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Reconstruction of early Pleistocene hominin carcass acquisition and processing behaviors are necessarily based at least in part on butchered fossil bones. This paper provides zooarchaeological and taphonomic analyses and behavioral interpretations of three similar to 1.5 million-year-old archaeofaunas from areas 1A and 103 in the Okote Member of the Koobi Fora Formation, northern Kenya: FwJj14A, FwJj14B, and GaJi14. These sites are all located in similar paleoenvironmental contexts, near shallow water with swampy, seasonally flooded areas, and some evidence for more wooded or gallery forest settings. Both individual specimen- and assemblage-level analyses of butchery-marked bones indicate that the hominins appear to have practiced similar butchery strategies at all of these sites, with butchery (defleshing, disarticulation, and marrow extraction) of both high- and low-ranked skeletal elements with no apparent preference for prey size, skeletal region, limb class, or limb portion. Only four tooth-marked specimens, including one likely crocodile-tooth-marked bone, are preserved in all three archaeofaunas. A paucity of limb epiphyses suggests that bone-crunching hyenids may have deleted these portions subsequent to hominin butchery. Strangely, there are no stone tools preserved with the 292 cut-marked and 27 percussion-marked faunal specimens (out of a total of 6,039 specimens), suggesting that raw material availability may have conditioned hominin lithic discard patterns at these locales. These assemblages increase our knowledge of the dietary behavior and ecology of Homo erectus, and provide support for variability in early Pleistocene hominin carcass foraging patterns. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Cranioplasty is a well-known procedure in modern neurosurgery. Although some authors have claimed it was also performed by prehistoric trepanners in various parts of the world, there is little hard evidence to support this. Here we review various claims of cranioplasty in Peru, where trepanation was widely practised in Prehispanic times. We find little support for assertions that cranioplasty was common. One recently discovered burial from the Cuzco region, however, provides the first documented case of the reinsertion of a bone plug into a trepanation opening. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper is an empirical extension aimed at investigating the relationships between the indicators of the financial superstructure and its intermediation environments; and especially how the former responds to the effects of the latter. Intermediation-environmental models patterned after multivariate regression, causality, and partial adjustment models of both linear and log-linear formulations were estimated and analyzed. The results reveal that three environments: socio-political, regulatory, and international finance-exerted significant effects on the intermediation function of the superstructure. Previous intermediation successes ginger up current performance. In the long run, the effects of the environmental factors on the intermediation function of the superstructure, in whatever direction, more than quadruples. In any given year, the Nigerian financial superstructure attains only about 21.9% of desired (optimal) FIR. Given this, it would take about 4-1/2 years for it to adjust its intermediation operations (FIR), in light of the effects of environmental factors, to optimal levels in order to significantly impact the economy as desired. Some consistent behavioral traits were identified from the results to include: the precepts of potential maximization, profit maximization, accommodation principles, survival and cost-minimization principles, and the neutrality axiom. © 2007 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

Studies of stone artifact morphology are beginning to rapidly increase in complexity. While these techniques provide new insights into artifact variation, it is also necessary to insure that these methods provide data that is behaviorally relevant. Here, we provide a new technique that includes three dimensional attributes to calculate platform areas to enhance the prediction of flake area from platform attributes. This data allows the calculation of more precise measures of reduction in large unifacial flake cores in Developed Oldowan assemblages (i.e., Karari Scrapers). Here, we look at measures of curation within these tool types across a landscape scale study. We apply demographic analyses of the degree to which an assemblage can be considered to be curated (i.e., the potential use life of a tool minus the actual use life of a tool). Results suggest that even though there is significant variation within a given paleogeographic setting, a higher frequency of pieces are used to their full potential in areas where raw material is predicted to have been scarce. These data suggest that hominins fulfill some aspects of a neutral model of artifact transport, yet likely make directed movements to transport tools to specific places on the ancient landscape. © 2010 Springer-Verlag New York.

Research has demonstrated the importance of supportive relationships and social networks to prisoners’ psychosocial outcomes, especially for women. Understandin...

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) Code of Federal Regulations regarding Protection of Human Subjects (45 C.F.R. part 46) provides guidance

Yoga practice is associated with positive health outcomes, including benefits related to managing substance use disorders and trauma symptomology. However, low-income vulnerable communities have limited access to yoga. This process evaluation of a trauma-informed yoga program for women with substance use disorders demonstrates the feasibility and utility of using noncertified yoga instructors to offer a basic yoga in community-based agencies. Participants describe outcomes related to relaxation, mindfulness, and movement that are well-aligned with their recovery needs. Study findings suggest the utilization of instructors with minimal training has the potential to expand research about and access to yoga among marginalized communities. © 2016, Western Michigan University. All rights reserved.

Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is an aggressive subset of breast cancer that is more common in African-American and Hispanic women. Early detection followed by intensive treatment is critical to improving poor survival rates. The current standard to diagnose TNBC from histopathology of biopsy samples is invasive and time-consuming. Imaging methods such as mammography and magnetic resonance (MR) imaging, while covering the entire breast, lack the spatial resolution and specificity to capture the molecular features that identify TNBC. Two nonlinear optical modalities of second harmonic generation (SHG) imaging of collagen, and resonance Raman spectroscopy (RRS) potentially offer novel rapid, label-free detection of molecular and morphological features that characterize cancerous breast tissue at subcellular resolution. In this study, we first applied MR methods to measure the whole-tumor characteristics of metastatic TNBC (4T1) and nonmetastatic estrogen receptor positive breast cancer (67NR) models, including tumor lactate concentration and vascularity. Subsequently, we employed for the first time in vivo SHG imaging of collagen and ex vivo RRS of biomolecules to detect different microenvironmental features of these two tumor models. We achieved high sensitivity and accuracy for discrimination between these two cancer types by quantitative morphometric analysis and nonnegative matrix factorization along with support vector machine. Our study proposes a new method to combine SHG and RRS together as a promising novel photonic and optical method for early detection of TNBC.

Heteronormativity, the “privileging of heterosexuality through its normalization” (Jackson, 2006, p. 109), causes confusion and anxiety for many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and asexual preservice teachers as they consider how they will talk about their lives with students. This article explores how preservice teachers have experienced the normalization of heterosexuality and the ways in which these experiences will shape their professional practices. Focus group and follow up interviews with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and asexual preservice teachers were analyzed using a constant comparison method. Findings suggest that participants’ professional vision was largely a response to heteronormativity. They wanted to be out, be role models, and create safe spaces; yet they felt unable to achieve this vision in what they perceived as heteronormative school climates. Implications for teacher preparation programs and policies include the importance of equipping all preservice teachers to identify and disrupt heteronormativity in schools.

Many radio collections within the United States are maintained in more informal program libraries and archives in hundreds of geographically dispersed broadcasting stations throughout the country. To assess the full extent of this problem and real risk posed to station-owned radio collections, this article assesses the results of a survey administered across twenty-seven nonprofit and commercial stations or corporate parent companies. Nonprofit stations, its findings suggest, are more likely to actively maintain their archives and do so in a manner that shows awareness of current archival standards, whereas commercial stations are less likely to exert active stewardship over their collections. © 2020 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Extreme climatic events including marine heatwaves (MHWs) are becoming more frequent and severe in the Anthropocene. However, our understanding of how these events affect population dynamics of ecologically important species is limited, in part because extreme events are rare and difficult to predict. Here, we quantified the occurrence and severity of MHWs over 60 years in warm range edge kelp forests on both sides of the North Atlantic. The cumulative annual intensity of MHWs increased two- to four-fold during this period, coinciding with the disappearance of kelps. We experimentally demonstrated a relationship between strong and severe 2018 heatwaves and high kelp mortality in both regions. Patterns of kelp mortality were strongly linked to maximum temperature anomalies, which crossed lethal thresholds in both regions. Translocation and tagging experiments revealed similar kelp mortality rates on reefs dominated by healthy kelp forests and degraded sediment-laden algal ‘turfs’, indicating equal vulnerability to extreme events. These results suggest a mechanistic link between MHWs and broad-scale kelp loss, and highlight how warming can make ecosystem boundaries unstable, forcing shifts to undesirable ecosystem states under episodically extreme climatic conditions. © 2020, The Author(s).

The Early Pliocene Sagantole Fm. in the Gona Project area, Afar State, Ethiopia, is noted for discoveries of the early hominin Ardipithecus ramidus. A large series of fossil cercopithecid primates dated to between 4.8 and 4.3 Ma has also been collected from these sediments. In this paper, we use qualitative analysis and standard dental and postcranial measures to systematically describe the craniodental remains and tentatively allocate postcrania to taxa where we are able to. We then use these data to compare these specimens to fossil assemblages from contemporary sites, interpret their paleobiology, and discuss implications for the paleoecology of the Gona Sagantole Fm. We recognize three cercopithecid species in the Gona Sagantole Fm. Pliopapio alemui makes up approximately two-thirds of the identifiable specimens; nearly all of the rest are allocated to Kuseracolobus aramisi, and a single molar indicates the presence of a second, somewhat larger but morphologically distinct papionin. Among the Early Pliocene cercopithecids from Gona are also a number of postcranial elements. None of the postcranial remains are directly associated with any of the cranial material. Nonetheless, some of the distal humeri and proximal femora can be tentatively allocated to either Pl. alemui or K. aramisi based on a combination of size, as the latter is approximately 50% larger than the former, and morphology. If these assignments are correct, they suggest K. aramisi was primarily arboreal and similar to most extant colobines, whereas Pl. alemui was more mixed in its substrate use, being more terrestrially adapted than K. aramisi, but less so than extant Papio or Theropithecus. Thus, we interpret the predominance of Pl. alemui over K. aramisi is consistent with a somewhat more open environment at Gona than at Aramis. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd

Environmental enrichment (EE) is one experimental manipulation that induces changes in the brain. However, it is important to distinguish between physical and social components of enrichment. To this end we established four groups of rats reared in different enriched environments during the adolescent period. Our results indicate heightened social memory and increased spine density in dentate gyrus specifically in socially enriched animals. Physical enrichment increased spine density in CA1. Dopamine D2 receptor expression in hippocampus was decreased across all enrichment conditions. Altogether, our results demonstrate differing effects of physical and social enrichment, supporting an important role for environment in synaptogenesis, behavior, and dopaminergic signaling. © 2020 The Authors