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Ionic Liquids (ILs) attracted extraordinary attention due to their versatility in different applications. Their low vapour pressure reduces the air pollution as compared to common volatile organic solvents, but this property is not sufficient to define them as green solvents. In fact, release of ILs from industrial processes into wastewaters may lead to pollute aquatic environments due to their high solubility and stability. Sustainability and efficiency of ILs are both fundamental requirements for their industrial applications which boost the knowledge of ILs toxicological and environmental properties to comply with the European Union regulation (REACH). Unfortunately toxicity and sustainability are wide terms being determined on different possible targets. Furthermore, reliable toxicity tests when available in the literature, are reported for a specific class of compounds. In this context a multivariate insight allowed to compact available toxicity data into 104 toxicity scores [1] representative of the most common aquatic living targets. The number of ILs resulting from the combination of cations and anions is estimated to be over a million, hence the ILs experimental space is so huge that it cannot be fully explored and requires a rational selection of highly informative experiments. The development of Quantitative Structure-Property Relationships (QSPRs) models implies the knowledge of structural descriptors for ILs. Unfortunately, experimentally determined physico-chemical properties in the case of ILs are very few, derived by different laboratories and scattered in the literature. To overcome this difficulty, we derived in silico cation and anion physico-chemical descriptors [2] by using the VolSurf+ approach. Such descriptors were tested in two QSPR models on ILs aquatic toxicity [2] and polarity [3], achieving good correlations and satisfactory predictions. Handling such a high number of descriptors may be difficult, especially for big ILs data sets. Consequently the descriptors were also compacted into few Principal Properties (PPs) [4] highly informative and suitable for multivariate experimental design. PPs can be used as descriptors in QSPR correlations to model both ILs biological activities [4,5] and physico-chemical properties [6,7] achieving reliable predictions and allowing an intelligent selection of further measurements in order to expand the explored experimental space. The work presented here moves a step forward for conjugating efficiency and sustainability of ILs, presently a major issue of the scientific community. References: [1] Paternò, A.; D Anna, F.; Musumarra, G.; Noto, R.; Scirè, S., RSC Adv., 2014, 4, 23985. [2] Paternò, A.; Bocci, G.; Goracci, L.; Musumarra, G.; Scirè, S., SAR QSAR Environ. Res., 2016, 27, 1. [3] Paternò, A; D Anna, F.; Fortuna, C. G.; Musumarra, G., Tetrahedron, 2016, 72, 3282. [4] Paternò, A.; Bocci, G.; Cruciani, G.; Fortuna, C. G.; Goracci, L.; Musumarra, G.; Scirè, S., SAR QSAR Environ. Res., 2016, 27, 221. [5] Paternò, A.; Scirè, S.; Musumarra, G., Toxicol. Res., 2016, 5, 1090. [6] Paternò, A.; Fiorenza, R.; Marullo, S.; Musumarra, G.; Scirè, S., RSC Adv., 2016, 6, 36085. [7] Paternò, A.; Goracci, L.; Scirè, S.; Musumarra, G., ChemistryOpen, 2017, doi:10.1002/open.201600119.

A wave of legislative efforts in the first half of this decade, at both the federal and state levels, has steered corporations to engage in corporate social responsibility. At the national level, Congress is increasingly calling upon the Securities and Exchange Commission to promulgate specialized disclosure rules. The most notable example is Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act, requiring publicly traded corporations to disclose their use of broadly defined "conflict minerals" in any products the corporations manufacture. At the local level, well over half the state legislatures have adopted benefit corporation statutes meant to encourage corporate directors to promote the public good.These two well-meaning phenomena appear congruent and their goals seem promising: superficially, the SEC's specialized disclosure rules can be characterized as federal benefit corporation rules. Closer examination, however, reveals that the reasoning bolstering the state benefit corporation statutes, aimed more at symbolism than substance, undermines the likely effectiveness of the federal specialized disclosure rules. Comparison of the two models indicates that the federal rules yield substantial costs but speech of little value, little change in corporate behavior, and, consequently, little advancement of the social cause the rules target. Econometric analysis of first-year filings under the SEC conflict minerals regulations supports this apprehension, suggesting that the benefits of the federal benefit corporation rules are more illusory than actual. By over-promising and under-delivering, these federal corporate social responsibility rules are, in fact, irresponsible.

Adam Taliaferro had it all: smarts, an easy-going personality, and incomparable athletic ability. None of that seemed to matter, however, on that fateful September day when his father was given startling news: Do not expect your son to walk. Ever. Since that numbing day, Taliaferro, the Penn State freshman cornerback who was paralyzed after he tackled an Ohio State running back, has defied the odds. Before he had spinal-fusion surgery, he made a vow to his mother: \u201cMom, I'm not going out like this.\u201d Three months later, he walked out of a Philadelphia hospital on crutches, dete

AbstractFertility responses to economic downturns differ among subpopulations. Whether the relationship between employment and fertility varies according to ethnic origin, and if so, how, are issues that have yet to be sufficiently acknowledged in empirical studies. It is well known that economic conditions affect childbearing, but little is known about how macro-level nonnationals' fertility was affected by the economic crisis. This study accounts for the effects by comparing the fertility responses of nonnationals with nationals (in terms of 'quantum' and 'tempo'), while assessing the role of compositional changes on the decline of nonnationals' fertility before, during and after the recession in Italy. It also determines whether and how responses to economic conditions differentially affected the fertility of nonnationals and nationals based on the stage of the recession. We built a regional-level panel dataset for the period 2006–2018 and estimated several ordinary least squares regression models with regional and calendar year fixed effects to control for unobserved regional and period characteristics. Results show that nonnationals' fertility responses were procyclical and more responsive to male than female unemployment. Fertility behaviours also responded to compositional effects, such as the increase in the stock of nonnational women coming from Eastern Europe and mixed marriages. The procyclical effect was stronger after 2009, primarily for nonnationals. Another important finding is that the greatest reduction in fertility was linked to age-specific unemployment among nonnational women aged 20–24 and 25–29. Finally, fertility responses of nationals were weaker independently of the observed unemployment measures.