Preface

We are so delighted to announce that 2021 2nd IYSF - Academic Symposium on New Energy and New Material (IYSF-NENM 2021) was successfully held during October 8-10, 2021 in Xi’an Shiyou University, China. The symposium is one of the parallel sessions of 2021 2nd International Youth Scientist Forum (IYSF 2021). It aimed to provide a platform for interdisciplinary cooperation and communication for young scholars to lighten academic atmosphere, encourage innovation, create cooperation opportunities and boost young scholars’ growth. With the forum based on the display of the frontiers of science, we invited well-known experts and scholars at home and abroad as well as the outstanding youth who work for science and technology to deliver academic reports. It is expected that the forum can provide a free academic atmosphere to encourage our distinguished guests to share their views, ignite new ways of thinking and harvest new ideas. About 80 participants from academic, high-education institutes and other organizations took part in the conference. The conference model was divided into two sessions, including oral presentations and keynote speeches. In the first part, some scholars, whose submissions were selected as the excellent papers, were given 15 minutes to perform their oral presentations one by one. Then in the second part, keynote speakers were each allocated 30-45 minutes to hold their speeches. We were very honored to have Prof. Tiantai Li, from Xi’an Shiyou University and Prof. Qing Jiang, from Jilin University as our Conference Chairman. List of Committee member are available in this pdf.

Scientific prizes and the extraordinary growth of scientific topics

Fast growing scientific topics have famously been key harbingers of the new frontiers of science, yet, large-scale analyses of their genesis and impact are rare. We investigated one possible factor connected with a topic’s extraordinary growth: scientific prizes. Our longitudinal analysis of nearly all recognized prizes worldwide and over 11,000 scientific topics from 19 disciplines indicates that topics associated with a scientific prize experience extraordinary growth in productivity, impact, and new entrants. Relative to matched non-prizewinning topics, prizewinning topics produce 40% more papers and 33% more citations, retain 55% more scientists, and gain 37 and 47% more new entrants and star scientists, respectively, in the first five-to-ten years after the prize. Funding do not account for a prizewinning topic’s growth. Rather, growth is positively related to the degree to which the prize is discipline-specific, conferred for recent research, or has prize money. These findings reveal new dynamics behind scientific innovation and investment.

Philosophical Reflection of the Concept of Borders in Modern Culturechinese Performing

Objective: philosophical reflection problems of the frontiers of science, knowledge and creativity in the modern intercultural integration; rationale for new interpretations and understanding of the concept "border" providing an integrative model for science and culture, which, in turn, implies the unacceptability of Orthodox approaches, and rigid demarcation between different spheres of cultural production. This explains the need to develop a "rational-reflexive culture" that meets the new demands of modern society.

Magnetic Metal Organic Framework Composites: Structurally Advanced Catalytic Materials for Organic Transformations

Since past two decades, metal organic frameworks (MOFs) are a rising star in modern material chemistry and engineering that have contributed immensely to advance the frontiers of science. Amalgamation of...

“Are we not Men?”: Reading the Human-Animal Interface in Science Fiction through John Berger’s “Why Look at Animals?”

The so-called animal turn in literature has fostered the evolution of animal studies, a discipline aimed at interrogating the ontological, ethical, and metaphysical implications of animal depictions. Animal studies deals with representation and agency in literature, and its insights have fundamental implications for understanding the conception and progression of human-animal interactions. Considering questions raised by animal studies in the context of literary depictions of animals in science fiction, this article threads John Berger’s characterization of the present as a time of radical marginalization of animals in his essay “Why Look at Animals?” through two highly influential science fiction texts: H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Applying Berger’s reasoning to these two novels raises issues of personhood, criteria for ontological demarcation, and the dynamics of power, providing an opportunity to clarify, modify, and refute a number of his finer claims. This process of refinement allows us to track conceptions of human-animal interactions through the literary landscape and explore their extrapolations into various speculative contexts, including the frontiers of science and post-apocalyptic worlds.

The Material Theory of Induction at the Frontiers of Science

According to John D. Norton's Material Theory of Induction, all reasonable inductive inferences are justified in virtue of background knowledge about local uniformities in nature. These local uniformities indicate that our samples are likely to be representative of our target population in our inductions. However, a variety of critics have noted that there are many circumstances in which induction seems to be reasonable, yet such background knowledge is apparently absent. I call such an absence of circumstances ‘the frontiers of science', where background scientific theories do not provide information about such local uniformities. I argue that the Material Theory of Induction can be reconciled with our intuitions in favour of these inductions. I adapt an attempted justification of induction in general, the Combinatoric Justification of Induction, into a more modest rationalisation at the less foundational level that the critics discuss. Subject to a number of conditions, we can extrapolate from large samples using our knowledge of facts about the minimum proportions of representative subsets of finite sets. I also discuss some of Norton's own criticisms of his theory and argue that he is overly pessimistic. I conclude that Norton's theory at least performs well at the frontiers of science.