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Femininity and beauty ideals are historically and culturally constructed. The current study examines the role of advertising in cultivating and accentuating cultural ideals of skin beauty. A content analysis was conducted on skin beauty advertisements (SBAs) in women's magazines (local editions Cosmopolitan and Vogue) from China and the USA. The findings provide evidence for the 'white or tan' dichotomy in skin beauty ideals between contemporary Eastern and Western cultures as how they are reflected and reproduced in SBAs, although the 'tan ideal' in the US was not as apparent as the 'white ideal' in China. The study also sheds light on the divergence and similarity in global advertising strategies (level of localization and standardization in execution elements) within the two markets. Implications for the globalization of beauty ideals and marketing practices are discussed.

The plant rhizosphere microbiota plays multiple roles in plant growth. We investigated the taxonomic and functional variations in the rhizosphere microbial community, examining both prokaryotes and eukaryotes, of four crops at the seedling stage: wheat, barley, and two rice varieties ( indica and japonica) seeded in paddy soil. The diversity of rhizosphere communities in these four species was determined. Results showed that wheat and barley had much stronger selection effects than rice for the rhizosphere microbial community. Functional metagenomic profiling indicated that a series of sequences related to glycan, limonene, and pinene degradation pathways as well as some relatively rare functions related to N or S metabolism were enriched in the rhizosphere soil. We conclude that the four tested crops induced the formation of the microbial community with specific features that may influence the plant growth but stochastic processes also appreciably influenced the functional selection.

In order to explore the effects of grazing frequency on functional traits and to test whether Stipa gandis has compensatory photosynthesis during the frequent grazing period, we investigated morphological traits, biomass allocation, photosynthetic traits, and chlorophyll fluorescence parameters of the species in Inner Mongolia, China. The grazing frequency treatments included fencing (T 0), grazing in May and July (T 1 , i.e., two months per year) and grazing from May to September (T 2 , i.e., continuous five months per year). Results indicate that T 1 and T 2 treatments did not affect individual biomass, but T 2 treatment negatively affected individual size, i.e., plant height, stem length, and leaf length. Physiological traits of S. grandis were significantly affected by grazing, year, and their interaction. In July 2014 (i.e., dry environment and low relative humidity), the photosynthetic rate, transpiration rate and water use efficiency were highest under T 2 treatment, which was caused by the increase in stomatal conductance. However, in July 2015 (i.e., wet environment and high relative humidity), the photosynthetic rate and water use efficiency were higher under T 1 and T 2 treatments, which were caused by the increase in actual quantum efficiency and stomatal conductance. Our results implied that under frequent grazing treatment, S. grandis had small height and efficient compensatory photosynthesis, which promoted its resistance to severe grazing.

In this paper, we investigate the impact of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on the conditional dependence between China and U.S. stock markets by employing the Copula-mixed-data sampling (Copula-MIDAS) framework. In the case of EPU, we consider the global EPU (GEPU), the American EPU (AEPU), and the China EPU (CEPU). The empirical analysis based on the Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite (SSEC) index in China and the S&P 500 index in the U.S. shows that the tail dependence between China and U.S. stock markets is symmetrical, and the t Copula outperforms alternative Copulas in terms of in-sample goodness of fit. In particular, we find that the t Copula-MIDAS model with EPU dominates the traditional time-varying t Copula in terms of in-sample fitting. Moreover, we observe that both the GEPU and AEPU have a significantly positive impact on the conditional dependence between China and U.S. stock markets, whereas CEPU has no significant impact. The tail dependence between China and U.S. stock markets exhibits an increasing trend, particularly in the recent years.