Geological subsidence and sinking islands: the case of Manono (Samoa)

W.R. Dickinson, as part of his wide study of the geological history of the Pacific islands, has linked the unique case of the deeply submerged Lapita site of Mulifanua in western Upolu (Samoa) to the slow subsidence of Upolu island. Recent archaeological research on the neighbouring small island of Manono has yielded new and detailed data on this geological process. A series of new dates has allowed us to define the speed of the subsidence and demonstrate the massive environmental changes to which the local population has had to adapt over the past 2000 years

Contribution à l’archéologie du « séjour paisible » kanak : étude et mise en valeur du hameau de Tipéhéne, Pombeï (Nouvelle-Calédonie)

Malgré les résultats multiples obtenus par le Pr José Garanger dans les années 1960-1970 lors des programmes de recherches liant traditions orales océaniennes et données archéologiques, peu de travaux ont été depuis menés en Mélanésie insulaire sur ce thème. Cet article souhaite contribuer à ce sujet, en présentant la première étude archéologique d’un hameau kanak ancien de la Grande Terre calédonienne. Le relevé du site de Tipéhéne, la fouille des différentes structures d’habitat dans le cadre d’un programme de mise en valeur touristique et culturelle du lieu, ainsi que la réalisation d’une série de datations C14, ont permis de montrer une chronologie d’occupation confirmant dans ses grandes lignes les données des traditions orales. La mise au jour de structurations variées des seuils des tertres, dont certaines de formes non répertoriées jusqu’à ces fouilles, souligne également la diversité des aménagements traditionnels des espaces d’habitat kanak. Ce type d’étude demande à être multiplié afin de répondre aux questions adressées par la population autochtone du pays aux archéologues sur son passé traditionnel.Even if Pr José Garanger obtained a great number of results in the 1960s-1970s through research programs associating Pacific oral traditions and archaeological data, few research projects have since been conducted in Island Melanesia on this theme. This paper wishes to contribute to the topic, by presenting the first archaeological study of an old kanak settlement of New Caledonia’s Grande Terre. The mapping of the site of Tipéhéne, the excavation of a number of the house structures as part of a rehabilitation program linked to a touristic and cultural project on this site, as well as the fulfilling of a number of C14 dates, have allowed to show a settlement and occupation chronology following in its main points the data presented by oral traditions. The uncovering of various types of house entrances, some never identified prior to these excavations, enhances the diversity of traditional structuring of the kanak households. This type of study needs to be multiplied, to help answer the questions asked to archaeologists by the indigenous population of the country on its traditional past.

Joint searches between gravitational-wave interferometers and high-energy neutrino telescopes: science reach and analysis strategies

Many of the astrophysical sources and violent phenomena observed in our Universe are potential emitters of gravitational waves (GWs) and high-energy neutrinos (HENs). A network of GW detectors such as LIGO and Virgo can determine the direction/time of GW bursts while the IceCube and ANTARES neutrino telescopes can also provide accurate directional information for HEN events. Requiring the consistency between both, totally independent, detection channels shall enable new searches for cosmic events arriving from potential common sources, of which many extra-galactic objects.Comment: 4 pages. To appear in the Proceedings of the 2d Heidelberg Workshop: "High-Energy Gamma-rays and Neutrinos from Extra-Galactic Sources", Heidelberg (Germany), January 13-16, 200

High-throughput triggered merging of surfactant-stabilized droplet pairs using traveling surface acoustic waves

We present an acoustofluidic device for fluorescently triggered merging of surfactant-stabilized picoliter droplet pairs at high throughput. Droplets that exceed a preset fluorescence threshold level are selectively merged by a traveling surface acoustic wave (T-SAW) pulse. We characterize the operation of our device by analyzing the merging efficiency as a function of acoustic pulse position, duration, and acoustic pressure amplitude. We probe droplet merging at different droplet rates and find that efficient merging occurs above a critical acoustic power level. Our results indicate that the efficiency of acoustically induced merging of surfactant stabilized droplets is correlated with acoustic streaming velocity. Finally, we discuss how both time-averaged and instantaneous acoustic pressure fields can affect the integrity of surfactant layers. Our technique, by allowing the merging of up to 105 droplets per hour, shows great potential for integration into microfluidic systems for high-throughput and high-content screening applications

Iron Behaving Badly: Inappropriate Iron Chelation as a Major Contributor to the Aetiology of Vascular and Other Progressive Inflammatory and Degenerative Diseases

The production of peroxide and superoxide is an inevitable consequence of aerobic metabolism, and while these particular "reactive oxygen species" (ROSs) can exhibit a number of biological effects, they are not of themselves excessively reactive and thus they are not especially damaging at physiological concentrations. However, their reactions with poorly liganded iron species can lead to the catalytic production of the very reactive and dangerous hydroxyl radical, which is exceptionally damaging, and a major cause of chronic inflammation. We review the considerable and wide-ranging evidence for the involvement of this combination of (su)peroxide and poorly liganded iron in a large number of physiological and indeed pathological processes and inflammatory disorders, especially those involving the progressive degradation of cellular and organismal performance. These diseases share a great many similarities and thus might be considered to have a common cause (i.e. iron-catalysed free radical and especially hydroxyl radical generation). The studies reviewed include those focused on a series of cardiovascular, metabolic and neurological diseases, where iron can be found at the sites of plaques and lesions, as well as studies showing the significance of iron to aging and longevity. The effective chelation of iron by natural or synthetic ligands is thus of major physiological (and potentially therapeutic) importance. As systems properties, we need to recognise that physiological observables have multiple molecular causes, and studying them in isolation leads to inconsistent patterns of apparent causality when it is the simultaneous combination of multiple factors that is responsible. This explains, for instance, the decidedly mixed effects of antioxidants that have been observed, etc...Comment: 159 pages, including 9 Figs and 2184 reference

An Alveary or Triple Dictionary, in English, Latin, and French

The LEME Corpus Manual has an editorial introduction, indexes of subjects, proper names, and chronology, a primary bibliography of LEME corpus texts, as well as English language texts not included in the Corpus, a description of the XML encoding and of lemmatization and source analysis tools. The appendix includes lists of language abbreviations and of abbreviations for parts of speech.Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of CanadaCanada Foundation for InnovationUniversity of Toronto LibrariesUniversity of Toronto PressInformation & Instructional Technology, Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Toront

A review of ecological models for brown trout: towards a new demogenetic model

Ecological models for stream fish range in scale from individual fish to entire populations. They have been used to assess habitat quality and to predict the demographic and genetic responses to management or disturbance. In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive review and synthesis of the vast body of modelling literature on the brown trout, Salmo trutta L., with the aim of developing the framework for a demogenetic model, i.e., a model integrating both population dynamics and genetics. We use a bibliometric literature review to identify two main categories of models: population ecology (including population dynamics and population genetics) and population distribution (including habitat–hydraulic and spatial distribution). We assess how these models have previously been applied to stream fish, particularly brown trout, and how recent models have begun to integrate them to address two key management and conservation questions: (i) How can we predict fish population responses to management intervention? and (ii) How is the genetic structure of fish populations influenced by landscape characteristics? Because salmonid populations tend to show watershed scale variation in both demographic and genetic traits, we propose that models combining demographic, genetic and spatial data are promising tools for improving their management and conservation. We conclude with a framework for an individual-based, spatially explicit demogenetic model that we will apply to stream-dwelling brown trout populations in the near future