Historical Transition of a Farming System towards Industrialization: A Danish Agricultural Case Study Comparing Sustainability in the 1840s and 2019

A Danish pre-industrial farming system is reconstructed and compared to its modern industrialized farming system equivalent to evaluate agricultural performance in a sustainability perspective. The investigated Danish farm system and its contributing elements have undergone significant transformations. The intensity of contemporary agriculture shows that high productivity levels have been achieved by increasing the input of energy using modern machinery. At the same time, the energy efficiency (calculations based on energetic indicators) diminishes over time as the degree of dependence on fossil fuels increases. The results from this study show significant changes in the farming system, specifically inputs from agricultural land use, livestock, and energy systems. From being highly circular, the system changed to being a clear linear farming system with highly increased productivity but less efficient at the same time, questioning the relationship between productivity and efficiency and resource utilization in modern farming systems. Through utilizing an agroecological historical approach by comparing system performance over time, the results offer opportunities to explore how agricultural farming systems evolve over time and help to describe the complexity of the system level in a sustainability perspective.

A Scoping Review of the Application of Metabolomics in Nutrition Research: The Literature Survey 2000–2019

Nutrimetabolomics is an emerging field in nutrition research, and it is expected to play a significant role in deciphering the interaction between diet and health. Through the development of omics technology over the last two decades, the definition of food and nutrition has changed from sources of energy and major/micro-nutrients to an essential exposure factor that determines health risks. Furthermore, this new approach has enabled nutrition research to identify dietary biomarkers and to deepen the understanding of metabolic dynamics and the impacts on health risks. However, so far, candidate markers identified by metabolomics have not been clinically applied and more efforts should be made to validate those. To help nutrition researchers better understand the potential of its application, this scoping review outlined the historical transition, recent focuses, and future prospects of the new realm, based on trends in the number of human research articles from the early stage of 2000 to the present of 2019 by searching the Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online (MEDLINE). Among them, objective dietary assessment, metabolic profiling, and health risk prediction were positioned as three of the principal applications. The continued growth will enable nutrimetabolomics research to contribute to personalized nutrition in the future.

A Revisionist Reading of the Transition of Buddhist Cave-Making from Yungang to Longmen

This study reexamines images and textual materials that can be related to the dating and iconography of caves at Yungang and Longmen and the historical transition between them. The transition is associated with the move of the Northern Wei capital from Pingcheng to Luoyang, and the beginnings of the Longmen caves is widely believed to coincide with the establishment of the capital at Luoyang in 495. Inscriptions in the Guyang Cave have been interpreted to support the widely held belief that it was created at the time of the move of the capital. Visual evidence of sculptural practice and transitions in sculptural art that can be observed broadly between caves and cave site can also be seen in micro-environments within a single cave or a single niche that offer new insights. Through comparative analysis of the caves' images and artworks found in other contexts, and their consideration in conjunction with textual materials, the author proposes a revisionist reconstruction of the early work in the Guyang Cave.

Beckett's Molloy, the Promise of Youth, and the Postwar

This paper argues that Samuel Beckett's Molloy charts the historical transition of the postwar moment in generational terms – terms that themselves had real historical significance in the years immediately following the Allied victory in World War II – ultimately, and uncharacteristically, advancing a youthful figure of promise in young Jacques Moran, Jr. Though Beckett is much more commonly read as an allegorist of existential ambivalence – if not despair – I contend that his first postwar novel must properly be understood as staging history in its confused, agonistic, and frustrating family dynamics. Beckett's rendering of authority, history, and hierarchy in terms of perversion, queerness, and sterility ultimately preserves a futurity centred not precisely on the child per se, but on the emergent figure of the adolescent – the teenager, even, I will venture to claim – avant la lettre: Jacques Moran, Jr.

Emerging self-assembling peptide nanomaterial for anti-cancer therapy

Recently it is mainly focused on anti-tumor comprehensive treatments like finding target tumor cells or activating immune cells to inhibit tumor recurrence and metastasis. At present, chemotherapy and molecular-targeted drugs can inhibit tumor cell growth to a certain extent. However, multi-drug resistance and immune escape often make it difficult for new drugs to achieve expected effects. Peptide hydrogel nanoparticles is a new type of biological material with functional peptide chains as the core and self-assembling peptide (SAP) as the framework. It has a variety of significant biological functions, including effective local inflammation suppression and non-drug-resistant cell killing. Besides, it can induce immune activation more persistently in an adjuvant independent manner when compared with simple peptides. Thus, SAP nanomaterial has great potential in regulating cell physiological functions, drug delivery and sensitization, vaccine design and immunotherapy. Not only that, it is also a potential way to focus on some specific proteins and cells through peptides, which has already been examined in previous research. A full understanding of the function and application of SAP nanoparticles can provide a simple and practical strategy for the development of anti-tumor drugs and vaccine design, which contributes to the historical transition of peptide nanohydrogels from bench to bedside and brings as much survival benefits as possible to cancer patients.

Numerical estimates of risk factors contingent on credit ratings

Assuming a favorable or an adverse outcome for every combination of a credit class and an industry sector, a binary string, termed as a macroeconomic scenario, is considered. Given historical transition counts and a model for dependence among credit-rating migrations, a probability is assigned to each of the scenarios by maximizing a likelihood function. Applications of this distribution in financial risk analysis are suggested. Two classifications are considered: 7 non-default credit classes with 6 industry sectors and 2 non-default credit classes with 12 industry sectors. We propose a heuristic algorithm for solving the corresponding maximization problems of combinatorial complexity. Probabilities and correlations characterizing riskiness of random events involving several industry sectors and credit classes are reported.

Getting to Sweden I

How and why some countries were able to make the historical transition from a patrimonial, nepotistic, and corrupt bureaucracy to a relatively clean and professionalized one is still an understudied topic in the literature on corruption. This chapter presents original data on such a transition in the case of Sweden, drawing on court hearings of cases of malfeasance among public officials in the period 1720–1850. An important explanation for why the Swedish bureaucracy was able to break out of the collective action trap of corruption relates to Charles Tilly’s theory of the importance of war for state making. This chapter pinpoints the importance of having lost a significant war—in the Swedish case, the war against Russia in 1808–9—and the constitutional and regime changes this set in motion. Drawing on comparative data on malfeasance, the similarities in this regard between the Swedish and Danish cases are highlighted.

The formation of money circulation in Russia: introduction of the metal system and banking supervision

The authors show the historical transition from the use of local money, in fact, reflecting the commodity turnover to an instrument of an emissive nature. The article describes the historical transition from bimetallism to the paper and bill of exchange forms of money circulation. it is shown that the money supply after the 1840s became a source of formation of credit funds, which ensured the need for the emergence of a system of banking supervision.