The Red Sea, Coastal Landscapes, and Hominin Dispersals

This chapter provides a critical assessment of environment, landscape and resources in the Red Sea region over the past five million years in relation to archaeological evidence of hominin settlement, and of current hypotheses about the role of the region as a pathway or obstacle to population dispersals between Africa and Asia and the possible significance of coastal colonization. The discussion assesses the impact of factors such as topography and the distribution of resources on land and on the seacoast, taking account of geographical variation and changes in geology, sea levels and palaeoclimate. The merits of northern and southern routes of movement at either end of the Red Sea are compared. All the evidence indicates that there has been no land connection at the southern end since the beginning of the Pliocene period, but that short sea crossings would have been possible at lowest sea-level stands with little or no technical aids. More important than the possibilities of crossing the southern channel is the nature of the resources available in the adjacent coastal zones. There were many climatic episodes wetter than today, and during these periods water draining from the Arabian escarpment provided productive conditions for large mammals and human populations in coastal regions and eastwards into the desert. During drier episodes the coastal region would have provided important refugia both in upland areas and on the emerged shelves exposed by lowered sea level, especially in the southern sector and on both sides of the Red Sea. Marine resources may have offered an added advantage in coastal areas, but evidence for their exploitation is very limited, and their role has been over-exaggerated in hypotheses of coastal colonization

Pyogenic spondylitis

Pyogenic spondylitis is a neurological and life threatening condition. It encompasses a broad range of clinical entities, including pyogenic spondylodiscitis, septic discitis, vertebral osteomyelitis, and epidural abscess. The incidence though low appears to be on the rise. The diagnosis is based on clinical, radiological, blood and tissue cultures and histopathological findings. Most of the cases can be treated non-operatively. Surgical treatment is required in 10–20% of patients. Anterior decompression, debridement and fusion are generally recommended and instrumentation is acceptable after good surgical debridement with postoperative antibiotic cover

Breath Formate Is a Marker of Airway S-Nitrosothiol Depletion in Severe Asthma

-nitrosothiols (SNOs), a class of endogenous airway smooth muscle relaxants. This deficiency results from increased activity of an enzyme that both reduces SNOs to ammonia and oxidizes formaldehyde to formic acid, a volatile carboxylic acid that is more easily detected in exhaled breath condensate (EBC) than SNOs. We therefore hypothesize that depletion of airway SNOs is related to asthma pathology, and breath formate concentration may be a proxy measure of SNO catabolism. (r = −0.39, p = 0.002, asthmatics only), and positively correlated with the NO-derived ion nitrite (r = 0.46, p<0.0001) as well as with total serum IgE (r = 0.28, p = 0.016, asthmatics only). Furthermore, formate was not significantly correlated with other volatile organic acids nor with inhaled corticosteroid dose.-nitrosothiols

Using a 3D virtual muscle model to link gene expression changes during myogenesis to protein spatial location in muscle

Background: Myogenesis is an ordered process whereby mononucleated muscle precursor cells (myoblasts) fuse into multinucleated myotubes that eventually differentiate into myofibres, involving substantial changes in gene expression and the organisation of structural components of the cells. To gain further insight into the orchestration of these structural changes we have overlaid the spatial organisation of the protein components of a muscle cell with their gene expression changes during differentiation using a new 3D visualisation tool: the Virtual Muscle 3D (VMus3D)

A novel signalling screen demonstrates that CALR mutations activate essential MAPK signalling and facilitate megakaryocyte differentiation.

Most MPN patients lacking JAK2 mutations harbour somatic CALR mutations that are thought to activate cytokine signalling although the mechanism is unclear. To identify kinases important for survival of CALR-mutant cells we developed a novel strategy (KISMET) which utilises the full range of kinase selectivity data available from each inhibitor and thus takes advantage of off-target noise that limits conventional siRNA or inhibitor screens. KISMET successfully identified known essential kinases in haematopoietic and non-haematopoietic cell lines and identified the MAPK pathway as required for growth of the CALR-mutated MARIMO cells. Expression of mutant CALR in murine or human haematopoietic cell lines was accompanied by MPL-dependent activation of MAPK signalling, and MPN patients with CALR mutations showed increased MAPK activity in CD34-cells, platelets and megakaryocytes. Although CALR mutations resulted in protein instability and proteosomal degradation, mutant CALR was able to enhance megakaryopoiesis and pro-platelet production from human CD34+ progenitors. These data link aberrant MAPK activation to the MPN phenotype and identify it as a potential therapeutic target in CALR-mutant positive MPNs.Leukemia accepted article preview online, 14 October 2016. doi:10.1038/leu.2016.280.Work in the Green lab is supported by Leukemia and Lymphoma Research, Cancer Research UK, the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre, the Cambridge Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre and the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society of America. WW is supported by the Austrian Science Foundation (J 3578-B21). CGA is supported by Kay Kendall Leukaemia Fund clinical research fellowship. UM is supported by a Cancer Research UK Clinician Scientist Fellowship. Work in the Huntly lab is supported by the European Research Council, the MRC (UK), Bloodwise, the Cambridge NIHR funded BRC, KKLF and a WT/MRC Stem Cell centre grant. Work in the Green and Huntly Labs is supported by core support grants by the Wellcome Trust to the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research (100140/z/12/z) and Wellcome Trust-MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute (097922/Z/11/Z)

Judgment of the Humanness of an Interlocutor Is in the Eye of the Beholder

Despite tremendous advances in artificial language synthesis, no machine has so far succeeded in deceiving a human. Most research focused on analyzing the behavior of “good” machine. We here choose an opposite strategy, by analyzing the behavior of “bad” humans, i.e., humans perceived as machine. The Loebner Prize in Artificial Intelligence features humans and artificial agents trying to convince judges on their humanness via computer-mediated communication. Using this setting as a model, we investigated here whether the linguistic behavior of human subjects perceived as non-human would enable us to identify some of the core parameters involved in the judgment of an agents' humanness. We analyzed descriptive and semantic aspects of dialogues in which subjects succeeded or failed to convince judges of their humanness. Using cognitive and emotional dimensions in a global behavioral characterization, we demonstrate important differences in the patterns of behavioral expressiveness of the judges whether they perceived their interlocutor as being human or machine. Furthermore, the indicators of interest displayed by the judges were predictive of the final judgment of humanness. Thus, we show that the judgment of an interlocutor's humanness during a social interaction depends not only on his behavior, but also on the judge himself. Our results thus demonstrate that the judgment of humanness is in the eye of the beholder

Measurement of the inclusive and dijet cross-sections of b-jets in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV with the ATLAS detector

The inclusive and dijet production cross-sections have been measured for jets containing b-hadrons (b-jets) in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of sqrt(s) = 7 TeV, using the ATLAS detector at the LHC. The measurements use data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 34 pb^-1. The b-jets are identified using either a lifetime-based method, where secondary decay vertices of b-hadrons in jets are reconstructed using information from the tracking detectors, or a muon-based method where the presence of a muon is used to identify semileptonic decays of b-hadrons inside jets. The inclusive b-jet cross-section is measured as a function of transverse momentum in the range 20 < pT < 400 GeV and rapidity in the range |y| < 2.1. The bbbar-dijet cross-section is measured as a function of the dijet invariant mass in the range 110 < m_jj < 760 GeV, the azimuthal angle difference between the two jets and the angular variable chi in two dijet mass regions. The results are compared with next-to-leading-order QCD predictions. Good agreement is observed between the measured cross-sections and the predictions obtained using POWHEG + Pythia. MC@NLO + Herwig shows good agreement with the measured bbbar-dijet cross-section. However, it does not reproduce the measured inclusive cross-section well, particularly for central b-jets with large transverse momenta.Comment: 10 pages plus author list (21 pages total), 8 figures, 1 table, final version published in European Physical Journal

Observation of associated near-side and away-side long-range correlations in √sNN=5.02 TeV proton-lead collisions with the ATLAS detector

Two-particle correlations in relative azimuthal angle (Δϕ) and pseudorapidity (Δη) are measured in √sNN=5.02  TeV p+Pb collisions using the ATLAS detector at the LHC. The measurements are performed using approximately 1  μb-1 of data as a function of transverse momentum (pT) and the transverse energy (ΣETPb) summed over 3.1<η<4.9 in the direction of the Pb beam. The correlation function, constructed from charged particles, exhibits a long-range (2<|Δη|<5) “near-side” (Δϕ∼0) correlation that grows rapidly with increasing ΣETPb. A long-range “away-side” (Δϕ∼π) correlation, obtained by subtracting the expected contributions from recoiling dijets and other sources estimated using events with small ΣETPb, is found to match the near-side correlation in magnitude, shape (in Δη and Δϕ) and ΣETPb dependence. The resultant Δϕ correlation is approximately symmetric about π/2, and is consistent with a dominant cos⁡2Δϕ modulation for all ΣETPb ranges and particle pT