This study revisits the long-standing consensus that the number and nature of basic-level administrative units in imperial China remained static over two millennia. It argues that this view underestimates the size and sophistication of field administration during the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127). During this period, towns (zhen) emerged as administrative centers, undertaking roles akin to the predominantly rural counties but within urban settings. Through a systematic analysis of the administrative functions of towns, this article reveals that approximately 30 percent of the 1,891 towns documented in 1085 were staffed by imperial officials and played a crucial role in delivering urban public goods such as fire prevention and law enforcement. In doing so, they supported the Song state’s extraordinary reliance on commercial taxation. These findings prompt a reassessment of the prevailing view in Chinese urban history that a disconnect between administration and commerce began during the Tang-Song transition.

Institutional investors conduct more governance research and are less likely to follow proxy advisor vote recommendations when a company’s bonds comprise a larger share of their assets. These findings are driven by bond holdings, shareholder proposals, and companies where fixed-income managers are more likely to be attentive and share an interest with equity investors in improving governance. The findings do not concentrate on companies or shareholder proposals where creditor–shareholder conflicts are likely. Overall, the findings suggest that corporate bond holdings influence how actively institutions monitor their equity positions and contribute to institutions’ overall incentive to be engaged stewards.

Regional survey of the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve, Cayo, Belize by the Rio Frio Regional Archaeological Project has revealed an expansive, ancient Maya granitic-rock extraction and ground stone tool crafting industry distributed across an 11 km2 region. To date, 16 extraction-workshop sites of varying size and compositional complexity totaling 100 ha or 1 km2 have been identified through a combination of ground-based reconnaissance and aerial LiDAR survey. This article introduces the two largest recorded to date, Buffalo Hill Quarries and Moshy’s Hill. Discussing them, we present an overview of the common attributes of the Mountain Pine Ridge quarry workshops including types of extraction sites (quarry pits, strip mines, and cut faces), structural components (bedrock pits and erected blocks), cached tools (hammerstones and pics), and discarded products (half-loaf and full-loaf forms and metates) found at them. As the type of sites presented here are new to archaeology, the article concludes with a series of questions to guide future work.

This article advances a story-driven, theoretical exploration of how entanglements of agony, exile and Land relations can reconfigure understandings of justice. Opening with autobiographical vignettes of “in-betweenness”, the article illuminates the unfolding of exilic life between Palestine and North America, naming the ruptures of writing about Palestine from afar as an ethical site of dwelling in the middle. Drawing on relational ontology, Indigenous and decolonial scholars, alongside posthumanist and new materialist thinkers, the article highlights convergences and dissonances in conceptualising Land as more than property: as kin, teacher and agentive being. From such relationality, this article argues that Land-bodied rights offer a framework for rethinking justice and education beyond the abstract, hierarchical assumptions of universal human rights, grounding learning in human and more-than-human relations. The final section explores diffractive pedagogies, suggesting that storytelling and more-than-human educational entanglements can foster an ethic of reciprocity and accountability towards the more-than-human justice. In envisioning rights through rupture, environmental education can become a site where ecological and decolonial justice are rethought and enacted through relational, Land-based and story-driven pedagogies.

While ethnographic observation has revealed nuances of ground stone production techniques and practical uses, there has been little theorizing about the archaeological exchange and movement of these goods or their deeper social meanings. In previous research, we obtained secure geochemical signatures for an ancient Maya ground stone tool assemblage by sourcing granite outcrops in Belize, enabling us to trace the provenience of certain archaeological assemblages. To understand the exchange mechanisms by which ground stone tools moved around the landscape, we explore three non-mutually exclusive models. We outline our expectations of material correlates for the archaeological record based on these exchange hypotheses and evaluate our assemblages against these expectations. This work helps broaden understandings of the organizational importance of ground stone tool production, exchange, and usage within ancient Maya society, critical first steps for investigating the socioeconomic dimensions of these tools.

This article outlines our research into granite use by the ancient Maya of the Alabama Townsite—a Late to Terminal Classic (ca. a.d. 700–900) rapid-growth community in East-Central Belize, part of the Eastern Maya Lowlands. One of our initial hypotheses regarding the seemingly sudden appearance of the town toward the end of the Late Classic period focused on granite as a staple resource exploited by its residents. We highlight current results of local geological surveys and related spatial, geochemical, and petrographic studies; preliminary analyses of surface-collected and excavated archaeological assemblages and architectural elements; and attempts at community-engaged experimental archaeology. We conclude that while ancient Alabamans did not extract granite as a staple resource for export, which could have fueled the community’s growth, they nonetheless valued granite in many ways, which we highlight in our discussion.

Cluster environments influence galaxy evolution by curtailing star formation activity, notably through ram-pressure stripping (RPS). This process can leave observable signatures – such as gas tails and truncated gas discs – that are crucial for understanding how RPS affects galaxies. In this study, using spatially resolved spectroscopic data from the SAMI Galaxy Survey, we identify galaxies undergoing or recently affected by RPS in eight nearby clusters (${0.029\lt z\lt 0.058}$), through a visual classification scheme based on the ionised gas (H$\alpha$+[NII]$\lambda$6584) morphologies, split into ‘unperturbed’, ‘asymmetric’, and ‘truncated’. Alongside, we measure non-parametric structural parameters (concentration, asymmetry, and offset between gas and stars) to quantify the ionised gas morphologies. We find that combinations of parameters such as concentration, shape asymmetry, and stellar-ionised gas centre offsets are useful in categorising the degree of RPS in line with their ionised gas morphologies. The projected phase-space analysis shows that asymmetric galaxies are found in a narrow region in cluster-centric distance (${0.1\lt R/R_{200}\lt 0.6}$, where ${R}_{200}$ is the characteristic cluster radius) and have a larger dispersion in line-of-sight velocity ($\sigma(|v_{\text{pec}}|)_\mathrm{Asym} = 0.71^{+0.09}_{-0.07}\ \sigma_{200}$, with $\sigma_{200}$ being the cluster velocity dispersion within ${R}_{200}$), compared to the truncated and unperturbed samples that are more broadly distributed and predominantly located at larger cluster-centric distances. This suggests that asymmetric galaxies are likely recent infallers – having crossed within 0.5 $R{_{200}}$ in the past $\sim$1 Gyr. In terms of star formation, RPS candidates (asymmetric and truncated) yield a much steeper resolved star-forming main sequence (rSFMS; $\Sigma_\mathrm{SFR} - \Sigma_\ast$) relation compared to the unperturbed counterparts, primarily emerging from having lower $\Sigma_\mathrm{SFR}$ values for the low mass density regime (i.e. $\mathrm{log} \ \Sigma_\ast \lesssim 8 \ \mathrm{M}_\odot \ \mathrm{kpc^{-2}}$), with the steepest gradient deriving from the truncated sample. Moreover, radial specific star formation rate profiles introduce different trends for unperturbed and RPS candidates. Star formation in RPS candidates is suppressed in the outskirts relative to unperturbed galaxies and is more prominent for the truncated sample compared to the asymmetric counterparts. In contrast, central (i.e. ${r/r_{\text{eff}}} \lt 0.5$) star formation activity in RPS candidates is comparable with that in their unperturbed and field counterparts, suggesting no elevated activity. Taken together, this suggests an evolutionary trend linked to the RPS stage, where unperturbed galaxies likely represent recently accreted systems (pre-RPS), while asymmetric and truncated galaxies may correspond to populations undergoing RPS and post-RPS phases, respectively, favouring outside-in quenching.

Following the Wong Kim Ark decision in 1898, ethnic Chinese, other Asians, and almost all individuals born on U.S. soil secured the right to jus soli birthright citizenship. They could not, however, secure recognition of their citizenship without documentation, the key that linked birth to birthright. At a time when birth registration was not common, ethnic Chinese were able to establish U.S. citizenship in two main ways: through an order by a U.S. District Court or certification by U.S. immigration authorities.1 However, this documentation did not settle questions of the holder’s identity, immigration or citizenship status. Immigration inspectors generally doubted testimony given in these cases and believed that it was used to obtain fraudulent documentation of lawful immigration or citizenship status.

Birthright citizenship, as a common law principle, was a cornerstone of the American Republic at its founding.1 Like many “universal” rights at the time, it was presumed to apply to white people, routinely denied to enslaved people, and deeply contested for free people of color. After the Civil War, amid the effort to rebuild a fractured Union and answer the decades-long Black freedom struggle, Congress sought to affirm and extend the principle of birthright citizenship in the U.S. Constitution. In 1868, Congress recognized the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, extending citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. The language of the Fourteenth Amendment was clear: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”2 This included—as the congressional record reveals—the children of immigrants regardless of race, nationality, or desirability of their parents.3

This 2025 supplemental issue of Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness (DMPHP) honors Dr. C. Norman (Norm) Coleman who dedicated his life to applying his expert knowledge of radiation to develop elegant, science-based solutions to incredibly complex problems such as the public health and medical response to radiological disasters and creating a corps of experts to provide quality cancer care for people in developing countries.

Understanding the possibility of future ice shelf collapses similar to that of the Larsen B is critical for improving sea-level-rise projections due to the restraint on upstream flow that ice shelves provide. Prior research has provided a criterion for assessing the vulnerability of ice shelves to hydrofracture. We apply these calculations to the model ensemble results from the Ice Sheet Modeling Intercomparison Project for CMIP6 (ISMIP6). With these ensemble results, we evaluate the predicted shelf vulnerability through time with forcings from several climate scenarios, climate models and basal melt parametrizations and with a range of fracture toughness values. Additionally, for the ISMIP6 experiments that included a collapse forcing (based on surface melt availability alone), we evaluate whether the ice subjected to the collapse forcing was vulnerable. We find that shelf vulnerability generally decreases through 2100 as ice thickness decreases, consistent with the predicted reduction in driving stress. Differences in initial vulnerability between models as well as sensitivity to fracture toughness, however, tend to outweigh the change from stress evolution. For the shelves where collapse was imposed in the corresponding ISMIP6 experiment (Larsen C, George VI, Wilkins), between 20$\%$ and 70$\%$ of collapsed shelf area was vulnerable depending on fracture toughness.