Living chondrichthyans comprise only a fraction of their historical diversity represented in the fossil record, but together they provide insights into the evolution of this ancient clade. Using a theoretical morphology approach, we sought the evolutionary drivers of mandible morphology, a key factor in the feeding ecology of the clade, across their more than 400 million year evolutionary history. Using an empirical sample of 122 extant and 95 extinct species across 35 orders, we created a theoretical morphospace that encompasses, and expands beyond, sampled variation. We sampled morphologies from this theoretical morphospace and subjected them to biomechanical analysis of speed and strength, deriving landscapes of functional performance and optimality into which we projected a phylomorphospace. We examined how the optimality landscape has been navigated by chondrichthyan evolution and how it has been occupied by taxa characterized according to habitat and trophic level. The empirical chondrichthyan morphospace occupation was dispersed from the trade-off optimality peaks. Early chondrichthyans occupy morphospace characterized by narrow, curved jaws before expanding to more robust morphologies through time. This move toward robust morphologies does not follow the most optimal trade-off morphologies, instead avoiding areas that are least optimal. Deep-water species occupy the largest morphospace area, while higher trophic level species stay closer to the trade-off optimality peaks. Our study shows that chondrichthyans, rather than being living fossils, have explored increasingly specialized jaw morphologies, likely related to shifts in ecology such as increased numbers of durophagous taxa, as opposed to a more generalist optimization of component biomechanical constraints.

Maintaining dialysis care in disaster-affected regions is challenging, especially where health care access is already limited. This case from coastal Fukushima highlights a woman in her 30s with diabetic nephropathy who required dialysis 3 times a week at a hospital 80 kilometers away due to local capacity shortages. Her visual impairment necessitated her father’s help for transportation. To ease this burden and support her return to work, she underwent a successful living donor kidney transplant, with her father as the donor. Post-transplant, her hospital visits were reduced to monthly follow-ups, significantly improving both her and her caregiver’s quality of life. This case illustrates the potential of kidney transplantation to address dialysis access issues in disaster-affected areas by reducing logistical and caregiving challenges. While not suitable for every patient, transplantation should be considered as part of health care recovery strategies in regions with limited dialysis availability.

Archaeologists have long identified quarries as a ubiquitous part of the landscape in which precolonial Maya populations built their world. Yet, it is only recently that scholars have begun to move away from viewing these quarries simply as places where stones were extracted to recognizing them as important nodes in the social, political, and cultural fabric of the Maya Lowlands. The four articles in this Special Section discuss some of the most recent insights into the lives of those who intimately worked with limestone, inhabited the cratered landscapes created by its extraction, and crafted their worlds through the relationships forged and maintained in the practices of quarrying, processing, and utilizing this material. In this introductory paper, we set the scene by reviewing previous research and outlining the main approaches involved in the documentation, analysis, and interpretation of Maya limestone quarries and production loci. We continue with a discussion of the relevance of quarry investigations for the general study of precolonial Maya societies. We conclude with a brief overview of current methodological trends, followed by a look ahead to the ways in which researchers could take such investigations forward and integrate them into future research agendas.

This article examines a case of phonological opacity in Uyghur resulting from an interaction between backness harmony and a vowel reduction process that converts harmonic vowels into transparent vowels. A large-scale corpus study shows that although opaque harmony with the underlying form of a reduced vowel is the dominant pattern, cases of surface-apparent harmony also occur. The rate of surface-apparent harmony varies across roots and is correlated with a number of factors, including root frequency. These data pose problems for standard accounts of opacity, which do not predict such variation. I propose an analysis where variation emerges from conflict between a paradigm uniformity constraint mandating that the harmonising behaviour of a root remains consistent, and surface phonotactic constraints. This is implemented in a parallel model by scaling constraint violations according to certainty in a root’s harmonic class. This aligns with past work suggesting some opacity is driven by paradigm uniformity.

Older adults aged 75 and older (75+) represent the fastest-growing demographic in the USA yet remain underrepresented in prevention-focused clinical research. This scoping review evaluated recruitment strategies used in healthy aging clinical trials targeting this population, with particular attention to technology-enabled and belonging-focused approaches.

A PubMed search initially identified only four US-based studies focused on adults aged 75+. To broaden the scope and enrich the analysis, additional studies involving adults aged 65+ and those with pre-existing conditions were included, yielding a total of 23 relevant studies. Recruitment strategies were analyzed using the Design for Belonging framework to assess how inclusion and engagement were fostered.

Findings revealed that adults aged 75+ preferred traditional methods – targeted mailings, phone calls, and in-person outreach – due to barriers related to digital access and usability. In contrast, adults aged 65+ showed greater receptivity to digital tools such as electronic health records, social media, and web-based enrollment. Community engagement and culturally tailored materials are effective across all age groups. However, few studies addressed later-stage engagement strategies like advocacy and trust repair.

These results underscore the importance of tailoring recruitment strategies to aging subgroups, combining personalized outreach with inclusive design to enhance equity and retention in clinical research.

In order to solve the problem of poor quality of paths generated by the traditional Q-RRT* algorithm and blind random search, an improved APF-QRRT* algorithm is proposed in this paper. The improved APF-QRRT* algorithm obtains a set of discrete critical path points connecting the start point and the end point by the Q-RRT* algorithm, and then fine-tunes the paths by using the local optimization capability of the APF to improve the smoothness and safety of the paths. The traditional Q-RRT* algorithm is improved, and the fast alternating expansion of two random trees is realized by introducing a bidirectional search strategy of two random trees and adopting node greedy expansion, where the nearest node of the tree is used as the reference for the expansion of this tree during the iterative process of path node generation. The experimental results show that the improved APF-QRRT* algorithm reduces the path planning time by 20.3%, the path length by 1.8%, the number of path nodes by 33.3%, and the number of sampling points by 23.6% compared with the standard APF-QRRT* algorithm in a complex environment. In this paper, a system test platform is constructed and utilized to carry out multi-AGV path planning experiments in real environments, and the experimental results show that the proposed hybrid path planning algorithm has good path planning effects.

The American War for Independence scrambled the concept of political allegiance and belonging. In James H. Kettner’s apt phrase, “subjects became citizens.” Where British law denied the possibility that a subject could renounce the obedience owed to their sovereign, Americans asserted through force of arms “the right to choose their allegiance.”1 Influenced by a contractual notion of political compact and by the mayhem of a violent civil war, people shuffled and sometimes reshuffled into camps of revolutionaries, loyalists, and neutrals.2

Meta-analytic confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) is a type of meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) that is useful for evaluating the factor structure of measurement scales based on data from multiple studies. Modeling the factor structure is just one example of the many potentially interesting research questions. Analyzing covariance matrices allows for the evaluation of measurement properties across studies, such as whether indicators are functioning the same across studies. For example, are some indicators more indicative of the common factor in certain types of studies than in others? The additional analysis of means of the observed variables opens up many other research questions to consider such as: “Are there mean differences in mental health between clinical and non-clinical samples?” To answer such questions, it is necessary to analyze both the covariance and the mean structure of the indicators. In this paper, we present, illustrate, and evaluate a method to incorporate the means of variables in the MASEM analyses of such datasets. We focus on meta-analytic CFA, with the aim of testing differences in latent means across studies. We provide illustrations of the comparison of latent means across groups of studies using two empirical datasets, for which data and analysis scripts are provided online. The performance of the new model was tested in a small-scale simulation study. The results showed adequate performance under the tested conditions. Finally, we discuss how the proposed method relates to other analysis options such as multigroup or multilevel structural equation modeling.

Recent studies have drawn attention to the importance of pre-electoral coalitions in multiparty presidential democracies. Despite this, much scholarship has neglected the period during which pre-electoral coalitions turn into governing coalitions. Through a systematic cross-case analysis of Latin American cases, this paper examines why some coalition governments largely resemble the pre-electoral pacts that preceded them while others do not. The results lend credence to the legislative status granted by pre-election coalition members to the government, the low polarization among pre-electoral coalition members and the high ideological polarization in the legislature to explain the resemblance between pre- and post-electoral coalitions. Intriguingly, case-based analysis suggests that the temporal distance to government inauguration plays, at best, a marginal role in this process. These findings contribute to the still-growing literature on pre-electoral coalitions in presidential democracies by shedding light on the complex causation behind the pathway from pre-electoral bargaining to fully developed coalition governments.

In this paper, we consider a reaction-diffusion equation that models the time-almost periodic response to climate change within a straight, infinite cylindrical domain. The shifting edge of the habitat is characterised by a time-almost periodic function, reflecting the varying pace of environmental changes. Note that the principal spectral theory is an important role to study the dynamics of reaction-diffusion equations in time heterogeneous environment. Initially, for time-almost periodic parabolic equations in finite cylindrical domains, we develop the principal spectral theory of such equations with mixed Dirichlet–Neumann boundary conditions. Subsequently, we demonstrate that the approximate principal Lyapunov exponent serves as a definitive threshold for species persistence versus extinction. Then, the existence, exponential decay and stability of the forced wave solutions $U(t,x_{1},y)=V\left (t,x_{1}-\int ^{t}_{0}c(s)ds,y\right )$ are established. Additionally, we analyse how fluctuations in the shifting speed affect the approximate top Lyapunov exponent.

Several epigrams of Callimachus showcase a larger content in a smaller format: one of these is Callim. Epigr. 2 Pf. = 34 G–P.

Depression is a highly common condition (World Health Organisation, 2022). Although many people demonstrate recovery there are marked levels of relapse. Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) is effective in preventing relapse. To date, the majority of studies do not primarily focus on the cost-effectiveness of MBCT within health care utilisation and workplace absenteeism. This study aims to explore the effectiveness of MBCT for prevention of depression relapse in patients attending a UK NHS primary care service. An observational (pre–post and follow-up) study of patients (n=23) who experienced at least three depressive episodes were provided with MBCT. Cost-effectiveness was assessed using self-report measures of service utilisation and employment absence. These were assessed before MBCT, following, and 6 months post. Secondary outcomes assessing clinical effectiveness included measures of depression (PHQ-9), anxiety (GAD-7), and functional impairment (WSAS). There was a significant reduction in absenteeism at work and in health care usage and expenditure at the end of treatment. These improvements were continued during the follow-up period. Secondary outcomes indicated clinical improvements on depression, anxiety and functioning were maintained to follow-up.

Key learning aims

1. (1) MBCT is a potentially cost-effective intervention in reducing absenteeism and health care usage for clients with recurrent depression.

2. (2) In line with previous observations, MBCT is a clinically effective intervention for relapse prevention in recurrent depression as recommended by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).

3. (3) Clinicians can consider the use of MBCT for clients with mild depression and recurrent depression within their services as recommended by NICE.

Saissetia oleae (Oliver) (Hemiptera: Coccidae) is a major pest of olive trees that requires effective biological control methods. This study evaluated the predatory mite Amblyseius swirskii Athias-Henriot (Acari: Phytoseiidae) for its predation efficiency against S. oleae eggs and nymphs under laboratory (25 ± 1 °C, 60 ± 10% RH) and screenhouse (25 ± 4 °C) conditions. Two laboratory trials were conducted over 6 days: Trial 1 assessed predation on S. oleae eggs, and Trial 2 on nymphs. Additionally, screenhouse trials tested four predator–prey ratios (T1: 1:2, T2: 1:4, T3: 1:8, T4: 1:10, adult A. swirskii to S. oleae eggs), with weekly observations over 10 weeks. Under laboratory conditions, A. swirskii caused significantly higher mortality in eggs (17.9 eggs consumed) than in nymphs (10.2 nymphs killed) by day 6, while mortality in control groups remained low (1.5 eggs, 2.0 nymphs). In screenhouse trials, A. swirskii significantly reduced S. oleae populations at all predator–prey ratios, with the 1:2 ratio achieving the greatest suppression, reducing densities to 0 eggs and 6 nymphs per plant by week 10, compared to 30 eggs and 110 nymphs in untreated controls. Predator populations increased in a density-dependent manner (T1 > T2 > T3 > T4). Treated plants maintained a high visual quality score (≥9.5 at week 10), whereas untreated plants showed a severe decline (0.9 at week 10). These results demonstrate that A. swirskii effectively suppresses S. oleae and holds promise as a sustainable biological control agent in integrated pest management for olives.