Tryptophan is an essential amino acid required for protein synthesis, immune regulation and the production of serotonin, melatonin and kynurenine. Its metabolism proceeds through three major pathways – the kynurenine, serotonin and gut microbiota–derived indole pathways – which are influenced by diet, microbiota and inflammation. The Mediterranean diet generally improves tryptophan bioavailability, enhances serotonin synthesis and limits excessive kynurenine activation through anti-inflammatory and microbiota-mediated mechanisms. In contrast, Western diets promote systemic inflammation, increase kynurenine production and reduce serotonin and beneficial indole metabolites. High-protein and ketogenic diets elevate substrate availability but may increase microbial production of indoles such as skatole and alter the balance of tryptophan utilisation, while calorie-restricted diets appear to downregulate pro-inflammatory tryptophan degradation and improve serotonin-related satiety regulation. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that diet is a key regulator of tryptophan metabolism, with implications for mood, sleep, inflammation, cancer progression and cardiometabolic health. Despite these advances, several knowledge gaps remain, including limited standardisation of dietary assessment methods, insufficient databases on the tryptophan content of foods and a lack of controlled comparative trials. Addressing these limitations may enable the development of nutritional strategies that optimise tryptophan metabolism and improve health outcomes.

This essay studies gender in medieval heresy by focusing on an inquisitorial trial in Milan in 1300. The inquisitors investigated a small group of devotees of a deceased penitent woman named Guglielma for venerating her as the Holy Spirit. A noble Humiliati nun, who would become Guglielma’s pope in a coming new age, and a wealthy layman cooperated as the devotees’ leaders. On the surface, the devotees seemed to have reversed gender roles, which late medieval male clergy-female mystic partnerships exemplified. Through an analysis of the surviving records, this article demonstrates that, instead of inverting gender expectations as the inquisitors assumed, the devotees’ vision of a new age – somewhat infused with Joachimism – and the co-leadership of the nun and the layman developed out of transcending the gender binary. As a result, the devotees saw Guglielma not as a co-redeemer with Christ but as the Holy Spirit who comforted them, would convert non-Christians, and had helped unite the devotees, even those of opposing political factions, into a family. Rejecting violent rupture as well as binary gender roles, their future age, which would begin with the nonviolent replacement of the Roman Church, would both preserve Milan’s social hierarchy and eschew binary gender roles.

Transitioning away from fossil fuels is in the best interest for long-term stakeholders of oil firms to mitigate risk from climate policy. Yet firms have an informational and positional advantage over strategies to mitigate climate-related risks, such that there is little incentive to decarbonize. Building on theories of firm behavior and the three faces of political power, we argue that investor pressure will be unlikely to change the climate strategy of fossil fuel firms. To measure climate strategy, we develop a novel technique using natural language processing tools to parse annual filings of all publicly-listed oil firms in the US. Using a difference-in-differences design exploiting an exogenous shock to shareholder power from a Securities and Exchange Commission regulatory amendment, we find no effects of shareholder pressure on deep reforms to climate strategies and weak effects on incremental pro-climate behavior. Through a case study of ExxonMobil, we show that climate-motivated investors are unable to overcome internal stakeholder resistance, despite shareholder pressure through direct communication, filed resolutions, and media campaigns. Our findings illustrate that polluting firms remain resistant to financial pressure for decarbonization, suggesting an important role for policy.

We identify the size of the largest connected component in a subcritical inhomogeneous random graph with a kernel of preferential attachment type. The component is polynomial in the graph size with an explicitly given exponent, which is strictly larger than the exponent for the largest degree in the graph. This is in stark contrast to the behaviour of inhomogeneous random graphs with a kernel of rank one. Our proof uses local approximation by branching random walks going well beyond the weak local limit and novel results on subcritical killed branching random walks.

This paper explores the interplay between intellectual property and gender in modern design law and practice, with a focus on the New Zealand Designs Act 1953 and references to Australian, United Kingdom and European Union law. It highlights how law and practice favour technical, utilitarian design principles (that coded masculine), but neglect the dynamic, sensory and affective (embodied and emotive) aspects of designs (that coded feminine). Through its focus on the technical, design law and practice ignore the socio-legal reality that the dynamic, sensory and affective are often central to a design’s success. The paper frames the foregoing in standpoint theory and affect. It challenges the focus on that which can be reduced to technical-based representation and the perception that this creates an objective master copy. The paper calls for a reassessment of what design law protects and how it protects it, to better align the system with the socio-legal realities of design creation and use.

Manes (1998). Implementing Collection Classes with Monads. Mathematical Structures in Computer Science 8 (231–276) introduced the notion of a collection monad on the category of sets as a suitable semantics for collection types. The canonical example of collection monad is the finite powerset monad. In order to account for the algorithmic aspects, the category of sets should be replaced with categories whose arrows are maps computable by low-complexity algorithms. Inspired by realizability, we give a systematic way for constructing categories of small sets and low-complexity functions and define an analogue of collection monads on such categories.

Thought reform campaigns aimed at the psychological transformation of captives have long been tools to enhance national security and political legitimacy in East Asia. Fusing Soviet concepts of human perfectibility and Confucian ideals of transformation through education, sophisticated systems have evolved to convert political opponents. Whether labelled as tenkō in Japan, ‘self-renovation’ in Nationalist China, or ‘new learning’ in the People’s Republic of China, these programmes shared the fundamental goal of pressuring individuals to renounce previous beliefs and adopt state-sanctioned ideologies. This article examines how Japanese war crimes prisoners, political dissidents, and former Chinese Nationalist officers experienced these campaigns. Despite differences in implementation, each regime used confession, group study, and psychological coercion. This historical perspective is particularly relevant today as China’s leadership continues to weaponise historical narratives – including the ‘correct’ understandings of WWII history – with implications for contemporary tensions between China and Taiwan.

A despairing agent might object to climate obligations by framing them as too demanding to be morally required because they give rise to burdensome consequences of despair, like depression. This objection can be refuted on the grounds that it is morally wrong. However, when it is understood as symptomatic of moral injury, an alternative response prioritizing moral repair is illuminated. I consider how the virtue of epistemic humility can promote tasks for repair, like attentiveness to symptoms of moral injury. I see this virtue as a basis for an active form of care for others and the self that resists temptations to refer to this objection.

Democracy is anchored by communication, grounded in a commitment to factual truth. This is an ideal historically captured by the ancient Athenian concept of parrhesia (frankness) and, in contemporary deliberative theory, by sincerity. This essay argues that the US far right has hijacked this democratic ideal, weaponizing it to create a post-truth environment and fuel a form of demagogic propaganda. The essay traces the historical evolution of the truth-telling ideal, noting how sincerity can morph into an antirhetorical style of “hyper-sincerity,” which performs shamelessness for a citizenry sidelined by massive economic inequality and corporate power. Drawing on Jason Stanley’s work, the essay then argues that this rhetorical style has become a form of fascist demagoguery, a rhetorical style that poses a threat to the very possibility of democratic politics. The final section explores the possibilities for irony as an antidote to hyper-sincerity. It reveals that the far right has also hijacked irony to create a mode of “fascist irony.” The paper concludes by calling for a “civic irony” rooted in a commitment to democratic values.

The letters exchanged between Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne in 1766 have encountered considerable attention, as have those passages in Sterne’s works that seemingly engage with antislavery discourse. Some critics suggest these passages fail to address slavery directly; Sterne, in turn, has been viewed as readily capitalizing on his connection with Sancho to promote a philanthropic image that his writings do not support, and even to exploit it for financial gain. This article suggests a recalibration, partly based on the chronology of this exchange and its first public appearance in 1775. It argues that a richer understanding of Sancho’s and Sterne’s reception histories, and especially the role played by the eighteenth-century press in recirculating reviews of and excerpts from this exchange, helps to establish a more nuanced approach toward how the public image and the texts of both writers were subsequently incorporated into antislavery and Abolitionist debates.

We study electoral participation in the provinces of Chile from 1932 to 1950, a time when electoral democracy and a competitive party system coincided with the adoption of import-substitution industrialization and growing migration into urban areas. Drawing on provincial-level data, we assess the effect of institutional, economic, and sociodemographic factors on voter turnout. The enfranchisement of women for municipal elections in 1935 unexpectedly reduced participation, as few women initially joined the electoral rolls. Higher literacy levels were associated with lower turnout, challenging modernization theory expectations. Urbanization, in contrast, was positively linked to participation. Surprisingly, provinces with strong mining and manufacturing sectors did not exhibit higher turnout, suggesting limited mobilization by leftist parties and barriers faced by informal workers and recent migrants. The findings underscore that suffrage expansion alone is insufficient to increase participation without targeted mobilization efforts. The study contributes to understanding the complexities of democratization and highlights the importance of bottom-up political engagement to complement institutional reforms in expanding political inclusion.

In this paper, we consider the time-dependent Born–Oppenheimer approximation (BOA) of a classical quantum molecule involving a possibly large number of nuclei and electrons, described by a Schrödinger equation. In the spirit of Born and Oppenheimer’s original idea, we study quantitatively the approximation of the molecular evolution. We obtain an iterable approximation of the molecular evolution to arbitrary order, and we derive an effective equation for the reduced dynamics involving the nuclei equivalent to the original Schrödinger equation and containing no electron variables. We estimate the coefficients of the new equation and find tractable approximations for the molecular dynamics going beyond the one corresponding to the original Born and Oppenheimer approximation.

Mughal historiography has primarily focused on the lives of royal women vis-à-vis the harem and the imperial court. Looking at the entanglements of power, gender, and social capital, this article attempts to study another group of women—courtesans—as cultural and economic agents in early modern North India. The aim here is to move away from an empire-centric study of women and look closely at non-royal women who normally figure peripherally in official sources. The article locates them within the monetary and non-monetary transactions of the slave trade and explores how it acted as a form of generating social capital for such women. Since possession of slaves was a mark of distinction and affluence, the article argues that a section of courtesans, by being slave owners, belonged to the upper strata of the economic class. Moreover, relaxations in taxes as well as gifts and rewards further show that these courtesans managed to gain a foothold in the socio-political sphere. In this manner, they can be considered liminal actors who belonged to mobile communities, both geographically and socially. Departing from a homogenised narrative, the article shows that courtesans functioned within a patriarchal system that simultaneously empowered and marginalised them.