Cephalopod beak sections used to trace mercury levels throughout the life of cephalopods: The giant warty squid Moroteuthopsis longimana as a case study.

Cephalopods represent an important pathway for mercury transfer through food webs. Due to the general difficulties in capturing oceanic squid, beaks found in the diet of top predators can be used to study their life-cycles and ecological role. Using upper beaks of the giant warty squid Moroteuthopsis longimana (major prey in the Southern Ocean), we describe a method to assess mercury concentrations along the life of cephalopods through the segmentary analysis of beak sections (i.

Adverse Maternal and Neonatal Outcomes in Indicated Compared with Spontaneous Preterm Birth in Healthy Nulliparas: A Secondary Analysis of a Randomized Trial.

Objective: To compare the risks of adverse maternal and neonatal outcomes associated with spontaneous (SPTB) versus indicated preterm births (IPTB).

Methods: A secondary analysis of a multicenter trial of vitamin C and E supplementation in healthy low-risk nulliparous women. Outcomes were compared between women with SPTB (due to spontaneous membrane rupture or labor) and those with IPTB (due to medical or obstetric complications).

Solar turbulence in earth's global and regional temperature anomalies.

This paper presents a study of the influence of solar activity on the earth's temperature. In particular, we focus on the repercussion of the fluctuations of the solar irradiance on the temperature of the Northern and Southern hemispheres as well as on land and ocean regions. While solar irradiance data are not directly analyzed, we make use of a published solar irradiance reconstruction for long-time-scale fluctuations, and for short-time-scale fluctuations we hypothesize that solar irradiance and solar flare intermittency are coupled in such a way that the solar flare frequency fluctuations are stochastically equivalent to those of the solar irradiance.