This study presents an innovative method for in situ measurements of electrical conductivity at microwave frequencies using a dielectric resonator (DR)-based probe. The DR, excited in the transverse electric mode with azimuthal index 0, radial index 1, and an open (non-integer) axial field variation denoted by δ (TE01δ mode) by a ridged waveguide, interacts with metallic layers as small as 5 × 5 mm2 on a dielectric substrate, enabling precise conductivity measurements through reflection coefficient analysis and electromagnetic simulations. Validation is performed by comparing the probe’s conductivity extraction results at 13.28 GHz with a conventional resonant cavity method at 10 GHz, demonstrating strong agreement. The used samples are therefore much smaller than what other comparable methods would require. The method is further applied to additively manufactured metallic deposits produced via a micro-dispensing technique, providing insights into their high-frequency (HF) conductivity and the effects of surface roughness. Additionally, a second-generation contact-based probe is developed to extend the characterization capabilities to larger samples and perform HF surface conductivity mapping. This advancement enables localized evaluations of surface properties and correlations with roughness, offering a valuable tool for optimizing additively manufactured components for HF applications.

In public healthcare systems, effectiveness is a central requirement for determining which services should be offered and reimbursed. Yet, due to its technical nature and to the need for specification through specialised bodies, the nature of this principle remains underexplored. This article bridges the gap by conducting a comparative analysis of effectiveness’ operation in three distinct healthcare systems: Germany, France, and England. We argue that effectiveness can be recognised as a foundational legal principle governing reimbursement decisions, revealing a substantive and a formal dimension. Substantively, effectiveness requires a consideration of an intervention’s ability to bring about a clinical benefit, accounting both for its desired outcomes and its risks. The applied evidentiary standard calls for a careful scrutiny of the available scientific evidence, as well as the state of medical knowledge. The exceptions to this standard are extremely limited and do not undermine the validity of the wider principle. Formally, the article emphasises the central role that administrative authorities conducting Health Technology Assessment (HTA) play, with delegated decisions ranging from the definition of the applicable evidentiary standards to the issuing of binding guidelines. It is argued that mechanisms must be put in place to ensure these bodies’ expertise, independence, and transparency.

How should we understand 1970s Kenya, with its combination of inequality and relative political stability? This article offers a new perspective on that by following the early history of the Harambee Co-operative Savings and Credit Society—the most prominent of many such societies that grew in those years. The rise and crisis of this co-operative provides evidence of mismanagement and the pursuit of personal advantage—but also suggests that civil servants saw the importance of enabling wider accumulation. As a result, the lowest-paid employees of government could see through Harambee—and other co-operatives—a possible, if precarious, route to a future as property-owners. That possibility helps explain both the institutional strength of Kenya’s provincial administration (whose employees were the members of Harambee Co-operative) and how a substantial number of Kenyans could develop a sense of themselves as citizens with a stake in the political system.

I argue for a hybrid analysis of English numeratives that (i) treats the extended basic numeratives (0–99) as lexemes but (ii) analyzes larger expressions as syntactic phrases or coordinations with magnitudes (hundred, thousand, million, …) as heads and factors (two hundred, forty-two million, …) as (obligatory) modifiers. A number of independent diagnostics – including ordinal/fractional morphology, prosodic phrasing and ellipsis/coordination – converge on the existence of a constituent containing all preceding material up to the rightmost base; this directly contradicts the cascading NumP + NP-deletion architecture of Ionin & Matushansky (2006, 2018) when applied to English. The analysis preserves the category assignments of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language – cardinals as determinatives and nouns, ordinals as adjectives, fractionals as nouns – and refines the functional picture: (i) multiplicative factors (one hundred) function as modifiers, never as determiners or complements, and (ii) additions (one hundred and two) are coordinates in a coordination. The resulting determinative category is a small closed list, not an open-ended stock of ‘numeral lexemes’. Cardinal nouns split in two: proper when they name, common when they count – a division borne out by distributional diagnostics. The result is a more complete, empirically tighter, morphosyntax-sensitive account of English numeratives that explains why English is lexical below 100 but demands overt syntax above it.

When Vietnamese refugees came to the Gulf Coast they were attracted to the region, in part, because of the fishing industry. But their entry into the fishery created friction with white fishers who had fished those waters for years. This friction would result in violence. This article anchors this history in the marine environment of coastal Texas. Many white fishers objected to Vietnamese resettlement because of how the Vietnamese fished. Local fishers had, for years, worried about the fisheries given decades of overfishing and pollution. In this context, white fishers weaponized these very real anxieties to argue that the Vietnamese were a threat to the coastal ecosystem. This threat the Vietnamese supposedly posed to these waters, along with the racism and xenophobia of white fishers, accounted for the depth of division and the degree of violence along the coast of Texas during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

This research presents the design and development of a microwave sensor capable of detecting and distinguishing hydroxylated organic compounds (HOCs), namely water, methanol, ethanol, and propanol. The work analyzes the physical mechanisms that govern the sensitivity and detectability of these liquids in the microwave range. Differences in sensor response are linked to variations in molecular characteristics such as dipole moment, microwave absorption, and refractive index. Unlike approaches that rely solely on experimentation, this study connects microwave behavior to fundamental molecular properties, enabling a predictive, physics-based understanding of HOC detection. Molecular polarization and relaxation models were combined with experimental observations to explain how these compounds interact with microwave fields. A metamaterial-based sensing cell was designed, simulated, and experimentally validated. Results demonstrate that the sensor effectively identifies hydroxyl compounds with high sensitivity. Water produced the highest resonance-frequency shift (0.76 GHz), followed by methanol (0.7 GHz), while ethanol and propanol showed similar shifts around 0.35–0.37 GHz. Propanol achieved a quality factor of 10.82 in the 12–17 GHz range. The sensor also reached a frequency detection resolution of 6.75 MHz and showed strong amplitude sensitivity, highest for water at 10.66 dB.

Since 2023, the armed conflict in Sudan has displaced nearly 900 000 people into eastern Chad, adding to pre-existing refugee populations and placing immense strain on already fragile health and social systems. Sudanese refugees experience high levels of psychological distress, yet Chad’s mental health services remain rudimentary, characterised by severe shortages of trained professionals and fragmented service provision. Despite underfunding, humanitarian agencies have explicitly prioritised mental health within their response framework, integrating mental health support into primary care and community-led initiatives. Cultural idioms of distress, stigma and language barriers continue to complicate care delivery, while simultaneously underscoring the importance of locally grounded approaches. Sustainable progress will require closer integration between humanitarian and development efforts, the strengthening of national systems and the expansion of community capacity. Innovative partnerships such as the Greentree Acceleration Plan offer pathways for scalable, culturally relevant interventions that may ultimately strengthen mental health systems for both refugees and host populations in Chad.

Studies have linked lower birth weight to development of radiographic osteoarthritis (OA). We examined early life factors in relation to subsequent knee pain among individuals with radiographic OA. 143 participants from the UK Hertfordshire Cohort study were included. Birth weight and weight at one year (WA1) were ascertained from health ledgers and used to derive conditional infant weight gain (CIWG). At baseline and follow-up, heath questionnaires (including knee pain) and knee radiographs were collected. Only those with radiographic knee OA at baseline were analysed. Logistic regression was used to examine early life factors in relation to pain. Pain at follow-up was common (men 41.3%, women 50%). Greater WA1 and greater CIWG were related to reduced risk of knee pain at follow-up after adjustment for sex and follow-up time. CIWG was protective against knee pain at follow-up, with this association attenuated after adjustment for follow-up osteophyte score. Validation in larger studies is required.

Late-phase graft incompatibility and subsequent yield reduction pose significant threats to sustainable nutmeg (Myristica fragrans) production in India, primarily due to the widespread use of wild Myristica species as rootstocks. Accurate rootstock authentication at the seedling stage is critical to prevent these long-term losses, but current methodologies are insufficient. This study develops novel chloroplast DNA (cpDNA)-based markers for species authentication and phylogenetic analysis in Myristica. Utilizing a comparative chloroplast genomics approach, we identified hypervariable regions to create robust sequence length polymorphism markers. Marker validation across 33 diverse Myristica accessions, including all major Indian cultivated germplasm, revealed a unique 25 bp deletion in the ycf4-cemA region. This deletion serves as a highly reliable diagnostic marker to differentiate cultivated nutmeg from wild rootstock species. The validated markers were successfully used to authenticate rootstocks in both commercial nurseries and established plantations, offering a critical tool to prevent long-term graft incompatibility. Intraspecific variation within M. fragrans cultivars was observed in the rpoB_trnC-GCA, trnS-UGA_psbZ and trnR-ACG_rrn5S intergenic spacer regions. UPGMA clustering distinctly separated the Myristica accessions into three discrete phylogenetic groups. Beyond rootstock management, the identified M. fragrans-specific marker can reliably authenticate nutmeg in commercial products, distinguishing it from potential adulterants like M. magnifica and M. andamanica. Furthermore, we report a species-specific marker for the endemic and IUCN red-listed vulnerable species, M. andamanica, which will be invaluable for its precise identification and conservation efforts. Our research provides an invaluable, easy-to-use toolkit for Myristica germplasm management, breeding programs and quality control of nutmeg products.

A basic premise of research on welfare state spending is that electoral incentives matter, with voters backing programme expansion and opposing retrenchment. However, the evidence supporting this premise is mixed. Departing from previous studies, we argue that these apparent null effects arise from an emphasis on the generosity of social benefits rather than their distribution. Shifting attention to the latter, we argue that individual preferences over the allocation of welfare spending depend on their relationship to economic vulnerability. Individuals in secure economic situations support schemes with benefits proportional to contributions, while those in more vulnerable positions favour systems based on recipient need. These heterogeneous preferences translate into public evaluations of policymaker performance, providing a pathway for the electoral connection. We test this argument in two stages. First, we use data from the European Social Survey to examine how individual precarity shapes preferences for needs-based versus contributory pensions. Second, we use the Executive Approval Database to assess how the composition of pension expenditures and perceptions of debt affect government support across eleven European welfare states from 1986 to 2019. Study findings provide evidence consistent with our theoretical expectations. Results highlight the micro-level foundations of policymakers’ electoral incentives and provide a path forward for specifying connections between the allocation of social policy spending and mass politics.

This article delves into the Republic of Colombia’s emigration policies and émigrés’ petitions to return to the new republican regime in the early 1820s. During the Spanish American Revolutions, thousands abandoned their homelands with the hope of eventually coming back. However, returning was not an easy endeavour. The influx of returnees sparked many questions for the nascent government. Consequently, émigrés and their relatives employed various strategies to facilitate the return of the former to Colombia. This article argues that the constant back-and-forth movements experienced by émigrés during the war allowed them to highlight the temporary condition of emigration and, therefore, to embrace or reject the status of émigrés strategically. Concerned by the doubts about their return, expatriates, many times, rejected the epithet of “émigré.” Aware of the politicization of the term, they emphasised that they did not abandon the country out of political loyalty but out of fear. Furthermore, they appealed to ideas of belonging to the republic, family reunification, and national reconciliation to advocate for their return and formal recognition as Colombian citizens. In doing so, expatriates left the label of “émigré” behind, challenging the Colombian government’s prior perception of emigration and promoting wider conceptions of republican citizenship.

Digital technologies provide a convenient and scalable approach to dietary assessment and personalised feedback, facilitating behaviour change. This is essential for reducing the prevalence of non-communicable diseases at a population level. However, the evaluation of the acceptability and feasibility of dietary feedback delivered via online platforms has not been thoroughly investigated. By utilising the term ‘system architecture’ to describe the essential components of the digital approach to capturing dietary feedback, this systematic review outlines the platform, dietary assessment methodology, reference values for assessing dietary intake, and elements of personalised dietary feedback. When reported, the acceptability and feasibility of personalised feedback were captured. OVID Medline, OVID Embase, Scopus via Elsevier, and Cinahl Plus via EBSCO identified 5,839 studies. Search terms included dietary assessment, feedback, and digital technologies. In total, 28 studies involving 301,271 participants were included. Food frequency questionnaires were the most commonly used dietary assessment method, accessed via web-based platforms. Dietary intake was commonly assessed using a diet quality index, and feedback was provided on food groups, often combined with a diet quality score or macronutrient analysis. While participant acceptance of personalised dietary feedback was generally high, the overall completion rates for acceptability questionnaires were low, and feasibility was seldom reported. Methods used to measure acceptability and feasibility varied, preventing comparisons across studies. Study quality was high; however, future research would benefit from the involvement of stakeholders and end-users in designing feedback messages.