Human migrations across geographic boundaries can facilitate the introduction of new husbandry practices and dispersal of plants and animals, resulting in changes in biodiversity. As previously demonstrated, the 12th century BCE Philistine migration-to the southern Levantine littoral, involved the transportation of pigs from Europe, engendering long term genetic displacement of local Near Easte...

The Mediterranean Sea is a marine biodiversity hot spot. Here we combined an extensive literature analysis with expert opinions to update publicly available estimates of major taxa in this marine ecosystem and to revise and update several species lists. We also assessed overall spatial and temporal patterns of species diversity and identified major changes and threats. Our results listed approx...

Many languages, including Arabic, are characterized by a wide variety of different dialects that often differ strongly from each other. When developing speech technology for dialect-rich languages, the portability and reusability of data, algorithms, and system components becomes extremely important. In this paper, we describe the development of a large-vocabulary speech recognition system for ...

Recently, the geographical origins of Ashkenazic Jews (AJs) and their native language Yiddish were investigated by applying the Geographic Population Structure (GPS) to a cohort of exclusively Yiddish-speaking and multilingual AJs. GPS localized most AJs along major ancient trade routes in northeastern Turkey adjacent to primeval villages with names that resemble the word "Ashkenaz." These find...

The trophic ecology of fourteen species demersal fishes and six decapod crustaceans from the continental slope rise Southeastern Mediterranean Sea (SEMS) was examined using stable isotope analysis. Mean δ 13 C values among fish varied by ca. 4.0‰, -20.85‰ ( Macroramphosus scolopax ) to -16.57‰ -16.89‰ Conger conger Centrophorus granulosus ), showing an enrichment in as a function depth (200 – 1...

The circulation of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea is characterized by numerous recurrent or permanent anticyclonic structures, which modulate pathway main currents and exchange water masses in basin. This work aims to describe structures thermohaline properties with particular focus on two anticyclones, Pelops Cyprus gyres, using in-situ (drifters Argo floats) satellite (altimetry) data. gyre in...