Free and Open Source Software Foundation

The issue of defensive settlement during the Hallstatt period (HaC-HaD) in the area of Greater Poland constitutes an important, although still insufficiently recognised, research topic. Given current research, 21 well-documented defensive sites are believed to have operated in the region at the beginning of the Iron Age. The article’s findings indicate that there has been a significant underestimation of the phenomenon’s scale. Pilot studies limited to three neighbouring districts have identified at least three new probable fortified settlements. The research was preliminary and requires continuation to confirm its chronological attribution to the Hallstatt period reliably. In the authors’ opinion, applying analogous methodological assumptions in other areas of the region may yield comparable findings and thus significantly shape the catalogue of defensive settlements from the beginnings of the Iron Agein Greater Poland. Considerable progress in these studies could indeed be achieved through systematic and reliable remote sensing prospection, as well as through a re-analysis of sites previously assessed negatively.

Pathogenic mutations in BRCA1 (BReast CAncer gene 1) confer high risks of both breast (up to 70%) and ovarian (up to 40%) cancers. Zinc (Zn) and copper (Cu) are essential for various physiological functions, including antioxidant reactions. Their balance, reflected in the Zn/Cu ratio, plays a crucial role in maintaining redox homeostasis, which is vital for cancer prevention. This study examines the antioxidant properties of Zn and Cu, specifically focusing on the blood Zn/Cu ratio as a potential marker for cancer risk among BRCA1 mutation carriers. The study cohort consisted of 989 initially unaffected women, followed up for 7.5 years. Blood samples were analyzed using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. Although individual Zn and Cu levels did not significantly correlate with overall cancer risk, those women with a Zn/Cu ratio above 6.38 experienced a significantly lower cancer risk than women with a ratio below this cut-off point. This suggests that the Zn/Cu ratio may be a valuable biomarker for cancer prevention in this high-risk group. Given the increased cancer risk in BRCA1 mutation carriers, optimizing Zn and Cu levels through dietary and active interventions could provide a preventive strategy.

The first successful planned extracapsular cataract extraction was reported by Jacques Daviel in 1752. The history of European cataract surgery in the first half of the 18th century, immediately preceding Daviel's report, contains interesting information that explains the foundations of this accomplishment. Daviel himself credited the prior work of Francois Pourfour du Petit. Other important advances were reported by Michel Brisseau, Antoine Maitre-Jan, Jean Méry and others. A critical insight during this time period was the realization that the cataract was, in fact, the opacified crystalline lens, rather than a membrane or opacity located anterior to the lens.

SummaryIn large‐scale and distributed actor systems, there are situations where processing messages within one of the actors fails, often due to failures that had occurred earlier in the system. In such cases, tracing down the origin of the failure is difficult since existing monitoring tools only provide ways to collect metrics and statistical information about system execution. In this paper, we describe a new tool for tracing distributed actor systems, Akka Tracing Tool, a library that allows users to generate a trace graph of messages. To address the distributed nature of the environment, we proposed an efficient data collection mechanism based on the one‐way replication technique implemented in CouchDB, a popular document database. The tool was evaluated in a distributed environment of up to 50 nodes set up in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) computing cloud on a real application: car traffic simulation. The measured overhead when tracing all messages was between 39% to 45% on average. The library also proved to be scalable with respect to the number of nodes in the actor system and to be user‐friendly. Owing to these properties, we expect that the tool can simplify finding errors and speed up the development process of actor systems.