Palaeoenvironmental proxies indicate long-term development of agro-pastoralist landscapes in Inner Asian mountains

A growing body of archaeological research on agro-pastoralist populations of the Inner Asian mountains indicates that these groups adapted various systems of mobile herding and cultivation to ecotopes across the region from as early as 5000 BP. It has been argued that these adaptations allowed the development of flexible social-ecological systems well suited to the long-term management of these mountain landscapes. At present, less attention has been paid to examining the long-term ecological legacy of these adaptations within the sedimentary or palaeoenvironmental record. Here we present sediment, palynomorph and charcoal data that we interpret as indicating agro-pastoralist environmental perturbations, taken from three cores at middle and high altitudes in the Kashmir Valley at the southern end of the Inner Asian mountains. Our data indicate spatially and temporally discontinuous patterns of agro-pastoralist land use beginning close to 4000 BP. Periods of intensification of upland herding are often coincident with phases of regional social or environmental change, in particular we find the strongest signals for agro-pastoralism in the environmental record contemporary with regionally arid conditions. These patterns support previous arguments that specialised agro-pastoralist ecologies across the region are well placed to respond to past and future climate deteriorations. Our data indicating long-term co-evolution of humans and landscape in the study area also have implications for the ongoing management of environments generally perceived as “pristine” or “wilderness”.

Mid-Cretaceous marine Os isotope evidence for heterogeneous cause of oceanic anoxic events

During the mid-Cretaceous, the Earth experienced several environmental perturbations, including an extremely warm climate and Oceanic Anoxic Events (OAEs). Submarine volcanic episodes associated with formation of large igneous provinces (LIPs) may have triggered these perturbations. The osmium isotopic ratio (187Os/188Os) is a suitable proxy for tracing hydrothermal activity associated with the LIPs formation, but 187Os/188Os data from the mid-Cretaceous are limited to short time intervals. Here we provide a continuous high-resolution marine 187Os/188Os record covering all mid-Cretaceous OAEs. Several OAEs (OAE1a, Wezel and Fallot events, and OAE2) correspond to unradiogenic 187Os/188Os shifts, suggesting that they were triggered by massive submarine volcanic episodes. However, minor OAEs (OAE1c and OAE1d), which do not show pronounced unradiogenic 187Os/188Os shifts, were likely caused by enhanced monsoonal activity. Because the subaerial LIPs volcanic episodes and Circum-Pacific volcanism correspond to the highest temperature and pCO2 during the mid-Cretaceous, they may have caused the hot mid-Cretaceous climate.

Revisiting regulatory decoherence: Accounting for temporal bias in a co-expression analysis reveals novel candidates controlling environmental response

Transcriptional Regulatory Networks (TRNs) orchestrate the timing, magnitude, and rate of organismal response to many environmental perturbations. Regulatory interactions in TRNs are dynamic but exploiting temporal variation to understand gene regulation requires a careful appreciation of both molecular biology and confounders in statistical analysis. Seeking to exploit the abundance of RNASequencing data now available, many past studies have relied upon population-level statistics from cross-sectional studies, estimating gene co-expression interactions to capture transient changes of regulatory activity. We show that population-level co-expression exhibits biases when capturing transient changes of regulatory activity in rice plants responding to elevated temperature. An apparent cause of this bias is regulatory saturation, the observation that detectable co-variance between a regulator and its target may be low as their transcript abundances are induced. This phenomenon appears to be particularly acute for rapid onset environmental stressors. However, exploiting temporal correlations appears to be a reliable means to detect transient regulatory activity following rapid onset environmental perturbations such as temperature stress. Such temporal correlation may lose information along a more gradual-onset stressor (e.g., dehydration). We here show that rice plants exposed to a dehydration stress exhibit temporal structure of coexpression in their response that can not be unveiled by temporal correlation alone. Collectively, our results point to the need to account for the nuances of molecular interactions and the possibly confounding effects that these can introduce into conventional approaches to study transcriptome datasets.

Time-Domain Joint Training Strategies of Speech Enhancement and Intent Classification Neural Models

Robustness against background noise and reverberation is essential for many real-world speech-based applications. One way to achieve this robustness is to employ a speech enhancement front-end that, independently of the back-end, removes the environmental perturbations from the target speech signal. However, although the enhancement front-end typically increases the speech quality from an intelligibility perspective, it tends to introduce distortions which deteriorate the performance of subsequent processing modules. In this paper, we investigate strategies for jointly training neural models for both speech enhancement and the back-end, which optimize a combined loss function. In this way, the enhancement front-end is guided by the back-end to provide more effective enhancement. Differently from typical state-of-the-art approaches employing on spectral features or neural embeddings, we operate in the time domain, processing raw waveforms in both components. As application scenario we consider intent classification in noisy environments. In particular, the front-end speech enhancement module is based on Wave-U-Net while the intent classifier is implemented as a temporal convolutional network. Exhaustive experiments are reported on versions of the Fluent Speech Commands corpus contaminated with noises from the Microsoft Scalable Noisy Speech Dataset, shedding light and providing insight about the most promising training approaches.

Neuro-vascular Reserve in Developing Snug and Fit Buildup

The body is observed to function optimally in life in some individuals while others have various problems. In the complexity involved, this paper describes saliently the mechanisms for biological robustness from birth and subsequent neuro-vascular and core matching patterns well-coordinated till adulthood. These mechanisms as the individual develops and maintains his core to keep vitality against environmental perturbations and they can be dysfunctional. The three related dimensions of the fascial organization, the co-directed nervous and perfusional elements in the body are emphasized. Re-understanding of these mechanisms in the body-map can be useful to revise the basis for re-defining our therapies

Methane seeps as refugia during ash falls in the Late Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway of North America

Methane seeps host rich biotic communities, forming patchy yet highly productive ecosystems across the global ocean. Persistent hydrocarbon emissions fuel chemosynthetic food webs at seeps. Methane seeps were abundant in the Western Interior Seaway of North America during the Late Cretaceous. This area also experienced intermittent ash falls, which negatively impacted the marine fauna. We propose that methane seeps acted as refugia during these environmental perturbations. We report a laterally continuous bentonite within the upper Campanian Baculites compressus Zone of the Pierre Shale in southwestern South Dakota (USA) that fortuitously cuts across a methane seep deposit. We compare the macroinvertebrate record below and above the bentonite at seep and non-seep sites. Our results reveal that the paleocommunity (measured by abundance and diversity) was largely unaffected by the ash fall at the seep site, whereas it was significantly altered at the non-seep site. Thus, methane seeps in the Western Interior Seaway may have provided refuges or served as oases in the aftermath of severe environmental perturbations.

Can Systems Biology Advance Clinical Precision Oncology?

Precision oncology is perceived as a way forward to treat individual cancer patients. However, knowing particular cancer mutations is not enough for optimal therapeutic treatment, because cancer genotype-phenotype relationships are nonlinear and dynamic. Systems biology studies the biological processes at the systems’ level, using an array of techniques, ranging from statistical methods to network reconstruction and analysis, to mathematical modeling. Its goal is to reconstruct the complex and often counterintuitive dynamic behavior of biological systems and quantitatively predict their responses to environmental perturbations. In this paper, we review the impact of systems biology on precision oncology. We show examples of how the analysis of signal transduction networks allows to dissect resistance to targeted therapies and inform the choice of combinations of targeted drugs based on tumor molecular alterations. Patient-specific biomarkers based on dynamical models of signaling networks can have a greater prognostic value than conventional biomarkers. These examples support systems biology models as valuable tools to advance clinical and translational oncological research.

Zircon of Triassic Age in the Stuttgart Formation (Schilfsandstein)—Witness of Tephra Fallout in the Central European Basin and New Constraints on the Mid-Carnian Episode

The Carnian Stuttgart-Formation (Schilfsandstein) of the Central European Basin contains relics of Triassic volcanic detritus in form of euhedral zircon grains and authigenic analcime. Multiple LA-ICP-MS spot analyses of single zircon crystals from an outcrop near Heilbronn (SW Germany) yielded weighted average 206Pb/238U ages between 250 and 230 Ma, providing evidence for tephra fallout in the southern part of the Central European Basin related to Olenekian, Anisian–Ladinian and Carnian volcanic activity. The tephra was probably transported by monsoonal circulations from volcanic centres of the NW Tethys to the Central European Basin. The four youngest zircon crystals gave a weighted average 206Pb/238U age of 231.1 ± 1.6 Ma (10 analyses), which is interpreted to date syn-depositional tephra fallout into the fluvial Lower Schilfsandstein Member of the Stuttgart Formation. This new maximum depositional age provides the first evidence that deposition of the Stuttgart Formation, which represents the type-example of the mid-Carnian episode, a global episode of enhanced flux of siliciclastic detritus and related environmental perturbations, occurred during the Tuvalian 2 substage at ca. 231 Ma, about 3 million years later than suggested by previous correlations. Zircon grains with weighted average 206Pb/238U ages of 236.0 ± 1.2 Ma (n = 17) and 238.6 ± 1.5 Ma (n = 6) and 206Pb/238U ages between 241 ± 6 and 250 ± 3 Ma point to the presence of tephra in early Carnian to Olenekian strata of the Keuper to Buntsandstein Groups. Traces of these reworked tephra were incorporated into the Stuttgart Formation due to fluvial erosion in the southern Central European Basin and at its margins.