Soil-lipids in cultural layers

This paper deals with some aspects of the effects of human activities on soil-lipid composition. There are several ways to characterize or classify changes in soils due to the impact of human activities. Until recently, the organic part of the soil has been analysed as a total organic content only. The main purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the possibilities of further analysis, using experience from fields such as organic geochemistry and chromatography. Included are decomposition of organic matter in soil, turnover time in natural strata, effects of human activities such as agriculture, dwelling and food handling, and some examples from Vendel par., Uppland, Sweden

Evidence of increasing functional differentiation in pottery use among Late Holocene maritime foragers in northern Japan

Hamanaka 2 is a multi-phase coastal site in Rebun Island with a ~ 3000-year occupation sequence extending from the final-stage Jōmon and Okhotsk to the Ainu Culture period (1050 BCE-1850 CE). To examine long-term trends in food processing at the site, we collected 66 ceramic sherds across six distinct cultural layers from the Final Jōmon to the Late Okhotsk period for lipid residue analysis. Given the site's beachfront location in an open bay, with ready access to abundant maritime resources, we predicted that the pottery would consistently have been used to process aquatic resources throughout all cultural periods. Though aquatic lipids dominated across the site sequence, the history of pottery use at the site proved more complex. Evidence of plant processing was found in all cultural phases, and from the Epi-Jōmon/Late Final Jōmon transition onwards 30% of the vessels were being used to process mixed dishes that combined both marine and terrestrial resources. By the start of the Okhotsk phase, separate sets of resources were being processed in different pots, suggesting functional differentiation in the use of pottery, and the rise of new kinds of cuisine – including the processing of millet. We tentatively explain these results as a consequence of the growing incorporation of Rebun Island into wider regional trade and interaction networks, which brought new kinds of resources and different social dynamics to Northern Hokkaido in the Late Holocene

Parametric improvement for the ingestion dose module of the European ARGOS and RODOS decision support systems

The European decision support systems ARGOS and RODOS rely on the ECOSYS model for prognoses of ingestion doses. ECOSYS needs an update of various parameter values to provide reliable estimates. This paper reports on some results of a Nordic initiative to derive parameter values that are specific to Nordic conditions, as well as to improve generic parameter values in ECOSYS, taking into account the host of useful measurement data accumulated since ECOSYS was created

Structural formation during bread baking in a combined microwave-convective oven determined by sub-second in-situ synchrotron X-ray microtomography

A new concept has been developed for characterizing the real-time evolution of the three-dimensional pore and lamella microstructure of bread during baking using synchrotron X-ray microtomography (SR\ub5CT). A commercial, combined microwave-convective oven was modified and installed at the TOMCAT synchrotron tomography beamline at the Swiss Light Source (SLS), to capture the 3D dough-to-bread structural development in-situ at the micrometer scale with an acquisition time of 400 ms. This allowed characterization and quantitative comparison of three baking technologies: (1) convective heating, (2) microwave heating, and (3) a combination of convective and microwave heating. A workflow for automatic batchwise image processing and analysis of 3D bread structures (1530 analyzed volumes in total) was established for porosity, individual pore volume, elongation, coordination number and local wall thickness, which allowed for evaluation of the impact of baking technology on the bread structure evolution. The results showed that the porosity, mean pore volume and mean coordination number increase with time and that the mean local cell wall thickness decreases with time. Small and more isolated pores are connecting with larger and already more connected pores as function of time. Clear dependencies are established during the whole baking process between the mean pore volume and porosity, and between the mean local wall thickness and the mean coordination number. This technique opens new opportunities for understanding the mechanisms governing the structural changes during baking and discern the parameters controlling the final bread quality

Relation between smoking history and gene expression profiles in lung adenocarcinomas

Background: Lung cancer is the worldwide leading cause of death from cancer. Tobacco usage is the major pathogenic factor, but all lung cancers are not attributable to smoking. Specifically, lung cancer in never-smokers has been suggested to represent a distinct disease entity compared to lung cancer arising in smokers due to differences in etiology, natural history and response to specific treatment regimes. However, the genetic aberrations that differ between smokers and never-smokers' lung carcinomas remain to a large extent unclear. Methods: Unsupervised gene expression analysis of 39 primary lung adenocarcinomas was performed using Illumina HT-12 microarrays. Results from unsupervised analysis were validated in six external adenocarcinoma data sets (n=687), and six data sets comprising normal airway epithelial or normal lung tissue specimens (n=467). Supervised gene expression analysis between smokers and never-smokers were performed in seven adenocarcinoma data sets, and results validated in the six normal data sets. Results: Initial unsupervised analysis of 39 adenocarcinomas identified two subgroups of which one harbored all never-smokers. A generated gene expression signature could subsequently identify never-smokers with 79-100% sensitivity in external adenocarcinoma data sets and with 76-88% sensitivity in the normal materials. A notable fraction of current/former smokers were grouped with never-smokers. Intriguingly, supervised analysis of never-smokers versus smokers in seven adenocarcinoma data sets generated similar results. Overlap in classification between the two approaches was high, indicating that both approaches identify a common set of samples from current/former smokers as potential never-smokers. The gene signature from unsupervised analysis included several genes implicated in lung tumorigenesis, immune-response associated pathways, genes previously associated with smoking, as well as marker genes for alveolar type II pneumocytes, while the best classifier from supervised analysis comprised genes strongly associated with proliferation, but also genes previously associated with smoking. Conclusions: Based on gene expression profiling, we demonstrate that never-smokers can be identified with high sensitivity in both tumor material and normal airway epithelial specimens. Our results indicate that tumors arising in never-smokers, together with a subset of tumors from smokers, represent a distinct entity of lung adenocarcinomas. Taken together, these analyses provide further insight into the transcriptional patterns occurring in lung adenocarcinoma stratified by smoking history

Ancient lipids document continuity in the use of early hunter-gatherer pottery through 9,000 years of Japanese prehistory

The earliest pots in the world are from East Asia and date to the Late Pleistocene. However, ceramic vessels were only produced in large numbers during the warmer and more stable climatic conditions of the Holocene. It has long been assumed that the expansion of pottery was linked with increased sedentism and exploitation of new resources that became available with the ameliorated climate, but this hypothesis has never been tested. Through chemical analysis of their contents, we herein investigate the use of pottery across an exceptionally long 9,000-y sequence from the Jōmon site of Torihama inwestern Japan, intermittently occupied from the Late Pleistocene to the mid-Holocene. Molecular and isotopic analyses of lipids from 143 vessels provides clear evidence that pottery across this sequence was predominantly used for cooking marine and freshwater resources, with evidence for diversification in the range of aquatic products processed during the Holocene. Conversely, there is little indication that ruminant animals or plants were processed in pottery, although it is evident from the faunal and macrobotanical remains that these foods were heavily exploited. Supported by other residue analysis data from Japan, our results show that the link between pottery and fishing was established in the Late Paleolithic and lasted well into the Holocene, despite environmental and socio-economic change. Cooking aquatic products in pottery represents an enduring social aspect of East Asian hunter-gatherers, a tradition based on a dependable technology for exploiting a sustainable resource in an uncertain and changing world