Combined organic biomarker and use-wear analyses of stone artefacts from Liang Bua, Flores, Indonesia

Organic biomarker and lithic use-wear analyses of archaeological implements manufactured and/or used by hominins in the past offers a means of assessing how prehistoric peoples utilised natural resources. Currently, most studies focus on one of these techniques, rather than using both in sequence. This study aims to assess the potential of combining both methods to analyse stone artefacts, using a set of 69 stones excavated from the cave site of Liang Bua (Flores, Indonesia). Prior to chemical analysis, an initial inspection of the artefacts revealed potential use-wear traces but no visible residues. Gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC-MS) analysis, including the targeting of 86 lipids, terpenes, terpenoids, alkanes and their analogues, found compounds with plant or animal origin on 27 of the 69 stones. The artefacts were subsequently cleaned, and use-wear analysis identified traces of use on 43 artefacts. Use-wear analysis confirmed traces of use on 23 of the 27 artefacts with potential use-residues that were determined by GC-MS. The GC-MS results were broadly consistent with the functional classes identified in the later use-wear analysis. This inclusive approach for stone artefact analysis strengthens the identifications made through multiple lines of enquiry. There remain conflicts and uncertainties in specific cases, suggesting the need for further refinement and analyses of the relationships between use-wear and residues

Heme Oxygenase-1 Deletion Affects Stress Erythropoiesis

BACKGROUND:Homeostatic erythropoiesis leads to the formation of mature red blood cells under non-stress conditions, and the production of new erythrocytes occurs as the need arises. In response to environmental stimuli, such as bone marrow transplantation, myelosuppression, or anemia, erythroid progenitors proliferate rapidly in a process referred to as stress erythropoiesis. We have previously demonstrated that heme oxygenase-1 (HO-1) deficiency leads to disrupted stress hematopoiesis. Here, we describe the specific effects of HO-1 deficiency on stress erythropoiesis. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS:We used a transplant model to induce stress conditions. In irradiated recipients that received hmox(+/-) or hmox(+/+) bone marrow cells, we evaluated (i) the erythrocyte parameters in the peripheral blood; (ii) the staining intensity of CD71-, Ter119-, and CD49d-specific surface markers during erythroblast differentiation; (iii) the patterns of histological iron staining; and (iv) the number of Mac-1(+)-cells expressing TNF-α. In the spleens of mice that received hmox(+/-) cells, we show (i) decreases in the proerythroblast, basophilic, and polychromatophilic erythroblast populations; (ii) increases in the insoluble iron levels and decreases in the soluble iron levels; (iii) increased numbers of Mac-1(+)-cells expressing TNF-α; and (iv) decreased levels of CD49d expression in the basophilic and polychromatophilic erythroblast populations. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE:As reflected by effects on secreted and cell surface proteins, HO-1 deletion likely affects stress erythropoiesis through the retention of erythroblasts in the erythroblastic islands of the spleen. Thus, HO-1 may serve as a therapeutic target for controlling erythropoiesis, and the dysregulation of HO-1 may be a predisposing condition for hematologic diseases

Cross-Language Question Re-Ranking

We study how to find relevant questions in community forums when the language of the new questions is different from that of the existing questions in the forum. In particular, we explore the Arabic-English language pair. We compare a kernel-based system with a feed-forward neural network in a scenario where a large parallel corpus is available for training a machine translation system, bilingual dictionaries, and cross-language word embeddings. We observe that both approaches degrade the performance of the system when working on the translated text, especially the kernel-based system, which depends heavily on a syntactic kernel. We address this issue using a cross-language tree kernel, which compares the original Arabic tree to the English trees of the related questions. We show that this kernel almost closes the performance gap with respect to the monolingual system. On the neural network side, we use the parallel corpus to train cross-language embeddings, which we then use to represent the Arabic input and the English related questions in the same space. The results also improve to close to those of the monolingual neural network. Overall, the kernel system shows a better performance compared to the neural network in all cases.Comment: SIGIR-2017; Community Question Answering; Cross-language Approaches; Question Retrieval; Kernel-based Methods; Neural Networks; Distributed Representation

Rat strain differences in brain structure and neurochemistry in response to binge alcohol

RATIONALE: Ventricular enlargement is a robust phenotype of the chronically dependent alcoholic human brain, yet the mechanism of ventriculomegaly is unestablished. Heterogeneous stock Wistar rats administered binge EtOH (3 g/kg intragastrically every 8 h for 4 days to average blood alcohol levels (BALs) of 250 mg/dL) demonstrate profound but reversible ventricular enlargement and changes in brain metabolites (e.g., N-acetylaspartate (NAA) and choline-containing compounds (Cho)). OBJECTIVES: Here, alcohol-preferring (P) and alcohol-nonpreferring (NP) rats systematically bred from heterogeneous stock Wistar rats for differential alcohol drinking behavior were compared with Wistar rats to determine whether genetic divergence and consequent morphological and neurochemical variation affect the brain's response to binge EtOH treatment. METHODS: The three rat lines were dosed equivalently and approached similar BALs. Magnetic resonance imaging and spectroscopy evaluated the effects of binge EtOH on brain. RESULTS: As observed in Wistar rats, P and NP rats showed decreases in NAA. Neither P nor NP rats, however, responded to EtOH intoxication with ventricular expansion or increases in Cho levels as previously noted in Wistar rats. Increases in ventricular volume correlated with increases in Cho in Wistar rats. CONCLUSIONS: The latter finding suggests that ventricular volume expansion is related to adaptive changes in brain cell membranes in response to binge EtOH. That P and NP rats responded differently to EtOH argues for intrinsic differences in their brain cell membrane composition. Further, differential metabolite responses to EtOH administration by rat strain implicate selective genetic variation as underlying heterogeneous effects of chronic alcoholism in the human condition

Development and application of a comprehensive analytical workflow for the quantification of non-volatile low molecular weight lipids on archaeological stone tools

Source determination of use-related residues on prehistoric stone tools is especially challenging, due to issues related to preservation, contamination and the contribution of residues from multiple sources. To increase confidence in this process, an analytical workflow was developed to include: (1) a sampling strategy that retains spatial information of the recovered residues and enables monitoring of environmental contamination; and (2) a sensitive and selective gas chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (GC-MS/MS) procedure to quantify non-volatile low molecular weight lipids on stone artefacts. This workflow was applied to 14 stone artefacts excavated from deposits at Liang Bua, a limestone cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. These artefacts range in age between ∼14 000 and 1000 years old, and were preliminarily classified as either potentially showing traces of use (n = 7) or not (n = 7) using low magnification microscopy. Residues were sampled by direct solvent extraction off the surface of the artefacts. The aliquots were spiked with internal standards and derivatised. The trimethylsilyl derivatives of 40 saturated fatty acids, sterols, di- and tri-terpenoids and their analogues were quantified using optimised multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) transitions. Six of the potentially used artefacts contained sterols, phytosterols and terpenoids, either individually or in combination, whereas none of these compounds was commonly found on the seven artefacts preliminarily classified as unused. This suggests that these six artefacts may have been used as implements to process resources, and provides scope for further investigation. This workflow can also be adapted for the analysis of other archaeological objects

Virulence Potential of Staphylococcus aureus Strains Isolated From Diabetic Foot Ulcers: A new paradigm

OBJECTIVE—The purpose of this study was to assess the virulence potential of Staphylococcus aureus strains isolated from diabetic foot ulcers and to discriminate noninfected from infected ulcers

Fast, Reliable, and Secure Drone Communication: A Comprehensive Survey

Drone security is currently a major topic of discussion among researchers and industrialists. Although there are multiple applications of drones, if the security challenges are not anticipated and required architectural changes are not made, the upcoming drone applications will not be able to serve their actual purpose. Therefore, in this paper, we present a detailed review of the security-critical drone applications, and security-related challenges in drone communication such as DoS attacks, Man-in-the-middle attacks, De-Authentication attacks, and so on. Furthermore, as part of solution architectures, the use of Blockchain, Software Defined Networks (SDN), Machine Learning, and Fog/Edge computing are discussed as these are the most emerging technologies. Drones are highly resource-constrained devices and therefore it is not possible to deploy heavy security algorithms on board. Blockchain can be used to cryptographically store all the data that is sent to/from the drones, thereby saving it from tampering and eavesdropping. Various ML algorithms can be used to detect malicious drones in the network and to detect safe routes. Additionally, the SDN technology can be used to make the drone network reliable by allowing the controller to keep a close check on data traffic, and fog computing can be used to keep the computation capabilities closer to the drones without overloading them.The work of Vinay Chamola and Fei Richard Yu was supported in part by the SICI SICRG Grant through the Project Artificial Intelligence Enabled Security Provisioning and Vehicular Vision Innovations for Autonomous Vehicles, and in part by the Government of Canada's National Crime Prevention Strategy and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) CREATE Program for Building Trust in Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (TrustCAV)

Analysis of shear forces during mash disk formation

This report concerns a forming process in which mash is forced from a spreading manifold into moulds on a rotating drum, transported in the moulds underneath a surface held flush with the drum (the shoe), and ejected from the moulds. The quality of the final product is understood to be related to the shear stresses experienced by the mash in the moulds as it is transported under the shoe. We describe and analyse mathematical models of the forming process, focusing on the fluid mechanics of mash in a mould. We treat this as a driven cavity flow and obtain flow profiles, stress profiles, and expressions for the maximum shear stress for different rheological models of the mash (Newtonian fluid, power-law fluid, and Bingham plastic)

The MALATANG Survey : The L GAS-L IR Correlation on Sub-kiloparsec Scale in Six Nearby Star-forming Galaxies as Traced by HCN J = 4 → 3 and HCO + J = 4 → 3

This is an author-created, un-copyedited version of an article published in The Astrophysical Journal. The Version of Record is available online at https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/aac512.We present HCN J = 4→3 and HCO+ J = 4→3 maps of six nearby star-forming galaxies, NGC 253, NGC 1068, IC 342, M82, M83, and NGC 6946, obtained with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope as part of the MALATANG survey. All galaxies were mapped in the central 2×2 region at 14 (FWHM) resolution (corresponding to linear scales of ∼0.2-1.0 kpc). The LIR-Ldense relation, where the dense gas is traced by the HCN J = 4→3 and the HCO+ J = 4→3 emission, measured in our sample of spatially resolved galaxies is found to follow the linear correlation established globally in galaxies within the scatter. We find that the luminosity ratio, LIR/Ldense, shows systematic variations with LIR within individual spatially resolved galaxies, whereas the galaxy-integrated ratios vary little. A rising trend is also found between LIR/Ldense ratio and the warm-dust temperature gauged by the 70 μm/100 μm flux ratio. We find that the luminosity ratios of IR/HCN (4-3) and IR/HCO+ (4-3), which can be taken as a proxy for the star formation efficiency (SFE) in the dense molecular gas (SFE dense), appear to be nearly independent of the dense gas fraction ( f dense) for our sample of galaxies. The SFE of the total molecular gas (SFEmol) is found to increase substantially with f dense when combining our data with those on local (ultra)luminous infrared galaxies and high-z quasars. The mean LHCN(4-3) LHCO+(4-3) line ratio measured for the six targeted galaxies is 0.9±0.6. No significant correlation is found for the L'HCN(4-3) L'HCO+(4-3) ratio with the star formation rate as traced by L IR, nor with the warm-dust temperature, for the different populations of galaxies.Peer reviewe