Multi-method (XRF, FTIR, TGA) analysis of ancient bricks from Karabalgasun : A preliminary study

Ancient ceramic artefacts attracted the attention of scientists as being a chronological indicator within the archaeological context; however, they can also provide information about the tech-nology and provenance. A series of brick samples from an ancient nomadic town at Karabal-gasun (Mongolia) have been analyzed using X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and thermogravimetric (TG) analysis in order to obtain information on the performance of the kilns used and on the technological skills of ancient pot-ters

Nonorganic sleep disorders and sleep quality among the general population of Mongolia

The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of non-organic sleep disorders and sleep quality, using a structured psychiatric interview following screening through the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) among the general population. This nationwide population-based cross-sectional study was carried out between August and October 2020 and involved 964 participants (74% women, mean age: 40.72±14.34) who were randomly selected from 64 clusters in 10 sites of Mongolia. 27.9% of the study participants were evaluated as having non-organic sleep disorders based on the diagnostic guidelines of the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Edition, Clinical Modification (ICD-10). The prevalence of non-organic sleep disorders differed in age (p<0.001). Non-organic sleep disorders were related to age, employment, diastolic blood pressure, sleep quality, and quality of life. The prevalence of non-organic sleep disorders in the general population of Mongolia was calculated as 27.9%, while the prevalence rate of the poor sleep quality was 42.2%

Economic Contributions of the Louisiana Nonprofit Sector: Size and Scope

This economic contribution study describes the nonprofit sector in the state of Louisiana. Nonprofit organizations studied in this report included 501(c)(3) organizations and 501(c) other organizations, defined under Title 26 of the United States Code. Trends in the size and scope of the sector, as well as employment, volunteerism, grant-making, and the financial health of nonprofits in Louisiana are detailed in order to tell the story of Louisiana nonprofits as well as uncover areas of concern for the sector moving forward

Suppression of Klotho expression by protein-bound uremic toxins is associated with increased DNA methyltransferase expression and DNA hypermethylation

The expression of the renoprotective antiaging gene Klotho is decreased in uremia. Recent studies suggest that Klotho may be a tumor suppressor, and its expression may be repressed by DNA hypermethylation in cancer cells. Here we investigated the effects and possible mechanisms by which Klotho expression is regulated during uremia in uninephrectomized B-6 mice given the uremic toxins indoxyl sulfate or p-cresyl sulfate. Cultured human renal tubular HK2 cells treated with these toxins were used as an in vitro model. Injections of indoxyl sulfate or p-cresyl sulfate increased their serum concentrations, kidney fibrosis, CpG hypermethylation of the Klotho gene, and decreased Klotho expression in renal tubules of these mice. The expression of DNA methyltransferases 1, 3a, and 3b isoforms in HK2 cells treated with indoxyl sulfate or p-cresyl sulfate was significantly increased. Specific inhibition of DNA methyltransferase isoform 1 by 5-aza-2′-deoxycytidine caused demethylation of the Klotho gene and increased Klotho expression in vitro. Thus, inhibition of Klotho gene expression by uremic toxins correlates with gene hypermethylation, suggesting that epigenetic modification of specific genes by uremic toxins may be an important pathological mechanism of disease

OCD? Not Me! Protocol for the development and evaluation of a web-based self-guided treatment for youth with obsessive-compulsive disorder

Background: OCD? Not Me! is a novel, web-based, self-guided intervention designed to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in young people aged 12–18, using the principles of exposure and response prevention. The current paper presents the protocol for the development of the programme and for an open trial that will evaluate the effectiveness of this programme for OCD in young people, and associated distress and symptom accommodation in their parents and caregivers. Methods: We will measure the impact of the OCD? Not Me! programme on OCD symptoms using the Children's Florida Obsessive Compulsive Inventory (C-FOCI), and both the self-report and parent report of the Children's Obsessional Compulsive Inventory—Revised (ChOCI-R). The impact of the programme on OCD-related functional impairment will be measured using the parent report of the Child Obsessive-Compulsive Impact Scale—Revised (COIS-R). Secondary outcome measures include the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale and the Youth Quality of Life—Short Form (YQoL-SF). The 21-item Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS-21) will be used to measure the impact of the programme on parent/caregiver distress, while the Family Accommodation Scale (FAS) will be used to measure change in family accommodation of OCD symptoms. Multilevel mixed effects linear regression will be used to analyse the impact of the intervention on the outcome measures

The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes

This is the final version. Available on open access from Nature Research via the DOI in this recordData availability: All collapsed and paired-end sequence data for samples sequenced in this study are available in compressed fastq format through the European Nucleotide Archive under accession number PRJEB44430, together with rescaled and trimmed bam sequence alignments against both the nuclear and mitochondrial horse reference genomes. Previously published ancient data used in this study are available under accession numbers PRJEB7537, PRJEB10098, PRJEB10854, PRJEB22390 and PRJEB31613, and detailed in Supplementary Table 1. The genomes of ten modern horses, publicly available, were also accessed as indicated in their corresponding original publications57,61,85-87.NOTE: see the published version available via the DOI in this record for the full list of authorsDomestication of horses fundamentally transformed long-range mobility and warfare. However, modern domesticated breeds do not descend from the earliest domestic horse lineage associated with archaeological evidence of bridling, milking and corralling at Botai, Central Asia around 3500 BC. Other longstanding candidate regions for horse domestication, such as Iberia and Anatolia, have also recently been challenged. Thus, the genetic, geographic and temporal origins of modern domestic horses have remained unknown. Here we pinpoint the Western Eurasian steppes, especially the lower Volga-Don region, as the homeland of modern domestic horses. Furthermore, we map the population changes accompanying domestication from 273 ancient horse genomes. This reveals that modern domestic horses ultimately replaced almost all other local populations as they expanded rapidly across Eurasia from about 2000 BC, synchronously with equestrian material culture, including Sintashta spoke-wheeled chariots. We find that equestrianism involved strong selection for critical locomotor and behavioural adaptations at the GSDMC and ZFPM1 genes. Our results reject the commonly held association between horseback riding and the massive expansion of Yamnaya steppe pastoralists into Europe around 3000 BC driving the spread of Indo-European languages. This contrasts with the scenario in Asia where Indo-Iranian languages, chariots and horses spread together, following the early second millennium BC Sintashta culture

Genomic Insights into the Formation of Human Populations in East Asia

厦门大学人类学研究所、厦门大学生命科学学院细胞应激生物学国家重点实验室王传超教授课题组与哈佛医学院David Reich教授团队合作，联合全球43个单位的85位共同作者组成的国际合作团队通过古DNA精细解析东亚人群形成历史。研究人员利用古DNA数据检验了东亚地区农业和语言共扩散理论，综合考古学、语言学等证据，该研究系统性地重构了东亚人群的形成、迁徙和混合历史。这是目前国内开展的东亚地区最大规模的考古基因组学研究，此次所报道的东亚地区古人基因组样本量是以往国内研究机构所发表的样本量总和的两倍，改变了东亚地区尤其是中国境内考古基因组学研究长期滞后的局面。 该研究是由王传超教授团队与哈佛医学院（David Reich教授）、德国马普人类历史科学研究所（Johannes Krause教授）、复旦大学现代人类学教育部重点实验室（李辉教授和金力院士）、维也纳大学进化人类学系（Ron Pinhasi副教授）、南洋理工大学人文学院（Hui-Yuan Yeh助理教授）、俄罗斯远东联邦大学科学博物馆（Alexander N Popov研究员）、西安交通大学（张虎勤教授）、蒙古国国家博物馆研究中心、乌兰巴托国立大学考古系、华盛顿大学人类学系、台湾成功大学考古所、加州大学人类学系等全球43个单位的85位共同作者组成的国际合作团队联合完成的。厦门大学人类学研究所、厦门大学生命科学学院细胞应激生物学国家重点实验室为论文第一完成单位。厦门大学人类学研究所韦兰海副教授、胡荣助理教授、郭健新博士后、何光林博士后和杨晓敏硕士参与了研究工作。The deep population history of East Asia remains poorly understood due to a lack of ancient DNA data and sparse sampling of present-day people1,2. We report genome-wide data from 166 East Asians dating to 6000 BCE-1000 CE and 46 present-day groups. Hunter-gatherers from Japan, the Amur River Basin, and people of Neolithic and Iron Age Taiwan and the Tibetan plateau are linked by a deeply-splitting lineage likely reflecting a Late Pleistocene coastal migration. We follow Holocene expansions from four regions. First, hunter-gatherers of Mongolia and the Amur River Basin have ancestry shared by Mongolic and Tungusic language speakers but do not carry West Liao River farmer ancestry contradicting theories that their expansion spread these proto-languages. Second, Yellow River Basin farmers at ～3000 BCE likely spread Sino-Tibetan languages as their ancestry dispersed both to Tibet where it forms up ～84% to some groups and to the Central Plain where it contributed ～59-84% to Han Chinese. Third, people from Taiwan ～1300 BCE to 800 CE derived ～75% ancestry from a lineage also common in modern Austronesian, Tai-Kadai and Austroasiatic speakers likely deriving from Yangtze River Valley farmers; ancient Taiwan people also derived ～25% ancestry from a northern lineage related to but different from Yellow River farmers implying an additional north-to-south expansion. Fourth, Yamnaya Steppe pastoralist ancestry arrived in western Mongolia after ～3000 BCE but was displaced by previously established lineages even while it persisted in western China as expected if it spread the ancestor of Tocharian Indo-European languages. Two later gene flows affected western Mongolia: after ～2000 BCE migrants with Yamnaya and European farmer ancestry, and episodic impacts of later groups with ancestry from Turan.We thank David Anthony, Ofer Bar-Yosef, Katherine Brunson, Rowan Flad, Pavel Flegontov,Qiaomei Fu, Wolfgang Haak, Iosif Lazaridis, Mark Lipson, Iain Mathieson, Richard Meadow,Inigo Olalde, Nick Patterson, Pontus Skoglund, Dan Xu, and the four reviewers for valuable comments. We thank Naruya Saitou and the Asian DNA Repository Consortium for sharing genotype data from present-day Japanese groups. We thank Toyohiro Nishimoto and Takashi Fujisawa from the Rebun Town Board of Education for sharing the Funadomari Jomon samples, and Hideyo Tanaka and Watru Nagahara from the Archeological Center of Chiba City who are excavators of the Rokutsu Jomon site. The excavations at Boisman-2 site (Boisman culture), the Pospelovo-1 site (Yankovsky culture), and the Roshino-4 site (Heishui Mohe culture) were funded by the Far Eastern Federal University and the Institute of History,Archaeology and Ethnology Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences; research on Pospelovo-1 is funded by RFBR project number 18-09-40101. C.C.W was funded by the Max Planck Society, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC 31801040), the Nanqiang Outstanding Young Talents Program of Xiamen University (X2123302), the Major project of National Social Science Foundation of China (20&ZD248), a European Research Council (ERC) grant to Dan Xu (ERC-2019-ADG-883700-TRAM) and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (ZK1144). O.B. and Y.B. were funded by Russian Scientific Foundation grant 17-14-01345. H.M. was supported by the grant JSPS 16H02527. M.R. and C.C.W received funding from the ERC under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant No 646612) to M.R. The research of C.S. is supported 30 by the Calleva Foundation and the Human Origins Research Fund. H.L was funded NSFC (91731303, 31671297), B&R International Joint Laboratory of Eurasian Anthropology (18490750300). J.K. was funded by DFG grant KR 4015/1-1, the Baden Württemberg Foundation, and the Max Planck Institute. Accelerator Mass Spectrometry radiocarbon dating work was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) (BCS-1460369) to D.J.K. and B.J.C. D.R. was funded by NSF grant BCS-1032255, NIH (NIGMS) grant GM100233, the Paul M. Allen Frontiers Group, John Templeton Foundation grant 61220, a gift from Jean-Francois Clin, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. 该研究得到了国家自然科学基金“中国东南各族群的遗传混合”、国家社科基金重大项目“多学科视角下的南岛语族的起源和形成研究”、厦门大学南强青年拔尖人才支持计划A类、中央高校基本科研业务费等资助

Does export support household income in Mongolia?

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Institutional arrangements for community-based rangeland management in Mongolia

Mongolia's transition from a centralized socialist economy to a market economy since 1990 has led to enormous changes in the country's socio-economic and environmental conditions. The livestock privatization was one of the most significant reforms in a country that promotes herders to increase their herd size to improve their livelihood. Although rangeland is under state authority by law, its strict control on rangeland management disappeared, and the herding system of Mongolia turned into de facto open access. There are differing opinions as per conflicts between private livestock versus public rangelands, and the pastoral livestock sector of Mongolia is a classic case of "tragedy of commons." Thus, Mongolia was faced with the dilemma of increasing the number of livestock and the need to manage natural resources properly. As livestock is the primary livelihood of rural households and provides most of the foodstuffs for Mongolia, an increase in livestock number is supported. However, a massive increase in livestock number creates high pressure on the rangeland and leads to rangeland degradation caused by overgrazing and other problems in the long run.  Rangeland degradation caused by overgrazing is one of the most significant environmental challenges that Mongolia is facing. According to the recent statistics, livestock numbers have tripled within the last two decades, which has put pressure on the rangelands, exceeding the rangeland carrying capacity by more than 30 million heads. Although the number of livestock has reached its highest record, the livestock number-based inequality is high within the herder households. Herders with less than 200 livestock, which is below the subsistence level, take up more than 50 percent of the total herder households. The main reason for the increase in livestock number is a lack of Government policy on rangeland management and markets to regulate its natural expansion. Because privatization of the livestock took place before the appropriate livestock support services could be introduced, that would have replaced the former negdel service and state procurement system. The objective of this study was 'to obtain insights into the relationship between poverty and sustainability of rangeland use under different arrangements for community-based rangeland management systems in different agro-ecological regions of Mongolia.' The objective is achieved by answering four research questions throughout the five separate chapters. Chapter 2 analyzed herders' behavior using game theory to characterize which type of game is being 'played' in the Mongolian livestock sector and provides better insight into the dynamics of the pastures' carrying capacity. The game estimation results suggest a so-called non-coordination game for steppe regions and a chicken's game for the Gobi region. Increasing herders' payoffs from the herding business would also be significant in the Gobi region by taking a more market-based approach. It has shown that when we allow the carrying capacity to be dynamic by letting it depend on weather conditions, the cycle of animal losses and increases can be explained better. Chapter 3 described the current institutional arrangements of rangeland management in Mongolia and the stakeholders participating in this area. The government of Mongolia and donor organizations supported and strengthened the institutions involved in rangeland management. This chapter analyzed the approaches of the donor organizations such as the World Bank, UNDP, and SDC. Since 2006, the territory based PUG approach have been promoted by the Administration of Land Affairs, Geodesy and Cartography. The nested PUG system vision is comprehensively organized throughout Mongolia and takes the lead in rangeland and livestock management and improvement. Chapter 4 deals with the specification of rangeland management in the Gobi region where it needs to have a long-distance move to seek better grazing areas or areas with less dzud and drought and have high pasture yields and adequate water supply. The case study presents general conditions in the Gobi region and introduction of PUG approach. The institutional arrangement of rangeland management in Gobi region needs a specific policy to regulate large mobile communities within and across soum and aimag territory. Chapter 5 analyzed the performance of the newly introduced institutional arrangement for community-based rangeland management in Mongolia. In recent years, community-based rangeland management approaches such as PUGs have been introduced in selected regions of Mongolia to explore appropriate mechanisms for countering rangeland degradation. The results show that the current select institutional arrangements have significant impacts on rangeland quality. A well-defined rangeland boundary is key to supporting rangeland quality, which is in line with the current government policy to introduce this scheme within the framework of an annual land management planning scheme. Inequality in herd sizes within a PUG negatively affects rangeland quality; the impact of group size resembles an inverted U-shaped relationship. Intermediate group sizes have the highest monitoring effort on rangeland management and lead to the best outcomes in rangeland quality. Chapter 6 investigates the comparative advantage of selected livestock-oriented products using the revealed comparative advantage index to show export opportunities for different types of livestock-oriented products. The study results illustrate that there are possibilities to develop export-oriented livestock production in Mongolia in various stages. The export of livestock-oriented products, combined with other policies, is a way to substantially reduce the animal number to sustainable levels, reduce overgrazing pressure, and increase export income. Long-term policy on meat and other livestock-oriented products should provide a legal framework of rangeland use to secure Mongolia's livestock sector's sustainable development. In general, many herders do not have enough animals to sustain themselves traditionally. Therefore, herders need to combine subsistence livestock-keeping with various other jobs to become more market-oriented herders to increase their income, health, and maintain the rangeland. The key innovation of the community-based rangeland management in Mongolia is herders' entire organization on a territorial basis, which is necessary to transfer the leadership role in pasture management from local governments to the herders themselves. However, pasture user groups cannot perform these management functions on their own. They need support and collaboration from soum and aimag governments to allocate pasture use rights and must assist with enforcing the rules that are agreed upon within and among PUG. Moreover, this system would be best introduced in conjunction with alternative income generation activities and economic support to compensate for losses associated with limiting herd sizes. The government of Mongolia aims to ensure the sustainable livestock sector, to secure herder households' livelihoods, and improve economic opportunities within the sector. One of their significant policy is to increase resilience to climate change by addressing overgrazing and balancing the livestock numbers with the rangelands' carrying capacity. For instance, an increase in meat exports would support decreasing livestock numbers to a level that would balance the carrying capacity. However, promoting exports will need to be combined with appropriate rangeland management policies, such as a user fee (pasture tax), to control the overgrazing problem. Possible policies that would support the export of meat and other products of animal origin in this context are developing a meat export industry and strategic animal breeding, reintroducing a livestock tax, supporting the growth of more productive animals. The research on this thesis contributes to the literature by i) adding a new country case to the World rangeland management study where still have nomadic pastoral livestock, ii) testing the interrelation between poverty and rangeland use, iii) analyzing the adoption of CBNRM approach in Mongolia's condition within the theoretical framework of sustainable governance of common-pool resources, and, iv) systematically analyzing the characteristics of pastoral livestock and its linkage to the market system