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This exhibition celebrates 80 years of conservation work by the Georgian Group. It aims to transport the visitor into a world of craftsmanship, beauty and design. Gathering together an eclectic selection of traditional 'Georgian' crafts practised in the 21st century, objects range from silk wallpaper and chandeliers to carved stone sculpture and ceiling designs. The works on display demonstrate that the Georgian tradition is a living tradition, and is one that should be supported and preserved. Founded in 1937, the Georgian Group is a conservation organisation created to campaign for the preservation of historic buildings and planned landscapes of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Exhibition: The Georgian Group, London, UK (02.02 - 25.02.2017).

The conservation of skin, leather and related materials is an area that, until now, has had little representation by the written word in book form. Marion Kite and Roy Thomson, of the Leather Conservation Centre, have prepared a text which is both authoritative and comprehensive, including contributions from the leading specialists in their fields, such as Betty Haines, Mary Lou Florian, Ester Cameron and Jim Spriggs.The book covers all aspects of Skin and Leather preservation, from Cuir Bouillie to Bookbindings. There is significant discussion of the technical and chemical elements necessary in conservation, meaning that professional conservators will find the book a vital part of their collection. As part of the Butterworth-Heinemann Black series, the book carries the stamp of approval of the leading figures in the world of Conservation and Museology, and as such it is the only publication available on the topic carrying this immediate mark of authority.

In this paper, a spectral collection of over 150 ATR-FT-IR spectra of materials related to cultural heritage and conservation science has been presented that have been measured in the extended region of 4000-80 cm –1 (mid-IR and far-IR region). The applicability of the spectra and, in particular, the extended spectral range, for investigation of art-related materials is demonstrated on a case study. This collection of ATRFT-IR reference spectra is freely available online ( http://tera.chem.ut.ee/IR_spectra/ ) and is meant to be a useful tool for researchers in the field of conservation and materials science.

Microorganisms (bacteria, archaea and fungi), in addition to lichens and insect pests, cause problems in the conservation of cultural heritage because of their biodeteriorative potential. This holds true for all types of historic artefacts, and even for art made of modern materials, in public buildings, museums and private art collections. The variety of biodeterioration phenomena observed on materials of cultural heritage is determined by several factors, such as the chemical composition and nature of the material itself, the climate and exposure of the object, in addition to the manner and frequency of surface cleaning and housekeeping in museums. This study offers a review of a variety of well-known biodeterioration phenomena observed on different materials, such as stone and building materials, objects exhibited in museums and libraries, as well as human remains and burial-related materials. The decontamination of infected artefacts, exhibition rooms and depots incurs high expenditure for museums. Nevertheless, the question has to be raised: whether the process of biodeterioration of cultural heritage can or should be stopped under all circumstances, or whether we have to accept it as a natural and an implicit consecution of its creation. This study also highlights critically the pros and cons of biocide treatments and gives some prominent examples of successful and unsuccessful conservation treatments. Furthermore, an outlook on the future research needs and developments in this highly interesting field is given.

Recent work within neuroimaging consortia have aimed to identify reproducible, and often subtle, brain signatures of psychiatric or neurological conditions. To allow for high‐powered brain imaging analyses, it is often necessary to pool MR images that were acquired with different protocols across multiple scanners. Current retrospective harmonization techniques have shown promise in removing site‐related image variation. However, most statistical approaches may over‐correct for technical, scanning‐related, variation as they cannot distinguish between confounded image‐acquisition based variability and site‐related population variability. Such statistical methods often require that datasets contain subjects or patient groups with similar clinical or demographic information to isolate the acquisition‐based variability. To overcome this limitation, we consider site‐related magnetic resonance (MR) imaging harmonization as a style transfer problem rather than a domain transfer problem. Using a fully unsupervised deep‐learning framework based on a generative adversarial network (GAN), we show that MR images can be harmonized by inserting the style information encoded from a single reference image, without knowing their site/scanner labels a priori. We trained our model using data from five large‐scale multisite datasets with varied demographics. Results demonstrated that our style‐encoding model can harmonize MR images, and match intensity profiles, without relying on traveling subjects. This model also avoids the need to control for clinical, diagnostic, or demographic information. We highlight the effectiveness of our method for clinical research by comparing extracted cortical and subcortical features, brain‐age estimates, and case–control effect sizes before and after the harmonization. We showed that our harmonization removed the site‐related variances, while preserving the anatomical information and clinical meaningful patterns. We further demonstrated that with a diverse training set, our method successfully harmonized MR images collected from unseen scanners and protocols, suggesting a promising tool for ongoing collaborative studies. Source code is released in USC‐IGC/style_transfer_harmonization (github.com). We develop a novel harmonization approach for T1‐weighted magnetic resonance imaging using a style‐encoding generative adversarial network that can be used to harmonize entire images for a variety of international, multi‐cohort, neuroimaging collaborations. Results demonstrated that this model avoids the need to control for clinical or demographic information. We showed that our harmonization removed the cross‐site variances, while preserving the anatomical information and clinical meaningful patterns.

Background Microplastics (MPs) and nanoplastics (NPs) have become a growing concern in dermatology due to their widespread presence in cosmetic formulations and the environment. These minuscule synthetic polymer particles prompt an essential exploration of their potential impact on dermatological homeostasis. Aims This study aims to investigate the effects of MPs and NPs on the integumentary system. Specifically, it seeks to understand the potential cutaneous alterations, inflammatory responses, and disruptions to the skin's physiological functions caused by these synthetic particles. Patients/Methods The investigation involves a comprehensive analysis of emerging research on MPs and NPs. This includes their presence in cosmetic formulations and environmental pervasiveness. The study delves into their capacity to breach the cutaneous barrier, raising concerns about the implications of prolonged exposure. Results Evidence suggests that MPs and NPs may indeed incite cutaneous alterations, provoke inflammatory responses, and disturb the homeostasis of the skin's physiological functions. Their small dimensions enhance their capability to breach the cutaneous barrier, further emphasizing the apprehensions associated with prolonged exposure. Conclusions While a precise understanding of the implications of MPs and NPs on dermatological health remains an ongoing scientific endeavor, this study underscores the growing significance of these synthetic particles. The findings emphasize the need for proactive measures to safeguard both individual well‐being and environmental preservation in the context of dermatological health.

Background Hand grip strength (HGS) is a powerful indicator of sarcopenia and other adverse health outcomes. Normative values for HGS for general Chinese people with a broad age spectrum are lacking. This study aims to establish normative values of HGS and explore the correlations between HGS and body composition among unselected people aged 8–80 in China. Methods From 2012 to 2017, 39 655 participants aged 8–80 years in the China National Health Survey were included. Absolute HGS was measured using a Jamar dynamometer. The relative HGS was normalized by body mass index. Body composition indexes included body mass index, body fat percentage, muscle mass, fat mass index (FMI) and muscle mass index (MMI). Sex‐specific smoothed centile tables for the P1, P5, P25, P50, P75, P95 and P99 centiles of HGS and body composition were generated using lambda‐mu‐sigma method. The correlations between muscle strength and body composition were estimated by partial Spearman correlation analysis. Results The median values (25th and 75th percentile) of HGS in boys and girls (8–19 years old) were 22 (14, 34) kg and 18 (12, 22) kg, respectively; in men and women aged 20–80 were 39 (33, 44) kg and 24 (20, 27) kg, respectively. Values of upper and lower HGS across ages had three periods: an increase to a peak in the 20 s in men (with the 5th and 95th values of 30 and 55 kg, respectively) and 30 s in women (with the 5th and 95th values of 18 and 34 kg, respectively), preservation through midlife (20s–40 s), and then a decline after their 50 s. The lowest HGS values in both sexes were in the 70‐ to 80‐year‐old group, with the 5th and 95th percentile values of 16 and 40 kg in men, and 10 and 25 kg in women. There were substantial sex differences in body composition in the life course (all P values <0.001). In ageing, the decrease of muscle strength was faster than that of muscle mass in both sexes. The correlations between muscle mass and HGS were most robust than other correlations, especially in women (0.68 vs. 0.50), children and adolescents. Conclusions Our study established the age‐ and sex‐specific percentile reference values for hand grip strength in an unselected Chinese population across a broad age‐spectrum. The rich data can facilitate the practical appraisal of muscle strength and promote early prediction of sarcopenia and other impairments associated with neuromuscular disorders.

Anthropogenic habitat fragmentation is often implicated as driving the current global extinction crisis, particularly in freshwater ecosystems. The genetic signal of recent population isolation can be confounded by the complex spatial arrangement of dendritic river systems. Consequently, many populations may presently be managed separately based on an incorrect assumption that they have evolved in isolation. Integrating landscape genomics data with models of connectivity that account for landscape structure, we show that the cumulative effects of multiple in‐stream barriers have contributed to the recent decline of a freshwater fish from the Murray–Darling Basin, Australia. In addition, individual‐based eco‐evolutionary simulations further demonstrate that contemporary inferences about population isolation are consistent with the 160‐year time frame since construction of in‐stream barriers began in the region. Our findings suggest that the impact of very recent fragmentation may be often underestimated for freshwater biodiversity. We argue that proactive conservation measures to reconnect many riverine populations are urgently needed.

Understanding how biodiversity originates and is maintained are fundamental challenge in evolutionary biology. Speciation is a continuous process and progression along this continuum depends on the interplay between evolutionary forces driving divergence and forces promoting genetic homogenisation. Coral reefs are broadly connected yet highly heterogeneous ecosystems, and divergence with gene flow at small spatial scales might therefore be common. Genomic studies are increasingly revealing the existence of closely related and sympatric taxa within taxonomic coral species, but the extent to which these taxa might still be exchanging genes and sharing environmental niches is unclear. In this study, we sampled extensively across diverse habitats at multiple reefs of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) and comprehensively examined genome‐wide diversity and divergence histories within and among taxa of the Stylophora pistillata species complex. S. pistillata is one of the most abundant and well‐studied coral species, yet we discovered five distinct taxa, with wide geographic ranges and extensive sympatry. Demographic modelling showed that speciation events have occurred with gene flow and that taxa are at different stages along a divergence continuum. We found significant correlations between genetic divergence and specific environmental variables, suggesting that niche partitioning may have played a role in speciation and that S. pistillata taxa might be differentially adapted to different environments. Conservation actions rely on estimates of species richness, population sizes and species ranges, which are biased if divergent taxa are lumped together. As coral reefs are rapidly degrading due to climate change, our study highlights the importance of recognising evolutionarily distinct and differentially adapted coral taxa to improve conservation and restoration efforts aiming at protecting coral genetic diversity.

Identification of fossil species is crucial to evolutionary studies. Recent advances from deep learning have shown promising prospects in fossil image identification. However, the quantity and quality of labelled fossil images are often limited due to fossil preservation, conditioned sampling and expensive and inconsistent label annotation by domain experts, which pose great challenges to training deep learning‐based image classification models. To address these challenges, we follow the idea of the wisdom of crowds and propose a multiview ensemble framework, which collects Original (O), Grey (G) and Skeleton (S) views of each fossil image reflecting its different characteristics to train multiple base models, and then makes the final decision via soft voting. Experiments on the largest fusulinid dataset with 2400 images show that the proposed OGS consistently outperforms baselines (using a single model for each view), and obtains superior or comparable performance compared to OOO (using three base models for three the same Original views). Besides, as the training data decreases, the proposed framework achieves more gains. While considering the identification consistency estimation with respect to human experts, OGS receives the highest agreement with the original labels of dataset and with the re‐identifications of two human experts. The validation performance provides a quantitative estimation of consistency across different experts and genera. We conclude that the proposed framework can present state‐of‐the‐art performance in the fusulinid fossil identification case study. This framework is designed for general fossil identification and it is expected to see applications to other fossil datasets in future work. Notably, the result, which shows more performance gains as train set size decreases or over a smaller imbalance fossil dataset, suggests the potential application to identify rare fossil images. The proposed framework also demonstrates its potential for assessing and resolving inconsistencies in fossil identification. 摘 要 化石物种的鉴定对进化研究学至关重要。近年来，深度学习在化石图像识别方面的研究进展表现出了广阔的前景。然而，由于化石保存和采样的限制，以及领域专家较少、鉴定结果具有不一致性，已标记的化石图像其数量与质量往往受到限制，这给基于深度学习的图像分类模型的训练带来了很大的挑战。 为了应对这些挑战，我们遵循群体智慧的思想，提出了一种多视角集成学习框架，该框架收集了每张化石图片的原图(O)、 灰度图(G)和骨架图(S)，从多个视角提取每张图像的不同特征，分别训练相应的基模型，然后通过软投票做出最终决策。 在目前最大的fusulinid图像数据集(共2400张图像)上的实验结果表明，集成OGS三个视角的模型性能始终优于使用单一视角模型，并且与集成OOO三个相同视角的模型相比，获得了更好或相当的性能。此外，随着用于训练数据的减少，所提框架的性能增益也越大。对于人类专家的识别一致性评估表明，OGS在数据集原始标签以及两位人类专家重新识别标签的两种场景下，都获得了最高的一致性。模型验证集的性能定量地评估了不同专家或不同的属之间一致性。 我们得出的结论是，本文所提出的方法可以在fusulinid化石鉴定案例研究中呈现最先进的性能。该方法是为一般化石识别而设计的，并有望在未来的工作中应用于其他化石数据集。值得注意的是，研究结果表明，OGS在较小或较不平衡化石数据集上显示出了更明显的性能提升，因而在识别稀有化石图像上有较高的潜在应用价值。此外，本文所提出的方法也具有评估和解决化石鉴定不一致性方面的潜力。