Financial performance of China's listed firms in presence of coronavirus: Evidence from corporate culture and corporate social responsibility.

Motivated from the shortage of the existing research studies on impacts of dangerously contagious diseases on firms' financial performance, this study sheds light on the impacts of Coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak on financial performance upon on the quarterly data of 126 Chinese listed firms across 16 industries. Overall, the Covid-19 outbreak reduced Chinese listed firms' financial performance proxied by the revenue growth rate, ROA, ROE, and asset turnover. This outbreak's negative effects on Chinese firms' profitability were much smaller than that on their revenue growth rates.

Responsible modelling: Unit testing for infectious disease epidemiology.

Infectious disease epidemiology is increasingly reliant on large-scale computation and inference. Models have guided health policy for epidemics including COVID-19 and Ebola and endemic diseases including malaria and tuberculosis. Yet a coding bug may bias results, yielding incorrect conclusions and actions causing avoidable harm.

Valorisation of agricultural biomass-ash with CO.

This work is part of a study of different types of plant-based biomass to elucidate their capacity for valorisation via a managed carbonation step involving gaseous carbon dioxide (CO). The perspectives for broader biomass waste valorisation was reviewed, followed by a proposed closed-loop process for the valorisation of wood in earlier works. The present work newly focusses on combining agricultural biomass with mineralised CO.

Offsetting anthropogenic carbon emissions from biomass waste and mineralised carbon dioxide.

The present work investigates biomass wastes and their ashes for re-use in combination with mineralised CO in cement-bound construction products. A range of biomass residues (e.g.

Benthic protists: the under-charted majority.

Marine protist diversity inventories have largely focused on planktonic environments, while benthic protists have received relatively little attention. We therefore hypothesize that current diversity surveys have only skimmed the surface of protist diversity in marine sediments, which may harbor greater diversity than planktonic environments. We tested this by analyzing sequences of the hypervariable V4 18S rRNA from benthic and planktonic protist communities sampled in European coastal regions.