scholarly journals Radiocarbon Dating Historical Mortars: Lime Lumps and/or Binder Carbonate?

Radiocarbon ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 875-899 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alf Lindroos ◽  
Åsa Ringbom ◽  
Jan Heinemeier ◽  
Greg Hodgins ◽  
Pia Sonck-Koota ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTLime lumps and bulk mortars show different 14C contamination when analyzed in several CO2 fractions isolated from the effervescence of an ongoing hydrolysis reaction. Age profiles of both materials are therefore highly complementary and together they can provide a reliable date. Furthermore, they can also reveal the complexity of the radiocarbon (14C) distribution within the mortar and thus prevent over-interpretation of the data. The lime lump versus bulk mortar dating data presented here has been collected over 22 years, with only a small fraction of the results so far published internationally. Since there has been an increasing interest in mortar dating over recent years with a special focus on lime lumps, and since many laboratories have just begun mortar dating experiments, we wish to present some of the extensive data that already exist. Previously published data from 15 lime lumps (including 34 14C measurements from sequential dissolution) and 43 new 14C measurements from 17 lime lumps are presented here. The samples are from medieval Finland and Sweden, classical Rome and medieval Italy, and the Roman Jerash (Gerasa), Jordan.

Radiocarbon ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 975-984 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. G. Hogg ◽  
T. F. G. Higham ◽  
J. Dahm

We measured the 14C content of 36 living marine molluscs from Tairua Harbour and the rocky coast on the Coromandel Peninsula of New Zealand. We identified species suitable for radiocarbon dating and show that the open marine intertidal zone is enriched in 14C compared to the open marine subtidal zone or estuary. We also found a uniform 14C distribution in the Tairua Harbour, by analyzing samples of the estuarine bivalve Austrovenus stutchbwyi collected up to 5 km from the harbor entrance.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Soloveva ◽  
Larisa Savelieva ◽  
Sergei Verkulich

<p>Pollen analysis is one of the methods that allow revealing ecological and climatic changes in the<br>past based on vegetation reconstruction. Spitsbergen (Svalbard) archipelago, as well as other<br>regions of the Arctic, is difficult for creation of regional models of vegetation and climate<br>development during the Holocene. This is primarily due to the limited distribution, low thickness<br>and relative young ages (usually this is the late Holocene) of organogenic deposits, which are<br>most suitable for palynological studies.<br>Nordenskiöld Land is located in the central part of the West Spitsbergen Island and different the<br>most favorable climatic conditions. The largest number of sites suitable for paleobotanical<br>researches is located here. The Coles valley has length about 12 km, well-developed profile and<br>situated on the north shore of Nordenskiöld Land. The field campaign with studying of<br>floodplain peat sediments from Coles River valley was carried out in August 2018. Two sites<br>(K18-15, K18-16) were studied on the remains of first terrace. Excavated deposits are<br>represented by leafy peat of varying degrees of decomposition with silt lenses. The laboratory<br>studies of sediments included radiocarbon dating, pollen and non-pollen palynomorph analyses.<br>They were carried out in Laboratory of St-Petersburg State University and Russian chemical-<br>analytical Lab on the Spitsbergen archipelago.<br>The pollen analysis of two sections from Coles River valley allowed us to reconstruct<br>paleovegetation changes. Samples from K18-15 site contain more mineral components and more<br>pollen and spores than samples from K18-16 site. This is probably due to the inflow of pollen<br>with water. The main components of spore-pollen spectra are Poaceae, Cyperaceae, Salix and<br>Betula sect. Nanae. The relationship between these taxa shows a different degree of moisture of<br>the study area under the dominance of the grass - sedge tundra. Thus, a significant influence on<br>the formation of spores and pollen spectra in the studied deposits is played by the dynamics of<br>the sedimentation.<br>Results of radiocarbon dating showed that studied deposits formed during mid and late<br>Holocene.<br>A generalization of all available palynological data on the Nordenskjöld land made it possible to<br>construct a scheme of dwarf birch (Betula sect. Nanae) distribution during the Middle and Late<br>Holocene. A comparison of received data with our previous data and published data from<br>Nordenskiöld Land shows the asynchronous of appear and distribution of shrubs on these area<br>from ~5000 to ~2500 yrs ago.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 09 (05) ◽  
pp. 366-381
Author(s):  
Fernando Corella ◽  
Montserrat Ocampos ◽  
Rafael Laredo ◽  
José Tabuenca ◽  
Maribel Carnicer ◽  
...  

AbstractIn the last two decades, surgeons have rapidly developed arthroscopic techniques to treat basal joint osteoarthritis. Such techniques spare the joint capsule and ligaments, allow more accurate staging of cartilage degeneration to determine the most appropriate treatment, and decrease the risk of injury to the radial artery and superficial branch of the radial nerve. Arthroscopic resection arthroplasty of the trapezium can be performed as either partial or complete trapeziectomy. Many papers have described partial trapeziectomy but few have discussed complete trapeziectomy.Suture button implants avoid the drawbacks of temporary fixation using Kirschner wire, as well as the drawbacks of ligament reconstruction, which necessitates the sacrifice of a tendon and involves both wide exposure and scar tissue.This paper aimed to review the published data on the arthroscopic treatment of basal thumb osteoarthritis, with a special focus on stabilization using suture button suspensionplasty, and to present a technique that structures this procedure into three steps, allowing it to be performed in an easier, more organized, and faster way.


Information ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 27
Author(s):  
Diego Garat ◽  
Dina Wonsever

In order to provide open access to data of public interest, it is often necessary to perform several data curation processes. In some cases, such as biological databases, curation involves quality control to ensure reliable experimental support for biological sequence data. In others, such as medical records or judicial files, publication must not interfere with the right to privacy of the persons involved. There are also interventions in the published data with the aim of generating metadata that enable a better experience of querying and navigation. In all cases, the curation process constitutes a bottleneck that slows down general access to the data, so it is of great interest to have automatic or semi-automatic curation processes. In this paper, we present a solution aimed at the automatic curation of our National Jurisprudence Database, with special focus on the process of the anonymization of personal information. The anonymization process aims to hide the names of the participants involved in a lawsuit without losing the meaning of the narrative of facts. In order to achieve this goal, we need, not only to recognize person names but also resolve co-references in order to assign the same label to all mentions of the same person. Our corpus has significant differences in the spelling of person names, so it was clear from the beginning that pre-existing tools would not be able to reach a good performance. The challenge was to find a good way of injecting specialized knowledge about person names syntax while taking profit of previous capabilities of pre-trained tools. We fine-tuned an NER analyzer and we built a clusterization algorithm to solve co-references between named entities. We present our first results, which, for both tasks, are promising: We obtained a 90.21% of F1-micro in the NER task—from a 39.99% score before retraining the same analyzer in our corpus—and a 95.95% ARI score in clustering for co-reference resolution.


Author(s):  
Eliana B. Souto ◽  
Joana R. Campos ◽  
Raquel Da Ana ◽  
Carlos Martins-Gomes ◽  
Amélia M. Silva ◽  
...  

Genotoxicity screening tests aim to evaluate if and to what extent a compound in contact with the human body (e.g., a drug molecule, a compound from the environment) interacts with DNA. The comet assay is a sensitive method used to predict the risk of DNA damage in individual cells, as it quantifies the tape breaks, being the alkaline version (pH > 13) the most commonly used in the laboratory. Epithelial cells serve as biomatrices in genotoxicity assessments. As ca. 80% of solid cancers are of epithelial origin, the quantification of the DNA damage upon exposure of epithelial cells to a drug or drug formulation becomes relevant. Comet assays run in epithelial cells also have clinical applications in human biomonitoring, which assesses whether and to what extent is the human body exposed to environmental genotoxic compounds and how such exposure changes over time. Ocular mucosa is particularly exposed to environmental assaults. This review summarizes the published data on the genotoxicity assessment in estimating DNA damage in epithelial cells with a special focus on ocular cell lines. General comet assay procedures for ex vivo and in vivo epithelium samples are also described.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten Merx ◽  
Manuel Barreto Miranda ◽  
Lenka Kellermann ◽  
Ulrich Mahlknecht ◽  
Oliver Lange ◽  
...  

We analysed trends over time in palliative first-line chemotherapy in patients with locally advanced or metastatic esophagogastric cancer. Special focus was on frequency and quality of HER2-testing and trends in drug use in combination with trastuzumab. Earlier published data about patients treated outside clinical studies showed a relatively low rate of HER2-testing and insufficient test quality. A total of 2,808 patients retrospectively documented in Therapiemonitor®from 2006 to 2013 were analysed regarding treatment intensity and trends in used drugs. Data on HER2-testing and therapies were analysed in two cohorts documented in 2010 and 2011 (1) compared to 2012 and 2013 (2). Treatment intensity increased: 49.3% of patients received at least a triplet in 2013 compared to 10.1% in 2006. In cohort 2 HER2 expression was tested in 79.1% of the cases. Still, in 26.9% testing was not done as requested by guidelines. Good performance status, multiple metastases, age ≤ 65 years, the objective “to prevent progression,” good cognitive capabilities, estimated good compliance, and social integration positively influenced the probability of HER2-testing; comorbidities negatively affected it. Usage of the combination of fluoropyrimidines and cisplatin with trastuzumab declined from 67% in cohort 1 to 50% in cohort 2.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Fink ◽  
Philip Hughes ◽  
Reka Fulop ◽  
Klaus Wilcken ◽  
Patrick Adams ◽  
...  

<p>Cosmogenic production rates (PRs) are the essential conversion factor between AMS cosmogenic concentrations and absolute exposure ages. The accuracy of cosmogenic glacial chronologies and reliability in their comparison to other paleoclimate systems  is largely contingent on the precision and accuracy of the adopted production rate. This is particularly critical in determining past glacial geochronologies at the scale of millennial temporal resolution. Most PR calibrations are carried out at deglaciation sites where radiocarbon provides the independent chronometric control usually based on 14C ages in basal sediments or varves from lake or bog cores which is assumed to represent the minimum age for glacial retreat. Under these conditions and hence provide PRs as maximum values. Given that today most AMS facilities can deliver 10-Be, 26-Al and 36-Cl data with total analytical errors less than 2% ( for 10 ka exposure), the precision of a PR remains largely dependent  on the error in the independent chronology and accuracy of AMS standards. The history over the past 20 years of the ever-decreasing value of  SLHL 10-Be cosmogenic spallation PRs   from initial estimates of about 7 atoms/g/a to the current  ‘accepted‘ (global average) values of ~4 atoms/g/a,   is an interesting story in itself and demonstrates the complexity in such determinations.  </p><p>Over the past few years new web-based calculators are now available to calculate uniformly new production rates from either new data or combinations of any set of published data (CRONUS-Earth, CRONUS-UW, CosmoCalc, ICE-D, CREp). This delivers a means by which new production rates can be seamlessly integrated and compared using identical constants, methods and statistics that were used to generate (currently accepted) global average or regional production rates.</p><p> For the British Isles, there are a number of 10-Be reference sites that give PRs (Lm scheme) between 3.89±3%  atoms/g/a  (Putnam, QG, v50, 2019) to 4.20±1% atoms/g/a (Small, JQS, v30, 2015) which convert to 3.95 and 4.28, respectively, using datasets in the ICE-D calculator). This difference in 10-Be spallation PRs has recently raised some debate and challenges for the timing of the local-LGM and demise of the British Ice Sheet. This work provides a new  British Isles site specific 10Be PR from the  Arenig Mountains in North Wales where radiocarbon dating of basal sediments from a bog core associated with a series of nearby cirque moraines provides independent age control.  Similarly in the South Island of New Zealand, the current accepted 10Be PR is 3.76±2% (Putnam, QG 2009; converts to 3.94±1% using ICE-D) and is the only available PR that is used for these southern hemispheric glacial sites. This work provides a new Australasian site specific 10Be PR from Arthurs Pass retreat moraines where radiocarbon dating of basal sediments from three cores extracted from a bog impounded by the moraine provides independent age control. </p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (41) ◽  
pp. 4379-4393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luciana Pinato ◽  
Caio Sergio Galina Spilla ◽  
Regina Pekelmann Markus ◽  
Sanseray da Silveira Cruz-Machado

Background: The alterations in neurological and neuroendocrine functions observed in the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) involves environmentally dependent dysregulation of neurodevelopment, in interaction with multiple coding gene defects. Disturbed sleep-wake patterns, as well as abnormal melatonin and glucocorticoid secretion, show the relevance of an underlying impairment of the circadian timing system to the behavioral phenotype of ASD. Thus, understanding the mechanisms involved in the circadian dysregulation in ASD could help to identify early biomarkers to improve the diagnosis and therapeutics as well as providing a significant impact on the lifelong prognosis. Objective: In this review, we discuss the organization of the circadian timing system and explore the connection between neuroanatomic, molecular, and neuroendocrine responses of ASD and its clinical manifestations. Here we propose interconnections between circadian dysregulation, inflammatory baseline and behavioral changes in ASD. Taking into account, the high relevancy of melatonin in orchestrating both circadian timing and the maintenance of physiological immune quiescence, we raise the hypothesis that melatonin or analogs should be considered as a pharmacological approach to suppress inflammation and circadian misalignment in ASD patients. Strategy: This review provides a comprehensive update on the state-of-art of studies related to inflammatory states and ASD with a special focus on the relationship with melatonin and clock genes. The hypothesis raised above was analyzed according to the published data. Conclusion: Current evidence supports the existence of associations between ASD to circadian dysregulation, behavior problems, increased inflammatory levels of cytokines, sleep disorders, as well as reduced circadian neuroendocrine responses. Indeed, major effects may be related to a low melatonin rhythm. We propose that maintaining the proper rhythm of the circadian timing system may be helpful to improve the health and to cope with several behavioral changes observed in ASD subjects.


Radiocarbon ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
T M L Wigley ◽  
A B Muller

Recent experimental work has suggested that the relative fractionation of 14C to 13C may differ from the accepted value of b = 2. In order to explore the implications of this possibility, the standard formulae for correcting radiocarbon dates for fractionation effects are rederived, but without making any of the usual assumptions or approximations. A generalized dating equation is derived (where ASN and AON are normalized sample and standard activities, β is a factor which reflects changes in atmospheric 13C and 14C content, {RST(o)/RST}b accounts for post-depositional changes in sample 13C ratio, and tcal is calendar age in years before ad 1950. The errors in calculated ages which might arise from different b values are estimated and shown to be small relative to other dating uncertainties. The effect of b ≠ 2 may be important in the calibration of radiocarbon dates using tree-ring samples of known age. A theoretical analysis suggests that b ≠ 2 effects may result in a correlation between age anomaly (ie, the difference between radiocarbon age and calendar age) and sample 13C data. However, an analysis of published data reveals no meaningful correlation. This result, while not eliminating the possibility that b ≠ 2, highlights its unimportance even in this high-precision application of radiocarbon dating.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Sameer Saleem ◽  
Mubbasher A. Syed ◽  
Khalid Changal ◽  
Abdulelah Nuqali ◽  
Mujeeb Sheikh

Iatrogenic coronary artery dissection is a potentially life-threatening complication of cardiovascular interventions. The optimal management of iatrogenic coronary artery dissection is not clear; however, both conservative management and percutaneous or surgical revascularization have been performed depending on the patient’s clinical status and the extent of dissection. We present the first reported case of right coronary artery dissection after Bentall procedure performed for ascending aortic aneurysm. Urgent percutaneous intervention using adjunctive coronary imaging was performed with excellent clinical recovery. In this article, we highlight coronary artery dissection after Bentall procedure as a possible complication, provide an insight into various options in its management, and review published data on iatrogenic coronary artery dissection. We also discuss the challenges in percutaneous treatment of coronary artery dissection with special focus on intracoronary imaging for accurate diagnosis and guidance in the management of this complex lesion.


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