The Tibetan Plateau is the highest and one of the most demanding environments ever inhabited by humans. We investigated the timing and mechanisms of its initial colonization at the Nwya Devu site, located nearly 4600 meters above sea level. This site, dating from 40,000 to 30,000 years ago, is the highest Paleolithic archaeological site yet identified globally. Nwya Devu has yielded an abundant blade tool assemblage, indicating hitherto-unknown capacities for the survival of modern humans who camped in this environment. This site deepens the history of the peopling of the “roof of the world” and the antiquity of human high-altitude occupations more generally.

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Abstract-With the application of semantic Web service and semantic Grid service, the similarity measure between services are more and more important in the processing of service matching. By formally defining the similarity of semantic services, useful information can be obtained about their similarity and compatibility. In this paper, we propose a concept similarity matching method based on semantic distance in service matching. Uses OWL-S to descript service, the algorithm computes semantic similarity of service in four macro steps. At last, we provide an experimental comparison of our method against traditional similarity measures, and prove empirically the benefits of our approach.

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Background:The PNPLA3 and TM6SF2 gene variants have been found to cause NAFLD with a favourable cardiovascular risk profile. Aims:To investigate the effects of the NAFLD risk alleles on the all-cause and causespecific mortality in 5581 Chinese adults. Methods:The genome-wide genotypes were detected using a genotyping array and serum lipoprotein profiles were examined using 1H NMR platform. Liver fat content (LFC) was measured using a quantitative ultrasound method. The vital status was determined using official registration data.Results: Genome-wide association analysis showed that a series of variants in PNPLA3 were associated with LFC, including rs738409 C>G variant (P = 8.6 × 10 −7 ). Further analyses validated the associations of TM6SF2 rs58542926 C>T and MBOAT7 rs641738 C>T variants with NAFLD. During 29 425.1 person-years of follow-up, the overall mortality was 816 per 100 000 person-years, where 299 deaths were attributable to cardiovascular disease and 85 to liver disease. The PNPLA3 rs738409 C>G variant was independently associated with increased liver-specific mortality (P for trend = 0.034) but reduced cardiovascular mortality (P for trend = 0.047).

The Qinling Mountains constitute a key climate barrier between southern and northern China. Our recent investigations revealed widely spread eolian deposits of Neogene age mantling the piedmont highlands of the intermountain basins within West Qinling. Micro-mammalian fossils dated a 150.2 m section (NL-VI) near Xihe for the late Miocene to Pliocene (~10-4 Ma). Soil micromorphology, grain-size and geochemical analysis consistently define typical loess-soil alternations for the upper (0-66 m) and lower (98-150.2 m) parts of the section, with the middle section (66-98 m) having been affected by episodic slope erosions. These results add important insights to the earlier studies about the widespread eolian deposition in northern China during the Miocene, prior to 8 Ma. They also suggest that the basic configuration of the ridges and inter-ridge basins of West Qinling has already formed by ~10 Ma. The well-preserved eolian deposits are unlikely to support intense substratum deformation and rapid uplift of West Qinling since the late Miocene. loess-soil sequence, Miocene-Pliocene, tectonic, the Qinling Mountains Citation:Ge J Y, Guo Z T. Neogene eolian deposits within the West Qinling Mountains: Climatic and tectonic implications.

Recent advances indicate that bone and energy metabolism are closely related. However, little direct evidence on causality has been provided in humans. We aimed to assess the association of three bone-related biomarkers-25 hydroxyvitamin D (25OHD), parathyroid hormone (PTH), and osteocalcin (OCN)-with several metabolic phenotypes and investigate any causal relevance to the associations using a Mendelian randomization (MR) study. Serum 25OHD, PTH, and total OCN were measured at baseline in 5169 eligible Chinese participants in Changfeng study. Partial correlation and bivariate GREML analysis were used to estimate phenotypic and genetic correlations, respectively. Multiple linear regression and logistic regression were used to assess linear associations. Genomewide association analysis (GWAS) was performed. Bidirectional two-sample MR analyses were conducted to examine causal relationships between OCN and body mass index (BMI), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), triglyceride (TG), high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), glycated hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c), and type 2 diabetes (T2DM), using our GWAS result of OCN and GWAS statistics from Biobank Japan project (BBJ) and the largest meta-analysis of T2DM GWAS in East Asian population. Circulating OCN was significantly associated with higher DBP and HDL-C and decreased TG, blood glucose level, insulin resistance, liver fat content, bone mineral density, BMI, and a favorable body fat distribution pattern. GWAS identified one novel serum PTH locus and two novel serum OCN loci, explaining 0.81% and 1.98% of variances of PTH and OCN levels, respectively. MR analysis suggested a causal effect of T2DM on lower circulating OCN concentration (causal effect: À0.03; À0.05 to À0.01; p = 0.006 for T2DM_BBJ and À0.03; À0.05 to À0.01; p = 0.001 for T2DM_EAS). These findings indicate that T2DM might impact bone remodeling and provide a resource for understanding complex relationships between osteocalcin and metabolic (and related) traits in humans.

Feature extraction is one of the challenging problems in fault diagnosis, and it has a direct bearing on the accuracy of fault diagnosis. Therefore, in this paper, a new method based on ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD), wavelet semi-soft threshold (WSST) signal reconstruction, and multi-scale entropy (MSE) is proposed. First, the EEMD method is applied to decompose the vibration signal into intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), and then, the high-frequency IMFs, which contain more noise information, are screened by the Pearson correlation coefficient. Then, the WSST method is applied for denoising the high-frequency part of the signal to reconstruct the signal. Secondly, the MSE method is applied for calculating the MSE values of the reconstructed signal, to construct an eigenvector with the complexity measure. Finally, the eigenvector is input to a support vector machine (SVM) to find the fault diagnosis results. The experimental results prove that the proposed method, with a better classification performance, can better solve the problem of the effective signal and noise mixed in high-frequency signals. Based on the proposed method, the fault types can be accurately identified with an average classification accuracy of 100%.Entropy 2020, 22, 290 2 of 28 functions (IMFs) by EMD [10]. Aiming at the shortcomings of the EMD, such as modal mixture and end effect, which affect the accuracy of signal decomposition [11], Wu et al. [12] improved the EMD method with auxiliary noise and proposed the ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) method.The EEMD method results in signal decomposition with anti-noise characteristics, reduces reconstruction errors, and improves the quality of IMFs by adding Gaussian white noise to the original signal. Therefore, the EEMD method is widely used in signal processing and fault diagnosis [13]. However, when the EEMD method is applied independently for decomposing signals and reducing noise, the information in the high-frequency components is also lost as some IMFs are discarded [14]. The WT method has a good performance on the suppression of random noise by having the properties of multi-scale, low entropy, and decorrelation [15]. Jumah et al. [16] proposed a method using wavelet transform and various thresholding techniques, which has a good effect on removing one-dimensional Gaussian white noise. However, there is no uniform standard for the operation of the wavelet threshold method, which has a greater impact on the final result. The wavelet hard threshold denoising method generates discontinuous points and loses some vital information [17]. The wavelet soft threshold denoising method causes distortion phenomena, such as edge blur effect [18].Although the wavelet threshold denoising method effectively removes noise from high-frequency signals, the effect is not ideal, and the useful signals still mix with noise signals. Nevertheless, the wavelet semi-soft threshold with the advantages of the hard and soft threshold can not only preserve the integrity of the signal but al...