New carbon and nitrogen stable isotope values for human remains dating to the mid-Upper Paleolithic in Europe indicate significant amounts of aquatic (fish, mollusks, and/or birds) foods in some of their diets. Most of this evidence points to exploitation of inland freshwater aquatic resources in particular. By contrast, European Neandertal collagen carbon and nitrogen stable isotope values do ...

Biases in the analysis of stable isotope discrimination in food webs Karl Auerswald*, Maximilian H. O. M. Wittmer, Antoine Zazzo, Rudi Schäufele and Hans Schnyder Lehrstuhl Für Grünlandlehre, Technische Universität München, Am Hochanger 1, D-85350 Freising-Weihenstephan, Germany; and CNRS Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, UMR 7209 ‘‘Archéozoologie, Archéobotanique : Sociétés, Pratiques et E...

Arson is a significant problem around the world, and is a crime which results in a low number of convictions. The scene of an arson can be varied, commercial, residential or national park, and recently cases have been identified which were initiated by a lit match. Matches can be recovered from a scene, usually in a burnt condition. The benefit of analysing unburnt matches has been researched p...

Isotopic compositions of reactants affect the rates of chemical and biochemical reactions. Usually it is assumed that heavy stable isotope enrichment leads to progressively slower reactions. Yet the effect of stable isotopes may be nonlinear, as exemplified by the "isotopic resonance" phenomenon. Since the isotopic compositions of other planets of Solar system, including Mars and Venus, are mar...

Reconstructing the diet of top marine predators is of great significance in several key areas of applied ecology, requiring accurate estimation of their true diet. However, from conventional stomach content analysis to recent stable isotope and DNA analyses, no one method is bias or error free. Here, we evaluated the accuracy of recent methods to estimate the actual proportion of a controlled d...

Stable isotope analysis has been used extensively to establish trophic relationships in many ecosystems. Present study utilised stable isotope signatures of carbon and nitrogen to identify trophic structure of aquatic food web in river and rice field ecosystems in Perak, northern peninsular Malaysia. The mean δ13C values of all producers ranged from -35.29 ± 0.21 to -26.00 ± 0.050‰. The greates...

1. Detritus that forms the basis for mosquito production in tree hole ecosystems can vary in type and timing of input. We investigated the contributions of plant- and animal-derived detritus to the biomass of Aedes triseriatus (Say) pupae and adults by using stable isotope ((15)N and (13)C) techniques in lab experiments and field collections.2. Lab-reared mosquito isotope values reflected their...

A calcite-rich block in nephelinitic agglomerate at Oldoinyo Lengai comprises Sr-calcite, apatite, fluorite, a Ba-Mn oxide akin to romanrchite, and a distinctive Mn-Fe spinel. Formerly reported as sC3vite, on textural, mineralogical and stable isotope grounds it is now re-interpreted as a highly-altered natrocarbonatite lava. An implication of this study is that natrocarbonatite is not just a m...

A stable isotope ([(13)C]) breath test is a promising method for assessing gastric emptying, but it has not been pervasive yet in Japan. We think that there are some barriers to its popularization, including the uncertainty concerning its theoretical backgrounds, the ambiguity of analyzing and interpreting the data, and the lack of standard protocols for breath sampling. The aim of the present ...

BACKGROUND Stable isotope analysis is increasingly being utilised across broad areas of ecology and biology. Key to much of this work is the use of mixing models to estimate the proportion of sources contributing to a mixture such as in diet estimation. METHODOLOGY By accurately reflecting natural variation and uncertainty to generate robust probability estimates of source proportions, the ap...