Paleoethnobotanical remains from basketry and cordage from the Paisley Caves offer an opportunity to explore how people engaged with plant communities over time. Fiber identification of textiles, together with radiocarbon dating, contributes new information about landscape use within the Summer Lake Basin. Expanded marshlands during the terminal Pleistocene / Early Holocene created suitable plant communities ideal for fiber technology, specifically wetland monocots and herbaceous dicots—including dogbane and stinging nettle—by 11,000 years ago. This technology is key to subsistence activities and craft production throughout the Holocene. Despite climatic events during the Middle Holocene, in which people transitioned from caves to sites centered on lakeshores and wetlands, the suite of fiber plants and their technological application remains constant. During the Late Holocene, bast fiber material diversified with the addition of flax and milkweed. The presence of flax in particular, a high-elevation plant, may reflect the increased use of upland root collection areas as populations increased. This research provides long-term data on culturally significant native plants used in the manufacture of fiber-based textiles over the last 14,000 years.

Mechanical properties of the arterial wall depend largely on orientation and density of collagen fiber bundles. Several methods have been developed for observation of collagen orientation and density; the most frequently applied collagen-specific manual approach is based on polarized light (PL). However, it is very time consuming and the results are operator dependent. We have proposed a new automated method for evaluation of collagen fiber direction from two-dimensional polarized light microscopy images (2D PLM). The algorithm has been verified against artificial images and validated against manual measurements. Finally the collagen content has been estimated. The proposed algorithm was capable of estimating orientation of some 35 k points in 15 min when applied to aortic tissue and over 500 k points in 35 min for Achilles tendon. The average angular disagreement between each operator and the algorithm was −9.3±8.6° and −3.8±8.6° in the case of aortic tissue and −1.6±6.4° and 2.6±7.8° for Achilles tendon. Estimated mean collagen content was 30.3±5.8% and 94.3±2.7% for aortic media and Achilles tendon, respectively. The proposed automated approach is operator independent and several orders faster than manual measurements and therefore has the potential to replace manual measurements of collagen orientation via PLM.

Arterial physiology relies on a delicate three-dimensional (3D) organization of cells and extracellular matrix, which is remarkably altered by vascular diseases like abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAA). The ability to explore the micro-histology of the aorta wall is important in the study of vascular pathologies and in the development of vascular constitutive models, i.e., mathematical descriptions of biomechanical properties of the wall. The present study reports and validates a fast image processing sequence capable of quantifying collagen fiber organization from histological stains. Powering and re-normalizing the histogram of the classical fast Fourier transformation (FFT) is a key step in the proposed analysis sequence. This modification introduces a powering parameter w, which was calibrated to best fit the reference data obtained using classical FFT and polarized light microscopy (PLM) of stained histological slices of AAA wall samples. The values of w = 3 and 7 give the best correlation (Pearson's correlation coefficient larger than 0.7, R2 about 0.7) with the classical FFT approach and PLM measurements. A fast and operator independent method to identify collagen organization in the arterial wall was developed and validated. This overcomes severe limitations of currently applied methods like PLM to identify collagen organization in the arterial wall.