Chitosan, derived from chitin-rich biological waste streams, offers a compelling basis for bio-based textile materials but remains underexplored as a primary fibre. This paper presents a material-driven investigation into the wet-spinning of chitosan filaments and their translation into textile and design contexts. A modular wet-spinning system was developed to bridge laboratory-scale polymer processing and textile-scale experimentation. Process parameters were tuned to achieve continuous filament formation, and mechanical characterisation indicates properties suitable for weaving and knitting under adapted conditions. Embedded within a biodesign framework, the study positions mechanical limitations not as deficits but as active parameters shaping textile construction and formfinding. By translating fibre-level material behaviour into woven structures and speculative prototypes, the work demonstrates how wet-spun chitosan can operate as a design material at the interface of chemistry, engineering and fashion, contributing to emerging practices in bio-based and regenerative textile design.

Family farms are facing unprecedented challenges with low commodity prices and high input costs combined with regulatory obstacles threatening the availability and practical use of pesticides. Ensuring U.S. agriculture has access to economically effective and safe pest management tools is paramount for our nation and the world as our farmers produce safe and affordable food, feed, fiber, and fuel. A squash field experiment assessed the weed control effectiveness and economic value of a standard herbicide program compared to six non-chemical alternatives including 1) a program using multiple passes with a sweep plow, 2) a program using multiple passes with a tine weeder, 3 & 4) hand weeding to supplement plow or weeder programs achieving 75% weed control, and 5 & 6) hand weeding to supplement plow or weeder programs achieving 95% weed control. The herbicide program provided 98-99% control of Palmer amaranth, large crabgrass, and wild radish at a cost of $104 ha-1 for the season. Cultivation (tine weeder or plow) controlled each weed only 36 to 64% at a cost of $144 to $207 ha-1, producing 83 to 85% less squash than the herbicide program. Supplementing cultivation with 9 to 13 hours ha-1 of hand weeding achieved approximately 75% control, resulting in weed control costs ranging from $916 to $1,073 ha-1, with 40 to 47% less squash fruit harvested than the herbicide program. For 95% weed control, 92 to 98 hours ha-1 of hand weeding was required, with results noted yields comparable to the herbicide program, but weed control costs ranged from $8,344 to $8,527 ha-1, an increase of 80 to 82 times above the herbicide program. This experiment demonstrates how plant protection tools can increase crop yield and quality while reducing costly inputs, thus improving the likelihood of safe, affordable, and sustainable food production.

State inaction and the escalating threat of climate change have led groups within the environmental movement to adopt more radical political tactics such as sabotage, vandalism and road blockades. How do citizens view such radical actions, and what determines their tolerance for them? Using survey data measuring environmental preoccupation, attribution of responsibility for climate change and attitudes toward thirteen contestation methods, this article maps the structure of public attitudes toward radical environmental activism. The results are threefold. First, tolerance has a clear threshold: citizens tolerate peaceful actions, are ambivalent toward disruptive tactics, and reject destructive and violent ones. Second, environmental preoccupation increases tolerance for nonviolent disruption but not for destructive or violent methods. Third, tolerance for radical tactics depends on whether respondents blame governments, corporations, or individuals for climate change. The article shows how responsibility attribution shapes legitimacy judgments about activism and underscores the limits of disruptive contestation in democracies.

Indigenous language revitalization is a multi-generational process. For example, many children now acquiring a Salish language in Western Canada are learning from caregivers who are second-language speakers. Little is known about the trajectory of children’s phonological acquisition in such contexts. Here, we investigate Hul’q’umi’num’, which, like many Salish languages, has far more consonants than English and much more frequent consonant clusters. Thirteen children (approximately 3–8 years) produced familiar Hul’q’umi’num’ words after hearing adult caregivers’ productions. Descriptive (using transcription notes) and quantitative (correlational and loglinear) analyses of the resulting 339 child words (1,179 consonants) revealed patterns that were reflective of general phonological development (e.g., highly variable fricatives, cluster simplification) and also patterns potentially specific to Hul’q’umi’num’ acquisition (e.g., de-ejectivization, precocious production of plain uvular stops). Results provide valuable data about child phonology in Salish contexts, with implications for language acquisition in multilingual contexts and for within-community early language teaching.

A reconfigurable multiphase (MP) modulator is presented that avoids continuous generation and distribution of MP clocks by reconstructing switching waveforms from a memory-stored wavetable using an event-driven pulse generator. Reconfiguration is achieved by updating the wavetable, enabling changes in phase count (e.g., 8–16 phases) and duty cycle to tune spectral performance without modifying the pulse-generator core. A waveform-level proof-of-concept transmitter chain with a commercially available RF amplifier is demonstrated at carrier frequencies of 0.9, 2.4, 3.7, and 6 GHz. Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing signals with bandwidths up to $500\,\mathrm{MHz}$ are used. In 8-phase, ${50}\%$ duty cycle operation, the measured out-of-band and in-band linearity achieves ${-48.3}\,\mathrm{dBc}$ adjacent-channel leakage ratio (ACLR) with ${1.56}\%$ error vector magnitude (EVM). Scaling from 8 to 16 phases via wavetable updates increases delivered output power by up to ${1.61}\,\mathrm{dB}$ while maintaining comparable ACLR and EVM. In 6-phase, ${33}\%$ duty cycle operation, the measured second- and third-harmonic rejection is approximately ${42}\,\mathrm{dBc}$ and ${45}\,\mathrm{dBc}$, respectively. These results validate the proposed architecture at the waveform level and motivate future integrated implementations with reconfigurable phase count and duty cycle.

The effect of alcohol consumption on atrial fibrillation risk remains controversial. Evaluating the association of alcohol consumption with atrial fibrillation-related biomarkers may help better understand the relevant mechanistic underpinnings. We studied participants from the PREDIMED-Plus study, a weight-loss randomized trial in metabolically unhealthy adults. N-terminal pro-B-type natriuretic protein, high-sensitivity troponin-T (hsTnT), high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP), 3-nitrotyrosine, and procollagen type 1 carboxy-terminal propeptide were measured in serum at baseline and years 3 and 5 of follow-up. We calculated average alcohol consumption in drinks/day (1 drink = 14 grams alcohol) with validated food frequency questionnaires. Using multivariable models we estimated cross-sectional and longitudinal associations of alcohol consumption with log-transformed biomarkers. Among 523 participants (mean age (SD): 65.1 (4.9) years, 40% female), mean alcohol consumption was 1 drink/day. Cross-sectionally, alcohol consumption was not associated with cardiac biomarkers. Longitudinally, compared to non-consumers, heavy drinkers at baseline (≥4 drinks/day) had smaller increases in hsTnT (β: -0.10, 95%CI: -0.20, 0.00) over 5 years. In contrast, those who increased alcohol consumption over follow-up experienced greater increases in hsCRP (β: 0.31, 95%CI: 0.00, 0.63) compared to those whose drinking behavior stayed the same. In this high-risk population, higher baseline alcohol intake was associated with smaller increases in hsTnT over follow-up while increases in alcohol intake over time were associated with higher levels of systemic inflammation. These findings highlight the importance of considering longitudinal changes in average alcohol exposure when evaluating its relationship with cardiometabolic biomarkers.

Oceans have long supported human societies by supplying essential ecosystem services. Their economic contribution is projected to double between 2010 and 2030. However, anthropogenic pressures undermine marine biodiversity, impairing the marine ecosystem’s ability to deliver ecosystem services and affecting human well-being. Marine protected areas (MPAs) are globally recognized as effective tools for biodiversity conservation, food security, societal well-being, and climate mitigation, not in isolation but in addition to other conservation initiatives. The Mediterranean basin, despite its ecological and cultural-historical significance, exhibits severe human pressures and significant environmental degradation. Despite the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework’s and EU Biodiversity Strategy’s 30x30 targets, current MPA coverage remains critically insufficient (<9% designated, <1% fully protected). Also, many MPAs suffer from poor design and enforcement, compromising their social, economic, and ecological effectiveness. Seven strategic actions are proposed here, encompassing (i) national political mobilization, (ii) enhanced regional cooperation, (iii) alignment of the objectives and implementation tools at national and regional scales, (iv) ratification of the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Agreement, (v) expansion and improved management of MPAs, (vi) establishment of legal frameworks, and (vii) diversification of financing sources. We argue here that achieving 30x30 targets strongly requires a coordinated basin-wide approach that integrates ecological, social, economic, and cultural dimensions.

This study investigates evidential meanings, referring to the information sources available to the speaker (i.e., direct witnessing, report, or inference), expressed through syntactic and lexical strategies in French. Across three experimental studies, we examined French subordinate structures, including complement, relative, pseudo-relative, and infinitive ECM clauses, that encompass perception or reporting verbs. We used witness rating, information source identification, and discourse completion tasks administered to a total of 221 French speakers. The results show that (i) infinitive ECM clauses are unambiguously associated with direct witnessing; (ii) pseudo-relative and relative clauses with voir are, though less strongly than infinitive, associated with direct witnessing; (iii) although still being sometimes used in reference to direct witnessing, complement clauses with voir are primarily suitable in inferential contexts based on resultant states; and finally (iv) complement clauses of dire are associated with reported sources. Our results show that indirect evidentiality is marked by complement clauses only, whereas direct evidentiality distributes over infinitive ECM, pseudo-relative and relative clauses with no significant difference between the two types of relatives. We conclude that indirect evidentiality in French is syntactically associated with one type of subordinate structure, whereas direct evidentiality is not.

There is a difference between doing something that is wrong and wronging someone in particular. Texting while driving is wrong; injuring a pedestrian because you were texting while driving is a wrong against that particular pedestrian. It has been common to think that wrongs just are violations of the wronged party’s rights, but recent arguments suggest otherwise: there can also be wrongs without rights violations. Supposing these arguments are correct, what is it to wrong someone?

Cet article présente les diverses configurations de crédit offertes par les magasins à rayons canadiens au cours du 20e siècle, en s’attardant au développement du crédit variable dans la période de l’après-guerre. Il démontre que les diverses formes de « comptes budgétaires » identifiées dans la littérature américaine étaient aussi offertes au Québec, en s’appuyant sur deux corpus d’archives. Il argue aussi que les transformations apportées au compte courant pour le rendre similaire à la vente à tempérament ont servi à transformer un contrat basé sur une relation humaine en contrat d’adhésion. Il fait ainsi une double contribution à la littérature : enrichissant d’une part les discussions théoriques des juristes sur le contrat d’adhésion de réflexions pertinentes tirées de la littérature sociologique sur le crédit à la consommation, et contribuant d’autre part à la littérature historique « fragmentée » sur le crédit à la consommation dans le siècle dernier.

Polarization has become the master concept for diagnosing contemporary democratic crises. The notion denotes three features: symmetry between parties, politics as an opinion space where positions diverge, and mutual repulsion between opposing camps. Yet none of these capture current realities. Across democracies, the central dynamic is not two poles drifting apart but the transformation of the political right into authoritarianism, norm breaking, and openness to political violence. Social democratic and center-right parties tend to respond in the opposite way from what “polarization” implies: by accommodating rightward. Attempts to salvage the polarization frame with modifiers (“asymmetric,” “affective,” “sectarian,” “pernicious”) concede these realities but risk hollowing out the concept’s definitional core. These limitations reveal a deeper misdiagnosis: when one party turns antidemocratic and illiberal, incivility and conflict are inevitable—but they are symptoms, not the root problem. Misdiagnosing them as the central issue leads to viewing civility and compromise as remedies, thereby risking the legitimation of authoritarian actors. This article proposes an alternative lens: the radicalization of the political right. Developed in the study of extremism, the radicalization framework better captures asymmetric change, identity-driven politics, and the mainstreaming of illiberalism. It foregrounds identity fusion, threat narratives, elite entrepreneurship, and escalation. Concepts are never politically innocent and persisting with “polarization” risks both misdiagnosing and normalizing authoritarian threats.

Through the example of Romania’s divergence from Soviet refugee policy in the case of the 1971 East Pakistani refugees, this article suggests that great powers face barriers to persuading even weaker states within their orbits of influence to acquiesce on issues of refugee politics. Responses to refugees touch sensitive state concerns about sovereignty. Aiding refugees can be an implicit condemnation of the state from which refugees flee. States that want to avoid the microscope of international opinion looking inside their own domestic human rights contexts will be hesitant to scrutinize another state, even in the context of a great power proxy conflict. As Romania sought to leverage favorable economic agreements, including with Pakistan and India, its position on the East Pakistani refugees reflected a hinge approach that attempted to balance political and economic relationships on both sides of the conflict. Small states use diplomatic entrepreneurship to work between larger powers as they pursue their own strategic goals. This article uses archival, diplomatic documents from Bucharest, some of which had never been accessed prior to this research. The article contributes a small state’s perspective based on diplomatic correspondence by its own officials and in its own language.

This article considers Hensley Henson’s advocacy of disestablishment following the Prayer Book defeat of 1927–8 as more than a rash reaction to events, one that he continued to work out well into the 1930s in response to domestic and international challenges to the Church, in addition to initiatives within the Church itself. Using his extensive journal and correspondence, as well as his published writings, it seeks an enhanced understanding not only of his views regarding ‘spiritual independence’ but of the wider debate in the Church – both among clergy and laity – and Free Churches, of which they were an integral part.