Plos One
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Landscapes and features of the everyday world were scarcely represented in Paleolithic art, especially those features associated with the human landscape (huts and campsites). On the contrary, other figurative motifs (especially animals) and signs, traditionally linked to the magic or religious conceptions of these hunter-gatherer societies, are the predominant themes of Upper Paleolithic art. This paper seeks to present an engraved schist slab recently found in the Molí del Salt site (North-eastern Iberia) and dated at the end of the Upper Paleolithic, ca. 13,800 years ago. ⋯ The analysis of individual motifs and the composition, as well as the ethnographic and archeological contextualization, suggests that this engraving is a naturalistic depiction of a hunter-gatherer campsite. Campsites can be considered the first human landscape, the first area of land whose visible features were entirely constructed by humans. Given the social meaning of campsites in hunter-gatherer life-styles, this engraving may be considered one of the first representations of the domestic and social space of a human group.
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To investigate the intravoxel incoherent motion diffusion weighted imaging (IVIM-DWI) as a potential valuable marker to monitor the therapy responses of VX2 to radiofrequency ablation (RF Ablation). ⋯ The IVIM-DW derived f, D and D* parameters have the potential to indicate therapy response immediately after RF Ablation treatment, while no significant correlations with classical tumor perfusion metrics were derived from DCE-MRI and perfusion-CT measurements.
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Patients undergoing hemodialysis (HD) often develop cerebral disease complications. Furthermore, cerebral regional saturation of oxygen (rSO2) was previously reported to be significantly lower in HD patients than in healthy subjects. We aimed to identify the factors affecting the cerebral rSO2 in HD patients. ⋯ In HD patients, cerebral rSO2 was affected by multiple factors, including pH, HD duration, and serum albumin concentration. Furthermore, this is the first report describing significantly lower levels of rSO2 in HD patients with DM than in those without DM.
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Gastric slow waves (GSW) are known to regulate gastric motility and are impaired with rectal distention (RD). Electroacupuncture (EA) at body acupoints, such as ST 36, has been shown to improve gastric dysrhythmias; however, little is known about the possible effects of auricular electroacupuncture (AEA) on GSW. To study effects and possible mechanisms of AEA on RD-induced gastric dysrhythmias in rats, ten male Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats implanted with gastric serosal electrodes were studied in two different experiments in fed state. ⋯ Our results demonstrated that RD induces gastric dysrhythmias in fed state in rats. AEA improves RD-induced gastric dysrhythmias via the vagal pathway. AEA may have a therapeutic potential in treating gastric dysrhythmias.
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Microglial cells become rapidly activated through interactions with pathogens, and the persistent activation of these cells is associated with various neurodegenerative diseases. Previous studies have investigated the transcriptomic signatures in microglia or macrophages using microarray technologies. However, this method has numerous restrictions, such as spatial biases, uneven probe properties, low sensitivity, and dependency on the probes spotted. ⋯ Furthermore, we confirmed that the expressions of key inflammatory genes as well as pro-inflammatory mediators in the supernatants were significantly induced in LPS treated primary microglial cells. This transcriptomic analysis is the first to show a comparison of the family-wide differential expression of most known immune genes and also reveal transcription evidence of multiple gene families in BV-2 microglial cells. Collectively, these findings reveal unique transcriptomic signatures in BV-2 microglial cells required for homeostasis and effective immune responses.