Lew-Levy and Amir propose that children develop meaningful cultures with the potential to undergird lasting and meaningful societal change. Identifying the domains in which this claim has traction is necessary if we are to accept that there is something special about childhood cultures that transcends considering them as fleeting expressions of an immature life stage.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) emit broadband radio emission that may, in rare cases, encode atomic hydrogen (Hi) absorption signals as they traverse the interstellar medium of their host galaxies. Though considered in the early FRB literature, the demanding observational prerequisites and the rarity of suitable events have meant that no thorough search for Hi absorption in FRB spectra has yet been undertaken. Here, we present an updated systematic analysis assessing the likelihood of modern facilities to detect such absorption features. As a proof of concept, we search for absorption in the spectrum of the bright ASKAP-localised FRB 20211127I, finding a 3σ opacity upper limit of 0.51. While this test case offers little constraining power, we find that narrow FRBs with fluences exceeding 20/70/150 Jy ms observed with MeerKAT/ASKAP/DSA can probe opacities below 0.1 — a regime in which absorption detections become physically meaningful. We further highlight that stacking thousands of bursts from hyperactive repeaters with FAST offers a very powerful avenue toward detection. Finally, we discuss the broad scientific potential of such detections, including constraints on extragalactic Hi spin temperatures, a means to physically probe the environment surrounding the progenitor, and a path towards disentangling host galaxy contributions to dispersion and scattering.

This paper explores two sites recently excavated by the Sirwan Regional Project (SRP)—Tepe Kalan (SRP018) and Kani Masi (SRP094)—located just 14 km apart on opposite sides of the lower Sirwan river in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and occupied simultaneously during the Middle Bronze Age I (c. 2000–1850 bce). The MB I was a lively period of political negotiation and cultural reconfiguration across the region, with these dynamics playing out in various social arenas, from rock reliefs to everyday eating and drinking activities. Detailed examination of the functional potentialities of pottery vessels from the two sites, set within an inter–regional context of connectivity, demonstrates alternative community networks and practices of cultural production. These material insights challenge us to reconceptualize our traditional approaches to borders and their state–driven political and cultural materializations and narratives. We emphasize here the perspective of mobile borders and emergent borderities, which allow us to move towards careful articulations of localized processes, community encounters and temporalities beyond the state.

Pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) is recommended for people with chronic respiratory diseases, but access is limited. Delivering PR in primary care may overcome these barriers; however, physiotherapists and Accredited Exercise Physiologists (AEPs) report limited PR experience. Aim: to investigate the changes in knowledge, skills, and confidence following an education program for physiotherapists and AEPs in PR delivery in primary care. Primary care physiotherapists or AEPs undertook an education program of 6–8 hours online training and a half-day face-to-face workshop. 17 clinicians completed the training. Median (IQR) knowledge scores increased from 7 (6,8) at baseline to 10 (9,11) post-training (p < 0.001; Hedges’ g = 1.52, 95% CI 0.81 to 2.21). Improvements in self-rated knowledge, skills, and confidence were observed across all domains and sustained at 3 months. In conclusion, a short education program improved PR knowledge, skills, and confidence in primary care clinicians. Educating primary care clinicians in PR is essential to build the workforce to provide PR in this setting and improve accessibility.

Adam Smith famously coined the metaphor of the ‘invisible hand’ to describe a capitalist market that was driven by individual aspirations and promises for profits but produced, somehow miraculously, something resembling a common good. Although the image of the invisible hand appeared in a rather marginal and fleeting passage in The Wealth of Nations, it became a key metaphor in nineteenth- and twentieth-century economic language and thinking.1 Despite its alluring imaginary, the metaphor did not go uncontested. Rexford Tugwell, an economist who played a key role in designing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s agrarian New Deal in the 1930s and served as director of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, sarcastically wrote in 1935 that the image of the invisible hand provided nothing more than a rhetorical veil to conceal ‘the destructive forces of the unrestrained competition’ that had been wrongfully portrayed as the ‘Siamese twin’ of democracy. But now, Tugwell wrote, ‘the jig is up. The cat is out of the bag. There is no invisible hand. There never was. [. . .] We must now supply a real and visible guiding hand to do the task which that mythical, nonexistent, invisible agency was supposed to perform, but never did.’ In the eyes of Tugwell, social and economic planning were fundamentally important for increasing the visibility of the ‘guiding hand’. Tugwell regarded planning not as something that was detrimental to democracy but rather as something that prevented democracy from being ‘stifled by competition’.2 Already a few years earlier in 1932, Tugwell had delivered a paper at the Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association in which he portrayed economic and social planning by government agencies as a necessary instrument to find a way out of the ‘disasters of recent years’ and associated the concept and the practice of planning with a ‘possible mastering of future history’.3

Children have creative, innovative minds. But not all innovations become cultural touchstones. I propose that innovations are more widely adopted when spearheaded by a high-status member of a social hierarchy. This works because people want to emulate high-status others (including some children), thus facilitating the mainstreaming of high-status people’s cultural innovations.

Contemporary work in bioethics presupposes a monistic view of race and a structuralist or polysemous view of racism. We aim to show that these received views are mistaken if the aim is to solve the racial health disparities problem. We argue that the theories that best enable us to solve the racial health disparities problem are a pluralist race theory and a virtue-theoretic account of racism because these theories are the best in terms of providing relevant accuracy and scope, causal explanatory power, nonsuperfluous ontological complexity, and practical utility for the task at hand.

Children’s natural curiosity, playfulness, sociability, and future orientation predispose them for cultural adaptation. I exemplify this with Sugata Mitra’s “hole in the wall experiment,” adolescents’ role in the computer revolution, and the likely role of play in children’s development of Nicaraguan Sign Language; and I give an example of juvenile play resulting in cultural innovation in Macaques.

In the Doctrine of Virtue, Kant raises the ‘casuistical’ question of whether sexual intercourse is ethically permissible only if it serves the purpose of procreation, or whether it is also permissible when procreation is not possible, e.g. during pregnancy. It might seem that Kant is assuming a special permissive law that allows ‘unpurposive’ sexual intercourse to prevent greater vices. However, as I shall argue, Kant merely recites an argument that was widespread in the eighteenth century. As a closer analysis of Kant’s argument shows, he in fact regards sexual intercourse incapable of reproduction as ethically impermissible.

Lew-Levy and Amir rightly see children’s peer culture as an overlooked engine of human cultural evolution. Researchers who share this view can now take up the burden of proving that the longevity of children’s traditions is indeed comparable to that of adults and of explaining why. The « selection for proliferation » hypothesis suggests a way.

As Korean cultural genres circulate globally, they acquire local meanings that may travel back to Korea, generating additional connotations. Drawing upon semiotic theory from linguistic anthropology, this article examines the resemiotization of morpheme “K-”, tracing how it detached from a few lexical items to become a productive morpheme and index of Koreanness in global cultural production. K-’s entextualized iterations take on new meanings across contexts, disrupting straightforward notions of transnational circulation. Global circulation in turn shapes domestic usage, reflecting the iterative relationship between consumers and Korean industry. While terms like K-drama and K-beauty remain relatively stable, newer ones like K-culture and K-wave are more open to negotiation. Ethnographically following K- across online and offline spaces, this study argues the morpheme emerges as a domestic index of outward-facing possibility—a locally global orientation—underscoring language’s pivotal role in shaping and advancing Korea’s national brand.

This article examines the role of showcase festivals and music export organisations (MEOs) in shaping international music careers amid the digital era’s paradox of access and visibility. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in Europe, it explores how these institutions have become central, interdependent actors within a global music export ecosystem that promises opportunity yet often reproduces existing hierarchies. While MEOs provide support through funding, training, and networking, and showcase festivals offer exposure through curated programming, access remains uneven and shaped by structural inequalities. Despite these challenges, the ecosystem offers a relevant, if imperfect, framework for enabling mobility, professional development, and artistic circulation. Its value lies not in guaranteeing outcomes, but in offering a visible and adaptive platform through which careers can be imagined and pursued. By reassessing institutional norms and broadening support mechanisms, this evolving infrastructure holds the potential to promote more inclusive and sustainable pathways for international music development.

Lew-Levy & Amir hypothesize that peer cultures have implications for the evolution and ecological adaptiveness of Homo sapiens. Here, we explore the feasibility of finding evidence of peer cultures in prehistory based on the current state of prehistoric archaeology. Accordingly, we recommend new experimental research with child knappers to improve our ability to infer children’s activities in the archaeological record.

Lew-Levy and Amir note that by adolescence, children shift from speaking like their parents to using the vernacular of their peers, suggesting that children attend closely to linguistic input from other children. But unlike adult input, peer input has been neglected in research. We believe this is due to methodological limitations that long-form audio recordings are uniquely equipped to overcome.

Prolog is a well-known declarative programming language commonly used in introductory courses on logic and reasoning. However, many students find Prolog challenging because it lacks the familiar debugging mechanisms found in imperative languages. In large classes, this difficulty is exacerbated by the challenge of providing timely and personalized feedback to students. In this work, we introduce ProDebug, the first tool to combine large language models (LLMs) with spectrum-based and mutation-based techniques for automated debugging of Prolog assignments. ProDebug automatically identifies faults and proposes bug repairs for student Git submissions. Faults are detected using three approaches – spectrum-based, mutation-based, and LLM reasoning – while repairs are generated using mutation-based techniques and LLMs. Our evaluation on 1499 buggy student submissions from a bachelor’s level programming class demonstrates the potential of automated, LLM-augmented feedback systems to scale support for declarative programming education.

By failing to recognize that adulthood and childhood are just examples – the former of an unmarked social category inappropriately used to generalize about people – the latter of a marked social category commonly overlooked in theories about our species, Lew-Levy and Amir miss an opportunity to make an important observation about social-cultural diversity and what it means to be human.

Lew-Levy and Amir highlight children as agents of cultural adaptation and widespread presence of peer cultures across populations, but their account underestimates peer culture in East Asian societies. Drawing on East Asian contexts, we show how strict family, school, and social structures lead peer culture to take on more covert forms, underscoring the need for broader cross-cultural perspectives.

In our target article, we proposed that children are not merely recipients of adult culture but actively produce and maintain their own peer cultures, which may help communities navigate rare yet pivotal episodes of social and ecological change. Commentaries from across the social and biological sciences expanded this framework, situating peer cultures within developmental, evolutionary, and comparative contexts. They emphasized the diversity of peer cultures, the communicative systems and transmission mechanisms that sustain them, and introduced new approaches for identifying them – from formal evolutionary models to research in non-human species and the archaeological record. In this response, we synthesize and build on these contributions by addressing questions about the scope and influence of peer cultures within the broader processes of cultural evolution and by outlining future directions for a more unified, cross-disciplinary science of peer cultures.