One way of characterizing what makes someone a good reasoner is to appeal to intellectual virtues, such as curiosity, fair-mindedness, or epistemic humility. My aim in this paper is to show that explaining how the virtue of humility should manifest itself in complex reasoning is more difficult than one might think. A very natural view of what intellectually humble deliberation looks like is problematic, because it leads to an infinite regress. I will explore whether and in which way this regress is vicious, and how our answers to these questions can lead us to a better account of how humility can inform stopping rules for good reasoning.

This research note examines how people labeled as hikikomori—prolonged social withdrawal—navigate isolation, moral judgment, and attempts at rehabilitation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a rural rehabilitation center, it situates their experiences within broader social transformations in post-industrial Japan. Departing from accounts that frame hikikomori primarily through diagnosis or individual pathology, this note foregrounds lived experience and the moral dimensions of rehabilitation. It argues that hikikomori are not anomalies at society’s edges, but rather windows into how contemporary Japan organizes value, recognition, and social connection, and that further ethnographic work is needed to illuminate these dynamics.

Network meta-analysis (NMA) is a vital methodology for synthesizing evidence across multiple treatments and informing medical decision-making. However, effective visualization and interpretation of results from large networks of interventions remain challenging, particularly for non-specialists. NMAstudio 2.0 is an innovative, interactive web application designed to address these difficulties by streamlining NMA workflows and enhancing result visualization. Developed using Python and R, NMAstudio 2.0 seamlessly integrates with established NMA frameworks. Our exemplar application of NMAstudio 2.0 using a Cochrane Review comparing several treatments for chronic plaque psoriasis demonstrates its capacity to facilitate all crucial steps of an NMA. The application features an intuitive interface for uploading data, automating analyses, generating interactive visualizations such as network diagrams, forest plots, ranking plots, and producing unique outputs like boxplots for transitivity checks and bidimensional forest plots. Most outputs are dynamically linked with the network diagram, enabling users to interactively explore evidence networks, apply advanced filtering, and highlight specific features by selecting nodes or edges within the diagram. While NMAstudio 2.0 aims to simplify NMAs, it also incorporates steps during the data upload process to mitigate the risk of producing poorly reported NMAs. NMAstudio 2.0 represents a significant step forward in improving the usability and accessibility of NMA, offering researchers a robust, versatile platform for evidence synthesis. Its integration of advanced features with an emphasis on user experience positions it as a valuable resource for enhancing decision-making and promoting evidence-based practice across diverse contexts.

This squib brings attention to a longstanding puzzle regarding the mechanism driving the strong polarity effect on future temporal reference in French. Our study presents new findings from two corpora of Parisian French, where negative contexts with n-words significantly favour the usage of synthetic future compared to contexts with the negative marker pas, in contrast to Laurentian French, where synthetic future is predominantly used in all negative contexts. We suggest that these differences pattern with another variation phenomenon, negative concord, and that the solution to the puzzles lies in the syntactic and semantic properties of negative expressions.

Developmental programming has emerged as one of the major biological principles and biomedical issues of this century because of its potential for long-term, even transgenerational, effects on the health and productivity of offspring. Livestock models have been widely used to establish the mechanisms of developmental programming in fetuses and offspring, and accordingly present data with dual benefits; both serving animal agricultural purposes and providing insights for biomedical applications. Livestock models have furthered our understanding of how developmental processes can influence postnatal health and productivity in the short- and long-term. In addition, because livestock are key to agricultural sustainability and food security, studies in livestock contribute to human livelihood. In this review, we will focus on the influence of maternal nutrition in livestock models on developmental outcomes. Maternal nutritional models include global nutrient intake (over- and under-nutrition) and supplementation of specific macro and micronutrients. Specifically, we will review the effects of maternal nutrition on: placental function, key metabolic tissues of the fetus/offspring (visceral tissues, skeletal muscle, and immune system), genetics, epigenetics, and transgenerational programming, parturition, and the underlying mechanism of developmental programming. Lastly, we will focus on gaps in knowledge and future research directions.

We introduce a novel method for proving the ergodicity of skew products of interval exchange transformations (IETs) with piecewise smooth cocycles having singularities at the ends of exchanged intervals. This approach is inspired by Borel–Cantelli-type arguments given by Fayad and Lemańczyk [On the ergodicity of cylindrical transformations given by the logarithm. Mosc. Math. J. 6 (2006), 657–672]. The key innovation of our method lies in its applicability to singularities beyond the logarithmic type, whereas previous techniques were restricted to logarithmic singularities. Our approach is particularly effective for proving the ergodicity of skew products for symmetric IETs and anti-symmetric cocycles. Moreover, its most significant advantage is the ability to study the equidistribution of error terms in the spectral decomposition of Birkhoff integrals for locally Hamiltonian flows on compact surfaces, applicable not only when all saddles are perfect (harmonic) but also in the case of some non-perfect saddles.

Developing cereal seeds contain photosynthetically active cells in the form of a thin green layer, the chlorenchyma, which surrounds the non-photosynthetic endosperm. The current understanding is that the chlorenchyma primarily supports endosperm respiration by supplying oxygen. However, despite the importance of such a function, photosynthetic electron transport is still poorly understood and would benefit from detailed study. This represents a technical challenge as bulky developing seeds are unsuitable for the classical spectroscopic methods routinely used for leaf material. In this study, we established a method that enables simultaneous measurement of photosystem I and photosystem II activities in dissected barley chlorenchymas with pulse amplitude modulation spectroscopy and also adapted it to measure electron transport with the electrochromic band shift. Comparative analyses of raw spectral signals and derived parameters measured on chlorenchymas and leaves demonstrate that this approach provides a reliable and detailed assessment of chlorenchyma photosynthesis. Establishing this method provides a new framework for investigating the physiological relevance of electron transport and carbon assimilation in non-foliar tissues such as chlorenchymas.

The privatisation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVS) used for situational awareness purposes to ensure their own situational awareness based on parameters gives direction to progress and provides a basic framework for future studies. In this context, a unique communication system architecture was proposed for obtaining state-of-the-art mini-UAV data and evaluations were carried out on the basis of data flow and parameters. Within the scope of the evaluation this study postulates a trailblazing approach as a means of optimising flight data pattern recognition by integrating Cross Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM) and long short-term memory (LSTM)-based predictive depiction. By leveraging the structured framework of CRISP-DM and the sequential learning capabilities of LSTM, this research aims to enhance the accuracy of mini unmanned aerial vehicle systems (UAVS) flight scenario predictive reliability. This framework is applied to navigation phase, where the overall flight trajectory can be seen, and accurate forecasting and pattern recognition are critical for optimising operational efficiency. The findings have displayed the ability to perform high-accuracy predictions of flight parameters within a structured process. The experimental results demonstrate that key flight parameters can be predicted with near–comma-level numerical accuracy, indicating a high level of estimation precision. Through facilitating immediate data transfer and organised navigation phase evaluation, this research provides a methodical strategy for managing flight data, simultaneously contributing notably to UAV decision support systems and self-qualification engineering.

This article explores the history of a hospital that was built and staffed by the European Economic Community (EEC) in Mogadishu, Somalia, during the 1960s. This case study offers a new perspective on several historiographical themes, such as the Cold War aid competition, the practices of European development assistance and the transition from colonial to postcolonial rule. First, the article illustrates how the Somali government kept the upper hand over the EEC on issues pertaining to the hospital through exploiting Cold War rivalries to secure more funding. Second, it shows how certain Italians remained influential even after Somalia’s independence. Third, it reveals how former colonial officials later acted as agents of decolonisation, and how a postcolonial government exploited the colonial pasts of development experts for its own benefit. Finally, nationalist rivalries among the doctors demonstrate that, in the 1960s, EEC development projects were as uncertain as the European integration process itself.

As human displacement rises, the humanitarian funding environment fluxes, and undernutrition continues to affect refugees and internally displaced communities; there is a need for evidence to better understand pathways to healthy, self-reliant livelihoods. In non-displaced contexts, livestock-keeping has been shown to increase resilience to malnutrition during crises and improve food security but much less evidence is available in displacement camp contexts. This review investigates what empirical evidence exists on the role of livestock ownership in refugee/IDP nutrition. A systematic search of MEDLINE, CAB Abstracts, Web of Science, African Journal Online, Dissertations and Theses Global and grey literature was undertaken according to PRISMA-ScR and JBI guidelines. From 903 records found, 21 studies were included for review, of which 12 reported positive effects of livestock keeping on nutritional outcomes in the refugee/IDP camp setting, 3 reported mixed effects and 6 determined no effect. No study found a solely negative effect. The human nutritional outcomes studied included anaemia, stunting, wasting, dietary diversity and food security proxies. One study explored the general impact of livestock ownership whilst the remainder explored the association between animal source food consumption and nutritional outcomes. The current relative scarcity of data in the refugee/IDP context, along with the lack of standardised study design and outcome measures, limits the ability to undertake formal meta-analysis and give evidence-based recommendations. We call for more research with adherence to existing standardised reporting guidelines such that appropriate analysis can be undertaken in such a highly complex system to enhance evidence for these vulnerable communities.

Many pressing riverine problems in Asia today can be traced back to the development of a set of new conceptualizations, technologies, and institutions of river management between roughly 1800 and 1945, a period moulded by the expansion of modern imperial powers on a global scale. This special feature investigates the multifaceted entanglements between rivers and imperialism in modern Asia by bringing together cases in Japan, India, China, and Vietnam. Building on the understanding of the dual potential of rivers to support and resist imperial ambitions, the articles in this special feature reconstruct the complicated human-river interactions across Asia that confounded anthropocentric expectations and show how imperial ethos, technologies, and institutions of river management were carried out, resisted, or transformed in varied local contexts by human and non-human actors alike. Understanding the unruly history of rivers in imperial Asia can help us to better understand the precarious future of rivers and their management on the warming continent.

New Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dates from archived samples from the site of Ch’uxuqullu, excavated 30 years ago on the Island of the Sun, Bolivia, provide a more precise and older chronology for human occupation. The first occupation began in the middle of the fourth millennium BC, considerably earlier than previously known. The site area was continually in use from at least 3500 BC up to around 160 BC. This new data, in conjunction with work in the last two decades, provides new insights into the archaeology of the lake region. The first use of pottery on the island is now refined with greater precision than previously proposed. We also know that watercraft technology began a millennium earlier than originally suggested. We report on these new dates and briefly discuss their implications for archaeological models of exchange and sedentism in the circum-Titicaca Basin.

Arborea elegans sp. nov., a new species of the clade Arboreomorpha, is described and figured based on three specimens preserved in mudstone from the Ediacaran Mistaken Point Formation at Halfway Cove, near the town of Logy Bay-Middle Cove-Outer Cove, Newfoundland, Canada. Arborea elegans is readily attributed to the clade Arboreomorpha because of its parallel primary branches diverging orthogonally from the central stalk, and merging at their apices to form a distinct marginal rim. It is assigned to the genus Arborea because of its distally tapered petalodium, rectangular first-order branches arising orthogonally from a prominent stalk, and first-order axes exposed over the entire length of the branches. It is distinguishable from other species of the genus by its slender petalodium, reduced stem, relatively broad first-order branches, and proportionally wide basal disc.