Urban regeneration has emerged as a critical strategy for addressing housing shortages and spatial inefficiencies in rapidly urbanizing megacities. However, many urban regeneration approaches are market-driven and often prioritize economic growth over social equity, leading to persistent gaps in affordable housing delivery. This study investigates the institutional barriers to affordable housing provision in Shenzhen, China—a pioneer in market-oriented urban regeneration—through a neo-institutional economics (NIE) lens. Combining policy analysis and 26 semi-structured interviews with government officials, developers, and residents, the research identifies three interconnected institutional obstacles: (1) ambiguous property rights rooted in the rural-urban dual land system, which prolongs negotiation and approval processes; (2) high transaction costs arising from fragmented governance and bureaucratic complexities; and (3) misaligned incentives among stakeholders that prioritize commercial gains over public welfare. Empirical findings reveal that over 80% of urban village regeneration projects face delays exceeding one year due to tenure disputes, while 70% of developers spatially marginalize affordable housing to maximize profits. These dynamics form a self-reinforcing “institutional trap,” where path dependency on land-finance regimes and weak regulatory constraints perpetuate housing inequity. The study contributes to urban scholarship by adapting insights from New Institutional Economics into an integrative tripartite analytical lens (“institutional structure–transaction costs–behavioural choices”, STB) that traces cascading transaction costs across project stages and links them to actors’ strategic, normative and reputational behaviours in Shenzhen’s market-driven regeneration regime. It challenges the assumption that market efficiency aligns with social goals and underscores the need for institutional reforms to reconcile growth with equity. Policymakers must address structural contradictions, such as rigid land ownership regimes and decentralized governance, to break the low-equilibrium trap. The findings hold global relevance for megacities grappling with similar tensions between market-driven regeneration and inclusive development. ... Read more

Alcohol oxidases (AOxs) catalyze the aerobic oxidation of alcohols to the corresponding carbonyl products (aldehydes or ketones), producing only H₂O₂ as the byproduct. The majority of known AOxs, however, have a strong preference for small, primary alcohols, limiting their broad applicability, e.g., in the food industry. To broaden the product scope of AOxs, we performed structure-guided enzyme engineering of a methanol oxidase from Phanerochaete chrysosporium (PcAOx). The substrate preference was extended from methanol to a broad range of benzylic alcohols by modifying the substrate binding pocket. A mutant (PcAOx-EFMH) with four substitutions exhibited improved catalytic activity toward benzyl alcohols with increased conversion and k_cat toward the benzyl alcohol from 11.3 to 88.9% and from 0.5 to 2.6 s^-1, respectively. The molecular basis for the change of substrate selectivity was analyzed by molecular simulation. ... Read more

Although near-term quantum computing devices are still limited by the quantity and quality of qubits in the so-called NISQ era, quantum computational advantage has been experimentally demonstrated. Moreover, hybrid architectures of quantum and classical computing have become the main paradigm for exhibiting NISQ applications, where low-depth quantum circuits are repeatedly applied. In order to further scale up the problem size solvable by the NISQ devices, it is also possible to reduce the number of physical qubits by "cutting"the quantum circuit into different pieces. In this work, we experimentally demonstrated a circuit-cutting method for simulating quantum circuits involving many logical qubits, using only a few physical superconducting qubits. By exploiting the symmetry of linear-cluster states, we can estimate the effectiveness of circuit-cutting for simulating up to 33-qubit linear-cluster states, using at most 4 physical qubits for each subcircuit. Specifically, for the 12-qubit linear-cluster state, we found that the experimental fidelity bound can reach as much as 0.734, which is about 19% higher than a direct implementation on the same 12-qubit superconducting processor. Our results indicate that circuit-cutting represents a feasible approach of simulating quantum circuits using much fewer qubits, while achieving a much higher circuit fidelity. ... Read more