Medieval Climate Variability in the eastern Amazon-Cerrado regions and its archeological implications

Solute Carrier Family 27 Member 6 (SLC27A6) Possibly Promotes the Proliferation of Papillary Thyroid Cancer by Regulating c-MYC

To investigate the expression and mechanism of LSC27A6 in papillary thyroid cancer (PTC). We analyzed the differential expression of SLC27A6 in PTC tissues and normal tissues based on the TCGA database and validated it using immunohistochemistry. Wilcoxon rank sum, chi-square test, or Fisher exact exam were used to analyze the relationship between the expression of SLC27A6 and clinicopathological information. Samples were divided into two groups according to whether BRAF was mutated or not, and Wilcoxon rank sum was used to determine whether the expression of SLC27A6 was related to BRAF mutation. The effects of SLC27A6 on the proliferation, migration, and apoptosis of PTC cells were detected by cell counting kit-8 (CCK8), colony formation assay, transwell assay, and flow cytometry. Spearman correlation analysis was used to evaluate the relationship between SLC27A6 and c-MYC. Protein expression was detected by Western blot. The expression of SLC27A6 was higher in PTC and positively correlated with N stage. SLC27A6 expression was higher in samples with BRAF mutations. Down-regulation of SLC27A6 inhibited cell proliferation, migration, and invasion and induced apoptosis. Spearman correlation analysis showed that SLC27A6 was positively correlated with c-MYC. Knockdown of SLC27A6 inhibited c-MYC expression. Our results suggest that SLC27A6 is overexpressed in PTC tissues and affects the progression of PTC by regulating c-MYC.

A multidisciplinary framework for biodiversity prediction in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest hotspot

Abstract: We briefly describe selected results from our thematic project focused on the biodiversity of the Atlantic Forest (“AF BIOTA”), which was jointly funded by FAPESP’s BIOTA Program, the U.S. National Science Foundation Dimensions of Biodiversity Program, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). As one of the five most important hotspots of biodiversity in the world, the Atlantic Forest (AF) holds less than 16% of its vegetation cover, yet, amongst the hotspots, it still harbors one of the highest numbers of species, including endemics. By gathering specialists across multiple disciplines (biology, geology, engineering), we aimed to understand how this megabiodiversity was built through time, informing biodiversity science and conservation. Among the results, we trained 18 Master’s and 26 Ph.D. students, published more than 400 peer-reviewed papers that improved our knowledge about the forest’s biologic and climatic diversity and dynamics through time, developed new analytical methods, produced outreach videos and articles, and provided data to help define biodiversity conservation policies.

Formal Tests for Resistance-Resilience in Archaeological Time Series

The study of resilience is a common pathway for scientific data to inform policy and practice towards impending climate change. Consequently, understanding the mechanisms and features that contribute towards building resilience is a key goal of much research on coupled socio-environmental systems. In parallel, archaeology has developed the ambition to contribute to this agenda through its unique focus on cultural dynamics that occur over the very long term. This paper argues that archaeological studies of resilience are limited in scope and potential impact by incomplete operational definitions of resilience, itself a multifaceted and contested concept. This lack of interdisciplinary engagement fundamentally limits archaeology’s ability to contribute meaningfully to understanding factors behind the emergence and maintenance of long-term societal resilience, a topic of significant interest that the field is in theory ideally positioned to address. Here, we introduce resilience metrics drawn from ecology and develop case studies to illustrate their potential utility for archaeological studies. We achieve this by extending methods for formally measuring resistance, the capacity of a system to absorb disturbances; and resilience, its capacity to recover from disturbances, with a novel significance test for palaeodemographic data. Building on statistical permutation and post-hoc tests available in the rcarbon package in the R statistical environment, we apply our adapted resilience-resistance framework to summed probability distributions of calibrated radiocarbon dates drawn from the Atlantic Forest of eastern Brazil. We deploy these methods to investigate cross-sectional trends across three recognised biogeographical zones of the Atlantic Forest domain, against the backdrop of prehistoric phases of heightened hydroclimatic variability. Our analysis uncovers novel centennial-scale spatial structure in the resilience of palaeodemographic growth rates. In addition to the case-specific findings, we suggest that adapting formal metrics can help archaeology create impact and engagement beyond relatively narrow disciplinary concerns. To this end, we supply code and data to replicate our palaeodemographic analyses to enable their use and adaptation to other archaeological problems.