While genetic relatedness, usually manifested as segments identical by descent (IBD), is ubiquitous in modern large biobanks, current IBD detection methods are not efficient at such a scale. Here, we describe an efficient method, RaPID, for detecting IBD segments in a panel with phased haplotypes. RaPID achieves a time and space complexity linear to the input size and the number of reported IBDs. With simulation, we showed that RaPID is orders of magnitude faster than existing method while offering competitive power and accuracy. In UK Biobank, RaPID identified 3,335,807 IBDs with a lenght ≥ 10 cM among 223,507 male X chromosomes in 11 min. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s13059-019-1754-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether there are dialectal and gender related differences in nasalance of main Mandarin vowels and three sentences in 400 Chinese normal adults. The mean nasalance score difference for dialect and gender was significant (p < .001) in all speech materials. For different dialects, the average nasalance scores show that Chongqing > Beijing > Shanghai > Guangzhou for the nasal sentence, oro-nasal sentence, /a/, /i/ and /u/. In addition, the average nasalance scores of females were higher than those of males for all speech materials in all dialects. The clinical significance of this study can be helpful in making nasalance clinical decisions for Chinese people with cleft palate, hearing disorders and dysarthria with resonance disorders. It also shows the theoretical and socio-cultural features for linguists considering dialects and gender.

With more and more destinations relying on repeat travelers, the inclination of tourists to revisit some destinations has become a significant topic of study. Therefore, the reasons for travelers’ revisits have been addressed in many research studies. These studies have determined several factors of the revisit inclination, such as satisfaction, destination image, and perceived quality. However, in most of the previous studies about the relationships among the destination image and tourists’ satisfaction, as well as their behavioral intentions to the destination, the moderating variables were not considered. Consequently, we analyzed the moderator effects of certain characteristics of different travel arrangements on the theoretical relationship among the destination image, tourists’ satisfaction, and their behavioral intentions to the destination. This article first identifies the similarities and differences among these two types of Chinese outbound travelers in terms of their demographic and trip characteristics. It then confirms that these two types of travelers differ in terms of the relationships among perceived destination images, satisfaction level, and future behavioral intentions using an invariance test of structural model. According to the multiple group cause-and-effect analysis, the results show that travel arrangement can largely affect either the relations between destination image and tourists’ satisfaction or their behavioral intentions. Moreover, the relationship between either destination image and tourists’ satisfaction or their behavioral intentions is generally stronger for independent visitors. Finally, the influences are discussed from both theoretical and practical perspective.

Large-scale, industrialized farming has contributed significantly to the increased global food supply to feed the fast-growing world population over the past few decades, but it also comes with severe threats to the environment. In particular, the excessive application of chemical fertilizer has led to large emissions of reactive nitrogen compounds into the atmosphere, where they become significant components of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 ) air pollution. Intercropping has been considered as a sustainable agricultural practice that can reduce the environmental impacts of agriculture, but its potential benefits beyond the farm scale have rarely been examined. Here we develop a new parameterization scheme for belowground mutualistic interactions between intercropped crops in the DeNitificaiton-DeComposition biogeochemical model, which is then used to simulate and quantify the benefits of nationwide adoption of maize-soybean systems in China in terms of gains in crop production, decreases in fertilizer consumption, and reductions in ammonia (NH 3 ) emission. We further examine how such a decline in NH 3 emission could lessen the downwind formation of PM 2.5 using the GEOS-Chem chemical transport model. We show that annual mean inorganic PM 2.5 concentrations can be reduced by up to 1.5 μg m -3 with the nationwide adoption of maize-soybean intercropping, with a corresponding annual net economic benefit of US$67 billion, of which US$13 billion arises from saved health costs from reduced air pollution. This study demonstrates the economic and environmental values of intercropping systems in dually promoting food security and environmental health, which can serve as a basis for policy consideration as governments and stakeholders explore more sustainable farming options.

Macau, the world’s largest casino hub with the largest gambling revenues, has received increasing attention as a research focus. Macau attracts more and more Chinese outbound tourists each year due to its gambling industry monopoly in Greater China. Macau is positioning itself as a ‘world center of tourism and leisure’ and has set out plans to become a broader-based tourist destination with economic diversification. Thus, an understanding of people’s varied motivations plays an important role in the current status of an environment with a moderate diversification of economic development. The objective of this study is to classify the outbound mainland Chinese tourists in Macau into more homogeneous subgroups on the basis of their travel motivations. Thirteen motivation items are extracted into four factors (namely knowledge and culture, relaxation, entertainment and gambling, and prestige) through exploratory factor analysis. Three distinct market segments are identified—freedom seekers, multi-purpose seekers, and fun and special interest in gambling seekers—based on a cluster analysis using k-means methodology. This study also presents the socio-demographic and trip characteristic differences among these three segments.