Paleobiological Implications of the Isotopic Signatures (13C,15N) of Fossil Mammal Collagen in Scladina Cave (Sclayn, Belgium)

1997 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 370-380 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hervé Bocherens ◽  
Daniel Billiou ◽  
Marylène Patou-Mathis ◽  
Dominique Bonjean ◽  
Marcel Otte ◽  
...  

An isotopic investigation of upper Pleistocene mammal bones and teeth from Scladina cave (Sclayn, Belgium) demonstrated the very good quality of collagen preservation. A preliminary screening of the samples used the amount of nitrogen in whole bone and dentine in order to estimate the preserved amount of collagen before starting the extraction process. The isotopic abundances of fossil specimens from still-extant species are consistent with their trophic position. Moreover, the15N isotopic abundance is higher in dentine than in bone in bears and hyenas, a phenomenon already observed in modern specimens. These results demonstrate that the isotopic compositions of samples from Scladina cave can be interpreted in ecological terms. Mammoths exhibit a high15N isotopic abundance relative to other herbivores, as was the case in Siberian and Alaskan samples. These results suggest distinctive dietary adaptations in herbivores living in the mammoth steppe. Cave bears are clearly isotopically different from coeval brown bears, suggesting an ecological separation between species, with a pure vegetarian diet for cave bear and an omnivorous diet for brown bear.

Author(s):  
M.A. Egyan ◽  

The article shows studies characterizing the quality of the squeeze: the mechanical composition of the squeeze is determined, the structural moisture of each component is determined, the sugar content in the formed process of sedimentation of the juice and its acidity are determined refractometrically. The kinetics of anthocyanins extraction was determined in two ways, the solids content in the extract was calculated, and the reaction rate constants of the extraction process and the efficiency coefficient of ultrasonic amplification of the extraction process speed were calculated.


Author(s):  
Elena Torna ◽  
Elena Smith ◽  
Meagan Lamothe ◽  
Dr. Bobbi Langkamp-Henken ◽  
Dr. Jeanette M Andrade

Nutrients ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (8) ◽  
pp. 2648
Author(s):  
Shila Minari Hargreaves ◽  
Eduardo Yoshio Nakano ◽  
Heesup Han ◽  
António Raposo ◽  
Antonio Ariza-Montes ◽  
...  

This study aimed to evaluate the general quality of life (QoL) of Brazilian vegetarians. A cross-sectional study was conducted with Brazilian vegetarian adults (18 years old and above). Individuals were recruited to participate in a nationwide online survey that comprised the WHOQOL-BREF as well as sociodemographic and characterization questions related to vegetarianism. The WHOQOL-BREF is composed of 24 items which are divided into four domains (domain 1: physical health; domain 2: psychological well-being; domain 3: social relationships; and domain 4: environment), plus two general items which were analyzed separately, totaling 26 items. The answers from the questionnaire were converted into scores with a 0–100 scale range, with separate analyses for each domain. Results were compared among groups based on the different characteristics of the vegetarian population. A total of 4375 individuals completed the survey. General average score results were 74.67 (domain 1), 66.71 (domain 2), 63.66 (domain 3) and 65.76 (domain 4). Vegans showed better scores when compared to the other vegetarians, except in domain four, where the statistical difference was observed only for semi-vegetarians (lower score). Individuals adopting a vegetarian diet for longer (>1 year) showed better results for domains one and two, with no difference for the other domains. Having close people also adopting a vegetarian diet positively influenced the results for all domains. On the other hand, it was not possible to distinguish any clear influence of the motivation for adopting a vegetarian diet on the scores’ results. Adopting a vegetarian diet does not have detrimental effects on one’s QoL. In fact, the more plant-based the diet, and the longer it was adopted, the better the results were.


Author(s):  
Francesco Mancini ◽  
Raffaele De Giorgi ◽  
Alessandro Ludovisi ◽  
Salvatrice Vizzini ◽  
Giorgio Mancinelli

AbstractThe introduction of the amphipod Dikerogammarus villosus in European fresh waters is to date recognized as a threat to the integrity of invaded communities. Predation by D. villosus on native benthic invertebrates is assumed as the key determinant of its ecological impact, yet available information describe the species as a primary consumer as well as a carnivore depending on local conditions. Here, we assessed the trophic position (TP) of D. villosus in Lake Trasimeno, a recently invaded lentic system in central Italy, using the CN isotopic signatures of individuals captured in winter spanning two orders of magnitude in body size. TP estimations were compared with those characterizing the native amphipod Echinogammarus veneris and other representative invertebrate predators. On average, D. villosus showed a trophic position higher than E. veneris, and comparable with that of odonate nymphs. An in-depth analysis revealed that large-sized individuals had a trophic position of 3.07, higher than odonates and close to that of the hirudinean predator Erpobdella octoculata, while small-sized specimens had a trophic position of 2.57, similar to that of E. veneris (2.41). These findings indicate that size-related ontogenetic shifts in dietary habits may per se vary the nature of the interaction between Dikerogammarus villosus and native invertebrates from competition to predation. Information collated from published isotopic studies corroborated the generality of our results. We conclude that intra-specific trophic flexibility may potentially amplify and make more multifaceted the impact of the species on other invertebrate species in invaded food webs.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (13) ◽  
pp. 5826
Author(s):  
Evangelos Axiotis ◽  
Andreas Kontogiannis ◽  
Eleftherios Kalpoutzakis ◽  
George Giannakopoulos

Ethnopharmacology experts face several challenges when identifying and retrieving documents and resources related to their scientific focus. The volume of sources that need to be monitored, the variety of formats utilized, and the different quality of language use across sources present some of what we call “big data” challenges in the analysis of this data. This study aims to understand if and how experts can be supported effectively through intelligent tools in the task of ethnopharmacological literature research. To this end, we utilize a real case study of ethnopharmacology research aimed at the southern Balkans and the coastal zone of Asia Minor. Thus, we propose a methodology for more efficient research in ethnopharmacology. Our work follows an “expert–apprentice” paradigm in an automatic URL extraction process, through crawling, where the apprentice is a machine learning (ML) algorithm, utilizing a combination of active learning (AL) and reinforcement learning (RL), and the expert is the human researcher. ML-powered research improved the effectiveness and efficiency of the domain expert by 3.1 and 5.14 times, respectively, fetching a total number of 420 relevant ethnopharmacological documents in only 7 h versus an estimated 36 h of human-expert effort. Therefore, utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support the researcher can boost the efficiency and effectiveness of the identification and retrieval of appropriate documents.


Author(s):  
Siti Faria Astari ◽  
I Gede Pasek Suta Wijaya ◽  
Ida Bagus Ketut Widiartha

Distribution process that takes a long time along with improper treatment, can cause meat become not fresh and decrease the quality of the meat. Therefore, unscrupulous meat sellers cheating on the non-fresh meat by mixing the non-fresh meat with the fresh one. A system that can classify the type and freshness level of meat automatically is needed. In this research, that system was developed based on texture, color and shape features using Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) classification. The methods used in the feature extraction process are statistical approach, GLCM and the HU's invariant moment. The total of data used in this research was 960 images of 3 different meat types which are chicken meat, goat meat, and beef. The highest accuracy obtained from the testing process was 90% on the combination features of HSI and invariant moment for the meat type in refrigerator


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 69
Author(s):  
Fawzi Ata Al-Sawalqa

This current exploratory study comes at a critical time to determine the risk disclosure pattern of Jordanian companies during Covid-19 pandemic in response to the request of JSC for Jordanian listed companies to prepare and send disclosure reports include the effect of Covid-19 pandemic on their activities in terms of material events, operational activities and the decisions of board of directors during the period of disclosure suspension extending from March 18, 2020 to May 5, 2020. Based on all the non-financial companies that listed in the first market, the results of the study indicated that the entire study sample (100%) did send the disclosure reports to JSC. In terms of the quality of disclosed risks, extraction process resulted in finding 20 risk items distributed over 5 categories. The results show that the average disclosure level is 65.6%, with the operational category ranked first and followed by investor relation category, financial category, strategic category and finally the market category. Results show that those sectors that were suspended completely during Covid-19 pandemic provided risk disclosures in all categories and vice versa. In addition to the several implications, the study offers many avenues for future study based on the risk disclosure model of the current study.


Author(s):  
Thomas A. Hegna ◽  
Javier Luque ◽  
Joanna M. Wolfe

Fossils are critically important for evolutionary studies as they provide the link between geological ages and the phylogeny of life. The Pancrustacea are an incredibly diverse clade, representing over 800,000 described extant species, encompassing a variety of familiar and unfamiliar forms, such as ostracods, tongue worms, crabs, lobsters, shrimps, copepods, barnacles, branchiopods, remipedes, and insects. Having colonized nearly every environment on Earth, from hydrothermal vents to terrestrial habitats, they have a diverse fossil record dating back to the Cambrian (540–485 Ma). The quality of the fossil record of each clade is variable and related to their lifestyle (e.g., free-living versus parasitic, benthic versus pelagic) and the degree of mineralization of their cuticle. We review the systematics, morphology, preservation, and paleoecology of pancrustacean fossils; each major clade is discussed in turn, and, where possible, fossil systematics are compared with more recent data from molecular phylogenetics. We show that the three epic clades of the Pancrustacea—Allotriocarida, Multicrustacea, and Oligostraca—all have Cambrian roots, but the diversification of those clades did not take place until the Middle and Late Paleozoic. We also address the potential affinities of three “problematic” clades: euthycarcinoids, thylacocephalans, and cyclids. We conclude by assessing the future of pancrustacean paleobiology, discussing new morphological imaging techniques and further integration with growing molecular phylogenetic data.


2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 300-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew J. London ◽  
Daniel Haley ◽  
Michael P. Moody

AbstractDue to the intrinsic evaporation properties of the material studied, insufficient mass-resolving power and lack of knowledge of the kinetic energy of incident ions, peaks in the atom probe mass-to-charge spectrum can overlap and result in incorrect composition measurements. Contributions to these peak overlaps can be deconvoluted globally, by simply examining adjacent peaks combined with knowledge of natural isotopic abundances. However, this strategy does not account for the fact that the relative contributions to this convoluted signal can often vary significantly in different regions of the analysis volume; e.g., across interfaces and within clusters. Some progress has been made with spatially localized deconvolution in cases where the discrete microstructural regions can be easily identified within the reconstruction, but this means no further point cloud analyses are possible. Hence, we present an ion-by-ion methodology where the identity of each ion, normally obscured by peak overlap, is resolved by examining the isotopic abundance of their immediate surroundings. The resulting peak-deconvoluted data are a point cloud and can be analyzed with any existing tools. We present two detailed case studies and discussion of the limitations of this new technique.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (16) ◽  
pp. 2658
Author(s):  
Mengzhen Qi ◽  
Yan Liu ◽  
Yijing Lin ◽  
Fengming Hui ◽  
Teng Li ◽  
...  

Continuous, rapid, and precise monitoring of calving events contributes to an in-depth understanding of calving mechanisms, which have the potential to cause significant mass loss from the Antarctic ice sheet. The difficulties in the precise monitoring of iceberg calving lie with the coexistence of ice shelf advances and calving. The manual location of iceberg calving is time-consuming and painstaking, while achieving precise extraction has mostly relied on the surface textural characteristics of the ice shelves and the quality of the images. Here, we propose a new and efficient method of separating the expansion and calving processes of ice shelves. We visualized the extension process by simulating a new coastline, based on the ice velocity, and detected the calved area using the simulated coastline and single-temporal post-calving images. We extensively tested the validity of this method by extracting four annual calving datasets (from August 2015 to August 2019) from the Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar mosaic of the Antarctic coastline. A total of 2032 annual Antarctic calving events were detected, with areas ranging from 0.05 km2 to 6141.0 km2, occurring on almost every Antarctic ice shelf. The extraction accuracy of the calved area depends on the positioning accuracy of the simulated coastline and the spatial resolution of the images. The positioning error of the simulated coastline is less than one pixel, and the determined minimum valid extraction area is 0.05 km2, when based on 75 m resolution images. Our method effectively avoids repetition and omission errors during the calved area extraction process. Furthermore, its efficiency is not affected by the surface textural characteristics of the calving fronts and the various changes in the frontal edge velocity, which makes it fully applicable to the rapid and accurate extraction of different calving types.


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