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As the pillar industry of China's national economy, the service industry has always experienced a lag in structural upgrading. As an important measure of China's institutional innovation, China's Free Trade Zone (FTZ) policy is of great significance for promoting the development of the service industry. Based on the panel data of 185 prefecture-level cities in China from 2010 to 2019, this paper empirically tests the impact of the FTZ policy on the upgrading of service industry structure by using the progressive difference-in-differences model. The results show that the FTZ policy can promote the upgrading of service industry structure, and the effect is enhanced with the extension of time. The heterogeneity test shows that the impact of the FTZ policy on the structural upgrading of the service industry is mainly reflected in promoting the development of the information service industry as well as the leasing and business service industry. The transmission mechanism test shows that the FTZ policy can promote the structural upgrading of the service industry by improving the level of trade facilitation and investment facilitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the end Ordovician mass extinction, brachiopod faunas were commonly of low diversity, generally rare in abundance, and restricted to shallow‐water environments in many places. The Cathaysiorthis fauna, first described from South East China, is the most diverse brachiopod fauna in the world succeeding the Hirnantia fauna, and has modified our previous views on the recovery of shelly benthos after the extinctions. Here, we report a newly‐discovered fauna with abundant Cathaysiorthis from the lower Zhangwan Formation (lower–middle Rhuddanian, lower Llandovery) in Qinling, Xichuan County, Henan Province, China. This fauna is slightly younger than that previously documented from South East China, and the evolution of Cathaysiorthis fauna, in terms of its composition, is discussed. The Qinling Cathaysiorthis fauna has a narrower bathymetric range (Benthic Assemblage Zone 3) than that of the fauna from South East China (BA 2–5) and occurred on the Qinling–Dabie Microplate located on the northwest margin of the South China Plate. The migration of the Cathaysiorthis fauna from the South China plate to Qinling–Dabie was achieved by larvae that used ambient ocean currents and possibly drifted from the Jiangnan Region of South East China to Qinling. The Qinling Cathaysiorthis fauna includes 13 species belonging to 12 genera. Two new species, Cathaysiorthis xichuanensis sp. nov. and Aegiria apta sp. nov. are established and described herein, and ten other species are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the development of new sequencing technology, the entire N6-methyl-adenosine (m(6)A) RNA methylome can now be unbiased profiled with methylated RNA immune-precipitation sequencing technique (MeRIP-Seq), making it possible to detect differential methylation states of RNA between two conditions, for example, between normal and cancerous tissue. However, as an affinity-based method, MeRIP-Seq has yet provided base-pair resolution; that is, a single methylation site determined from MeRIP-Seq data can in practice contain multiple RNA methylation residuals, some of which can be regulated by different enzymes and thus differentially methylated between two conditions. Since existing peak-based methods could not effectively differentiate multiple methylation residuals located within a single methylation site, we propose a hidden Markov model (HMM) based approach to address this issue. Specifically, the detected RNA methylation site is further divided into multiple adjacent small bins and then scanned with higher resolution using a hidden Markov model to model the dependency between spatially adjacent bins for improved accuracy. We tested the proposed algorithm on both simulated data and real data. Result suggests that the proposed algorithm clearly outperforms existing peak-based approach on simulated systems and detects differential methylation regions with higher statistical significance on real dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Air pollution can cause disease and has become a major global environmental problem. It is currently believed that air pollution may be related to the progression of SSNHL. As a rapidly developing city in recent years, Hefei has serious air pollution. In order to explore the correlation between meteorological variables and SSNHL admissions, we conducted this study. This study investigated the short-term associations between SSNHL patients admitted to the hospital and Hefei climatic variables. The daily data on SSNHL-related hospital admissions and meteorological variables containing mean temperature (T-mean; °C), diurnal temperature range (DTR; °C), atmospheric pressure (AP; Hp), and relative humidity (RH; %), from 2014 to 2021 (2558 days), were collected. A time-series analysis integrating distributed lag non-linear models and generalized linear models was used. PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library, and Web of Science databases were searched. Literature published up to August 2023 was reviewed to explore the potential impact mechanisms of meteorological factors on SSNHL. The mechanisms were determined in detail, focusing on wind speed, air pressure, temperature, humidity, and air pollutants. Using a median of 50.00% as a baseline, the effect of exceedingly low T-mean in the single-day hysteresis effect model began at a lag of 8 days (RR = 1.032, 95% CI: 1.001 ~ 1.064). High DTR affected the admission rate for SSNHL on lag 0 day. The significance of the effect was the greatest on that day (RR = 1.054, 95% CI: 1.007 ~ 1.104) and then gradually decreased. High and exceedingly high RH affected the admission rate SSNHL on lag 0 day, and these effects lasted for 8 and 7 days, respectively. There were significant associations between all grades of AP and SSNHL. This is the first study to assess the effect of meteorological variables on SSNHL-related admissions in China using a time-series approach. Long-term exposures to high DTR, RH values, low T-mean values, and all AP grades enhance the incidence of SSNHL in residents. Limiting exposure to extremes of ambient temperature and humidity may reduce the number of SSNHL-related hospital visits in the region. It is advisable to maintain a suitable living environment temperature and avoid extreme temperature fluctuations and high humidity. During periods of high air pollution, it is recommended to stay indoors and refrain from outdoor exercise., (© 2024. The Author(s).)