Singh convincingly argues that understanding culture requires understanding subjective selection. Here, I (1) suggest an extension to Singh’s cultural manifold, namely status signaling systems and (2) argue that Singh’s approach might unfold its greatest impact on the study of modern culture and economics. Indeed, subjective selection seems to readily predict numerous modern phenomena such as highly addictive digital interfaces.

The Climate Change Anxiety Scale (CCAS), developed by Clayton and Karazsia (2020), assesses the negative emotional impact of climate change on well-being. However, its psychometric properties have not yet been sufficiently explored for Spanish spoken in Spain and Spanish culture. This research introduces the Spanish version of the CCAS (CCAS–S), examines its psychometric properties, and provides validity evidence supporting its intended purpose. Two studies were conducted: first, the original version of the CCAS was translated into Spanish using a committee approach to translation design; second, 806 participants completed the CCAS–S along with additional assessment instruments to gather validity evidence. The 13-item Spanish version showed adequate reliability and internal structure validity evidence for the two-dimensional model, aligning with theoretical expectations. Nevertheless, a refined 10-item version distinguishing metacognitive impairment, emotional distress, and functional interference dimensions optimized the scale’s intended purpose. The study discusses the conditions for using the CCAS–S measures and its practical implications.

The Little Ice Age (LIA, ∼1400–1850 CE) was characterized by colder winters and more frequent extreme weather events in the Northern Hemisphere. While changes in ocean circulation likely contributed to global cooling, the specific mechanisms remain poorly understood. Here, we investigate how ocean circulation changed before, during, and after the LIA using marine sediment cores from the Laurentian Channel in the lower St. Lawrence Estuary. We first established a Mg/Ca–temperature calibration for Globobulimina auriculata using instrumental temperature data and a century-old box core. Applying this calibration to a longer piston core, we reconstructed bottom-water temperatures during the LIA. Coupling these results with existing δ1⁸O calcite data allowed us to isolate the δ1⁸O seawater signal, which reflects changes in the relative contributions of the Labrador Current and Gulf Stream. Our results indicate an increase of fresh and cold Labrador Sea–derived waters around 1500 CE. Throughout most of the LIA, we observed a slow and steady warming of the bottom water associated with a gradual increase in the proportion of Atlantic-derived waters until ∼1850 CE. The ∼1800–1950 CE interval shows high-amplitude variability, including a sudden freshening event at the LIA’s end. After 1950 CE, regional warming dominates, consistent with previous studies documenting increased Atlantic influence over the Canadian shelf.

I read Singh’s stimulating proposal as a comeback to methodological individualism: social and cultural phenomena are driven by individual motivations, given by individuals’ subjective reasons for action. Singh’s version of this classic doctrine is useful when it leads him to question cultural group selection. But contrary to methodological individualism, the cognitive mechanisms shaping culture are not necessarily conscious, coherent, or causal.

The commercialisation of ‘payment-like’ digital currencies in the financial system challenges our pre-existing state-centric legal conception of money due to their self-governing and decentralised nature. Stablecoins – particularly those which are backed by reserves and pegged to a single fiat currency on a 1:1 basis (SCS) – have the potential to reduce the transaction costs of cross-border payments. By drawing insights from a comparison of the Singapore and United Kingdom regulatory approaches towards facilitating SCS as a means of payment, the objective of this article is to consider how the legal characterisation of money under the common law should respond to, and facilitate the increasing use of, such digital currencies as a means of payment. It proposes a substance over form approach towards the characterisation of ‘money’. Under this proposed characterisation, the legal form or origin of an instrument should not be determinative of its monetary status; instead, the touchstone of the monetary status of an instrument is whether it serves as an effective means of the transfer of monetary value between parties, regardless of its underlying technology. On this basis, ‘payment-like’ digital currencies which bear these functional characteristics, such as SCS, may be recognised as money and the functional equivalent of fiat currency, subject to the appropriate regulatory safeguards that enable them to serve this monetary function.

This paper analyzes the use of rubu unpaid “traditional” labor in Toro District in western Uganda during the colonial period. It explores how the “traditional” roots of the unpaid labor system were negotiated and reinterpreted by African elites through their attempts to gain more control over the labor through wrangling over exemptions and commutations for the work which, then, shaped British responses to the forced labor regime. Chiefs managed rubu labor on the ground and wielded a lot of exploitative power. However, the British administration used intermediaries, luwalo inspectors, to monitor rubu labor and delimit the power of chiefs. This paper also investigates the growth of commutations from so-called traditional labor as a colonial revenue generator.

Females with autism, and especially young females, have been underrepresented in research on students with autism. Females with autism are typically diagnosed later than are males, due in part to differences in their presentation and lack of awareness of autism in females. This means that potentially serious mental health disorders originating in preadolescence in females can go unnoticed and untreated. We addressed this gap by examining the school-related wellbeing of females with autism aged 7–14 through an anonymous online survey completed by 38 parents. Seven key themes were identified: social issues, sensory issues, change issues, bullying, lack of understanding of autism, academic issues, and issues related to food or eating. By mapping these issues against aspects of wellbeing identified in the literature, we highlight their negative impacts on social and emotional wellbeing among females as young as 7 years and conclude that greater awareness and understanding of autism among young females is needed.

The concept of super-attracters downplays the impact of basic emotions upon decision-making. The complexity of emotions belies the instinctual nature of such emotional systems, which are ultimately established by genetics and evolutionary processes. Examples of super-attractants may perhaps be better framed as evolutionary adaptiveness versus vestigial/byproduct behaviors.

This article examines how two recent artworks by Jewish Israeli artists—Paleosol 80 South by Amir Yatziv and Jonathan Doweck (2013), and Ella Littwitz’s Qasr al-Yahud project (2021)—critically engage with the legacy of biblical orientalism and its connection to ongoing colonial and ecological violence in Palestine/Israel. Focusing on biblical sites located in militarized border areas, both artworks self-reflectively invoke the orientalist tropes of wilderness and frontier, alongside typical genres of Western Holy Land literature. Simultaneously, they confront the present-day destruction of these sites through state violence, which turns the orientalist cliché into a reality. The article analyzes the contrasting registers of signification applied to the landscape—scriptural, military, and ecological—and explores how the artworks dramatize the tension between them. In doing so, they expose the mechanisms of power that shape the landscape and trace the marginalized histories that endure in their shadow.

This article presents the results of the 2018–2021 seasons of excavation undertaken at the Darband-i Rania pass in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Fieldwork at Qalatga Darband saw the completion of excavation of the monumental fortified manor together with the geophysical mapping of the square fort and other areas of the site. At the Assyrian fortress of Usu Aska, excavation of two areas of utilitarian architecture was supported by a full programme of environmental sampling, while the defensive wall was articulated in multiple locations; in one of these the need for repeated rebuilding is interpreted as due to damage caused by earthquakes. Operations at Murad Rasu concentrated on investigating the badly eroded remains of a monumental mudbrick building now dated to the late third or the early second millennium B.C.

The field of cultural evolution has long emphasized forms of social learning where learners are “blind” to payoffs of cultural traits, while neglecting “sighted” processes like guided variation. We review new insights that could inform psychologically enriched models of social learning. These insights reveal new ways that blindness creeps into selection, even when agents appraise the payoffs of cultural traits.

Singh explains how cultural convergence is driven by super-attractors through subjective selection, but this account underestimates how social norms shape which psychological goals are maintained or suppressed. We clarify that social norms filter subjective selection by guiding what individuals regard as effective or desirable behaviors and by redefining their goals, thereby embedding subjective selection within the multilevel normative ecosystem.

In elections under proportional representation (PR), proportionality between votes and seats is an ideal never achieved in reality. Discrepancies between votes and seats are most prevalent under the most widely used PR seat allocation formula, D’Hondt/Jefferson. This article provides the first comprehensive model to explain the discrepancies between the national seat allocation and the vote distribution under the D’Hondt rule. The model identifies six systematic factors that drive these deviations, ranging from the bias in the seat allocation rule to differences in the electoral rules (e.g. malapportionment) and party competition across districts. Thus, this model goes beyond the well-known rule that large parties are overrepresented under D’Hondt by providing a quantitative point estimate of this deviation and of between-district inequalities. The model identifies the (expected) beneficiaries and losers of the seat allocation and predicts the magnitude of these penalties and benefits. At the level of political parties, the model predicts the gains and losses in terms of seats, relative to the parties’ proportional share of seats. Empirical tests on 156 elections from 23 democracies, covering 3,653 political parties and 2,139 constituencies, are used to assess its validity and to calculate the resulting substantial effects.

Using the Biodesign Challenge as a representative corpus of early-stage exploratory work in biodesign, this paper analyzes 843 student-led projects presented between 2016 and 2025 to identify correlations between waste engagement, technological strategies, and project outcomes. The study proposes a Map of Practices at the intersection of waste, biotechnology, and materials design, grouping projects according to their level of involvement with waste, living systems, and material production. Results reveal the relevance of waste as both a driver and a material input in waste-driven biodesign, identifying recurring strategic approaches to waste, innovative biological strategies that merge materials design with waste management, and critical tensions, such as the predominance of degradable waste streams over more recalcitrant forms. Based on these findings, a decision-making tool is proposed to support problem definition, technology integration, and outcome positioning in waste-driven biodesign practices. In response to the growing urgency of waste as a pervasive socio-ecological challenge, this research addresses conceptual and methodological gaps concerning the integration of waste into biodesign and contributes analytical and practical tools for supporting more circular and regenerative material futures.

I praise the synthesis and expansion of attractor theory to explain statistical universals, but critique its failure to explain absolute universals. I agree that lullabies, hero stories, and shamanism are good candidates for primarily cultural evolutionary explanations, but argue that the larger, most universal categories they are sub-phenomena of – music, language, religion – require gene-culture coevolutionary explanations.

The paper presents a framework to automatically identify crack patterns and the related features in existing reinforced concrete (RC) bridges. The challenge of this work is to define a tool for detecting the focused defect and highlighting the number and the orientation of cracks, allowing for correct interpretation and driving further evaluations on the residual life of the structure. The study is framed within the increasing interest in monitoring the structural health of existing bridges through automated tools, able to support engineers in the phase of visual assessment and interpretation of structural defects. When dealing with periodic inspection of large bridge portfolios, the support provided by automated tools can be fundamental for planning further strategies aimed at ensuring the structural safety and preventing future disasters. Given a stack of photos of a bridge structural element, an image stitching procedure is proposed to produce a near-complete image of the entire element. On the latter, a pipeline of deep-learning (DL) algorithms is employed to automatically detect and identify cracks (as a combination of object detection and segmentation algorithms). Finally, the proposed tool extracts cracks for counting and defines their orientation (i.e., vertical, horizontal, diagonal), in order to provide near-complete information about the crack pattern for the structural element. A full description of the methodology and the proposed algorithms is reported throughout the manuscript, showing the main pros and cons and assessing the effectiveness of the tool on a real-life case study.

Singh sees cultural convergence as people choosing traditions that seem to work well in practice. I build on this by looking at symbolic super attractors, like ancestor worship or cosmic diagrams. These can last for a long time since they fit human ways of thinking and give people a sense of deeper grounding. Unlike practical choices, which are judged by how effective they are, symbolic ones are valued for how well they make sense and hold together. Recognizing both sides gives a clearer picture of how cultures form and endure.

Digital care platforms are reshaping how migrant care work is organised and governed. Drawing on an original dataset of over 15,000 worker profiles from four care platforms in Türkiye and combining biterm topic modelling with online ethnographic observations, this article examines how migrant care workers are represented on care platforms at the intersection of platformisation, migration governance and care markets. We argue that platforms formalise visibility rather than employment, absorbing a feminised migrant workforce excluded from formal channels while displacing legal and compliance risks onto workers. Migrant women are substantially overrepresented relative to their share of formal work permits, and wage expectations are stratified along nationality and gender lines. Workers produce a hybrid persona that combines professional and affective repertoires, in which legal status functions as a selective visibility resource. The article contributes to debates on how platformisation is reshaping social care governance across various welfare systems, with a focus on gendered and racial inequalities.