This paper reports the results of an in-depth analysis of the frozen remains of a woolly mammoth ( Mammuthus primigenius ) named Zhenya, which has been dated to 48,000 cal BP. The carcass, found near the mouth of the Yenisey River in eastern Siberia, was a juvenile male whose ontogenetic age at death was 8–10 AEY. Its reconstructed live height at the shoulders (pSH 227.4 cm) was the equal of some adult female woolly mammoths and extant elephants. The large stature and a flaked off tusk tip that matches breaks on tusks of male African elephants are indirect indications that this mammoth most likely had reached sexual maturity, had been expelled from its maternal herd, and had been in at least one fight with another male. The mammoth's bones were relatively healthy, although some had minor lesions. Rudimentary upper second molars (M2/m2) were present, but no lower second molars were found in the alveoli, and the left tusk had never developed. Despite the abnormal development of the upper and lower second molars, the cheek teeth which were in wear (Dp4/dp4 and M1/m1) showed normal function without any indications of developmental delay. The completed growth of the light-colored dentin bands on the tusk strongly suggests the Fall of the year was the season of death. This season is also supported by accumulated fat in the upper parts of the torso, indicative of physiological preparation for the winter ahead. The few minor traces of carnivore scavenging, the little disturbed condition of the carcass, and the absence of bone modifications made by human actions, along with the social status of this young male animal, are interpreted here as highly probable evidence that the Zhenya Mammoth died from unrecoverable injuries inflicted during a bull-to-bull fight. The mineralogical analysis of site sediments revealed that the mammoth's burial in situ took place in the Yenisey River valley seasonally inundated by the river, which together with Fall's freezing temperatures protected the carcass from scavengers. An analysis of ancient DNA provides strong support for Zhenya's mitochondrial lineage within the deeply diverging clade III haplogroup B.
Four new manganese germanates and silicates, A 2 MnGeO 4 (A = Li, Na) and A 2 MnSiO 4 (A = Na, Ag), were prepared, and their crystal structures were determined using the X-ray Rietveld method. All of them contain all components in tetrahedral coordination. Li 2 MnGeO 4 is orthorhombic (Pmn2 1 ) layered, isostructural with Li 2 CdGeO 4 , and the three other compounds are monoclinic (Pn) cristobalite-related frameworks. As in other stuffed cristobalites of various symmetry (Pn A 2 MXO 4 , Pna2 1 and Pbca AMO 2 ), average bond angles on bridging oxygens (here, Mn-O-X) increase with increasing A/X and/or A/M radius ratios, indicating the trend to the ideal cubic (Fd3̅m) structure typified by CsAlO 2 . The sublattices of the magnetic Mn 2+ ions in both structure types under study (Pmn2 1 and Pn) are essentially the same; namely, they are pseudocubic eutaxy with 12 nearest neighbors. The magnetic properties of the four new phases plus Li 2 MnSiO 4 were characterized by carrying out magnetic susceptibility, specific heat, magnetization, and electron spin resonance measurements and also by performing energy-mapping analysis to evaluate their spin exchange constants. Ag 2 MnSiO 4 remains paramagnetic down to 2 K, but A 2 MnXO 4 (A = Li, Na; X = Si, Ge) undergo a three-dimensional antiferromagnetic ordering. All five phases exhibit short-range AFM ordering correlations, hence showing them to be low-dimensional magnets and a magnetic field induced spin-reorientation transition at T < T N for all AFM phases. We constructed the magnetic phase diagrams for A 2 MnXO 4 (A = Li, Na; X = Si, Ge) on the basis of the thermodynamic data in magnetic fields up to 9 T. The magnetic properties of all five phases experimentally determined are well explained by their spin exchange constants evaluated by performing energy-mapping analysis.
We have designed multifunctional silver alginate hydrogel microcontainers referred to as loaded microcapsules with different sizes by assembling them via a template assisted approach using natural, highly porous calcium carbonate cores. Sodium alginate was immobilized into the pores of calcium carbonate particles of different sizes followed by cross-linking via addition of silver ions, which had a dual purpose: on one hand, the were used as a cross-linking agent, albeit in the monovalent form, while on the other hand they have led to formation of silver nanoparticles. Monovalent silver ions, an unusual cross-linking agent, improve the sensitivity to ultrasound, lead to homogeneous distribution of silver nanoparticles. Silver nanoparticles appeared on the shell of the alginate microcapsules in the twin-structure as determined by transmission electron microscopy. Remote release of a payload from alginate containers by ultrasound was found to strongly depend on the particle size. The possibility to use such particles as a platform for label-free molecule detection based on the surface enhanced Raman scattering was demonstrated. Cytotoxicity and cell uptake studies conducted in this work have revealed that microcontainers exhibit nonessential level of toxicity with an efficient uptake of cells. The above-described functionalities constitute building blocks of a theranostic system, where detection and remote release can be achieved with the same carrier.
The nematic order (nematicity) is considered one of the essential ingredientsto understand the mechanism of Fe-based superconductivity. In most Fe-basedsuperconductors (pnictides), nematic order is reasonably close to theantiferromagnetic order. In FeSe, in contrast, a nematic order emerges belowthe structure phase transition at T_s = 90 K with no magnetic order. The caseof FeSe is of paramount importance to a universal picture of Fe-basedsuperconductors. The polarized ultrafast spectroscopy provides a tool to probesimultaneously the electronic structure and the magnetic interactions throughquasiparticle dynamics. Here we show that this approach reveals both theelectronic and magnetic nematicity below and, surprisingly, its fluctuationsfar above Ts to at least 200 K. The quantitative pump-probe data clearlyidentify a correlation between the topology of the Fermi surface (FS) and themagnetism in all temperature regimes, thus providing profound insight into thedriving factors of nematicity in FeSe and the origin of its uniqueness.
Auxin plays a pivotal role in virtually every aspect of plant morphogenesis. It simultaneously orchestrates a diverse variety of processes such as cell wall biogenesis, transition through the cell cycle, or metabolism of a wide range of chemical substances. The coordination principles for such a complex orchestration are poorly understood at the systems level. Here, we perform an RNA-seq experiment to study the transcriptional response to auxin treatment within gene groups of different biological processes, molecular functions, or cell components in a quantitative fold-change-specific manner. We find for Arabidopsis thaliana roots treated with auxin for 6 h that (i) there are functional groups within which genes respond to auxin with a surprisingly similar fold changes and that (ii) these fold changes vary from one group to another. These findings make it tempting to conjecture the existence of some transcriptional logic orchestrating the coordinated expression of genes within functional groups in a fold-change-specific manner. To obtain some initial insight about this coordinated expression, we performed a motif enrichment analysis and found cis-regulatory elements TBX1-3, SBX, REG, and TCP/site2 as the candidates conferring fold-change-specific responses to auxin in Arabidopsis thaliana .
The title borophosphate is characterized by a rare combination of the magnetic high-spin Mn 2+ ions in both octahedral and tetrahedral coordinations. The crystal structure and magnetic properties are presented.