In federal systems where multiple orders of government share authority, do citizens care about which order makes a policy? To investigate whether citizens place importance on the order of government and whether if they do, this reflects principled preferences or implicit assumptions about policy performance, we conducted a vignette experiment in Germany. The design of the study disentangles the effects of policy adoption and financing from the expected effectiveness of a policy and its impact on regional differences. Our findings show that citizens are largely indifferent regarding the order of government that adopts a policy, but they show a modest preference for financing by the federal government. These results suggest that previously observed preferences for federal policy-making in other studies may reflect citizens’ implicit assumptions about policy performance rather than principled support for centralization.

This paper investigates the frequency of commentary pragmatic markers in Ghanaian and Ugandan Englishes, and their use across different text categories, using the Ghanaian and Ugandan components of the International Corpus of English. These markers, which are grouped into assessment, emphasis, evidential, hearsay and manner-of-speaking markers, are explored from a variational pragmatic approach. The results show that Ghanaian English users employ an overall higher frequency of commentary pragmatic markers than Ugandan English users. Ghanaian English users utilise more commentary pragmatic markers in private and public dialogues and printed writing than Ugandan English users, while the latter employ more commentary pragmatic markers in monologues than their Ghanaian English counterparts. The study confirms the influence of local African languages and cultures on the use of some English commentary pragmatic markers, thus contributing to the research on nativisation and pragmatic variation in these varieties.

Viticulture is essential for reducing pesticide use and associated risks. Often the adoption of individual pesticide reduction measures is investigated in isolation, and little is known on broader patterns and the joint adoption of measures. We address this gap by analyzing adoption choices of Swiss grape growers across a large number of pesticide reduction measures, using a contingency analysis and a k-means clustering algorithm. We focus on how measure, farm, and farmer characteristics correlate with this adoption. The analysis uses survey data collected among 436 Swiss grapevine producers. Results indicate that farmers in our sample appear to exploit complementary effects between measures. Moreover, the cluster analysis reveals that Swiss producers can be split into two groups of roughly equal size, with one adopting a greater variety of pesticide reduction measures, and the other relying more on pesticides alone. We further identify significant differences in farm and farmer characteristics that could explain this variation in measure adoption. Our analysis has important implications for research and policy. Firstly, they underline the importance of fostering the adoption of efficient and effective measure bundles. Secondly, they highlight the need for targeted policies to mobilize farmers relying mostly on pesticides to diversify their plant protection practices and thus contribute to overall pesticide reduction.

We evaluated an endoscope surveillance culture program at a tertiary academic center from 2019–2024. Postreprocessing culture positivity was highest for esophagogastroduodenoscopy (25.9%). Carbapenem-resistant organism matches between endoscope and patient isolates occurred in 5% of positive cultures.

Human sacrifice is one of the most dramatic and enduring rituals known to ancient societies. Death of the victim represents the climax of the event because lethal violence produces vivid images that articulate power relations between the organizers, audience, and those sacrificed. This study reconstructs burial treatments, biological profiles, and trauma patterns on 49 human sacrifices excavated from the site El Pollo located 13 km from Chan Chan, the capital city of the Chimú Empire (AD 1050/1100–1450), in the Moche Valley, Peru. Children and adolescents (n = 31/37) exhibit cutmarks to the anterior chest, which mirror the victim profiles and patterning of skeletal trauma documented at other Chimú sacrificial sites. Sacrifice at El Pollo also involved opening the chest cavities of adult males, dispatching bound male captives, and administering incisions to victim torsos to release blood. Given the administrative capacity and imperial enterprises of the Chimú Empire, these data indicate that sacrifice at El Pollo was part of a highly systematic ritual program staged throughout the Moche Valley and overseen by ruling elites at Chan Chan. This study provides evidence that sacrifice was modified to suit the civic-ceremonial needs of the empire and supported imperial efforts of militaristic expansion.

Biological determinism continues to shape how kinship is defined, from research to repatriation proceedings. This privileging of biological relatedness reflects and reinforces dominant ‘Western’ frameworks of kinship, often sidelining culturally-specific, Indigenous, and community-centered understandings of family and social belonging. Advances in archaeogenomic technologies today offer unprecedented insight into past human societies, and these advances have the potential to forge new, multivocal, and inclusive approaches to kinship. However, the application of ancient DNA risks reproducing power imbalances and epistemic hierarchies when genetic connections are assumed to be the primary or sole measure of social ties. This paper examines the conceptual and ethical implications of privileging DNA as a measure of kinship, emphasizing how such practices can obscure complex social realities, undermine self-determination, and reify narrow and essentialist understandings of identity. We call for critical reflection about the agents and motivations of archaeogenomics research, on the role of genetics in defining relationships and urge that multiple knowledge systems be considered in studies of kinship, both past and present.

This introduction to the Creole Gardens as Decolonial Practice: Regrowth, Recycling, Resistance and Repair issue of Public Humanities draws on fieldwork undertaken in the gardens of the Seychelles and Guadeloupe in 2024 and 2025, as well as on Edouard Glissant’s definition of the “jardin creole” as resistance to unitary and hegemonic attitudes toward identity, culture, and belonging. Such gardens have been recognized as a long-standing feature of Creole societies past and present. As a legacy and antithesis of the plantation economy, they continue to be mobilized to promote biodiversity against monocropping, human subsistence over profit, and sustainable small-scale agricultural practices. We present the creole garden around four key words—“regrowth,” “recycling,” “resistance,” and “repair”—that have emerged through our fieldwork observations, testimonies from horticultural activists, scholarship and theory on plots and gardens of the Creole world, as well as the recent proliferation of cultural and artistic interventions on gardens that contributors to this issue chronicle and analyze. Our work demonstrates that botany, pharmacy, foodways, and horticulture can be tools of resistance that self-empower marginalized peoples of African, European, and Asian heritage by generating, from displacements and uprooting, new cultures and new solidarities. Indeed, in the garden, the body interacts with the collective and with the land to provide dignity, pleasure, and healing; and the garden itself is as an “archive-repertoire” of the connected Atlantic and Indian Oceans, which activates hidden pasts and futures that our issue explores.

It is well known that over Heyting arithmetic with finite types, the effective principle of the formal Church thesis, stating that all number-theoretic functional relations are computable, is inconsistent with Brouwer’s intuitionistic principles on the continuum, in particular, the fan theorem. Here, we build two arithmetic quasi-toposes, validating on the one hand Brouwer’s continuity principles, including the Fan theorem, and on the other hand, a restricted form of Church’s Thesis, called the Type-theoretic Church Thesis and written $\textsf{TCT}$, expressing that all morphisms of the considered quasi-topos are computable. One quasi-topos is constructed by formalizing the category of assemblies $\mathbf{Asm}$ within Hyland’s effective topos using intuitionistic Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory $\mathbf{IZF}$ extended with Brouwer’s continuity principles as our meta-theory. The other quasi-topos is obtained as an elementary quotient completion in the same intuitionistic meta-theory. While in previous work by the first author with F. Pasquali and G. Rosolini, it has been shown that these two quasi-toposes are equivalent when working within the classical $\mathbf{ZFC}$ set theory; here, we show that this is no longer the case when working within $\mathbf{IZF}$. We also observe that the aforementioned inconsistency is resolved in such quasi-toposes by the non-validity of the axiom of unique choice on the natural numbers and that no non-trivial topos can validate the effective principle $\textsf{TCT}$ together with Brouwer’s continuity principles altogether.

ARC is designed to produce ${400}\,\textrm {MW}$ of net electricity and prove the commercial feasibility of a fusion power plant. In order to achieve this goal ARC has to operate with optimal core performance in a stationary scenario that minimises wear on the first wall and divertor. This requires avoiding or mitigating magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) instabilities which have the potential to not only degrade the plasma core but also lead to deleterious transient heat loads on plasma facing components. Therefore, this work aims at characterising the MHD stability of the high performance ARC scenario and inform the design of error field correction coils. Firstly, simulations of vertical displacement events show that an in-vessel coil is not needed and instead the poloidal shaping coils can be used to control vertical stability. These simulations also inform the demands on the corresponding coil power supplies. Stability analysis of the ideal kink mode with or without a conducting wall and kinetic effects suggests that the ARC baseline scenario operates deeply in the stable region. Using RDCON, tearing modes at the $m/n=2/1$ and $3/2$ surfaces (with poloidal mode number $m$, and toroidal mode number $n$) are shown to be linearly stable, and including thermal transport effects in the rational surfaces lead to further stabilisation. However, other transient plasma instabilities can seed neoclassical tearing modes (NTMs). The marginally stable width of NTMs in ARC strongly depends on the internal inductance and can fall below ${0.1}{\,\,\%}$ of the normalised poloidal flux. Furthermore, an empirical cross-machine model of the $n=1$ error field leading to a disruption predicts a critical error field larger than SPARC but smaller than ITER. Three-dimensional coils can be designed with the Generalised Purturbed Equilbium Code based on a simple model that calculates the maximum correctable error field that is limited by the neoclassical toroidal viscosity torque. Broad scans of different coil geometries identify a set of 2 rows of off-midplane coils to be a suitable solution. It is also determined that such a set of three-dimensional coils is capable of correcting $n=2$ error fields to some degree and creating strong enough $n=2$ or $n=3$ edge resonant perturbation fields for the suppression of edge-localised modes at reasonable coil currents. The final design of the first ARC will be further informed by results from SPARC.

In this commentary, I approach ‘kinship trouble’ as a cultural and medical anthropologist with two decades of ethnographic and collaborative engagement with genetics, and as someone deeply committed to and interested in interdisciplinary collaboration. From this perspective, the collection’s significance is its focus on the emergent encounter between two very different fields—new kinship studies and palaeogenetics—both of which intersect with archaeology. Combining the intellectual explosion of new kinship studies with the data explosion of palaeogenetics is an enticing premise. What can happen, kinship trouble asks us, if the creativity that characterizes the new kinship studies could be married with the rich new layers of genomic information that have sedimented archaeological scholarship? And what could be lost if this opportunity is squandered? The contributions to this collection read archaeological and palaeogenetic evidence against the grain to reveal active kin-making practices that often disrupt presentist, ethnocentric and heterosexist assumptions. These vibrant interpretations of relatedness provide many ‘carrots’ to entice anthropologists, archaeologists and palaeogeneticists to become ‘oddkin’ and to ‘lean in’ to kinship trouble.

What is kinship trouble? When and where did it emerge? Why does it matter and how can we overcome it? These questions guide our discussion of kinship trouble, a term meant to capture the difficulties in reconstructing ancient kin relations, but also an attempt to resolve them through interdisciplinary collaboration and ethically adequate approaches. Motivated by the importance of crossing disciplinary boundaries and the urgency of working together to understand human diversity in the past and present, we reconsider kinship not only as a biological or genetic but also as a social phenomenon for the study of societies through archaeogenetic, archaeological, and socio-cultural anthropological approaches. As to the question of how kinship trouble could be overcome, we propose making more ‘oddkin’ (sensu Haraway) to bring disciplines into the conversation and foster unexpected collaborations around three themes: ethical collaboration, the integration of biological and social approaches, and kinship studies as acts of care and (non)mutuality of being.

This study investigates trends in the conceptualization, methods and analysis of kinship throughout the corpus of bioarchaeological research from the pre-Hispanic Andes in recent years (since 2000). Building on a summary of key shifts in archaeogenetics and definitions of foundational concepts like ayllu social organization and relationship kinship in the Indigenous Americas, the study carries out bibliometric analysis of four methods-based search strings. The resulting corpus (N=25 publications) is analysed for word frequency and correlation to understand how kinship analysis has changed through time, across cultures and contexts and according to methods used within bioarchaeology. Results show that explicit testing of kinship-related hypotheses has remained somewhat steady across aDNA, biodistance, cranial vault modification (CVM) and isotopic studies—especially for foundational bioarchaeology journals—and may be experiencing a resurgence. However, household and community levels of kinship were often excluded from study conceptualization and research questions. Results suggest isotopic analysis can augment archaeogenetic and morphometric approaches to understanding how common geography and substance consumption constitute kin groups. Collaborative, multi-correlate databases of archaeological individuals are proposed to advance kinship studies in Andean bioarchaeology.