The resilience of postglacial hunter-gatherers to abrupt climate change

Understanding the resilience of early societies to climate change is an essential part of exploring the environmental sensitivity of human populations. There is significant interest in the role of abrupt climate events as a driver of early Holocene human activity, but there are very few well-dated records directly compared with local climate archives. Here, we present evidence from the internationally important Mesolithic site of Star Carr showing occupation during the early Holocene, which is directly compared with a high-resolution palaeoclimate record from neighbouring lake beds. We show that-once established-there was intensive human activity at the site for several hundred years when the community was subject to multiple, severe, abrupt climate events that impacted air temperatures, the landscape and the ecosystem of the region. However, these results show that occupation and activity at the site persisted regardless of the environmental stresses experienced by this society. The Star Carr population displayed a high level of resilience to climate change, suggesting that postglacial populations were not necessarily held hostage to the flickering switch of climate change. Instead, we show that local, intrinsic changes in the wetland environment were more significant in determining human activity than the large-scale abrupt early Holocene climate events

Bronchospasm and Anaphylactic Shock Following Lidocaine Aerosol Inhalation in a Patient with Butane Inhalation Lung Injury

Allergic reactions to local anesthetics are very rare and represent <1% of all adverse local anesthetics reactions. A 54-year-old man was admitted to the hospital in the winter because of shortness of breath. The patient reportedly had an inhalation lung injury due to butane gas fuel. On the fifth day, he developed an asthmatic attack and anaphylactic shock immediately after lidocaine aerosol administration to prepare for bronchoscopy to confirm an acute inhalational lung injury diagnosis. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation was performed immediately after respiratory arrest, and the patient was admitted to the intensive care unit intubated and on a ventilator. He was extubated safely on the third post-cardiopulmonary resuscitation day. These observations suggest that aerosol lidocaine anesthesia may cause airway narrowing and anaphylactic shock. Practitioners should be aware of this potential complication. We report on this case with a brief review of the literature

Rapid global ocean-atmosphere response to Southern Ocean freshening during the last glacial.

Contrasting Greenland and Antarctic temperatures during the last glacial period (115,000 to 11,650 years ago) are thought to have been driven by imbalances in the rates of formation of North Atlantic and Antarctic Deep Water (the 'bipolar seesaw'). Here we exploit a bidecadally resolved 14C data set obtained from New Zealand kauri (Agathis australis) to undertake high-precision alignment of key climate data sets spanning iceberg-rafted debris event Heinrich 3 and Greenland Interstadial (GI) 5.1 in the North Atlantic (~30,400 to 28,400 years ago). We observe no divergence between the kauri and Atlantic marine sediment 14C data sets, implying limited changes in deep water formation. However, a Southern Ocean (Atlantic-sector) iceberg rafted debris event appears to have occurred synchronously with GI-5.1 warming and decreased precipitation over the western equatorial Pacific and Atlantic. An ensemble of transient meltwater simulations shows that Antarctic-sourced salinity anomalies can generate climate changes that are propagated globally via an atmospheric Rossby wave train.A challenge for testing mechanisms of past climate change is the precise correlation of palaeoclimate records. Here, through climate modelling and the alignment of terrestrial, ice and marine 14C and 10Be records, the authors show that Southern Ocean freshwater hosing can trigger global change

Connecting the Greenland ice-core and U/Th timescales via cosmogenic radionuclides: Testing the synchroneity of Dansgaard-Oeschger events

During the last glacial period Northern Hemisphere climate was characterized by extreme and abrupt climate changes, so-called Dansgaard-Oeschger (DO) events. Most clearly observed as temperature changes in Greenland ice-core records, their climatic imprint was geographically widespread. However, the temporal relation between DO events in Greenland and other regions is uncertain due to the chronological uncertainties of each archive, limiting our ability to test hypotheses of synchronous change. In contrast, the assumption of direct synchrony of climate changes forms the basis of many timescales. Here, we use cosmogenic radionuclides (10Be, 36Cl, 14C) to link Greenland ice-core records to U=Th-dated speleothems, quantify offsets between the two timescales, and improve their absolute dating back to 45 000 years ago. This approach allows us to test the assumption that DO events occurred synchronously between Greenland ice-core and tropical speleothem records with unprecedented precision. We find that the onset of DO events occurs within synchronization uncertainties in all investigated records. Importantly, we demonstrate that local discrepancies remain in the temporal development of rapid climate change for specific events and speleothems. These may either be related to the location of proxy records relative to the shifting atmospheric fronts or to underestimated U=Th dating uncertainties. Our study thus highlights the potential for misleading interpretations of the Earth system when applying the common practice of climate wiggle matching

Understanding anti-government sentiment and the public's anti-corruption behavior: The roles of perceived ethics failure, emotional leadership, and communication strategy

This study conceptualizes anti-government sentiment and tests the relationships between anti-government sentiment and three antecedents (i.e., ethics failure, compassionate leadership, and communication strategy). An online survey (n=1,112) was conducted in South Korea. Exploratory Factor Analysis with Principal Component Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis were conducted on the measures proposed for anti-government sentiment. The hypotheses were tested using Structural Equation Modeling. Results show that publics’ perceptions of the government’s ethics failure, lack of compassionate leadership, and use of a buffering strategy for communication are positively related to their anti-government sentiment toward the incumbent government

TRIP Database: a manually curated database of protein–protein interactions for mammalian TRP channels

Transient receptor potential (TRP) channels are a superfamily of Ca2+-permeable cation channels that translate cellular stimuli into electrochemical signals. Aberrant activity of TRP channels has been implicated in a variety of human diseases, such as neurological disorders, cardiovascular disease and cancer. To facilitate the understanding of the molecular network by which TRP channels are associated with biological and disease processes, we have developed the TRIP (TRansient receptor potential channel-Interacting Protein) Database (http://www.trpchannel.org), a manually curated database that aims to offer comprehensive information on protein–protein interactions (PPIs) of mammalian TRP channels. The TRIP Database was created by systematically curating 277 peer-reviewed literature; the current version documents 490 PPI pairs, 28 TRP channels and 297 cellular proteins. The TRIP Database provides a detailed summary of PPI data that fit into four categories: screening, validation, characterization and functional consequence. Users can find in-depth information specified in the literature on relevant analytical methods and experimental resources, such as gene constructs and cell/tissue types. The TRIP Database has user-friendly web interfaces with helpful features, including a search engine, an interaction map and a function for cross-referencing useful external databases. Our TRIP Database will provide a valuable tool to assist in understanding the molecular regulatory network of TRP channels

Language education policy and practice in East and Southeast Asia

East and Southeast Asia represents a linguistically and culturally diverse region. For example, more than 700 languages are spoken in Indonesia alone. It is against this backdrop of diversity that the ten countries that comprise Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) have recently signed the ASEAN Charter which, while calling for respect for the region's languages, cultures and religions also officially nominates English as ASEAN's working language. In this article, we examine the language education policies of the region and consider the implications of these policies for the maintenance of linguistic and cultural diversity on the one hand and the promotion of English and the respective national languages on the other. As ASEAN is closely connected to the three major countries of China, Japan and South Korea, as indicated by the ‘ASEAN + 3’ forum, we also include these countries here. We stress that, as space forbids an in-depth treatment of the language education policies of each of the 13 countries, we have chosen to describe and discuss in some depth the policies of 5 countries (China, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam), as these provide a cross-section of language policy contexts and approaches in the region. We add brief notes on the policies of the remaining countries

The circadian clock, metabolism and obesity

In the last decades, obesity has been on the rise becoming a burden for health care systems. The reasons behind this rise are most likely caused by lifestyle rather than by an increase in gene mutations, because manifestations of genetic alterations would take longer than just a few decades. Lifestyle has a great impact on the circadian system and therefore on the body internal organization of physiological and biochemical processes, regulating various aspects of behavior and metabolism. In the following, I will discuss recent studies delineating relationships between metabolic processes and the circadian system, how metabolites and nutrients regulate the circadian clock and how nuclear receptors can act as metabolic sensors and clock regulators. Finally, I will discuss how clock modulation and feeding patterns influence the development of obesity

CD8+ T cell-mediated control of distant tumours following local photodynamic therapy is independent of CD4+ T cells and dependent on natural killer cells

Cancer survival rates decrease in the presence of disseminated disease. However, there are few therapies that are effective at eliminating the primary tumour while providing control of distant stage disease. Photodynamic therapy (PDT) is an FDA-approved modality that rapidly eliminates local tumours, resulting in cure of early disease and palliation of advanced disease. Numerous pre-clinical studies have shown that local PDT treatment of tumours enhances anti-tumour immunity. We hypothesised that enhancement of a systemic anti-tumour immune response might control the growth of tumours present outside the treatment field. To test this hypothesis we delivered PDT to subcutaneous (s.c.) tumours of mice bearing both s.c. and lung tumours and monitored the growth of the untreated lung tumours. Our results demonstrate that PDT of murine tumours provided durable inhibition of the growth of untreated lung tumours. The inhibition of the growth of tumours outside the treatment field was tumour-specific and dependent on the presence of CD8+ T cells. This inhibition was accompanied by an increase in splenic anti-tumour cytolytic activity and by an increase in CD8+ T cell infiltration into untreated tumours. Local PDT treatment led to enhanced anti-tumour immune memory that was evident 40 days after tumour treatment and was independent of CD4+ T cells. CD8+ T cell control of the growth of lung tumours present outside the treatment field following PDT was dependent upon the presence of natural killer (NK) cells. These results suggest that local PDT treatment of tumours lead to induction of an anti-tumour immune response capable of controlling the growth of tumours outside the treatment field and indicate that this modality has potential in the treatment of distant stage disease

Association of genetic variants in complement factor H and factor H-related genes with systemic lupus erythematosus susceptibility

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), a complex polygenic autoimmune disease, is associated with increased complement activation. Variants of genes encoding complement regulator factor H (CFH) and five CFH-related proteins (CFHR1-CFHR5) within the chromosome 1q32 locus linked to SLE, have been associated with multiple human diseases and may contribute to dysregulated complement activation predisposing to SLE. We assessed 60 SNPs covering the CFH-CFHRs region for association with SLE in 15,864 case-control subjects derived from four ethnic groups. Significant allelic associations with SLE were detected in European Americans (EA) and African Americans (AA), which could be attributed to an intronic CFH SNP (rs6677604, in intron 11, Pmeta = 6.6×10-8, OR = 1.18) and an intergenic SNP between CFHR1 and CFHR4 (rs16840639, Pmeta = 2.9×10-7, OR = 1.17) rather than to previously identified disease-associated CFH exonic SNPs, including I62V, Y402H, A474A, and D936E. In addition, allelic association of rs6677604 with SLE was subsequently confirmed in Asians (AS). Haplotype analysis revealed that the underlying causal variant, tagged by rs6677604 and rs16840639, was localized to a ~146 kb block extending from intron 9 of CFH to downstream of CFHR1. Within this block, the deletion of CFHR3 and CFHR1 (CFHR3-1Δ), a likely causal variant measured using multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification, was tagged by rs6677604 in EA and AS and rs16840639 in AA, respectively. Deduced from genotypic associations of tag SNPs in EA, AA, and AS, homozygous deletion of CFHR3-1Δ (Pmeta = 3.2×10-7, OR = 1.47) conferred a higher risk of SLE than heterozygous deletion (Pmeta = 3.5×10-4, OR = 1.14). These results suggested that the CFHR3-1Δ deletion within the SLE-associated block, but not the previously described exonic SNPs of CFH, might contribute to the development of SLE in EA, AA, and AS, providing new insights into the role of complement regulators in the pathogenesis of SLE