A multidisciplinary approach to forensic biological profiling on a single tooth and nail sample.

Introduction: Analysis of a single tooth and nail can provide valuable forensic information, including year of birth, year of death, age, sex, DNA-profile, geographic residence during childhood and at time of death and drug exposure. The aim is to minimize the amount of used bodily material and to validate the applicability of a multidisciplinary sampling protocol.

Methods: A nail of the big toe, a tooth and blood of seven deceased individuals were collected postmortem.

Verification of the age of 10- and 20-year-old Tawny Port wines using Radiocarbon.

Port is a famous sort of fortified wine, exclusively produced in the Douro region of Portugal. Among the various types of Port wines, the Tawny types with stated maturation ages of 10 or 20 years are among the higher quality and more expensive ones. Fraudulently producing those with a shorter maturation time than claimed, along with additions or treatments to mask this, would make production of those wines cheaper.

Human remains from Arma di Nasino (Liguria) provide novel insights into the paleoecology of early Holocene foragers in northwestern Italy.

We report the discovery and analysis of new Mesolithic human remains-dated to ca. 10,200-9000 cal. BP-from Arma di Nasino in Liguria, northwestern Italy, an area rich in Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic attestations, but for which little information on Early Holocene occupation was available.

Catalytic Depolymerization of Lignin and Woody Biomass in Supercritical Ethanol: Influence of Reaction Temperature and Feedstock.

The one-step ethanolysis approach to upgrade lignin to monomeric aromatics using a CuMgAl mixed oxide catalyst is studied in detail. The influence of reaction temperature (200-420 °C) on the product distribution is investigated. At low temperature (200-250 °C), recondensation is dominant, while char-forming reactions become significant at high reaction temperature (>380 °C).

Carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes of well-preserved Middle Pleistocene bone collagen from Schöningen (Germany) and their paleoecological implications.

Carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes in bone collagen can provide valuable information about the diet and habitat of mammal species. However, bone collagen degrades in normal circumstances very rapidly, and isotope analyses are therefore usually restricted to fossil material with a Late Pleistocene or Holocene age. The Middle Pleistocene site of Schöningen, dated to around 300,000 years ago, yielded bones and teeth with an exceptionally good state of collagen preservation.