Integrated Calendar

A sediment core was collected from the unsaturated zone of Nizzanim, Israel, from the surface to the water table at 20m. At 3m depth a live root of retama was found and at 10.5m depth a live rootlet was found.
The mineralogy of the sediment core alternated between high quartz (low clay) and low quartz (high clay) due to variation in climate regimes. 14C in the organic fraction of the sediment core was measured to 14m depth. The data divides into two groups: insitu, at the extant surface, and exsitu, at the depth of the roots from the extant insitu data.
The correlation of the insitu data is 0.9897 and the average rate of sedimentation is 0.77mm/yr. The average depth of the roots below the extant surface is 8.6±2.6m.
The dating of the core made possible attributing geologic information to different depths:
1. The little ice age
2. The flooding of the black sea
3. The younger Dryas
The age of the sediment at the depth of 12m is 14Kyear. Thus it seems that there was no unsaturated zone in the site and therefore no Coastal Aquifer. The sea level was at that time 80 below the present level and 15km to the west. Our ancestors followed the coast westward the then returned eastward.

The mammalian central nervous system is arguably the most complex system studied in biology. Normal function of the brain relies on the assembly of a diverse set of cell-types, including most prominently neurons, but also glial cells and vasculature. We developed and applied large-scale single-cell RNA sequencing for unbiased molecular cell-type classification in various regions of the mouse brain. First, I will describe our initial work on the cortex and hippocampus, and later give two examples where we dissect the maturation process of (I) cells from the oligodendrocyte lineage across the CNS, and (II) granule cells in the dentate gyrus. These results and our ongoing efforts demonstrate the importance of systematic molecular approaches to understanding cellular organization and dynamics in tissues.