Herd management and subsistence practices as inferred from isotopic analysis of animals and plants at Bronze Age Politiko-Troullia, Cyprus.

The Bronze Age village of Politiko-Troullia, located in the foothills of the copper-bearing Troodos mountains of central Cyprus, was occupied ~2050-1850 cal BCE. Excavated evidence shows that community activities included copper metallurgy (ore processing, smelting and casting), crop cultivation, and rearing of livestock. Faunal analysis reveals day-to-day subsistence practices that included consumption of sheep, goat, cattle, and pig, as well as community-scale ritual feasting focused on fallow deer, Dama dama mesopotamica. In this paper, we present bone collagen stable isotope data from these taxa to infer how these animals were managed. We incorporate stable isotope baselines calculated from modern cereal grains and compare these to archaeological seeds from Politiko-Troullia. Mean values of δ13C and δ15N cluster for livestock consistent with a diet of C3 plants, with a wider range in goats that suggests free-browsing herds. Higher δ15N values in cattle may reflect supplemental feeding or grazing in manured fields. Plant isotope values suggest livestock diets were predominantly composed of cultivated taxa. In contrast, deer and pig bones produce more negative mean δ13C and δ15N values suggesting that the villagers of Politiko-Troullia complemented their management of domesticated animals with hunting of wild deer and feral pigs in the woodlands surrounding their village.

Economic and social activities on ancient Cypriot terraced landscapes.

We investigate ancient agricultural terraces and their associated social and economic activities across the site complex consisting of the village at Politiko-Troullia and its more extensive associated taskscape. Surface artifact distributions mapped over 12 ha are integrated with evidence excavated from this Bronze Age settlement in central Cyprus. Contrary to expectations, artifact densities do not diminish with distance from the village architecture. In particular, concentrations of Prehistoric Bronze Age ceramics and ground stone artifacts are most pronounced on nearby terraced hillsides. These terraces were not utilized for domestic structures, but for extensive processing of agricultural crops and copper ore. Bronze Age excavated plant remains indicate cultivation of olives, grapes and figs, with wood resources dominated by olive and pine. Larger, non-portable ground stones and gaming stones are associated with communal social and economic activities in open courtyard settings in Politiko-Troullia. This category of ground stone also is particularly common on the terraced hillsides around Troullia, suggesting that similar behaviors occurred beyond village structures. The terraced landscape of Politiko-Troullia exemplifies a multi-faceted taskscape with a range of agricultural, metallurgical and social activities.

Small Cell Carcinoma of the Gall Bladder.

Small cell carcinoma of the gall bladder (SCCGB) is a rare condition, with only 53 prior cases reported in the world literature when our case was first diagnosed. Our patient was found to have limited stage disease and was treated with sequential laparoscopic cholecystectomy, etoposide/carboplatin chemotherapy followed by consolidating loco-regional radiation therapy. She is alive and well without evidence of disease more than 132 months since diagnosis. We describe here our experience in the diagnosis, staging workup, treatment, and surveillance of a case of SCCGB and review the published literature. Treated aggressively with currently available methods, patients with limited stage SCCGB can have an excellent prognosis. The authors' intent is to provide a reasonable plan of treatment for other physicians facing such an unusual patient.

Nonlinear degradation-enhanced transport of morphogens performing subdiffusion.

We study a morphogen gradient formation under nonlinear degradation and subdiffusive transport. In the long-time limit, we obtain the nonlinear effect of degradation-enhanced diffusion, resulting from the interaction of non-Markovian subdiffusive transport with a nonlinear reaction. We find the stationary profile of power-law type, which has implications for robustness, with the shape of the profile being controlled by the anomalous exponent. Far away from the source of morphogens, any changes in the rate of production are not felt.

Random death process for the regularization of subdiffusive fractional equations.

The description of subdiffusive transport in complex media by fractional equations with a constant anomalous exponent is not robust where the stationary distribution is concerned. The Gibbs-Boltzmann distribution is radically changed by even small spatial perturbations to the anomalous exponent [S. Fedotov and S. Falconer, Phys. Rev. E 85, 031132 (2012)]. To rectify this problem we propose the inclusion of the random death process in the random walk scheme, which is quite natural for biological applications including morphogen gradient formation. From this, we arrive at the modified fractional master equation and analyze its asymptotic behavior, both analytically and by Monte Carlo simulation. We show that this equation is structurally stable against spatial variations of the anomalous exponent. We find that the stationary flux of the particles has a Markovian form with rate functions depending on the anomalous rate functions, the death rate, and the anomalous exponent. Additionally, in the continuous limit we arrive at an advection-diffusion equation where advection and diffusion coefficients depend on both the death rate and anomalous exponent.

Subdiffusive master equation with space-dependent anomalous exponent and structural instability.

We derive the fractional master equation with space-dependent anomalous exponent. We analyze the asymptotic behavior of the corresponding lattice model both analytically and by Monte Carlo simulation. We show that the subdiffusive fractional equations with constant anomalous exponent µ in a bounded domain [0,L] are not structurally stable with respect to the nonhomogeneous variations of parameter µ. In particular, the Gibbs-Boltzmann distribution is no longer the stationary solution of the fractional Fokker-Planck equation whatever the space variation of the exponent might be. We analyze the random distribution of µ in space and find that in the long-time limit, the probability distribution is highly intermediate in space and the behavior is completely dominated by very unlikely events. We show that subdiffusive fractional equations with the nonuniform random distribution of anomalous exponent is an illustration of a "Black Swan," the low probability event of the small value of the anomalous exponent that completely dominates the long-time behavior of subdiffusive systems.