EU-wide Enviromental and Exposure Monitoring of Dioxins, PCBS and Other Persistent Organic Pullutants (POPs) in Butter and Correlations to Published Air Data

The project is a pilot and is aimed at evaluating whether a robust relationship can be established between POPs in commercially available milk products when compared to analytical data on POPs in ambient air. The experimental approach is based on 2 sets of diary product samples: 1. The 2001 milk survey with 88 milk samples from 68 locations in Europe 2. The 2007 organic diary product survey with 85 samples collected directly from farms in Europe. Dioxins, PCB and pesticides are analyzed in all samples and compared to regional air data collected from literature.JRC.DDG.H.5-Rural, water and ecosystem resource

The Walking Dead at Saqqara

Funerary rituals and mortuary cults are classics of religious studies research in ancient Egypt. Still, we know little about how the living interacted with ancestors and gods in daily life. The case study of the city of Memphis and its Saqqara necropolis in the late 2nd mil. BCE focusses on lived ancient religion, and demonstrates the spectrum of religious practices and options to configure religion and sociality through commemorative practices

Terahertz radiation driven chiral edge currents in graphene

We observe photocurrents induced in single layer graphene samples by illumination of the graphene edges with circularly polarized terahertz radiation at normal incidence. The photocurrent flows along the sample edges and forms a vortex. Its winding direction reverses by switching the light helicity from left- to right-handed. We demonstrate that the photocurrent stems from the sample edges, which reduce the spatial symmetry and result in an asymmetric scattering of carriers driven by the radiation electric field. The developed theory is in a good agreement with the experiment. We show that the edge photocurrents can be applied for determination of the conductivity type and the momentum scattering time of the charge carriers in the graphene edge vicinity.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure, additional Supplemental Material (3 pages, 1 figure

Group-specific environmental sequencing reveals high levels of ecological heterogeneity across the microsporidian radiation

This is the final version of the article. Available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.The description of diversity is a key imperative in current biological studies and has been revolutionised by the molecular era that allows easy access to microbial diversity not visible to the naked eye. Broadly-targeted SSU rRNA gene amplicon studies of diverse environmental habitats continue to reveal new microbial eukaryotic diversity. However, some eukaryotic lineages, particularly parasites, have divergent SSU sequences, and are therefore undersampled or excluded by the methodologies used for SSU studies. One such group is the Microsporidia, which have particularly divergent SSU sequences and are rarely detected in even large-scale amplicon studies. This is a serious omission as microsporidia are diverse and important parasites of humans and other animals of socio-economic importance. Whilst estimates of other microbial diversity are expanding, our knowledge of true microsporidian diversity has remained largely static. In this work, we have combined high throughput sequencing, broad environmental sampling, and microsporidian-specific primers to broaden our understanding of the evolutionary diversity of the Microsporidia. Mapping our new sequences onto a tree of known microsporidian diversity we uncover new diversity across all areas of the microsporidian tree and uncover clades dominated by novel sequences, with no close described relatives. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.NERC. Grant Numbers: NE/I002014/1, NE/H009426/1, NE/H000887/1. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). Grant Number: FC121

Preoperative gynecology conference: the impact on resident management of surgical patients

Objective: To determine if a preoperative conference impacts the resident recommended surgery on gynecology patients seen in continuity clinics. Study Design: A twice monthly preoperative conference was initiated in January of 2009 where residents presented their proposed surgical intervention. A retrospective review of the first 100 preoperative conference submission forms was performed and analysis made on how often the type or route of surgery was changed based on conference discussion and if further work up or tests were requested prior to scheduling surgery. Results: Discussion of patients through a preoperative conference venue resulted in a surgical management change in 36% of patients and further medical management prior to surgery was recommended in 29%. Conclusions: A preoperative gynecology conference does impact the chosen surgery for resident patients. This venue may be a valuable tool for teaching residents optimization of the preoperative evaluation and selection of the appropriate surgical intervention

AR2, a novel automatic muscle artifact reduction software method for ictal EEG interpretation: Validation and comparison of performance with commercially available software.

Objective: To develop a novel software method (AR2) for reducing muscle contamination of ictal scalp electroencephalogram (EEG), and validate this method on the basis of its performance in comparison to a commercially available software method (AR1) to accurately depict seizure-onset location. Methods: A blinded investigation used 23 EEG recordings of seizures from 8 patients. Each recording was uninterpretable with digital filtering because of muscle artifact and processed using AR1 and AR2 and reviewed by 26 EEG specialists. EEG readers assessed seizure-onset time, lateralization, and region, and specified confidence for each determination. The two methods were validated on the basis of the number of readers able to render assignments, confidence, the intra-class correlation (ICC), and agreement with other clinical findings. Results: Among the 23 seizures, two-thirds of the readers were able to delineate seizure-onset time in 10 of 23 using AR1, and 15 of 23 using AR2 (

Perspectives on Lived Religion II

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