Phylogenetic evidence reveals early Kra-Dai divergence and dispersal in the late Holocene.

Studying language evolution brings a crucial perspective to bear on questions of human prehistory. As the most linguistically diverse region on earth, East and Southeast Asia have witnessed extensive sociocultural and ethnic contacts among different language communities. Especially, the Kra-Dai language family exhibits tremendous socio-cultural importance in these regions. Due to limited historical accounts, however, there are several controversies on their linguistic relatedness, ambiguities regarding the divergence time, and uncertainties on the dispersal patterns. To address these issues, here we apply Bayesian phylogenetic methods to analyze the largest lexical dataset containing 646 cognate sets compiled for 100 Kra-Dai languages. Our dated phylogenetic tree showed their initial divergence occurring approximately 4000 years BP. Phylogeographic results supported the early Kra-Dai language dispersal from the Guangxi-Guangdong area of South China towards Mainland Southeast Asia. Coupled with genetic, archaeological, paleoecologic, and paleoclimatic data, we demonstrated that the Kra-Dai language diversification could have coincided with their demic diffusion and agricultural spread shaped by the global climate change in the late Holocene. The interdisciplinary alignments shed light on reconstructing the prehistory of Kra-Dai languages and provide an indispensable piece of the puzzle for further studying prehistoric human activities in East and Southeast Asia.

The Millet of the Matter: Archeobotanical Evidence for Farming Strategies of Western Han Dynasty Core Area Inhabitants.

Despite decades of investigation, consensus has yet to be reached on when and where wheat replaced millet as the primary crop in the core regions of early Imperial China. Previous studies have suggested that wheat cultivation likely became widespread prior to or during the Han Dynasty (202 BC-AD 220). Here, we tested this hypothesis by applying archeobotanical tools to plant remains found in five pottery model granaries (cang) entombed in a newly excavated late Western Han burial at the Longzaocun cemetery in the Guanzhong Basin. This analysis allowed us to explore the extent of wheat expansion and agricultural strategies in the heartland of early dynastic China. Macro- and micro-botanical evidence shows that the Longzaocun residents consumed two kinds of crops: foxtail and common millet. Combining these findings with previous studies, we argue that millet-based multi-crop farming dominated the regional agricultural system during the Western Han Dynasty (202 BC-AD 8) and analyze the political and cultural motivations for the Han people's usage on millet crops from the burial concepts and fiscal systems. Echoing previous studies, we argue that millets remained the most valuable subsistence food for inhabitants of the Loess Basins in the Han core, and that wheat was not cultivated on a large scale in this area during the Western Han Dynasty.

The Unmet Medical Demand among China's Urban Residents.

Our work aimed to build a reasonable proxy for unmet medical demands of China's urban residents. We combined health demand modeling and stochastic frontier analysis to produce a frontier medical demand function, which allowed us to disentangle unmet medical demands from the unobservable effects. We estimated unmet medical demands by using China's provincial dataset that covered 2005-2018. Our estimates showed that unmet medical demand at the national level was 12.6% in 2018, and regions with high medical prices confronted more unmet medical demands than regions with moderate or low medical prices during 2005-2018. Furthermore, medical prices and education were the main factors that affected unmet medical demand; therefore, policy making should pay more attention to reducing medical costs and promoting health education.

The effects of urbanization on household wastewater emissions in China: Efficient- and inefficient- emissions.

While considerable efforts have been made to address the relationship between urbanization and environmental issues, few of them focus on household emissions. Thus, this work aimed at evaluating the effect of urbanization on household wastewater emissions, and made a distinction between the efficient- and the inefficient-emissions. We compiled a China's provincial dataset over the period 2005-2017, and estimates indicated that a 1% rise in the urbanization was correlated with a 0.581 increase of efficient emissions, while inefficient emissions decreased by 7.606. As of 2017, the sample period end year, the inefficient emissions accounted for 10.5% of the total emissions of China as a whole, which was relatively large and could not be overlooked. Meanwhile, a back-of-the-envelope estimate revealed that urbanization had a negative impact on China's total emissions, with a marginal effect ranging from -0.226 to -1.354 over the sample period. The above findings, however, did not imply that urbanization would spontaneously reduce the inefficient- and total-emissions. Thus, the government in the process of urbanization should strengthen environmental education, municipal facilities, and others.

The effect of Se-deficient diet on gene expression of inflammatory cytokines in chicken brain.

Selenium (Se) plays an important role in the brain development, function, and degeneration, nutritional encephalomalacia is closely related with dietary Se in avian. However, there is little evidence on the relationship between inflammation and encephalomalacia in avian and the mechanism which Se regulates the inflammatory response in brain tissues remains to be unclear. The present paper describes the effects of Se-deficient granulated diet on one transcription factor-nuclear factor kappaB and four pro-inflammatory cytokines-tumor necrosis factor, cyclooxygenase2, inducible nitric oxide synthase and Prostaglandin E synthase mRNA expression in the chicken brain tissues associated encephalomalacia. One hundred male chickens (1 day old; Weiwei Co. Ltd., Harbin, China) were divided into two groups (50 chickens per group). The expression levels in the brain tissues (cerebral gray matter, cerebral white matter, marrowbrain, cerebellum, thalamus and brain stem) were determined by real-time PCR on days 15, 25, 35, 45, and 55, respectively. The results showed the productions of pro-inflammatory mediators were increased following Se-deficiency. These data indicate the correlations between nutritional encephalomalacia and inflammatory response and the activity of inflammatory response in chicken brain may be induced by Se-deficiency.