How does the development of fintech affect financial efficiency? Evidence from China

The rapid development of fintech is transforming the global financial system. However, how does fintech impact financial efficiency? Based on the technology spillover theory, this study analysed the theoretical mechanism of fintech’s impact on financial efficiency and used the text mining method to construct a fintech level index for each province in China. Using interprovincial panel data from 2008 to 2018, the study empirically tested the relationship between fintech development and financial efficiency. The results show that technology spillover theory can adequately explain the impact of financial technology on financial efficiency and that there is a Ushaped nonlinear relationship between fintech development and financial efficiency. Further analysis shows that financial decentralisation moderates the marginal effect of fintech on financial efficiency. The effect of fintech on financial efficiency is more significant in regions with greater financial decentralisation. Therefore, at this stage, the study recommends that we actively embrace fintech, continuously deepen the integration of technology and finance, promote improvement in financial efficiency, and expand the positive role of local governments in technological innovation

Spectroscopy of broad absorption line quasars at 3≲z≲53\lesssim z \lesssim 5 -- I: evidence for quasar winds shaping broad/narrow emission line regions

We present an observational study of 22 broad absorption line quasars (BAL QSOs) at $3\lesssim z \lesssim5$ based on optical/near-IR spectroscopy, aiming to investigate quasar winds and their effects. The near-IR spectroscopy covers the \hb\ and/or \mgii\ broad emission lines (BELs) for these quasars, allowing us to estimate their central black hole (BH) masses in a robust way. We found that our BAL QSOs on average do not have a higher Eddington ratio than that from non-BAL QSOs matched in redshift and/or luminosity. In a subset consisting of seven strong BAL QSOs possessing sub-relativistic BAL outflows, we see the prevalence of large \civ-BEL blueshift ($\sim$3100 km s$^{-1}$) and weak \oiii\ emission (particularly the narrow \oiii$\lambda$5007 component), indicative of nuclear outflows affecting the narrow emission-line (NEL) regions. In another subset consisting of thirteen BAL QSOs having simultaneous observations of \mgii\ and \hb, we found a strong correlation between 3000~\AA\ and 5000~\AA\ monochromatic luminosity, consistent with that from non-BAL QSOs matched in redshift and luminosity; however, there is no correlation between \mgii\ and \hb\ in FWHM, likely due to nuclear outflows influencing the BEL regions. Our spectroscopic investigations offer strong evidence that the presence of nuclear outflows plays an important role in shaping the BEL/NEL regions of these quasars and possibly, regulating the growth of central supermassive black holes (SMBHs). We propose that BEL blueshift and BAL could be different manifestations of the same outflow system viewed at different sightlines and/or phases.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures. Accepted for publication in Ap

Biosynthesis of Putrescine from L-arginine Using Engineered Escherichia coli Whole Cells

Putrescine, a biogenic amine, is a highly valued compound in medicine, industry, and agriculture. In this study, we report a whole-cell biocatalytic method in Escherichia coli for the production of putrescine, using L-arginine as the substrate. L-arginine decarboxylase and agmatine ureohydrolase were co-expressed to produce putrescine from L-arginine. Ten plasmids with different copy numbers and ordering of genes were constructed to balance the expression of the two enzymes, and the best strain was pACYCDuet-speB-speA. The optimal concentration of L-arginine was determined to be 20 mM for this strain. The optimum pH of the biotransformation was 9.5, and the optimum temperature was 45 °C; under these conditions, the yield of putrescine was 98%. This whole-cell biocatalytic method appeared to have great potential for the production of putrescine.</jats:p

Composition and predictive functional analysis of bacterial communities inhabiting Chinese Cordyceps insight into conserved core microbiome.

BACKGROUND: Over the past few decades, most attention to Chinese Cordyceps-associated endogenous microorganism was focused on the fungal community that creates critical bioactive components. Bacterial community associated with Chinese Cordyceps has been previously described; however, most studies were only presenting direct comparisons in the Chinese Cordyceps and its microenvironments. In the current study, our objectives were to reveal the bacterial community structure composition and predict their function. RESULTS: We collected samples of Chinese Cordyceps from five sites located in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and used a high throughput sequencing method to compare Chinese Cordyceps-associated bacterial community composition and diversity quantitatively across sites. The results indicated that for the Chinese Cordyceps-associated bacterial community there is no single core microbiome, which was dominated by the both Proteobacteria and Actinobacteria. Predictive functional profiling suggested a location specific function pattern for Chinese Cordyceps and bacteria in the external mycelial cortices involved in the biosynthesis of active constituents. CONCLUSIONS: This study is firstly used high throughput sequencing method to compare the bacterial communities inhabiting Chinese Cordyceps and its microhabitat and to reveal composition functional capabilities of the bacteria, which will accelerate the study of the functions of bacterial communities in the micro-ecological system of Chinese Cordyceps

Regional Homogeneity: Towards Learning Transferable Universal Adversarial Perturbations Against Defenses

This paper focuses on learning transferable adversarial examples specifically against defense models (models to defense adversarial attacks). In particular, we show that a simple universal perturbation can fool a series of state-of-the-art defenses. Adversarial examples generated by existing attacks are generally hard to transfer to defense models. We observe the property of regional homogeneity in adversarial perturbations and suggest that the defenses are less robust to regionally homogeneous perturbations. Therefore, we propose an effective transforming paradigm and a customized gradient transformer module to transform existing perturbations into regionally homogeneous ones. Without explicitly forcing the perturbations to be universal, we observe that a well-trained gradient transformer module tends to output input-independent gradients (hence universal) benefiting from the under-fitting phenomenon. Thorough experiments demonstrate that our work significantly outperforms the prior art attacking algorithms (either image-dependent or universal ones) by an average improvement of 14.0% when attacking 9 defenses in the black-box setting. In addition to the cross-model transferability, we also verify that regionally homogeneous perturbations can well transfer across different vision tasks (attacking with the semantic segmentation task and testing on the object detection task).Comment: The code is available here: https://github.com/LiYingwei/Regional-Homogeneit

Correlation between serum esterase polymorphism and production performance of Yuxi fat-tailed sheep

The polymorphism of serum esterase (Es) of Henan Yuxi fat-tailed sheep was detected through polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE), and the correlation between serum esterase and productivity was analyzed. The research result indicated that there are two alleles on the Es loci of Henan Yuxi fat-tailed sheep: Es+ and Es-. The gene frequencies of Es+ and Es- were 0.55 and 0.45, respectively. Besides, the frequencies of three genotypes (Es++, Es+- and Es--) are 0.425, 0.250 and 0.325, respectively. The recommended height of Es++ genotype is significantly higher than that of Es+- genotype (P&lt;0.05), but the above two produce indistinctive difference in recommended height with Es-- genotype (P&gt;0.05). The chest circumference of Es++ genotype is significantly higher than that of Es-- (P&lt;0.05), but the above two produce indistinctive difference in chest circumference with Es+- genotype (P&gt;0.05). Es exerts no significant impact on other indexes (P&gt;0.05).Keywords: Henan Yuxi fat-tailed sheep, serum esterase (Es), polymorphismAfrican Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 12(9), pp. 986-98

Adaptive transmission in heterogeneous networks

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/166243/1/cmu2bf00018.pd

M2-like macrophages in the fibrotic liver protect mice against lethal insults through conferring apoptosis resistance to hepatocytes.

Acute injury in the setting of liver fibrosis is an interesting and still unsettled issue. Most recently, several prominent studies have indicated the favourable effects of liver fibrosis against acute insults. Nevertheless, the underlying mechanisms governing this hepatoprotection remain obscure. In the present study, we hypothesized that macrophages and their M1/M2 activation critically involve in the hepatoprotection conferred by liver fibrosis. Our findings demonstrated that liver fibrosis manifested a beneficial role for host survival and apoptosis resistance. Hepatoprotection in the fibrotic liver was tightly related to innate immune tolerance. Macrophages undertook crucial but divergent roles in homeostasis and fibrosis: depleting macrophages in control mice protected from acute insult; conversely, depleting macrophages in fibrotic liver weakened the hepatoprotection and gave rise to exacerbated liver injury upon insult. The contradictory effects of macrophages can be ascribed, to a great extent, to the heterogeneity in macrophage activation. Macrophages in fibrotic mice exhibited M2-preponderant activation, which was not the case in acutely injured liver. Adoptive transfer of M2-like macrophages conferred control mice conspicuous protection against insult. In vitro, M2-polarized macrophages protected hepatocytes against apoptosis. Together, M2-like macrophages in fibrotic liver exert the protective effects against lethal insults through conferring apoptosis resistance to hepatocytes

Otitis Media in Sperm-Associated Antigen 6 (Spag6)-Deficient Mice

Mammalian SPAG6 protein is localized to the axoneme central apparatus, and it is required for normal flagella and cilia motility. Recent studies demonstrated that the protein also regulates ciliogenesis and cilia polarity in the epithelial cells of brain ventricles and trachea. Motile cilia are also present in the epithelial cells of the middle ear and Eustachian tubes, where the ciliary system participates in the movement of serous fluid and mucus in the middle ear. Cilia defects are associated with otitis media (OM), presumably due to an inability to efficiently transport fluid, mucus and particles including microorganisms. We investigated the potential role of SPAG6 in the middle ear and Eustachian tubes by studying mice with a targeted mutation in theSpag6 gene. SPAG6 is expressed in the ciliated cells of middle ear epithelial cells. The orientation of the ciliary basal feet was random in the middle ear epithelial cells of Spag6-deficient mice, and there was an associated disrupted localization of the planar cell polarity (PCP) protein, FZD6. These features are associated with disordered cilia orientation, confirmed by scanning electron microscopy, which leads to uncoordinated cilia beating. The Spag6 mutant mice were also prone to develop OM. However, there were no significant differences in bacterial populations, epithelial goblet cell density, mucin expression and Eustachian tube angle between the mutant and wild-type mice, suggesting that OM was due to accumulation of fluid and mucus secondary to the ciliary dysfunction. Our studies demonstrate a role for Spag6 in the pathogenesis of OM in mice, possibly through its role in the regulation of cilia/basal body polarity through the PCP-dependent mechanisms in the middle ear and Eustachian tubes