In high-income countries, fertility is increasingly postponed into ages when fecundity declines, elevating the risk of unmet reproductive goals. In this context, how individuals perceive their own and their partner’s reproductive potential may carry important implications for well-being and relationship stability, long before clinical infertility is diagnosed. Drawing on 13 waves of longitudinal data from the German Family Panel (pairfam), this study uses individual fixed-effects models to examine how within-person changes in perceived fecundity – both one’s own and one’s partner’s – are related to life satisfaction, relationship satisfaction, and union dissolution. By capturing both individual and partner assessments, this approach emphasizes the couple as the key unit of reproductive experience. Declines in both own and partner’s perceived fecundity are associated with lower life and relationship satisfaction. However, perceptions of a partner’s fecundity exert a stronger influence on relationship outcomes than self-perceptions. In particular, decreases in partner-perceived fecundity increase the risk of separation, a pattern not observed for changes in one’s own fecundity. These associations do not vary significantly by gender but are moderated by parental status and age, with effects being weaker among parents and older individuals. By integrating both self- and partner assessments of fecundity, this study advances a dyadic, life course perspective on fertility. It shows that subjective reproductive potential functions as a relational stressor with meaningful consequences for emotional well-being and relationship trajectories.

Launched in 1994, the European Nutrition Leadership Platform (ENLP) has evolved over three decades into a unique and internationally recognised initiative for the development of leadership skills in the field of nutrition and public health. Through its two training programmes, the ENLP Essentials programme, designed primarily for early-career professionals and emerging leaders in nutrition, food science, and health, and the ENLP Advanced programme, tailored to mid-career and senior professionals seeking to enhance their leadership capacity, equips participants with scientific communication and interpersonal skills while fostering resilience, authenticity, and cross-sector collaboration. With more than 1000 graduates, many of whom now hold leading positions in academia, industry, government, and non-governmental organisations, the programme has proven its impact on professional development and the nutrition landscape. At IUNS-ICN 2025 in Paris, the ENLP celebrated its 30th anniversary and emphasised that leadership in the nutrition sector is best defined by authenticity, caring, resilience, and shared values. In the coming decades, the programme will continue to focus on inclusivity, adaptability, and vision, demonstrating that investing in people is the most powerful lever for improving nutrition and public health.

All scientific fields exhibit contested boundaries between valid and invalid knowledge. This paper examines how demarcation processes change as fields expand. Disciplinary fields committed to rapid growth encounter conditions under which comparably legitimate elites with incompatible perspectives have conflicting views of professional authority; one solution to this problem is to find a way to recognize both views as legitimate. I consider an exemplary case of this process: the work of the 1950–4 APA Committee on Test Standards on the Technical Recommendations for Psychological Tests and Diagnostic Techniques to develop the notion of construct validation. Negotiations between two psychologists (psychometrician and committee chair Lee Cronbach and social psychologist and former APA president Gordon Allport) led to a compromise between two competing uses of psychological tests: as literary objects accreting reputation and influence for psychological theories, and as technical objects susceptible to analysis using comparative statistical methods. The resulting notion of construct validation minimizes conflicts between theories and methods in part by limiting the ethical scope of both forms of knowledge.

Adoption of organic no-till soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.] production practices within grain cropping systems in the U.S. Northeast remains limited due to variability in performance and crop rotation challenges. During soybean production, weed control is provided by rolled-crimped cereal rye (Secale cereale L.) mulch, which can be insufficient due to late sowing within grain cropping systems. In two experiments, we evaluated rye cultural management strategies for rye biomass, weed suppression, and soybean yield. We tested (1) four rye seeding rates (31 to 188 kg ha−1) and two sowing arrangements (grid vs. row sowing) and (2) fall-applied poultry litter (0, 3.36, 6.63 Mg ha−1) with two soybean planting dates (planting green or standard planting). Increasing cereal rye seeding rate did not lead to increased rye biomass but did increase weed suppression. Soybean yield was unaffected by rye seeding rates. Sowing arrangement did not affect any response. Fall poultry litter significantly increased rye biomass, but weed suppression was unaffected. In 1 yr, planting green reduced soybean establishment and yield. Of the cultural practices evaluated, increasing seeding rate was most effective at reducing weed biomass, while poultry litter effectively increased rye biomass but not weed suppression. These results highlight the limitations of organic no-till soybean within grain crop rotations in the U.S. Northeast when using cereal rye as a stand-alone weed-suppression method. Increasing cereal rye seeding rates or applying fall fertility could be effective cultural practices when integrated with other weed control tactics to supplement weed suppression by rye surface mulch.

This article explores the evolution of the “creational body” motif in Iranian mythology, focusing on its transformation within Zoroastrian theological contexts. Drawing on Indo-European and Indo-Iranian cosmogonic narratives, the article examines two primary representations: Gayōmard, the human prototype, and āsrō-kirb, an enigmatic body described as the “form of fire”. While the original Indo-Iranian myths often portray the creation of the cosmos through the sacrificial dismemberment of a primordial being, Zoroastrian texts adapt this narrative to align with their dualistic theology. The dismemberment of Gayōmard is attributed to Ahriman and his demonic forces, dissociating Ohrmazd and the Beneficent Immortals from acts of violence. By contrast, āsrō-kirb’s narrative presents an abstract, faceless body dismembered by Ohrmazd, whose act is sanitized of its grotesque sacrificial elements. Through textual analysis of Pahlavi sources, this article investigates the theological motivations behind these alterations, highlighting how Zoroastrian priests sought to reconcile inherited cosmogonic myths with their ethical and doctrinal imperatives. The findings reveal a dual adjustment: the reinterpretation of Gayōmard’s narrative to condemn Ahriman, and the abstraction of āsrō-kirb to obscure its violent origins, while maintaining its creational function. These adaptations underscore the dynamic interplay between inherited mythology and evolving theological frameworks in the Zoroastrian tradition.

This article explores the Berkshire Downs as a frontier zone between Wessex and Mercia in the Early Middle Ages, arguing that royal women played a central role in negotiating political control and the ideological perception of the landscape. After establishing the Berkshire Downs as a frontier zone in the seventh and eighth centuries, this article will argue that the frontier was mediated in the second half of the ninth century by royal women such as Æthelswith of Mercia (c. 838–888), who was able to serve as an interlocutor between both kingdoms. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, the continued association of royal women with estates such as Wantage and Cholsey reflects the transformation of the Downs from a contested frontier into a royal heartland within a unified English kingdom, as female patronage and tenure helped bind the landscape to the royal dynasty.

The prospect of geoengineering the Earth—the deliberate, large-scale intervention in Earth’s climate system to help mitigate the negative impacts associated with climate change—forces us to confront more than just scientific and technological questions. It challenges us to examine questions about our character. While some scholars have argued that geoengineering the Earth would be an act of arrogance, we develop a new account of ecological humility that is grounded in evidence from environmental psychology and argue that, under some conditions, this virtue is consistent with geoengineering the Earth.

This article examines how the far-right political party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) mobilizes population replacement conspiracy theories, particularly the concept of Umvolkung, as a mode of political propaganda. While the genealogy of Umvolkung harks back to the Weimar Republic, and it is also tied to the racial and demographic engineering of the Nazi era, it has re-emerged in contemporary far-right discourse as a conspiracy theory of population replacement. In this article, I argue that the AfD’s deployment of population replacement conspiracy theories operates as biopolitical technologies seeking to legitimize exclusionary projects such as the “Remigration” program. Ultimately, I contend, population replacement conspiracy theories promote a biopolitical vision of protecting the national racially characterized social body from the existential threat of replacement through tightening border regimes, reconceptualizing concepts of citizenship and naturalization, and entertaining the political death of those racially characterized as non-Germans by means of exclusion-remigration imaginaries.

Upper limb rehabilitation exoskeletons face fundamental challenges achieving coordinated multi-joint assistance within portable configurations. Current cable-driven systems demonstrate effective single-joint support but lack coordinated shoulder-elbow capabilities due to anchor-point sensing constraints that limit workspace during simultaneous movements. To address these limitations, this paper presents a novel coordinated 3-Degree of Freedom (DOF) shoulder-elbow exosuit (3.3 kg) employing motor-proximal sensing architecture. Strategic load cell repositioning from anchor points to actuation unit locations eliminates spatial constraints, while geometric compensation algorithms maintain measurement accuracy, enabling coordinated assistance (shoulder flexion/extension, abduction/adduction, elbow flexion/extension) with preserved 0–$90^\circ$ kinematic workspace. Systematic development integrating product design specifications, multi-criteria decision-making, and biomechanical component dimensioning provided traceable design synthesis. Preliminary proof-of-concept tests with healthy participants (n = 5) provide an initial assessment of the system performance, demonstrating adequate sensing accuracy within the primary Activities of Daily Living (ADL) workspace, measurable muscle activation reduction, and preserved natural kinematics with minimal range-of-motion (ROM) constraint. An extensive experimental validation is out of the scope of this work. Results establish technical feasibility for coordinated cable-driven assistance, identifying requirements for future clinical translation.

The “differentiability gap” presents a primary bottleneck in Earth system deep learning: Since models cannot be trained directly on non-differentiable scientific metrics and must rely on smooth proxies (e.g., MSE), they often fail to capture high-frequency details, yielding “blurry” outputs. We develop a framework that bridges this gap using two different methods to deal with non-differentiable functions: The first is to analytically approximate the original non-differentiable function into a differentiable equivalent one; the second is to learn differentiable surrogates for scientific functionals. We formulate the analytical approximation by relaxing discrete topological operations using temperature-controlled sigmoids and continuous logical operators. Conversely, our neural emulator uses Lipschitz-convolutional neural networks to stabilize gradient learning via: (1) spectral normalization to bound the Lipschitz constant and (2) hard architectural constraints enforcing geometric principles. We demonstrate this framework’s utility by developing the Minkowski image loss, a differentiable equivalent for the integral-geometric measures of surface precipitation fields (area, perimeter, and connected components). Validated on the EUMETNET OPERA dataset, our constrained neural surrogate achieves high emulation accuracy, completely eliminating the geometric violations observed in unconstrained baselines, which generate physically impossible precipitation fields in up to 7.8% of cases. However, applying these differentiable surrogates to a deterministic super-resolution task reveals a fundamental trade-off: While strict Lipschitz regularization ensures optimization stability, it inherently over-smooths gradient signals, restricting the recovery of highly localized convective textures. This work highlights the necessity of coupling such topological constraints with stochastic generative architectures to achieve full morphological realism.