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Abstract. Few ice cores from the Amundsen Sea and Bellingshausen Sea sectors of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) extend back in time further than a few hundred years. The WAIS is believed to be susceptible to collapse as a result of anthropogenic climate change and may have at least partially collapsed during the Last Interglacial (LIG) period. Understanding the stability of the WAIS during warm periods such as the LIG and Holocene is important. As part of the WACSWAIN (WArm Climate Stability of the West Antarctic ice sheet in the last INterglacial) project, the British Antarctic Survey's (BAS) Rapid Access Isotope Drill (RAID) was deployed in 2020 on Sherman Island in the Abbot Ice Shelf, West Antarctica. We drilled a 323 m deep borehole, with discrete samples of ice chippings collected that cover the entire depth range of the drilled ice. The samples were analysed for stable water isotope composition and major ion content at BAS from 2020–2022. Using annual layer counting of chemical records, volcanic horizon identification and ice modelling, an age scale for the record of 1724 discrete samples is presented. The Sherman Island ice record extends back to greater than 1240 years, providing the oldest, continuous ice-derived palaeoclimate records in the coastal Amundsen and Bellingshausen Sea sectors to date. We demonstrate the potential for recovery of a complete Holocene climate record from Sherman Island in the future and confidence in the ability of RAID samples to contain sufficiently resolved records for meaningful climatic interpretation.

Background: Households are an important location for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) transmission, especially during periods when travel and work was restricted to essential services. We aimed to assess the association of close-range contact patterns with SARS-CoV-2 transmission.Methods: We deployed proximity sensors for two weeks to measure face-to-face interactions between household members after SARS-CoV-2 was identified in the household, in South Africa, 2020–2021. We calculated the duration, frequency, and average duration of close-range proximity events with SARS-CoV-2 index cases. We assessed the association of contact parameters with SARS-CoV-2 transmission using mixed effects logistic regression accounting for index and household member characteristics.Results: We included 340 individuals (88 SARS-CoV-2 index cases and 252 household members). On multivariable analysis, factors associated with SARS-CoV-2 acquisition were index cases with minimum Ct value 35, and female contacts (aOR 2.5 95% CI 1.3–5.0). No contact parameters were associated with acquisition (aOR 1.0–1.1) for any of the duration, frequency, cumulative time in contact, or average duration parameters.Conclusions: We did not find an association between close-range proximity events and SARS-CoV-2 household transmission. Our findings may be due to study limitations, that droplet-mediated transmission during close-proximity contacts plays a smaller role than airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in the household, or due to high contact rates in households. International audience

Funnelling(Fun) is a recently proposed method for cross-lingual text classification (CLTC) based on a two-tier learning ensemble for heterogeneous transfer learning (HTL). In this ensemble method, 1st-tier classifiers, each working on a different and language-dependent feature space, return a vector of calibrated posterior probabilities (with one dimension for each class) for each document, and the final classification decision is taken by a meta-classifier that uses this vector as its input. The meta-classifier can thus exploit class-class correlations, and this (among other things) givesFunan edge over CLTC systems in which these correlations cannot be brought to bear. In this article, we describeGeneralized Funnelling(gFun), a generalization ofFunconsisting of an HTL architecture in which 1st-tier components can be arbitraryview-generating functions, i.e., language-dependent functions that each produce a language-independent representation (“view”) of the (monolingual) document. We describe an instance ofgFunin which the meta-classifier receives as input a vector of calibrated posterior probabilities (as inFun) aggregated to other embedded representations that embody other types of correlations, such as word-class correlations (as encoded byWord-Class Embeddings), word-word correlations (as encoded byMultilingual Unsupervised or Supervised Embeddings), and word-context correlations (as encoded bymultilingual BERT). We show that this instance ofgFunsubstantially improves overFunand over state-of-the-art baselines by reporting experimental results obtained on two large, standard datasets for multilingual multilabel text classification. Our code that implementsgFunis publicly available.

The timing and impact of deglaciation and Holocene readvances on the terrestrial continental margins of the Antarctic Peninsula (AP) have been well-studied but are still debated. Potter Peninsula on King George Island (KGI) (Isla 25 de Mayo), South Shetland Islands (SSI), NW Antarctic Peninsula, has a detailed assemblage of glacial landforms and stratigraphic exposures for constraining deglacial landscape development and glacier readvances. We undertook new morphostratigraphic mapping of the deglaciated foreland of the Warszawa Icefield, an outlet of the Bellingshausen (Collins) Ice Cap on Potter Peninsula, using satellite imagery and new lithofacies recognition and interpretations, combined with new chronostratigraphic analysis of stratigraphic sections, lake sediments, and moraine deposits. Results show that the deglaciation on Potter Peninsula began before c. 8.2 ka. Around c. 7.0 ka, the Warszawa Icefield and the marine-facing Fourcade Glacier readvanced across Potter Peninsula and to the outer part of Potter Cove. Evidence of further readvances on Potter Peninsula was absent until the Warszawa Icefield margin was landward of its present position on three occasions: c. 1.7–1.4 ka, after c. 0.7 ka (most likely c. 0.5–0.1 ka), and by 1956 CE. The timing of Holocene deglaciation and glacier fluctuations on Potter Peninsula are broadly coeval with other glacier- and ice-free areas on the SSI and the northern AP and likely driven by interactions between millennial–centennial-scale changes in solar insolation and irradiance, the southern westerlies, and the Southern Annular Mode. Frontiers in Earth Science, 10 ISSN:2296-6463

Abstract Background: Myocardial infarction (MI) is a serious condition that increases with age and is caused by atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. It is of value to identify the reasons why some are affected, and possibly, why different personality traits can be associated with increased or decreased risk for myocardial infarction. Methods: This is a cross-sectional study based on data collected in 2017 from the European survey wave 7 of Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Individuals aged >50 years were included in the study. The big five personality traits, i.e., openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism constituted the main exposure variables and were analyzed separately. The value of each personality trait variable was divided into tertile with higher score indicating a higher level. The primary outcome was MI. The association between each personality trait and MI were examined by Logistic regression models which was used to estimate the Odds Ratios (ORs) and 95% Confidence Intervals (CI). Results: There were 6336 participants reported having a MI in this study. Neuroticism was significantly associated with the increased OR of 1.16 (95% CI: 1.09 - 1.24) for middle level of neuroticism and 1.39 (95% CI: 1.30 - 1.49) for the high level of neuroticism. Higher level of agreeableness is significantly associated with the decrease odds of MI. Conclusions: This cross-sectional study is based on a survey of a population aged 50 years and older in Europe. A higher level of neuroticism was associated with the increased odds of MI. A higher level of agreeableness is associated with decreased odds of MI. It has been demonstrated that different personalities are associated with different odds of suffering MI and seems to play a role as a risk factor.

Abstract. The association between climate variability and grain harvest yields has been an important component of food security and economy in European history. Yet, inter-regional comparisons of climate–yield relationships have been hampered by locally varying data types and the use of different statistical methods. Using a coherent statistical framework, considering the effects of diverse serial correlations on statistical significance, we assess the temperature and hydroclimate (precipitation and drought) signatures in grain harvest yields across varying environmental settings of early modern (ca. 1500–1800) Europe. An unprecedentedly large network of yield records from northern (Sweden), central (Switzerland), and southern (Spain) Europe are compared with a diverse set of seasonally and annually resolved palaeoclimate reconstructions. Considering the effects of different crop types and time series frequencies, we find within regions consistent climate–harvest yield associations characterized by a significant summer soil moisture signal in Sweden, winter temperature and precipitation signals in Switzerland, and spring and annual mean temperature signals in Spain. The regional-scale climate–harvest associations are weaker than the recently revealed climate signals in early modern grain prices but similar in strength to modern climate–harvest relationships at comparable spatial scales. This is a noteworthy finding considering the uncertainties inherent in both historical harvest and palaeoclimate data.