Activity concentrations of U and Ra in two European black shales and their experimentally-derived leachates.

The production of gas from unconventional resources became an important position in the world energy economics. In 2012, the European Commission's Joint Research Centre estimate 16 trillion cubic meters (Tcm) of technically recoverable shale gas in Europe. Taking into account that the exploitation of unconventional gas can be accompanied by serious health risks due to the release of toxic chemical components and natural occurring radionuclides into the return flow water and their near-surface accumulation in secondary precipitates, we investigated the release of U, Th and Ra from black shales by interaction with drilling fluids containing additives that are commonly employed for shale gas exploitation.

Influence of the intertropical convergence zone on the East Asian monsoon.

The Asian-Australian monsoon is an important component of the Earth's climate system that influences the societal and economic activity of roughly half the world's population. The past strength of the rain-bearing East Asian summer monsoon can be reconstructed with archives such as cave deposits, but the winter monsoon has no such signature in the hydrological cycle and has thus proved difficult to reconstruct. Here we present high-resolution records of the magnetic properties and the titanium content of the sediments of Lake Huguang Maar in coastal southeast China over the past 16,000 years, which we use as proxies for the strength of the winter monsoon winds.

Tel-Aviv-Heidelberg Three Generation Offspring Study: Genetic and environmental sources of variation and covariation among plasma lipids, lipoproteins, and apoliproteins.

Multivariate genetic analysis, implemented in the statistical package for pedigree analysis, FISHER, was carried out on a large sample of Israeli pedigrees to evaluate heritability and genetic correlations among an array of plasma lipids: total cholesterol (TCHL), triglycerides (TRIG), HDL-C and HDL2-C, HDL3-C, LDL-C and HDL-C%, apolipoproteins A and B (APO-A1 and APO-B), lipoprotein LP(a) and fibrinogen (FIBR). Multiple regression analysis showed that although sex, age, smoking and other study environmental factors, have a significant contribution to the variation of each plasma lipid, they exert little effect on covariation in lipids. Genes, however, are important factors of the variation and covariation in lipids.

Tel Aviv-Heidelberg three-generation offspring study: genetic determinants of plasma fibrinogen level.

Elevated plasma fibrinogen concentrations (fibrinogen) are an important independent risk factor of atherosclerotic disease. Using the kinetic method, we measured fibrinogen in 808 individuals, of which 757 were members of 204 pedigrees. Correlation analysis and two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed a significant association of fibrinogen with age, body mass index (BMI), sex, smoking habits, sport activity, and other lifestyle factors.

[Geriatrics, a social medicine challenge].

The number of old people in our society is strongly increasing. In 1960 1.4 percent of the German population were older than 80 years, in 1993 this percentage was 3.