Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study

Biomolecular archaeology has significantly advanced our understanding of ancient foodways. However, the inevitable methodological biases of those novel methods might give deviating, even contradictory results. This paper highlights the major challenges of, but also potential solutions for, combining and comparing multiproxy dietary data. A rich dataset covering human skeletal remains, pottery, and zooarchaeological records from habitation and burial contexts from the Late Iron Age (650–1300 CE, LIA) Pada archaeological complex, NE Estonia, was subject to stable isotope, organic residue, and microfossil analysis, further complemented by local zooarchaeological and archaeobotanical records. All those dietary records were combined and compared through statistical modelling approaches to (a) exemplify the limitations and biases of different analytical approaches and (b) build a more cohesive and nuanced understanding of local foodways and their social variations. Our results show that LIA Eastern Baltic communities relied heavily on terrestrial, particularly plant based C3 diets with relatively low proportions of animal-based foods, although animal products were preferred in burial ritual context. Interestingly, no dietary variations were detected across different age and sex categories, proving equal access to main food sources for all community members in Pada. The latter contradicts with previously reported datasets from the same region and emphasises the utmost importance of multilevel dietary analysis not only in terms of dietary proxies, but also for different consumption contexts.

Abstract According to the standard view, lying requires that the pertinent disbelieved content is asserted, while merely misleading does not. Expressives form an interesting test case for the standard view: expressive content is standardly considered to be not asserted. Thus, if one can lie with expressives the standard view is wrong; if one cannot, the standard view is further supported. However, our intuitions are not as clear-cut as one may hope and it is thus hard to settle the question merely on intuitive grounds. Some considerations are suggested that may help us to settle the question independently of our intuitions. It is argued that these considerations speak in flavor of the standard view of lying and against a non-standard, commitment-based, view.

Externalizing and internalizing disorders are common in youth but are often studied separately, preventing researchers from identifying shared (i.e., transdiagnostic) alterations in brain structure. Using data from the ENIGMA (Enhancing NeuroImaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis) Consortium, we conducted a mega-analysis to identify shared and distinct cortical and subcortical brain alterations across internalizing (anxiety disorders and depression) and externalizing (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder [ADHD] and conduct disorder [CD]) disorders in youth. 3D T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging data from youths (age range 4-21 years) with anxiety disorders (n = 1044), depression (n = 504), ADHD (n = 1317), and CD (n = 1172) along with healthy control participants (n = 4743) were analyzed. We assessed group differences in regional cortical thickness, surface area (SA), and subcortical volume using linear models, adjusted for site, age, and sex, as well as total intracranial volume in the SA and subcortical volume models. We observed transdiagnostic associations, with both internalizing and externalizing disorders characterized by lower SA in the insula, entorhinal cortex, and middle temporal gyrus and lower amygdala volume (Cohen's ds = -0.07 to -0.24) as well as total SA and intracranial volume (ds = -0.11 to -0.25). Externalizing-specific reductions in SA were observed in frontoparietal regions (ds = -0.08 to -0.13), but no internalizing-specific associations were identified. Disorder-specific alterations were identified for ADHD, CD, and anxiety disorders but not depression. Both common and disorder-specific alterations were identified, with regions involved in salience attribution and emotion processing implicated across internalizing and externalizing disorders. These novel findings can guide future research targeting common biological processes across youth psychiatric disorders as well as features unique to individual disorders.

Education is related to a wide variety of beneficial health, behavioral, and societal outcomes. However, whether education causes long-term structural changes in the brain remains unclear. A pressing challenge is that individuals self-select into continued education, thereby introducing a wide variety of environmental and genetic confounders. Fortunately, natural experiments allow us to isolate the causal impact of increased education from individual (and societal) characteristics. Here, we exploit a policy change in the UK (the 1972 ROSLA act) that increased the amount of mandatory schooling from 15 to 16 years of age to study the impact of education on long-term structural brain outcomes in the UK Biobank. Using regression discontinuity (RD) – a causal inference method – we find no evidence of an effect from an additional year of education on any structural neuroimaging outcomes. This null result is robust across modalities, regions, and analysis strategies. An additional year of education is a substantial cognitive intervention, yet we find no evidence for sustained experience-dependent plasticity. Our results provide a challenge for prominent accounts of cognitive or ‘brain reserve’ theories which identify education as a major protective factor to lessen adverse aging effects. Our preregistered findings are one of the first implementations of RD on neural data – opening the door for causal inference in population-based neuroimaging.

AimThis case report explored the application of next‐generation sequencing (NGS) and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) to visualize and characterize microbial populations in a refractory endodontic infection with apical calculus‐like deposits, a rarely reported phenomenon.SummaryHistopathologic analysis revealed bacterial biofilms and calcifications on the root surface, with Gram‐positive bacteria predominant in both hard and soft tissues. Microbial sequencing showed Pseudomonadota dominated hard tissues, whereas Bacillota were prevalent in soft tissues, with distinct genera like Lactibacterium and Streptococcus identified. FISH imaging confirmed spatially distributed bacterial taxa, including Actinomycetota and Chloroflexota, within the biofilm, aligning with NGS findings. Notably, Bacteroidota was exclusive to soft tissues, whereas Chloroflexota was detected only in hard tissues. The presence of extensive calculus‐like deposits on the root surface provided new insights into the microbial complexity of persistent endodontic infections and their management.Key learning pointsThe combination of NGS and FISH provided unprecedented insights into the microbial composition of refractory endodontic infections, revealing a diverse and spatially organized ecosystem.Distinct microbial compositions in hard and soft tissues emphasize the importance of targeted therapeutic strategies for endodontic infections.The presence of unique bacterial taxa and biofilms in calculus‐like deposits offers new avenues for research into the pathogenesis and persistence of endodontic infections.

Arvioitu teos: Mikko Salmela: True emotions. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2014.

Tämä artikkelikokoelma esittelee raamatuntutkimuksen ja sukupuolentutkimuksen leikkauspintoja suomalaiselle yleisölle. Teos ei pyri olemaan kaiken kattava esitys aiheesta, vaan sen tavoitteena on havainnollistaa sukupuolentutkimuksen soveltamista Raamatun ja muun varhaisjuutalaisen ja -kristillisen kirjallisuuden tutkimukseen erilaisista metodologisista ja temaattisista näkökulmista. Näin syntyvä moniääni­nen kokonaisuus auttaa ymmärtämään sukupuolen rakentumista Raa­matun ajan maailmassa. Otos on luonnollisesti valikoiva, mutta mukana on erilaisia aineistoja aina muinaisesta Lähi-idästä myöhäisantiikkiin. Sukupuolentutkimus on olemukseltaan monitieteistä, ja sen piiriin lukeutuvat eksegeettiset tutkimukset ovat ammentaneet metodologisia virikkeitä usealta taholta. Myös tässä teoksessa esiteltävät näkökulmat ulottuvat arkeologiasta tekstintutkimukseen ja eletyn uskonnon viitekehyksestä queer-teoriaan.

Lower levels of education are associated with higher mortality. Lower levels of education are also associated with lower income, which is also associated with higher mortality. We investigate the impact of education on mortality and the extent to which this is mediated through income over the life course. We account for both selective educational attainment and selective income over the life course, through inverse propensity weighting (IPW) of the mortality hazard. We decompose the educational gain, that is, the decrease in mortality from more education, in the hazard into an indirect effect of education, running through changes in income and a direct effect of education, running through other factors. We use Swedish conscription data (men only), linked to parental information and individual annual income for the period 1968 till 2012. Our empirical results indicate large educational gains in mortality. We also find that this educational gradient runs through changes in income, especially for the more educated, and does not run through other factors related to education. We conduct several robustness and sensitivity checks that indicate that the results are robust.

In central and southern Europe, grapevine is a climate-sensitive agricultural product of large economic importance, both in historical times and today. We systematically investigated the climatic impact, focusing on volcanic-forced abrupt cooling, on two long annual records of wine production quantity (spanning 1444-1786) from the Moselle Valley in present-day Luxembourg, close to the northern limit of viticulture in Europe. We present a consistent picture of the impact of volcanic eruptions on wine production through climate. To this end, we applied superposed epoch analysis -an appropriate method for detecting episodic signals in non-stationary time-series -in combination with a bootstrap procedure to estimate the statistical significance. We also assessed the long-term relationship between different annual and seasonal climate parameters and wine production in the Moselle Valley. Robust and highly significant wine production declines occurred in the years immediately following major volcanic events. Warmer, and to a lesser extent drier, climate condition had a moderately strong, but persistent, positive effect on wine production. We also find a volcanic cooling signature in spring and summer in temperature reconstructions. However, the detected volcanic signature in the Moselle Valley wine production is considerably stronger than the one found for Central Europe in tree-ring data and is instead more akin to the strong volcanic signature present in Fennoscandian tree-ring series. On the basis of our findings, we encourage further compilation, publication, and analyses of additional wine production series containing unique biological and climatic information. The climatic response to volcanic forcing during the past few millennia has been studied intensively from local to global scales typically using tree-ring data from strongly temperature-limited growth environments. Impacts on agricultural productivity, including on viticulture, in less extreme climatic settings remains far less well understood. The study of long time-series of agricultural productivity, like grapevine harvest quantities, offers insights into the effects of such abrupt cooling on biological records with properties possibly differing from those of tree-ring series. This, in turn, may shed new light on still unresolved 1