain policy environments, making enterprise resilience a key concern for both managers and policymakers. As firms operate within interconnected digital and supply chain systems, this study examines whether digital intelligence policy and supply chain coordination policy are jointly associated with enterprise resilience. Using a firm-year panel of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2024, we investigate AI innovation pilot zones and supply chain innovation pilots, with a particular focus on whether their coexistence is associated with a complementarity premium. The results suggest that both AI innovation pilot zones and supply chain innovation pilots are positively associated with enterprise resilience. The interaction between the two policies is significantly positive, providing evidence consistent with an additional joint-policy association beyond their separate associations. Dynamic analysis supports the parallel trend assumption and suggests that the estimated complementarity association becomes stronger over time. Mechanism tests provide channel-consistent evidence that joint policy exposure is associated with higher values of the digital-transformation indicator, stronger supply chain coordination, and greater resource reconfiguration. Heterogeneity analysis further suggests that this association is more pronounced among non-state-owned firms, firms in supply-chain-dependent industries, firms located in cities with stronger digital infrastructure, and firms with higher risk exposure. These findings highlight the potential importance of coordinated policy design for supporting firm-level resilience. Full article

Amid the increasingly stringent technological blockade imposed by some Western developed countries, and against the backdrop of rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and emerging Industry 5.0 paradigms, enhancing indigenous innovation capabilities and overcoming key technological bottlenecks has become an urgent imperative. Drawing on path dependence and path creation theories, as well as the Stimulus–Organism–Response (SOR) framework, this study develops an analytical framework to examine how technological blockade accelerates indigenous innovation in latecomer countries. Using a multiple-case study design, the proposed framework is examined through two strategic technology domains: generative artificial intelligence and new energy vehicles (NEVs). Data were collected through technical documentation, publicly available interview materials involving key stakeholders, and third-party reports. The findings indicate that technological blockade accelerates the transition from imitative to indigenous innovation in latecomer countries. Further mechanism analysis reveals that the external pressure formation mechanism, endogenous motivation activation mechanism, and innovation behavior transformation mechanism jointly constitute a pressure-driven transformation mechanism. Specifically, technological blockade, as an external stimulus, disrupts the existing path-dependent state of imitative innovation; the blockade-induced pressure activates the endogenous motivation of innovation actors, which is further reinforced under national foundational conditions and policy guidance; and under the combined influence of external pressure and endogenous motivation, innovation actors’ behaviors undergo significant changes, gradually shifting from reliance on external technologies and resources toward indigenous R&D and breakthroughs in key technologies. This process ultimately drives the transition from imitative to indigenous innovation, marking a shift from path dependence to path creation. By demonstrating how technological blockade accelerates the transition of the innovation trajectory, this study offers theoretical insights for latecomer countries facing external technological constraints and provides policy implications for building resilient innovation ecosystems and enhancing technological autonomy in the era of AI-driven industrial transformation. Full article

This narrative review examines the historical evolution, current applications, and major challenges of machine learning (ML) in education, positioning ML as a transformative yet deeply contested force in contemporary teaching and learning. Tracing developments from early computer-assisted instruction and intelligent tutoring systems to contemporary deep learning, natural language processing, and generative AI, the review shows how these technologies have expanded education’s capacity for personalization, prediction, automation, content generation, and large-scale data-driven decision-making. It synthesizes evidence across key domains, including student performance prediction, early warning systems, adaptive learning, intelligent tutoring, automated assessment, learning analytics, curriculum design, and inclusive education. In addition, the review critically highlights persistent limitations and risks, particularly algorithmic bias, data privacy concerns, limited interpretability, uneven pedagogical value, infrastructure constraints, and the disruption of conventional assessment by generative AI. Rather than treating ML as a purely technical innovation, the paper argues that its educational significance depends on how responsibly it is designed, implemented, and governed. The review concludes that the future of ML in education will be shaped not only by advances in computational methods but also by ethical judgment, pedagogical alignment, and institutional commitment to equity, transparency, and human-centered educational practice across diverse learning contexts worldwide. Full article

Climate change, soil degradation, and the disruption of global nutrient cycles are placing unprecedented pressure on agricultural systems and global food security. These challenges are increasingly recognized as central concerns for planetary health, as agriculture simultaneously depends upon and alters critical Earth system processes. Microbe-based agricultural inputs (including biofertilizers, biostimulants, and biocontrol agents) have been widely promoted as climate-smart solutions capable of enhancing productivity, resilience, and environmental sustainability. However, despite rapid scientific and commercial advances, their performance in the field remains highly variable and strongly context-dependent. This review critically examines the evidence base underpinning climate-smart microbial solutions, with a particular focus on their capacity to confer climate resilience across diverse crops, soils, and climatic conditions. We synthesize current knowledge on the functional roles of beneficial microorganisms, including extremophilic and stress-adapted taxa, while highlighting key biological, technological, ecological, and socio-economic constraints that limit predictability and scalability. Special attention is given to evidence gaps related to long-term field performance, ecosystem-level impacts, and the trade-offs associated with widespread microbial deployment. We further assess recent innovations such as synthetic microbial consortia, microbiome engineering, advanced formulations, and data-driven decision tools. Then we highlight how these new technologies may address context dependency but still need validation under real-world conditions. Finally, we discuss policy, regulatory, and capacity-building considerations required to responsibly integrate microbial solutions into climate-smart agriculture frameworks. Overall, this review argues that microbial inoculants should be viewed not as universal inputs but as context-specific tools whose successful deployment depends on robust evidence, ecological sensitivity, and system-level integration. Advancing microbial solutions for agriculture will therefore require aligning technological innovation with broader planetary health objectives, ensuring that efforts to enhance agricultural productivity also support long-term ecosystem stability and resilience. Full article

In sociotechnical transitions, landscape disruptions, such as climate change, exert pressure on incumbent regimes and can trigger the emergence of niche innovations. Renewable energy communities represent one such innovation, increasingly central to European energy policy. This paper applies a critical realist method to examine the energy community niche in Portugal, drawing on a content analysis of the scientific literature and recent Horizon Europe research projects involving Portuguese actors. The analysis reveals three distinct research pathways structuring knowledge production in this niche—technology-driven, socio-governance-oriented, and infrastructure-focused. It also reveals a systemic R&D bias: incumbent actors occupy dual positions—simultaneously at the regime level and within the niche—playing central roles in learning and network formation while exhibiting limited capacity to translate innovation into institutional change and large-scale diffusion. Building on these critical realist findings, we then apply the Strategic Niche Management framework as an evaluative lens, revealing structural misalignments between components of the sociotechnical system. Together, these two analytical steps offer a novel reading of the Portuguese energy community niche, contributing to the theoretical debate on incumbent roles in transition dynamics and identifying concrete shortcomings for future R&D agenda-setting. Full article

Increasing external uncertainty, supply disruptions, and market volatility have made resilience enhancement increasingly important for sustainable agricultural supply chains. While existing studies mainly examine agricultural supply chain resilience from macro or operational perspectives, limited attention has been paid to how firms’ strategic AI investment reshapes organizational resilience under external shocks. Using panel data on Chinese agricultural-related listed firms from 2010 to 2024, this study examines whether and how strategic AI investment enhances supply chain resilience. Empirical results show that strategic AI investment significantly improves both dimensions of supply chain resilience, namely resistance capacity and recovery capacity. Mechanism analyses indicate that this effect mainly operates through supply diversification, technological innovation, and information transparency. Further analyses reveal heterogeneous effects across supply chain positions, ownership structures, and regional digital development environments. In addition, compatibility analyses show that strategic AI investment not only strengthens supply chain resilience but also improves operational efficiency, R&D investment intensity, and financial stability. Overall, this study highlights strategic AI investment as an important organizational capability for strengthening agricultural supply chain resilience under increasing external uncertainty. Full article

The accelerating convergence of geopolitical volatility, technological disruption, environmental stress, and societal transformation has rendered traditional strategic management frameworks insufficient. Organizations now operate in environments defined not only by disruptions with existential implications but by wickedness—conditions in which problems are ambiguous, stakeholders disagree, and solutions reshape the challenge itself. Building on the premise that strategy itself is a wicked problem, this article advances a central claim: organizational resilience is best understood as an architectural capability largely grounded in humanity-based identity. Unlike organizational structure, mission, or even current strategy, each of which may be transient in turbulent environments, organizational identity, which is a construct that derives from individuals and humanity, provides an enduring basis for harmonizing the organization and its environment. Utilizing the lens of “humanity”—in its two dimensions of humankind and humaneness—we synthesize research on wicked problems, organizational identity, dynamic capabilities, modular design, alliances and smart power, and hybrid intelligence. We then propose an integrative model linking humanity-driven identity to resilience through three vectors—Inspirational Transformative Ambition, Innovative Value Networks, and Hybrid Intelligence Ecosystems—operationalized via a recently developed diagnostic tool. Finally, we offer corroborative evidence for the “Business of Humanity” logic, arguing that aligning humankind (opportunity across the full market spectrum) with humaneness (values-based evaluation) strengthens resilience by expanding opportunity sets while enhancing legitimacy, trust, and stakeholder alignment. Full article

Technology enterprises are leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to foster disruptive innovation, aiming to seize first-mover advantages in technological catch-up and strategic transformation. Most existing studies adopt static research methods such as empirical analysis to explore corporate disruptive innovation from the dimensions of technology, market, organization and value creation. However, few scholars dynamically investigate the impacts of multi-stakeholder interactions on the disruptive innovation of AI enterprises from the perspective of innovation ecosystem by employing evolutionary game theory. Against this backdrop, this paper adopts the evolutionary game approach to explore how the bounded rational strategic interactions among AI enterprises, incumbent enterprises and governments in the innovation ecosystem affect the evolutionary dynamics of AI enterprises’ disruptive innovation behaviors. It also examines under what conditions of benefits, costs, risks and policies the system can evolve toward a stable strategic equilibrium. The findings reveal that the sustainable advancement of disruptive innovation by AI enterprises is not merely driven by the unilateral willingness of individual firms. Instead, it is jointly shaped by the innovation investment of AI enterprises, cooperative responses of incumbent enterprises, and regulatory and supportive policies of governments, as well as comprehensively influenced by base benefits, R&D investment pressure, technology spillover effects and niche competition risks. This research provides theoretical references for improving the innovation governance and policy support system of the AI industry. Future research can further analyze the influence of strategic interactions among more heterogeneous stakeholders on the evolutionary process of disruptive innovation of AI enterprises. Full article

Sustainable regional competitiveness and civil protection have traditionally been treated as distinct fields: the former rooted in regional economics and innovation studies, and the latter in disaster management, public safety, and risk governance. However, increasing climate-related hazards, technological disruptions, geopolitical instability, and the fragility of critical infrastructure demonstrate that competitiveness and resilience are deeply interconnected. This study presents a narrative literature review of publications from 2022 to 2025, integrating insights from evolutionary economic geography, institutional theory, sustainability studies, disaster risk reduction, spatial planning, and governance research. Building on this synthesis, we propose a novel conceptual framework that links civil protection capacity to long-term regional competitiveness. The framework introduces a multi-pillar model encompassing risk governance, institutional quality, critical infrastructure resilience, spatial planning systems, human capital dynamics and demographic stability, social trust and regional legitimacy, innovation driven by risk-management technologies, and multi-level governance coordination. Our analysis highlights how asymmetric threats are characterized by unpredictability, non-linearity, and uneven territorial impacts—interact with structural vulnerabilities, amplifying regional disparities and challenging conventional competitiveness strategies. Importantly, the framework demonstrates that robust institutions and integrated civil protection mechanisms can transform exposure to shocks into opportunities for adaptation, innovation, and structural upgrading. By conceptualizing competitiveness as a dynamic, emergent property shaped by economic, social, and risk-management capacities, this study positions civil protection as a strategic, measurable, and foundational component of sustainable regional development. The framework provides a theoretical foundation for future empirical research, policy design, and multi-criteria assessments aimed at fostering resilience-oriented competitiveness. Full article

The COVID-19 pandemic brought global tourism to a near standstill, rapidly shifting many destinations from overtourism to a temporary state of non-tourism due to lockdowns and border closures. As travel resumed between 2021 and 2022, ‘revenge tourism’ emerged, characterised by a surge in travel as people sought to compensate for lost experiences. This resurgence has reignited overtourism, a phenomenon marked by excessive tourist numbers and negative impacts on host communities, including environmental degradation, infrastructure strain and socio-cultural disruption. While overtourism has been extensively studied in the global North, its manifestations in the global South, particularly in South Africa, remain underexplored. This study addresses the existing gap by exploring the potential of digital technologies, namely, artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR) and social media platforms, as instruments for managing visitor flows and alleviating overtourism in selected hotspots throughout South Africa. Using a qualitative, literature-based design, this study evaluates the contextual relevance and multi-dimensional scalability of these technologies. The findings aim to advance discussions on overtourism and propose innovative, technology-driven strategies, as well as research opportunities tailored to the unique challenges of the global South. Full article

Food-grade microorganisms utilize core cofactors, such as nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) and its phosphate form (NADP), to mediate redox reactions and regulate energy metabolism homeostasis as well as biosynthesis of functional components. In metabolic engineering, perturbation of the NAD(P)⁺/NAD(P)H network may significantly disrupt intracellular redox homeostasis, leading to impaired strain growth and limited synthesis of targeted functional products. This review systematically examines the latest research progress in the field of food-grade microbial cofactor engineering, focusing on the key mechanisms and synergistic pathways of core strategies, such as metabolic flux optimization and cofactor regeneration systems, in maintaining cellular redox homeostasis and enhancing the biosynthesis of functional ingredients. Future research should focus on exploring the potential for integrating multi-omics approaches and intelligent control technologies, proposing innovative approaches to address the challenges of industrialized production, and providing theoretical support for food biomanufacturing. Full article

Complex environments, such as underground pipe galleries, subway tunnels, and bridge piles, seriously affect the construction of underground passages. Reducing the disruption of the surrounding environment and road traffic during the construction of underground passages in urban transportation hubs is very important for underground passages. Overcoming these difficulties is a problem that we constantly strive to solve. In this paper, we innovatively propose an open-shield construction method (OSM) without a support structure. It simplifies the construction process, is very adaptable to low soil cover depth and complex construction environments, and has minimal impact on traffic disruption during construction. We first analyze the main problems in the construction of urban underground passages and then elaborate on the OSM in detail. Then, an example of an actual project is used to explain the requirements for prefabricated pipe segments and the waterproof structure. Finally, the effect of applying this method is evaluated by using numerical simulation technology and actual monitoring data. This method provides practical engineering application references for the construction of urban underground passages. Full article

This study systematically examines the impacts of extreme temperatures on the digital economy development index and the underlying mechanisms based on panel data from 281 prefecture-level cities in China from 2012 to 2023. This study explicitly distinguishes the distinctive adaptive capacity of the digital economy in responding to climate risks. Through global and local spatial autocorrelation analysis, the study finds that both extreme temperatures and the digital economy exhibit significant spatial clustering. This study employs the spatial Durbin model (SDM) and effect decomposition and further incorporates the GS2SLS estimator alongside dual instrumental variables constructed from historical geographic characteristics to address endogeneity, thereby identifying the asymmetrical impacts of extreme heat and extreme cold on the digital economy with great rigor. Specifically, extreme heat fosters short-term local digital demand that is subsequently translated into long-term growth in IT human capital and infrastructure, thereby increasing the DEDI. However, its net spatial effect is inhibitory due to energy crowding out. Extreme cold, by contrast, primarily disrupts supply chains and intensifies energy consumption, with its impact largely confined to the local scope. Green technological innovation mitigates the impact of extreme heat on the digital economy through demand substitution, while, under extreme cold, it manifests as the physical protection of infrastructure. Meanwhile, an optimized industrial structure substantially reduces the economy’s dependence on supply chains, amplifying the promotional effect of extreme temperatures on the digital economy and reflecting the transformation capacity of regions under complex environmental conditions. Heterogeneity analysis demonstrates that the effects of extreme temperatures vary significantly across different urban agglomerations, economic zones, geographic regions and city types. This study not only extends the theoretical framework for the economic assessment of climate risks and spatial econometric analysis to the climate sensitivity of the digital economy but also provides empirical evidence for understanding the complex relationship between climate change and digital economy development and offers references for differentiated policies in a coordinated regional digital economy. Full article