Search results for "Past"
showing 10 items of 931 documents
Stable isotopes, radionuclides, and calculated sea surface temperature of two sediment cores in the Sicily Channel
2016
The Eastern Mediterranean Transient (EMT) occurred in the Aegean Sea from 1988 to 1995 and is the most significant intermediate-to-deep Mediterranean overturning perturbation reported by instrumental records. The EMT was likely caused by accumulation of high salinity waters in the Levantine and enhanced heat loss in the Aegean Sea, coupled with surface water freshening in the Sicily Channel. It is still unknown whether similar transients occurred in the past and, if so, what their forcing processes were. In this study, sediments from the Sicily Channel document surface water freshening (SCFR) at 1910±12, 1812±18, 1725±25 and 1580±30 CE. A regional ocean hindcast links SCFR to enhanced deep-…
8000 years of coastal changes on a western Mediterranean island: A multiproxy approach from the Posada plain of Sardinia
2018
Abstract A multi-proxy palaeoenvironmental investigation was conducted to reconstruct the Holocene history of coastal landscape change in the lower Posada coastal plain of eastern Sardinia. In the Mediterranean region, coastal modifications during the Holocene have been driven by a complex interplay between climate, geomorphological processes and human activity. In this paper, millennial-scale human-sea level-environment interactions are investigated near Posada, one of the largest coastal plains in eastern Sardinia. Biostratigraphic and palynological approaches were used to interpret the chrono-stratigraphy exhibited by a series of new cores taken from the coastal plain. This new study elu…
The Arrival of Steppe and Iranian Related Ancestry in the Islands of the Western Mediterranean
2019
A series of studies have documented how Steppe pastoralist-related ancestry reached central Europe by at least 2500 BCE, while Iranian farmer-related ancestry was present in Aegean Europe by at least 1900 BCE. However, the spread of these ancestries into the western Mediterranean where they have contributed to many populations living today remains poorly understood. We generated genome-wide ancient DNA from the Balearic Islands, Sicily, and Sardinia, increasing the number of individuals with reported data from these islands from 3 to 52. We obtained data from the oldest skeleton excavated from the Balearic islands (dating to ∼2400 BCE), and show that this individual had substantial Steppe p…
The Halaesa landscape (III B.C.) as ancient example of the complex and bio-diverse traditional Mediterranean polycultural landscape.
2014
Southern Europe and the whole Mediterranean area are distinguished by landscape types whose characters result from countless, long and complex cultural and historical processes that developed in an equally complex and varied environment. The Mediterranean rural landscape would keep these same distinctive characteristics until the crisis of the mixed-crops, and the phenomena of urbanization in the nineteen-sixties/ seventies. This paper identifies the characteristics of the Mediterranean polycultural and polyspecific (coltura promiscua) landscape, characterized by the presence of trees (both wild and cultivated), starting from a historical overview of the central Mediterranean. The analysed …
Aseasonal sheep and goat milk production in the Mediterranean area: Physiological and technical insights
2015
Abstract Aseasonal or out-of-season milk production for small ruminants raised in Mediterranean areas refers generally to milk having to be produced at a time that corresponds to summer which is when conditions are generally unfavourable with respect to both physiological aspects and nutritional factors related to seasonal climatic trends. In fact, sheep and goat milk production in the Mediterranean basin is mostly based on pasture utilization and thus follows the pasture availability pattern. This causes a strong seasonal pattern to the amount of milk processed by cheese processes plants, with the peak being in the spring, a marked reduction in early summer and nil or low availability of m…
Feeding and management techniques to favour summer sheep milk and cheese production in the Mediterranean environment
2015
Sheep milk production in summer can lead to a diversification of milk products and to a more regular product distribution in the market throughout the year. However, in Mediterranean countries small ruminant production cycles are subjected to seasonal variations in forage resources. During summer, a key period for out of season production systems, nutrition plays a fundamental role in regulating the quantity and quality of milk production. In this review, feeding strategies and techniques that could be applied for out of season production in dairy ewes under different Mediterranean conditions are described for intensive, pasture-based and mixed systems. The most common feeding strategies us…
Comparing different methods to determine soil physical quality in a mediterranean forest and pasture land
2016
Soil physical quality (SPQ) can be assessed by different experimental methodologies and criteria and the optimal/critical values or ranges for SPQ indicators are still approximate. Sampling soils with minimal anthropic pressures should allow improvements in SPQ assessment. Different experimental methodologies and criteria were applied to sample a Mediterranean oak forest (Quercus ilex L.) and pasture land, in Sicily, with a varying degree of anthropic disturbance. Soil water retention was determined in the laboratory and the field, using the BEST (Beerkan Estimation of Soil Transfer parameters) procedure of soil hydraulic characterization. Capacity-based indicators, the S index, and locatio…
Experimental Evaluation of a New Thermal Process for Microorganisms Inactivation
2015
A new thermal process for the inactivation of microorganisms in beverages has been studied and is presented in this paper. The treatment, not yet studied in the scientific literature, mainly consists of a thermal shock characterized by temperature increases up to 30°C/s, with final temperatures up to 65°C. This study presents the first experimental results obtained by the application of the new thermal treatment, with different combinations of the process parameters (rate of temperature rise, final temperature and holding time), on separate suspensions of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Listeria innocua and Candida albicans. The required rapid temperature in…
Investigation of a tunnel pasteurizer for “Nocellara del Belice” table olives processed according to the “Castelvetrano method”
2014
The influence of pasteurization temperature and time of treatment on the flesh firmness and the evolution of microbial communities was studied for table olives Cv. Nocellara del Belice, packed in glass jars and processed with a tunnel pasteurizer. The experiment was first carried out on the laboratory level in order to select the optimal combination of pasteurization time/temperature so as to obtain the proper balance between the consistency of the pulp and the microbiological quality of the final product. Pasteurization at industrial scale was then carried out in a tunnel pasteurizer applying the treatment at 75 °C for 8 min in the thermal center of the jars. Besides flesh firmness and mic…
Dot-immunobinding assay with the globular domain of collagen type IV for antiglomerular basement membrane antibodies
1988
A dot-immunobinding assay for the detection of antiglomerular basement membrane antibodies has been developed. The globular domain NC1 of basement membrane collagen type IV was used as antigen. The assay proved to be specific, sensitive, and reproducible. Circulating antibodies in each of 12 sera from patients with florid Goodpasture's syndrome could be demonstrated, whereas sera from patients with Goodpasture's syndrome in clinical remission and various control sera showed no reactivity. The advantages of the dot-blot assay are: the usage of the purified Goodpasature target antigen NCI reduces unspecific binding of IgG; only minimal amounts of antigen are required to give a positive signal…