In 2019 we published the extensive review paper ‘Petawatt and exawatt class lasers worldwide’ in High Power Laser Science and Engineering. We are delighted that the review has achieved over 1000 citations on Google Scholar and over 750 on Web of Science. We take this opportunity to reflect on the current state of the field.

This comment examines the rapidly evolving ecosystem of historical research data in the United Kingdom, where cultural heritage collections are increasingly digitised, commercialised and fragmented. Historians face growing challenges in discovering, accessing and reusing data as resources move behind paywalls, and repositories remain scattered, without a national infrastructure to ensure long-term preservation or discoverability. Drawing on examples from major digital initiatives, we analyse the life cycle of historical research data and highlight the complex interplay of commercial, institutional and scholarly interests that shape access. We distinguish three types of data that emerge from historians’ typical engagements with digitised collections: derived, enhanced and aggregated data. We argue that historians must actively participate in the practices relating to the creation, maintenance and reuse of such data. This will involve new forms of citation, favouring open datasets, improving digital skills and building communities around shared resources. The comment concludes with proposals to improve discoverability, sustainability and reuse, urging the discipline to establish common standards and infrastructures to secure an equitable data commons for future research.

This commentary is part of a series of responses to Michele Goodwin’s 2025 LSA presidential address.

Distributed ledgers, including blockchain and other decentralized databases, are designed to store information online where all trusted network members can update the data with transparency. The dynamics of a ledger’s development can be mathematically represented by a directed acyclic graph (DAG). In this paper, we study a DAG model that considers batch arrivals and random delay of attachment. We analyze the asymptotic behavior of this model by letting the arrival rate go to infinity and the inter-arrival time go to zero. We establish that the number of leaves in the DAG, as well as various random variables characterizing the vertices in the DAG, can be approximated by its fluid limit, represented as the solution to a set of delayed partial differential equations. Furthermore, we establish the stable state of this fluid limit and validate our findings through simulations.

This article offers a response of hope to the metacrisis. Because of modernity’s philosophical premises, particularly Enlightenment concepts that separated humanity from nature, modern approaches to environmental challenges embrace a dualistic schism between culture and nature, fragmenting understanding through the compartmentalisation of knowledge. In our current situation, many feel bleak and too helpless to act. In response, we offer the experiences of Māori youth from a specific iwi (tribe) of Aotearoa New Zealand, Rongomaiwāhine. These young people speak of their holistic conceptualisation of humanity, the natural and the spiritual. Their values focus on taking responsibility for care in all realms, often through actions significant in community or land-sky-seascape settings. Their lives and ideas suggest the value of a framework grounded in Indigenous Māori philosophy from which others may learn. Thus, far from seeking new technological solutions we offer rememberings of how the ecology of relationships was and, for the rangatahi, remains. In this, the past, present and future are woven together in an understanding of the natural world of which humanity is merely a small part. The result is a hopeful framing of life in which relations of care protect ecological continuity.

Medical practitioners are among the people with a refugee or asylum seeker background to whom Australia has granted sanctuary. Yet, as the media has reported, refugee doctors (as we refer to them for convenience in this article) are often employed in low-skilled roles, rather than continuing their medical careers in Australia. Provided it is established that they are safe and competent to practise medicine, it would benefit refugee doctors, but also the community if they obtain legal entitlement to do so; Australia is presently facing major shortages of medical practitioners in certain geographical locations and fields of practice. The researchers in this study conducted semi-structured interviews with ten refugee doctors to explore their experiences in navigating the pathways for international medical graduates (‘IMGs’) to attain registration to practise medicine from the Medical Board of Australia. The study identified that refugee doctors encounter substantial challenges in this regard. A comparative analysis of the findings of this study with those of previous research reveals that, while IMGs frequently face barriers, certain obstacles appear to be unique to refugee doctors’ experiences. This article recommends specific reforms to address them.

The northeastern Arabian Peninsula has an extreme arid climate. To establish past variations in precipitation intensity during the late Quaternary, the oxygen isotope ratios (δ18O) of meteoric calcite cements of the late Quaternary aeolianites of the Ghayathi Formation in Abu Dhabi and Dubai have been analysed. The Ghayathi Formation is a carbonate-rich aeolianite, stabilised by calcite cement precipitated from rising groundwater during humid intervals. The calcite cements are well developed inside and outside a thin micrite rim of now hollow grains, formed by leaching of unstable carbonate grains. The δ18O values of cement analysed in thin sections by secondary ion mass spectrometry vary from −9.1‰ (VPDB) in coastal to +12.7‰ (VPDB) inland areas. This exceptionally wide range of the otherwise petrographically uniform aeolianite is due to the contrasts in humidity and evaporation rate between the coastal and inland areas. The δ18O values as low as −9.1‰ suggest intense precipitation in the late Quaternary, possibly due to the northward expansion of the intertropical convergence zone and intensified Indian summer monsoon. The exceptionally high values must be due to intense evaporation at low humidity in low-salinity, playa-type environments during intermittent arid intervals.

The Great Depression in 1929 had a transformative impact on Turkey. The institutions established to minimize the effects of the crisis propagated a set of statist measures. The National Economy and Savings Association and Public Press Directorate utilized photography and painting in the beginning of the 1930s to propagate those measures. In their efforts, these institutions constructed a new conception of landscape with a moral agenda: citizens and artists should travel in Anatolia to learn about the country, love it, and create art accordingly. Key to this conception was the productivity of the land. The most comprehensive cultural program during World War II, Homeland Tours, mimicked this new conception of a landscape. This article analyzes the conception of productive landscapes up until the end of World War II by drawing attention to the overlooked photography collection in the State Archives, which comprises paintings made during the Homeland Tours. One of the many tools that the statist economic institutions devised was agricultural statistics. The comparison between the paintings and actual land use statistics demonstrates that the artists collectively followed the statist economic agenda.

Multilevel modeling accounts for outcome dependence across lower-level units due to unobserved group effects, while spatial modeling accounts for outcome dependence across units in the same level of analysis due to diffusion. Outcome dependence can occur simultaneously due to both spatial diffusion in the lower-level units and spatial diffusion in the unobserved group effects. For example, counties are nested within states and diffusion processes might take place at both levels of analysis. Building on recent research from the spatial econometrics and multilevel modeling literature, we propose a class of spatial hierarchical models with binary outcomes. One method accounts for spatially independent, unobserved group effects and the other method accounts for spatially dependent unobserved group effects. We propose a Bayesian approach to estimate such effects while also accounting for lower-level diffusion in the outcome, and provide software to estimate these models. Our Monte Carlo results demonstrate that failing to correctly account for diffusion and/or the nested structure of data can lead to bias in both parameter estimates and substantive effects. We apply these models to analyze the causes of civil rights protests in the United States in the 1960s.