The “affirmative consent model” for sexual acts requires that participants give explicit, unambiguous, informed, and enthusiastic consent. This model is a valuable harm reduction practice but, as a pre-requisite for erotic action, it is sometimes over-applied. As a result, people can feel unduly constrained and forgo valuable activities. I introduce a case study, the Pagan fertility festival of Beltane, which customarily includes a representation of sexual congress, such as dancing, gyrating, or thrusting. I argue that to permissibly perform these erotic ritual acts, the protagonists—in this case, the May Queen and Oak King—do not need explicit affirmative consent from everyone gathered in the magic circle or temple. Indeed employing the widespread operative model of affirmative consent can be disadvantageous because it would require participants to know the ritual’s details beforehand. In making this case, I highlight the costs of predictability, choreography, and prior communication in erotic rituals. And I argue that, owing to distinctive features of community-orientated and religious erotics, theorists shouldn’t simply extend interpersonal sexual ethics to explain these contexts. Instead, to countenance Paganism as an important social form, theorists must look to the ethics of institutions. Like churches and educational establishments, erotic ritual is social infrastructure.

Definitional invisibility is the systematic reframing of stable aspects of identity as temporary ‘choices’. This Editorial explains how choice-framing distorts formulation, weakens the therapeutic alliance and sustains institutional inequities, and recommends concrete clinical, documentation and organisational strategies to reduce harm and improve person-centred care.

Language differs from other cultural domains in its high degree of normativity and conventionality; hence, many linguistic innovations by young children are considered acquisition errors that do not diffuse into language communities. Moreover, young children’s cognitive-pragmatic limitations hinder their ability to introduce structure into novel communication systems. Consequently, children are unlikely agents of language change or drivers of language emergence.

Lew-Levy and Amir contend that children are cultural producers in their own right, contributing to cumulative culture through peer culture. We argue that children’s pedagogical contributions extend beyond the social world of peers. Children not only transmit child-relevant knowledge from peer to peer, but also actively share, with children and adults alike, knowledge both that ultimately stemmed from cognitively mature agents.

Healthcare sustainability is a multidisciplinary field that seeks to mitigate healthcare’s environmental consequences. Antimicrobial stewardship and healthcare sustainability both aim to reduce wasteful resource use while maximizing patient safety. However, a strong partnership between antimicrobial stewardship and healthcare sustainability has yet to develop. To facilitate environmentally sustainable decision-making in antimicrobial prescribing, we developed a web-based calculator (EcoRxChoice (www.ecorxchoice.com)) where users can enter different antimicrobial regimens and compare how much plastic waste each regimen creates. This work was supported in part by the Society of Infectious Diseases Pharmacists (SIDP), reflecting SIDP’s commitment to strengthening sustainability as a practical extension of antimicrobial stewardship and empowering infectious disease pharmacists to make measurable environmental impact through evidence-based care.

A pair of young monozygotic male twins affected with Feingold syndrome were briefly described in previous issues of Twin Research and Human Genetics. An opportunity to meet the twins and their mother occurred in March 2026. An overview of the condition and interview with the twins’ mother is presented, as are implications for future research and practice. Next, research summaries of pseudoamonoamniotic twins, selective fetal growth restriction in monoamniotic twins, twin authorship attribution, and twins discordant for clubfoot are provided. This article concludes with human interest stories involving twins with different fathers, biological relatedness in a married couple, the birth of identical quadruplets, and twins switching places.

Do field experimental interventions produce durable changes in gender representation? We examine the persistence of experimental treatment effects in Karpowitz, Monson, and Preece (2017), where a single letter from Republican Party leaders significantly increased women’s election to state delegate positions. Two years later, differences between treatment and control conditions evaporated. Treated precincts largely retained earlier experimental gains, but the treatment effect size was smaller because of increases in the control condition. We examine four possible explanations for this pattern. First, we find considerable evidence of an incumbency effect among women in one treatment condition. Second, increases in women’s representation in the control condition appear to be related in part to larger turnout during the 2016 election cycle. Finally, we find little evidence of lasting attitude changes about women’s representation and few traces of post-experimental spillover.

Since the publication of the original Vancouver Obsessional Compulsive Inventory (VOCI), a large body of evidence demonstrating the prevalence and importance of newer symptom domains in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) (e.g. mental contamination, reassurance seeking, and symmetry, ordering, and arranging) has emerged. Although the VOCI has excellent psychometric properties, these developments point to the need for a revision. The present study aimed to revise the VOCI to provide a brief and up-to-date measure to assess OCD symptomatology. The development of the VOCI-2 is discussed, along with information about its reliability, validity and factor structure. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted on data obtained from 1108 non-clinical participants who completed the VOCI, the Vancouver Obsessional Compulsive Inventory – Mental Contamination Scale (VOCI-MC), the Symmetry Ordering and Arranging Questionnaire (SOAQ), and the Covert and Overt Reassurance Seeking Inventory (CORSI) to arrive at an updated measure, and clinical samples (primary diagnosis of OCD, n=59; anxious controls, n=42; depressed controls, n=18) completed the VOCI-2 to assess known-groups validity. The VOCI-2 consists of six distinctive factors reflecting symptom categories: Symmetry, Ordering and Arranging; Reassurance Seeking; Checking; Mental Contamination; Obsessions; and Contact Contamination. The updated questionnaire is characterized by strong reliability and validity, face valid items and subscales, is easy to administer and reflects a current understanding of the heterogeneous presentations of OCD. Future directions include additional validation in larger clinical samples and in other (e.g. treatment) contexts.

Mycelium composites are intended to replace plastics in different applications as lightweight, sustainable alternatives. One major limitation is the exchange of oxygen and heat in the core of the material. Bio-welding allows the stacking of thinner layers that are then connected by fungal mycelium. We screened six different fungi for their growth rate, binding strength and gap-bridging capability before fabricating bio-welded composites from beech sawdust with two of the fungi, using two different particle sizes and growth durations. The influence of these parameters, as well as the number of layers and their orientation in the material, on internal bond strength and thermal conductivity was assessed. We found that the maximum gap-bridging distance of a fungus is less essential than the strength of the mycelium connection. Most importantly, the surface roughness of the layers must be minimized to ensure that the bio-welded interface is stronger than the individual layers.

This article argues that the regulation of rents in eighteenth-century Turin played a central role in shaping the city’s social fabric. Focusing on the first half of the century, it examines the process of rent formation culminating in a 1749 edict that condemned excessive increases and introduced new procedures for regulation. By analysing both the causes of rising rents and the criteria used to define fair rents, the article shows how rent-setting operated as a site of clash and negotiation among the competing interests of institutions, landlords and tenants. The procedures and solutions adopted reveal a system of values through which access to the city was defined. In this sense, the rental market emerges not merely as an economic mechanism but as a key arena in which the production, appropriation and transformation of urban space were negotiated and redefined.

Mycelium-based composites are part of an emerging group of biofabricated materials with potential for sustainable construction and interior applications. Their properties depend on fungal species, substrate composition, incubation conditions, and post-processing strategies, yet the relative influence and controllability of these parameters remain fragmented across the literature. This review systematically analyses 46 peer-reviewed studies to evaluate how externally controllable fabrication parameters affect mechanical, thermal, acoustic, and hygroscopic performance. The biofabrication workflow is structured into pre-processing, incubation, and post-processing stages, with particular emphasis on incubation as an underexplored design domain. While species and substrate strongly determine baseline performance, environmental and physical parameters applied during growth, such as moisture, temperature, aeration, and mechanical confinement, suggest potential opportunities for dynamic property tuning. By proposing incubation as an emerging opportunity for material programming, this review outlines pathways toward digitally controlled, functionally graded mycelium composites, contributing a structured framework for integrating biological growth into biodesign workflows.

Contrary to the notion of collective self-rule, in modern democratic states the set of individuals that make the rules and the set of individuals to whom rules apply cannot be one and the same. Recognizing this “non-identity thesis” has important implications for democratic theory. Among them is the need to recognize that any democratic system will involve rule over others and that democratic procedures will not be sufficient for political legitimacy.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, best known for “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Herland, brings a colloquial Machiavellian deception to women’s political education in her sorely neglected novel, Benigna Machiavelli. Serialized in her magazine, The Forerunner, which itself is one of Gilman’s attempts to generate social change, Benigna Machiavelli gives us the character, Benigna MacAvelly, triply marginalized—female, a child, from a poor family—who becomes a hidden leader. Benigna, following in the footsteps of Ben Franklin and Machiavelli, and advocating associations as a means to preserve liberty, seeks to cultivate women as social, political, and economic actors. Because the man-made world has malformed women, limiting reason’s effectiveness as a means to pursue social change, Benigna turns to deception. This paper examines Benigna’s—and Gilman’s—uses of deception and imagination, respectively, as tools to create a new world, to generate a democratic polity.

In September 1833, eleven students aged between fourteen and twenty-one were imprisoned and brought before judge Manuel Joaquín Valdivieso in Santiago de Chile. They were accused of leading a rebellion that had rocked the country’s foremost educational institution, the Instituto Nacional, earlier that month. When asked who had initiated the revolt or invited them to join, the students refused to name names, insisting instead that theirs had been “a complot of all.” Their statement echoed similar assertions made by protesters across the Spanish Atlantic, from Castilian peasants to Andean Natives. Tracing the confrontation between the Instituto students and Judge Valdivieso, this article examines how appeals to collective agency and unanimous action disrupted the attribution of penal responsibility. I argue that such strategies served not only to deflect blame but to assert the legitimacy of revolts and other dissident political acts. The article explores how students confronted the judge’s interpretation of their movement, from their motivations to the dynamics of the insurrection. To justify their revolt, it shows, the Instituto students had to mobilize their knowledge of the law—not to claim its protection, but to undermine its capacity to render their actions intelligible.

Within nationality studies, the 19th-century philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) is typically presented as the founding father of liberal-nationalism because of his warning that liberal democratic institutions need to be embedded within the framework of a mononational state. However, the leading Mill scholar in the field, Georgios Varouxakis, has long challenged this designation. Indeed, in the absence of any attempt by other scholars to refute his claim that Mill should be interpreted as a cosmopolitan patriot instead, he has raised the question of whether the conventional view is little more than a disciplinary dogma. This article defends the conventional view through two key moves. First, to counter Varouxakis’ principal objections, we show that Mill’s account of the emergence of nationalities, as a historically progressive phenomenon grounded in an expansion of human sympathies, implies that his concerns about nationalistic indifference or hostility to foreigners do not translate into objections to nationality as such. Second, to counter Varouxakis’ presentation of the cosmopolitan patriot interpretation as a viable alternative to the liberal-nationalist one, we argue that Mill’s ethical and political cosmopolitanism is insufficient to support a liberal-postnationalist interpretation and is instead best understood as an integral component of his liberal nationalism.

Measurements of peculiar velocities in the local Universe are a powerful tool to study the nature of dark energy at low (z < 0.1) redshifts. Here we present the largest single set of z < 0.1 peculiar velocity measurements to date, obtained using the Fundamental Plane (FP) of galaxies in the first data release (DR1) of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI).We describe the photometric and spectroscopic selection criteria used to define the sample, as well as extensive quality control checks on the photometry and velocity dispersion measurements. Additionally, we perform detailed systematics checks for the many analysis parameters in our pipeline. Our DESI DR1 catalogue contains FP-based distances and peculiar velocities for 98, 292 unique early-type galaxies, increasing the total number of z < 0.1 FP distances ever measured by a factor of ∼ 2. We achieve a precision of 26% random error in our distance measurements which is comparable to previous surveys. A series of companion DESI papers use the distances and peculiar velocities presented in this paper to measure cosmological parameters.