De facto currency baskets of China and East Asian economies: The rising weights

We employ Bayesian method to estimate a time-varying coefficient version of the de facto currency basket model of Frankel and Wei (2007) for the RMB of China, using daily data from February 2005 to July 2011. We estimate jointly the implicit time-varying weights of all 11 currencies in the reference basket announced by the Chinese government. We find the dollar weight has been reduced and sometimes significantly smaller than one, but there is no evidence of systematic operation of a currency basket with discernable pattern of significant weights on other currencies. During specific periods, the reduced dollar weight has not been switched to other major international currencies, but to some East Asian currencies, which is hard to explain by trade importance to or trade competition with China. We examine currency baskets of these East Asian Economies, including major international currencies and the RMB in their baskets. We find an evident tendency of Malaysia and Singapore to increase the weights of RMB in their own currency baskets, and a steadily and significantly positive weight of RMB in the basket of Thailand. These evidences suggest that, the positive weights of some East Asian currencies in RMB currency basket during specific periods largely reflect the fact that these East Asia economies have been systematically placing greater weights on RMB under the new regime of RMB exchange rate.RMB currency basket; time-varying regressions; East Asia; China; US

A simple and natural interpretations of the DAMPE cosmic-ray electron/positron spectrum within two sigma deviations

The DArk Matter Particle Explorer (DAMPE) experiment has recently announced the first results for the measurement of total electron plus positron fluxes between 25 GeV and 4.6 TeV. A spectral break at about 0.9 TeV and a tentative peak excess around 1.4 TeV have been found. However, it is very difficult to reproduce both the peak signal and the smooth background including spectral break simultaneously. We point out that the numbers of events in the two energy ranges (bins) close to the 1.4 TeV excess have $1\sigma$ deficits. With the basic physics principles such as simplicity and naturalness, we consider the $-2\sigma$, $+2\sigma$, and $-1\sigma$ deviations due to statistical fluctuations for the 1229.3~GeV bin, 1411.4~GeV bin, and 1620.5~GeV bin. Interestingly, we show that all the DAMPE data can be explained consistently via both the continuous distributed pulsar and dark matter interpretations, which have $\chi^{2} \simeq 17.2$ and $\chi^{2} \simeq 13.9$ (for all the 38 points in DAMPE electron/positron spectrum with 3 of them revised), respectively. These results are different from the previous analyses by neglecting the 1.4 TeV excess. At the same time, we do a similar global fitting on the newly released CALET lepton data, which could also be interpreted by such configurations. Moreover, we present a $U(1)_D$ dark matter model with Breit-Wigner mechanism, which can provide the proper dark matter annihilation cross section and escape the CMB constraint. Furthermore, we suggest a few ways to test our proposal.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures, 5 tables. Figures and Bibs update

Association of copy number variations with chronic hepatitis B in Chinese population

With one third of the Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection population of the world, chronic Hepatitis B (CHB) has become a top burden in China. CHB is a lifelong infection with HBV which can cause serious health problems, like cirrhosis, liver cancer or even death. HBV infection is known to result in various clinical conditions, including asymptomatic HBV carriers to chronic hepatitis and primary hepatocellular carcinoma. Several studies have shown that host genetic susceptibility could be an important factor that determines these various outcomes of HBV infection. Many Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) and Copy Number Variations (CNVs) have been associated with genetic susceptibility for many diseases including the HBV infection. SNPs and CNVs of the host could determine the CHB outcomes and disease progression. In this project, we conducted SNP-based and copy number polymorphic region (CNPR) - based CNV analysis of the genotyping data generated from 2,689 CHB patients and 1,200 healthy controls in Chinese population by Illumina Human OmniExpress BeadChip and OmniZhonghua BeadChip. Based on the analysis results, we found 8 deletion CNPRs, as well as 3 duplication CNPRs were significantly changed between CHB patients and healthy controls. Moreover, there were nine genes revealed the copy number loss, including FGFR3 (p=1.49X10-7), FGR-3 (p=1.49X10-7), LETM1 (p=1.49X10-7), TACC3 (p=1.49X10-7), TMEM129 (p=1.49X10-7), PANK4 (p=4.55X10-4), PLCH2 (p=4.55X10-4), CED-6 (p=2.04X10-4), DIRC1 (p=2.04X10-4), as well as three genes revealed the copy number gain, including FLJ43080 (p=2.50X10-5), CSMD3 (p=6.288X10-5), MGAT4C (p=1.52X10-4) in CHB patients compared with healthy controls. It is important to understand the functions of these genes and the mechanisms through which these genes are associated with HBV infection and CHB development. Through the CNVs analysis, we provided potential therapeutic targets and novel diagnosis markers for HBV infection and CHB development

Dietary supplementation of L-carnitine relieved detrimental impacts of a high-fat diet in juvenile Trachinotus ovatus

In recent years, the dramatically high lipid level has been used in fish feeds, resulting in low survival rates of fish and huge economic losses. Based on these issues, a six-week feeding experiment was conducted to investigate whether diet supplements with L-carnitine can be used to relieve detrimental impacts on growth performance, hepatic lipid accumulation, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and non-specific immune status, as well as intestinal morphology of Trachinotus ovatus, fed on a high-fat diet. Three isonitrogenous diets were formulated to either include or exclude high-fat and L-carnitine (lipid positive (LP): 130 g kg−1 lipid, lipid negative (LN): 210 g kg−1 lipid, lipid negative with L-carnitine (LNC): 210 g kg−1 lipid with 0.6 g kg−1 L-carnitine). Results indicated that the growth performance and mid-intestine villi length of T. ovatus in the LN group were significantly lower than that of the LP group (p 0.05) and significantly higher levels in the LNC group (p 0.05). In conclusion, L-carnitine can relieve the detrimental impact on growth performance of T. ovatus exposed to a high-fat diet treatment by reducing hepatic lipid accumulation and improving intestinal morphology, anti-inflammatory and non-specific immune status, but could not mitigate oxidative pressure.publishedVersio

Bipolaronic blockade effect in quantum dots with negative charging energy

We investigate single-electron transport through quantum dots with negative charging energy induced by a polaronic energy shift. For weak dot-lead tunnel couplings, we demonstrate a bipolaronic blockade effect at low biases which suppresses the oscillating linear conductance, while the conductance resonances under large biases are enhanced. Novel conductance plateau develops when the coupling asymmetry is introduced, with its height and width tuned by the coupling strength and external magnetic field. It is further shown that the amplitude ratio of magnetic-split conductance peaks changes from 3 to 1for increasing coupling asymmetry. Though we demonstrate all these transport phenomena in the low-order single-electron tunneling regime, they are already strikingly different from the usual Coulomb blockade physics and are easy to observe experimentally.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure