Cogongrass [Imperata cylindrica (L.) P. Beauv.] is a recalcitrant invasive grass widespread in the southeastern United States. In non-crop systems, management relies on foliar applications of glyphosate and imazapyr; multiple applications over several years are often required, increasing labor, logistical, and chemical costs. Although numerous herbicide alternatives have been evaluated, few match the efficacy of glyphosate or imazapyr. Glufosinate is a broad-spectrum herbicide, and demand for glyphosate alternatives has generated interest in its potential for invasive grass management, but long-term evaluations of glufosinate and tank mixes for I. cylindrica are limited. This study evaluated single foliar spot applications of glufosinate (2.0 kg ae ha−1) alone and in tank mixtures with glyphosate (3.4 kg ae ha−1) or imazapyr (1.1 kg ae ha−1) at three Florida field sites heavily invaded (88% to 92% cover) by I. cylindrica using percent cover and belowground biomass. All treatments containing glufosinate produced rapid foliar necrosis, reducing cover to 15% to 21% within 14 days after treatment (DAT). By 270 DAT, cover increased in the glufosinate-alone (43%) and glufosinate + glyphosate (42%) treatments but remained approximately 25 to 30 percentage points lower than the control. At 540 DAT, cover in these treatments did not differ from that in the control. Across all sites, I. cylindrica cover at 540 DAT was reduced relative to the control by glyphosate (37%), imazapyr (9%), imazapyr + glufosinate (7%), and imazapyr + glyphosate (11%). Notably, the imazapyr + glufosinate mixture produced both rapid and sustained reductions in I. cylindrica cover. These results suggest glufosinate alone provides short-term suppression of aboveground tissue but can be enhanced through tank mixing with soil-active herbicides such as imazapyr to improve long-term suppression of belowground meristems.

Large-language models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing and opened new possibilities for the computational social sciences and digital humanities. Yet translating historical sources remains difficult because early modern varieties are scarcely represented in contemporary training corpora and because standard tokenizers fragment their non-standard orthography. This article tackles these gaps by adapting open LLMs to early modern Dutch-to-English translation and advances two concrete contributions: (i) a memory-efficient fine-tuning workflow that runs on a single consumer GPU, comparing order-reward policy optimization with the Unsloth supervised fine-tuning approach and (ii) a verifiable evaluation protocol that combines embedding-based metrics with systematic expert review. Experiments on testimonial texts (1680–1792) show that fine-tuning choice decisively shapes quality: the Unsloth-tuned Mistral model attains the highest BERTScore and METEOR values and most faithfully preserves historical nuance. The framework supports a collaborative workflow where machine-generated drafts accelerate expert translation, making archival texts more accessible while maintaining scholarly oversight through domain-expert validation.

Studying social behaviour of mobile and cryptic marine mammals is challenging, particularly for small species like harbour porpoises whom in many areas tend to be challenging to initially spot and then gain repeated observations. Recently, there has been a rise in the number of observations of harbour porpoises occurring in atypical group sizes that are larger than the typical size of two to three individuals. This behaviour, in conjunction with the evolving availability and usability of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology, is supporting and improving the capture of information on social behaviours. Around Shetland, Scotland, harbour porpoises are sighted from land via opportunistic and systematic surveys year-round with atypical group sizes also observed. To capture information on group size, opportunistic and systematically collected UAV footage were collated and analysed. This revealed sexual approach behaviours in typical group sizes of small groups (two to four individuals), as well as atypical group sizes of medium groups (five to nine individuals), large groups (10 to 19 individuals), and aggregations (≥20 individuals) occur in multiple bays around Shetland. This is the first insight into group sizes and behaviours for the region which was recently designated as an Important Marine Mammal Area (IMMA). Further insight into these social behaviours and group size (e.g. seasonality, site fidelity) could aid harbour porpoise conservation and management within the IMMA and elsewhere.

We investigate whether judges’ political ideology affects corporate tax behaviors. We find that firms engaging in less aggressive tax planning when Circuit Court judges are more liberal. Cross-sectionally, the deterrent effect of liberal judge ideology is more pronounced for firms that engage in judiciary-sensitive tax strategies, face higher enforcement risk from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), or have larger reputational costs from tax disputes. Our findings further suggest that liberal judge ideology reduces firms’ R&D investments and market value by constraining tax planning. Overall, our evidence highlights the importance of judge ideology for firm behavior in the context of corporate tax planning.

The suitability of marine limpet shells for radiocarbon dating may depend on potential offsets due to diet and habitat, especially with regard to grazing mollusks on carbonate substrates (Dye 1994; England et al. 2013). A previous study on one grazing limpet species on the coast of Ireland found no offsets from carbonate substrates (Allen et al. 2019), but a similar study from mediterranean coasts found significant offsets on carbonate substrates (Ferguson et al. 2011). We carried out a new study of radiocarbon and stable carbon isotopes, using multiple species of mollusks collected live from the coasts of Gibraltar and Sardinia, from both carbonate and non-carbonate substrates. The 14C results indicate that one species, inhabiting the upper shore, has a significant offset at the carbonate locations. This species, Patella rustica, has adapted to tolerate desiccation and may have biological traits that result in higher metabolic-derived carbon incorporated in its shell. The results of this preliminary study imply that selected species of grazing mollusks are suitable for radiocarbon dating, even in areas of carbonate geology.

This article explores the evolving Chinese representations of Queen Victoria from the First Opium War (1839) to her Diamond Jubilee (1897), beginning with early Qing official histories that deliberately omitted or delegitimized her presence, portraying her implicitly as a female usurper whose rule violated Confucian gender norms and dynastic orthodoxy. Such initial silencing is later juxtaposed with increasingly complex portrayals across a broad spectrum of textual and visual sources, including painting captions, diplomatic travelogues, private poems, newspaper reports, and illustrations. Focusing on envoys like Binchun, whose cautious official diary contrasts with his more admiring private poetry, and Zhang Zuyi, whose pseudonymous writings convey ambivalence and critique, the essay examines how rhetorical strategies were shaped by genre, anonymity, and audience. The analysis also extends to popular and elite print culture, particularly Dianshizhai Pictorial and Shenbao, to trace how Queen Victoria’s image circulated among both literate and semiliterate readers. Throughout, the article argues that acts of translation and mediation—visual, linguistic, and ideological—shaped not only perceptions of the British monarch but also reflected the fractured modernity of the Qing empire. The study contributes to global Victorian studies by foregrounding non-Western receptions and complicating imperial iconography through a Sinocentric lens.

Food systems sustainability has interested researchers for decades; one area of interest is developing methods to measure it in various contexts. Our review of the literature finds many studies that have posited metrics and indicators for measuring sustainability in the food system, with most of them relying on secondary data rather than direct inquiry of stakeholders like farmers. This Preliminary Report presents results of farmer perceptions of sustainability, focusing on consumer-facing agriculture (direct market and agritourism) farms in Vermont, as part of the first phase of research in one of a set of projects aimed at developing sustainability metrics. We emphasize metrics that can be used for farm management, marketing, and policy advocacy, and add two dimensions (human and production) to the more common three (ecological, economic, and social). Using interviews from six case studies, we posit indicators across five dimensions of sustainability and identify tradeoffs in achieving them, emphasizing the farmers’ experiences. Our discussion compares and contrasts our results with the literature. Results will form the basis of a statewide farmer survey, which will be conducted in the next year.

Ever since the advent of recombinant DNA technology in the early 1970s concerns have been expressed about the misuse potential of this and subsequent biotechnology breakthroughs. This article focuses on the securitization of gain-of-function (GOF) virology research in the United States, utilizing an updated theoretical framework that distinguishes between “riskification” and “threatification.” The paper examines three distinct cases, two historical, one ongoing. It argues that early attempts to govern GOF research primarily employed a riskification approach, characterized by self-governance by the scientific community. However, the controversy over the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic led to a shift toward threatification, bringing in high-level political actors like the U.S. President and Congress, resulting in the adoption of more restrictive, legally-enforced oversight measures. The article concludes that the application of this theoretical distinction provides a better understanding of how the governance of dual-use research has evolved in the United States.

The frequency and severity of disasters are increasing, and promoting the adoption of digital technologies could enhance the agility, reach, and resilience of humanitarian supply chains. Global patterns of digital innovation in humanitarian supply chains are examined through a systematic quantitative literature review and bibliometric analysis of 4,780 Scopus-indexed documents (2015–2025). Combined with targeted qualitative syntheses, co-word analysis, co-citation mapping, and bibliographic coupling, the analysis reveals digitalisation as an expanding technology-led field, dominated by response-phase applications. Dominant clusters centre on: artificial intelligence-driven forecasting, emerging logistics optimisation, last-mile operations, and data analytics platforms. We interpreted these patterns through the Technology–Organisation–Environment model. It is found that digital technologies are necessary and applicable throughout disaster management phases. A conceptual framework reconfigures Technology–Organisation–Environment domains reflecting the context-driven dynamics of humanitarian supply chains, emphasising resilience. Future research should focus on longitudinal, co-designed case and action research into digital adoption, integration challenges, and community-based knowledge in fostering innovation.

The presence of right-to-left shunt has been proposed as a prominent mechanism of paradoxical embolism in patients with active cancer. We conducted a retrospective observational study including patients presenting to the Ottawa Hospital between January 2020 and December 2022 with ischemic stroke with and without active cancer. Among 491 patients (36.9% female, median age 53), 43 (8.8%) had active cancer, with 12 (27.9%, 95% CI 15–44) having a shunt. Of 448 patients without cancer, 133 (29.7%, 95% CI 25–34) had a shunt. Overall, our finding does not support the hypothesis that cancer-associated stroke is related to right-to-left shunting.

Karapetrović conjectured that the norm of the Hilbert matrix operator on the Bergman space $A^p_\alpha $ is equal to $\pi /\sin ((2+\alpha )\pi /p)$ when $-1<\alpha <p-2$. In this article, we provide a proof of this conjecture for $0\leq \alpha \leq \frac {6p^3-29p^2+17p-2+2p\sqrt {6p^2-11p+4}}{(3p-1)^2}$, and this range of $\alpha $ improves the best known result when $\alpha>\frac {1}{47}$ and $\alpha \not =1$.

Several authors have investigated the structure of groups in which each subgroup satisfies a property $\mathcal {X}$ or a property which is antagonistic to $\mathcal {X}$. This point of view will be adopted here, considering groups in which each subgroup is either nearly normal or contranormal.

A pair of Dehn fillings on a compact, orientable 3-manifold M with a torus boundary $\partial M$ is said to be purely cosmetic if the resulting 3-manifolds are orientation-preservingly homeomorphic. In this article, we show that if $\partial M$ is incompressible, then there are only finitely many pairs of purely cosmetic fillings.

En la segunda década del siglo XXI, varios países latinoamericanos vivieron un ciclo de movilizaciones que antecedió a campañas presidenciales marcadas por la disputa entre candidaturas de izquierdas y derechas. En algunos casos, los actores que participaron de los estallidos respaldaron a candidatos de izquierda; en otros, no. Con base en esta variación este artículo analiza los factores que incidieron en ese apoyo en Ecuador, Perú, Chile y Colombia (2021–2022). Se plantea que dicho respaldo depende de la inclusión programática de sus reivindicaciones y de las estrategias de cooperación o conflicto con las candidaturas. El análisis se desarrolla a través de un rastreo de procesos, utilizando una revisión documental de prensa, programas de gobierno y comunicados. Se concluye que los conflictos endógenos y exógenos entre actores movilizados y candidaturas presidenciales son el factor más relevante para explicar el apoyo o rechazo hacia coaliciones de izquierda.

Political science is a field rich in multimodal information sources, from televised debates to parliamentary briefings. This paper bridges a gap between computer and political science in multimodal data analysis using audio. The adoption of multimodal analyses in political science (e.g., video/audio with text-as-data approaches) has been relatively slow due to unequal distribution of computational power and skills needed. We provide solutions to challenges encountered when analyzing audio, advancing the potential for multimodal data analysis in political science. Using a dataset of all televised U.S. presidential debates from 1960 to 2020, we focus on three features encountered when analyzing audio data: low-level descriptors (LLDs), such as pitch or energy; Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs); and audio embeddings/encodings, like Wav2Vec. We showcase four applications: (a) forced alignment of audio text using MFCCs, time-stamping transcripts, and speaker information; (b) speech characterization using LLDs; (c) custom-made classification models with audio embeddings and MFCCs; and (d) emotional recognition models using Wav2Vec for classification of discrete emotions and their valence-arousal dominance. We provide explanations to help understand how these features can be applied for different political research questions and advice on vigilance to naive interpretation, for both experienced researchers and those who want to start working with audio.

Radiocarbon dating by accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) requires transforming samples into graphite, a step that typically depends on liquid nitrogen and high-purity carrier gases, increasing both cost and operational complexity. We present μGRAPHILINE, a fully automated, modular combustion–graphitization line that removes these dependencies by combining dual-zone combustion with iron–zinc reduction. Performance was evaluated on more than 180 standards and reference materials targets measured on two independent AMS systems. The μGRAPHILINE consistently achieved >90% graphitization yields, stable backgrounds of ∼0.24 pMC (≈48,500 BP), and sample throughput of ∼3.5 hours per target. Reliable operation was demonstrated for a broad sample-size range, from routine 1 mg C down to ∼0.2 mg C, with ion currents sufficient for precise AMS analysis. The system’s automation, modularity, and low memory effect support improved laboratory throughput and operator efficiency. These results indicate that μGRAPHILINE provides a robust and efficient approach to radiocarbon sample preparation with broad potential applications.