The Dayao Paleolithic site, located in Inner Mongolia on the eastern margin of China's vast northwestern drylands, was a lithic quarry-workshop utilized by Pleistocene human migrants through the region. Determining the age of this activity has previously yielded controversial results. Our magnetostratigraphic and OSL dating results suggest the two artifact-bearing paleosols are correlated with MIS 5 and 7, respectively. Correlating paleoclimatic data with marine δ18O records leads us to conclude that two sandy gravel layers containing many artifacts in the lower part of the Dayao sequence were formed during MIS 9 and 11, if not earlier. Our results reveal that the earliest human occupation at the Dayao site occurred before ca. 400 ka during a relatively warm and moist interglacial period, similar to several subsequent occupations, documenting the earliest and northernmost archaeological assemblage yet reported in China's arid northwest. We conclude that the northward and southward displacements of the East Asian summer monsoon rain belt during past interglacial-glacial cycles were responsible for the discontinuous human occupation detected at the Dayao site. The penetration of this precipitation regime into dryland ecologies via the Huanghe (Yellow River) Valley effectively created a corridor for hominin migration into China's arid northwest.

A multidisciplinary fieldwork and research project was recently begun at the Yangshang site (220–140 ka), a late Early Paleolithic locale in the western Chinese Loess Plateau. 1696 lithic artifacts and 337 faunal remains were recovered during the excavation. Sedimentological and paleoenvironmental investigations indicate the site preserves a relatively long and minimally disturbed archaeological sequence associated with paleoenvironmental changes during MIS 7–6. A detailed techno-typological analysis of Yangshang's lithic assemblages was undertaken to examine the influence of glacial cycles on late Middle Pleistocene hominin technological strategies in the western Chinese Loess Plateau. The results show that while the Yangshang site is dominated by quartz-based core/flake assemblages typical of most Early Paleolithic sites in North China, the lithic assemblages provide evidence that different provisioning systems existed during the penultimate glaciation. We argue that these shifts reflect changes in land use and mobility that were tied to climate change. Our results suggest that theoretically informed statistical analyses of so-called unchanging and crude lithic technology can yield meaningful evidence for behavioral shifts.

The third generation of the BeiDou navigation satellite system (BDS-3) is a global navigation system, and is expected to be in full operation by 2020. High-precision orbits are a precondition for BDS-3 to provide a highly accurate service, which needs a global tracking and monitoring capability for the operational satellites. However, it is difficult for BDS to construct global ground monitoring stations. Fortunately, Ka-band Inter-Satellite Link (ISL) antennae fitted to the BDS-3 satellites can be used to extend the visible arc of the Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) satellites and to enhance the ground stations for orbit determination. This paper analyses the ISL-enhanced orbit determination for eight BDS-3 satellites, using the data from ten Chinese domestic stations and 13 international Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Monitoring and Assessment System (iGMAS) overseas stations. The results show that the Three-Dimensional (3D) position Root Mean Square (RMS) error of the Overlapping Orbit Differences (OODs) is approximately 1 m when only ten regional stations are used. When the ISL measurements are added, the 3D position RMS error is decreased to 0·5 m, and the accuracy of the 24-hour orbit prediction can also be improved from 2 m to 0·7 m, which is even better than that of the orbits determined using globally distributed stations. It can be expected that with the subsequent launch of BDS-3 satellites and the increasing number of ISLs, the advantage of the ISL enhanced orbit determination will become more significant.

Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) attitude determination and positioning play an important role in many navigation applications. However, the two GNSS-based problems are usually treated separately. This ignores the constraint information of the GNSS antenna array and the accuracy is limited. To improve the performance of navigation, an integrated attitude and position determination method based on an affine constraint model is presented. In the first part, the GNSS array model and affine constrained attitude determination method are compared with the unconstrained methods. Then the integrated attitude and position determination method is presented. The performance of the proposed method is tested with a series of static data and dynamic experimental GNSS data. The results show that the proposed method can improve the success rate of ambiguity resolution to further improve the accuracy of attitude determination and relative positioning compared to the unconstrained methods.

Astronomy cloud computing environment is a cyber-Infrastructure for Astronomy Research initiated by Chinese Virtual Observatory (China-VO) under funding support from NDRC (National Development and Reform commission) and CAS (Chinese Academy of Sciences). Based on virtualization technology, astronomy cloud computing environment was designed and implemented by China-VO team. It consists of five distributed nodes across the mainland of China. Astronomer can get compuitng and storage resource in this cloud computing environment. Through this environments, astronomer can easily search and analyze astronomical data collected by different telescopes and data centers , and avoid the large scale dataset transportation.

This paper proposes a discrete-time risk model that has a certain type of correlation between premiums and claim amounts. It is motivated by the well-known bonus-malus system (also known as the no claims discount) in the car insurance industry. Such a system penalises policyholders at fault in accidents by surcharges, and rewards claim-free years by discounts. For simplicity, only up to three levels of premium are considered in this paper and recursive formulae are derived to calculate the ultimate ruin probabilities. Explicit expressions of ruin probabilities are obtained in a simplified case. The impact of the proposed correlation between premiums and claims on ruin probabilities is examined through numerical examples. In the end, the joint probability of ruin and deficit at ruin is also considered.

Dietary fibre intake has been suggested to reduce blood glucose levels in diabetic patients, particularly when glycosylated Hb (HbA1c) levels are high. In the present study, we used a quantile regression (QR) approach to characterise the possible heterogeneous associations of dietary fibre intake with HbA1c levels in Chinese diabetic patients. A total of 497 diabetic patients participated in the baseline survey in 2006 and in the follow-up survey in 2011, both of which were conducted in Pudong New Area of Shanghai, China. Structured in-person interviews were conducted to collect information on demographic characteristics and lifestyle factors. Dietary intake was assessed using a validated FFQ. Blood samples were collected during the interviews for biochemical assays. QR models were used to examine the heterogeneous associations of dietary factors with HbA1c levels. A significant marginal association of insoluble dietary fibre intake with subsequent HbA1c levels was observed only when the HbA1c level was over 6·8 %. The associations appeared to be greater when the quantile levels of HbA1c were higher. The coefficient estimates were − 0·174 (95 % CI − 0·433, − 0·025) at the quantile of 0·60, − 0·200 (95 % CI − 0·306, − 0·008) at 0·70, − 0·221 (95 % CI − 0·426, − 0·117) at 0·80, and − 0·389 (95 % CI − 0·516, − 0·018) at 0·90. A similar pattern was observed for the associations of dietary glycaemic index (GI) value with HbA1c levels. In conclusion, the present results indicate that the associations of insoluble dietary fibre intake and GI value with subsequent HbA1c levels depend on glycaemic control status in Chinese diabetic patients. More studies are required to confirm our findings.