Maternal exposure to purified versus grain-based diet during early lactation in mice affects offspring growth and reduces responsivity to Western-style diet challenge in adulthood.

The nutritional environment during fetal and early postnatal life has a long-term impact on growth, development, and metabolic health of the offspring, a process termed "nutritional programming." Rodent models studying programming effects of nutritional interventions use either purified or grain-based rodent diets as background diets. However, the impact of these diets on phenotypic outcomes in these models has not been comprehensively investigated.

Toward defining the Anthropocene onset using a rapid increase in anthropogenic fingerprints in global geological archives.

One of the remaining issues regarding the Anthropocene is the lack of stratigraphic evidence indicating when the cumulative human pressure from the early Holocene began to fundamentally change the Earth system. Herein, we compile anthropogenic fingerprints from various high-precision-dated proxy records for 137 global sites to determine the age of the unprecedented surge in these records over the last 7700 y. The cumulative number of fingerprints revealed an unprecedented surge in diverse anthropogenic fingerprints starting in 1952 ± 3 CE, corresponding to the onset of the Great Acceleration.

Grain versus AIN: Common rodent diets differentially affect health outcomes in adult C57BL/6j mice.

Semi-synthetic and grain-based diets are common rodent diets for biomedical research. Both diet types are considered nutritionally adequate to support breeding, growth, and long life, yet there are fundamental differences between them that may affect metabolic processes. We have characterized the effects of diet type on breeding outcomes, metabolic phenotype, and microbiota profile in adult mice.

Record of H and Cl from the Fukushima nuclear accident recovered from soil water in the unsaturated zone at Koriyama.

The opportunity to measure the concentrations of H and Cl released by the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011 directly in rain was lost in the early stage of the accident. We have, however, been able to reconstruct the deposition record of atmospheric H and Cl following the accident using a bore hole that was drilled in 2014 at Koriyama at a distance of 60 km from the accident. The contributions of H and Cl from the accident are 1.

Multi-part strategy for testing differential taxa abundance in sequencing data: A simulation study with an application to a microbiome study.

Comparing the microbiome across study arms is a recurrent goal in many studies. Standard statistical methods are often used for this purpose, however, they do not always represent the best choice in this context given the characteristics of microbiota sequencing data, e.g.