209 research outputs found
Palaeopathology and horse domestication: the case of some Iron Age horses horn the Altai Mountains, Siberia
We discuss the use of palaeopathological indicators in horse skeletons as potential sources I of evidence about the use of horses for riding and traction. We suggest that this type of information can provide an important and perhaps more reliable complement to other indicators of domestication such as morphological changes, kill-off patterns and bit wear, which suffer from various ambiguities of interpretation. We emphasise the importance of studying the skeletons of modern control samples of horses of known life histories as a constraint on the interpretation of palaeopathological evidence and demonstrate the viability of the technique through a comparison of free-living Exmoor ponies with Iron Age Scythian horse remains from Siberia. We demonstrate that stresses caused by riding produce characteristic lesions on the vertebrae which can be distinguished from age-related damage in free-living animals, and in addition that these stresses could have been moderated by changes of saddle design in the Medieval period. These results also throw new light on customs associated with horse burial
Mechanisms of Spontaneous Current Generation in an Inhomogeneous d-Wave Superconductor
A boundary between two d-wave superconductors or an s-wave and a d-wave
superconductor generally breaks time-reversal symmetry and can generate
spontaneous currents due to proximity effect. On the other hand, surfaces and
interfaces in d-wave superconductors can produce localized current-carrying
states by supporting the T-breaking combination of dominant and subdominant
order parameters. We investigate spontaneous currents in the presence of both
mechanisms and show that at low temperature, counter-intuitively, the
subdominant coupling decreases the amplitude of the spontaneous current due to
proximity effect. Superscreening of spontaneous currents is demonstrated to be
present in any d-d (but not s-d) junction and surface with d+id' order
parameter symmetry. We show that this supercreening is the result of
contributions from the local magnetic moment of the condensate to the
spontaneous current.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, RevTe
Fire and the relative roles of weather, climate and landscape characteristics in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence forest of Canada
Question: In deciduous-dominated forest landscapes, what are the relative roles of fire weather, climate, human and biophysical landscape characteristics for explaining variation in large fire occurrence and area burned? Location: The Great Lakes-St. Lawrence forest of Canada. Methods: We characterized the recent (1959-1999) regime of large (℠200 ha) fires in 26 deciduous-dominated landscapes and analysed these data in an information-theoretic framework to compare six hypotheses that related fire occurrence and area burned to fire weather severity, climate normals, population and road densities, and enduring landscape characteristics such as surficial deposits and large lakes. Results: 392 large fires burned 833 698 ha during the study period, annually burning on average 0.07% ± 0.42% of forested area in each landscape. Fire activity was strongly seasonal, with most fires and area burned occurring in May and June. A combination of antecedent-winter precipitation, fire season precipitation deficit/surplus and percent of landscape covered by well-drained surficial deposits best explained fire occurrence and area burned. Fire occurrence varied only as a function of fire weather and climate variables, whereas area burned was also explained by percent cover of aspen and pine stands, human population density and two enduring characteristics: percent cover of large water bodies and glaciofluvial deposits. Conclusion: Understanding the relative role of these variables may help design adaptation strategies for forecasted increases in fire weather severity by allowing (1) prioritization of landscapes according to enduring characteristics and (2) management of their composition so that substantially increased fire activity would be necessary to transform landscape structure and composition
ADAM12 is a circulating marker for stromal activation in pancreatic cancer and predicts response to chemotherapy
Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is characterized by abundant stroma that harbors tumor-promoting properties. No good biomarkers exist to monitor the effect of stromal targeting therapies or to predict response. We set out to identify such non-invasive markers for PDAC stroma and predict response to therapy. Gene expression datasets, co-culture experiments, xenografts, and patient samples were analyzed. Serum samples were measured from a cohort of 58 resected patients, and 87 metastatic or locally advanced PDAC patients. Baseline and follow-up levels were assessed in 372 additional metastatic PDAC patients who received nab-paclitaxel with gemcitabine (nâ=â184) or gemcitabine monotherapy (nâ=â188) in the phase III MPACT trial. Increased levels of ADAM12 were found in PDAC patients compared to healthy controls (pâ<â0.0001, nâ=â157 and nâ=â38). High levels of ADAM12 significantly associated with poor outcome in resected PDAC (HR 2.07, pâ=â0.04). In the MPACT trial survival was significantly longer for patients who received nab-paclitaxel and had undetectable ADAM12 levels before treatment (OS 12.3âm vs 7.9âm pâ=â0.0046). Consistently undetectable or decreased ADAM12 levels during treatment significantly associated with longer survival as well (OS 14.4âm and 11.2âm, respectively vs 8.3, pâ=â0.0054). We conclude that ADAM12 is a blood-borne proxy for stromal activation, the levels of which have prognostic significance and correlate with treatment benefit
Local mean-field study of capillary condensation in silica aerogels
We apply local mean-field (i.e. density functional) theory to a lattice model
of a fluid in contact with a dilute, disordered gel network. The gel structure
is described by a diffusion-limited cluster aggregation model. We focus on the
influence of porosity on both the hysteretic and the equilibrium behavior of
the fluid as one varies the chemical potential at low temperature. We show that
the shape of the hysteresis loop changes from smooth to rectangular as the
porosity increases and that this change is associated to disorder-induced
out-of-equilibrium phase transitions that differ on adsorption and on
desorption. Our results provide insight in the behavior of He in silica
aerogels.Comment: 19 figure
Permanent Genetic Resources added to Molecular Ecology Resources Database 1 February 2013-31 March 2013
This article documents the addition of 142 microsatellite marker loci to the Molecular Ecology Resources database. Loci were developed for the following species: Agriophyllum squarrosum, Amazilia cyanocephala, Batillaria attramentaria, Fungal strain CTeY1 (Ascomycota), Gadopsis marmoratus, Juniperus phoenicea subsp. turbinata, Liriomyza sativae, Lupinus polyphyllus, Metschnikowia reukaufii, Puccinia striiformis and Xylocopa grisescens. These loci were cross-tested on the following species: Amazilia beryllina, Amazilia candida, Amazilia rutila, Amazilia tzacatl, Amazilia violiceps, Amazilia yucatanensis, Campylopterus curvipennis, Cynanthus sordidus, Hylocharis leucotis, Juniperus brevifolia, Juniperus cedrus, Juniperus osteosperma, Juniperus oxycedrus, Juniperus thurifera, Liriomyza bryoniae, Liriomyza chinensis, Liriomyza huidobrensis and Liriomyza trifolii. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.Peer Reviewe
Search for direct production of charginos and neutralinos in events with three leptons and missing transverse momentum in âs = 7 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector
A search for the direct production of charginos and neutralinos in final states with three electrons or muons and missing transverse momentum is presented. The analysis is based on 4.7 fbâ1 of protonâproton collision data delivered by the Large Hadron Collider and recorded with the ATLAS detector. Observations are consistent with Standard Model expectations in three signal regions that are either depleted or enriched in Z-boson decays. Upper limits at 95% confidence level are set in R-parity conserving phenomenological minimal supersymmetric models and in simplified models, significantly extending previous results
Jet size dependence of single jet suppression in lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s(NN)) = 2.76 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the LHC
Measurements of inclusive jet suppression in heavy ion collisions at the LHC
provide direct sensitivity to the physics of jet quenching. In a sample of
lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s) = 2.76 TeV corresponding to an integrated
luminosity of approximately 7 inverse microbarns, ATLAS has measured jets with
a calorimeter over the pseudorapidity interval |eta| < 2.1 and over the
transverse momentum range 38 < pT < 210 GeV. Jets were reconstructed using the
anti-kt algorithm with values for the distance parameter that determines the
nominal jet radius of R = 0.2, 0.3, 0.4 and 0.5. The centrality dependence of
the jet yield is characterized by the jet "central-to-peripheral ratio," Rcp.
Jet production is found to be suppressed by approximately a factor of two in
the 10% most central collisions relative to peripheral collisions. Rcp varies
smoothly with centrality as characterized by the number of participating
nucleons. The observed suppression is only weakly dependent on jet radius and
transverse momentum. These results provide the first direct measurement of
inclusive jet suppression in heavy ion collisions and complement previous
measurements of dijet transverse energy imbalance at the LHC.Comment: 15 pages plus author list (30 pages total), 8 figures, 2 tables,
submitted to Physics Letters B. All figures including auxiliary figures are
available at
http://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/HION-2011-02
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