Strain rate and stress are widely regarded as crucial indicators for quantifying glacier dynamics on sub-monthly scales. However, existing frameworks for quality assessment of both strain rate and stress in fast-moving glaciers remain insufficient, hindering the application of rheological analysis to complex dynamic natural processes. To address this gap, we first extract and evaluate the surface velocity fields and their gradients from Sentinel-2A/B imagery using the Normalised Cross-Correlation (NCC) approach for Helheim Glacier, eastern Greenland. The results indicate that the minimum time threshold significantly affecting velocity gradients is 10 days for the Sentinel-2A/B missions, and that the threshold varies with season. We further develop a method based on error theory to enhance the retrieval accuracy of strain rate and stress at sub-monthly baselines, thereby supporting high-resolution dynamic research on Helheim Glacier. Our evaluations demonstrate the applicability of the NCC method to sub-monthly time scales and rapidly changing regions, thereby contributing to the quantification of glacier changes in a warming world.

Commentators on the younger Pliny’s obituary of Silius Italicus (Ep. 3.7) have often remarked its chilly and emotionally distant tone. This article argues that Pliny’s stance towards Silius is more subtly antagonistic than has generally been realised. To that end, it explores various stratagems whereby Pliny strives to diminish Silius’ standing as politician and man of letters. Most important, Pliny problematises Silius’ suicide. He does so in two ways. The first is the terminological nebulousness of the clauus which, we are informed by Pliny, was the cause of Silius’ suicide. Perusal of Greek and Roman medical texts establishes that clauus can refer to a whole range of afflictions, some serious, others not, so that, in the absence of further clinical detail, it is difficult to determine whether the suicide was justified or not – especially since Pliny also lists a number of contingent circumstances which might have acted as a brake on Silius’ intention of killing himself. The second is to cast doubt on the philosophical, civic and familial validity of Silius’ suicide. All this stands in profound contrast to the expansive and highly apologist account of the suicide of Corellius Rufus (Ep. 1.12) which, in the article’s conclusion, is mined for the political implications to be drawn from it in relation both to Corellius and to Pliny himself.

The annelid genus Diopatra is a well-known example of marine ecosystem engineering, as it creates tubes in coastal sediments all around the world. In the Amazon coast, this annelid is common in intertidal estuarine areas and protected beaches. However, there are no data for the Amazon coast regarding studies on the meiofauna associated with Diopatra sp. tubes. Therefore, the present study characterized, for the first time, the meiofauna community found on a muddy-sandy tidal flat of the Amazon coast in areas with and without the presence of Diopatra sp. tubes. Samples were collected in February 2014 in two different areas: (1) an area in which Diopatra sp. tubes were present, and (2) an area without tubes. A total of 13 major meiofaunal groups were found, with Nematoda as the dominant group. Overall, a significant increase in meiofauna density and richness of the meiofauna was observed in the area with the presence of Diopatra sp. tubes. While no large aggregations of Diopatra sp. tubes were observed in the study region, the presence of even a single tube had significant effects on the environmental conditions available to the meiofauna community. The present findings add knowledge about the presence of the bioconstructor in coastal areas and reinforce the role of tube-building polychaetes as ecosystem engineers.

The widespread rise of renting unaffordability and gentrification across European cities has drawn attention to the social unsustainability of heavily financialized and privatized housing markets. Indeed, contemporary patterns of standardization and depoliticization of housing crises collide with the increasingly pronounced functional equivalence between tenancies and home-owning, as well as with future urbanization prospects. The Article departs from an understanding of housing crises as by-products of inter alia property relations to examine two distinct clusters of constitutional tension that define the European housing landscape. It then details the recalibration of renting profitability and the regulatory or “soft” asymmetrization of housing governance as defining features of a post- or counter-neoliberal movement within property’s constitutional politics. While profitability relativism readily aligns with the basic tenets of European social constitutionalism, the plural resistances of constitutional governance structures to the localist repoliticization of housing crises urges fresh thinking around the shifting geographies of urban homeownership politics.

Malgré le fait que le Nouveau-Brunswick est la seule province officiellement bilingue au Canada, l’accès aux soins de santé dans la langue officielle de la minorité semble demeurer un grand défi. La province est l’une de celles avec la plus grande proportion de personnes âgées de 65 ans et plus, dont 35 % sont francophones. Le but de cette étude qualitative de type théorisation ancrée était d’identifier comment les personnes aînées francophones en situation minoritaire accèdent aux soins en français. Des entrevues avec des personnes âgées provenant des trois communautés francophones minoritaires au N.-B. furent réalisées. Les résultats mettent en lumière le processus de « l’identité contre la vulnérabilité » en présentant six étapes qui illustrent le faible nombre d’actions entreprises pour accéder aux soins de santé en français. De plus, l’influence constante de facteurs extrinsèques et intrinsèques affecte l’étape où on s’identifie comme francophone, ce qui accentue la vulnérabilité de la personne aînée dans le système de santé.

The KP-I equation arises as a weakly nonlinear model equation for gravity-capillary waves with Bond number $\beta \gt 1/3$, also called strong surface tension. This equation has recently been shown to have a family of nondegenerate, symmetric ‘fully localized’ or ‘lump’ solitary waves which decay to zero in all spatial directions. The full-dispersion KP-I equation is obtained by retaining the exact dispersion relation in the modelling from the water-wave problem. In this paper, we show that the FDKP-I equation also has a family of symmetric fully localized solitary waves which are obtained by casting it as a perturbation of the KP-I equation and applying a suitable variant of the implicit-function theorem.

This study presents a framework that combines Bayesian inference with reinforcement learning to guide drone-based sampling for methane source estimation. Synthetic gas concentration and wind observations are generated using a calibrated model derived from real-world drone measurements, providing a more representative testbed that captures atmospheric boundary layer variability. We compare three path planning strategies—preplanned, myopic (short-sighted), and non-myopic (long-term)—and find that non-myopic policies trained via deep reinforcement learning consistently yield more precise and accurate estimates of both source location and emission rate. We further investigate centralized multi-agent collaboration and observe comparable performance to independent agents in the tested single-source scenario. Our results suggest that effective source term estimation depends on correctly identifying the plume and obtaining low-noise concentration measurements within it. Precise localization further requires sampling in close proximity to the source, including slightly upwind. In more complex environments with multiple emission sources, multi-agent systems may offer advantages by enabling individual drones to specialize in tracking distinct plumes. These findings support the development of intelligent, data-driven sampling strategies for drone-based environmental monitoring, with potential applications in climate monitoring, emission inventories, and regulatory compliance.

Private equity (PE) firms are increasingly investing in healthcare, seeking short-term returns through market consolidation, price increases, asset sales, and financial engineering. Although PE is transforming the healthcare sector, many countries lack systematic data to determine whether a regulatory response is warranted. Using data from PitchBook, we document substantial and growing PE investment in health care across 25 of 38 Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, totalling over 8,400 reported deals and $1.4 trillion in capital between 2013 and 2023. Outpatient clinics represent the dominant target of investment, while hospital and elder care sectors have attracted investments in select countries. Exploratory regression analyses suggest that PE firms are less likely to invest in countries with a social health insurance system and that PE deal volume is positively associated with health expenditures. Country-specific deviations from model predictions underscore the importance of unmeasured country-specific factors such as regulation, payment policy, and market competition. Eight case studies illustrate the operational, financial, and social implications of PE investments, as well as diverse regulatory contexts. Given the lack of disclosure requirements, a key policy priority for governments is to enhance transparency to enable effective monitoring of the financialisation of health care delivery.

This article examines the historical and ongoing role of public agricultural research and extension in shaping avocado production in southern Turkey. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, expert interviews, and documentary analysis, I find that the making of Turkey’s avocado production base owes to a century-long state involvement in agricultural research and development. Contrary to the assumption that global markets single-handedly shape contemporary production and export geographies in the global South, in the case of Turkey’s avocado production it is not the market per se, but extensionists on the ground who actively advocate for risk-taking, efficient, export-oriented production methods. Despite the push for export-oriented production, smallholders continue to prioritize the domestic market by choosing to produce locally popular and more cold-hardy cultivars that are less prone to frost damage. Findings suggest that while public agricultural research and development were indispensable in creating the material conditions for this high-value crop boom in southern Turkey, farmers’ agency and local contextual factors ultimately shape the trajectory of this production geography. The analysis also demonstrates a persistent disconnect between the state’s agricultural vision and farmers’ realities, which explains why the avocado boom has remained a primarily domestic, rather than export-oriented, phenomenon.

In fragile contexts, the state is sometimes unable to effectively perform some of its fundamental functions, such as the provision of public services, law-making, or territorial governance. Multinational corporations sometimes step in to perform these functions by leveraging their political power. On the one hand, this facilitates the enjoyment of fundamental rights for the affected citizens; on the other hand, it risks undermining the relationship between citizens and the state itself, further weakening its foundations. This paper aims to identify a normative criterion to navigate this phenomenon, drawing on theory of positive constitutionalism to do so.

Design creativity is an inherently complex and recursive cognitive process involving nonlinear transitions between distinct cognitive states. This experimental neurocognitive study provides empirical support for theoretical nonlinear and recursive models of design creativity by examining neurocognitive processes across design creativity cognitive states, including idea generation (IDG), idea evolution (IDE), rating process (IDR), and rest mode (RST). EEG signals were recorded during loosely controlled design creativity tasks, and 13 well-established features were extracted from recurrence quantification analysis (RQA). A feature selection pipeline identified the most significant features for distinguishing between the cognitive states. Statistical analyses of the features provided deeper insights into brain dynamics and confirmed the significance of the selected features, supported by EEG topography maps. The findings revealed distinct and complex recursive dynamics across cognitive states, primarily involving the frontal, parietal and central regions, offering novel insights complementary to prior EEG studies. We also classified the cognitive states using the selected significant features through six classification models: k-Nearest Neighbor, Support Vector Machine, Naïve Bayes, Multi-Layer Perceptron, Linear Discriminant Analysis and Random Forest. To ensure robust evaluation, we applied three cross-validation strategies – hold-out, k-fold and one-subject-out – and combined the classifiers using majority voting fusion. Classification results (10-fold cross-validation) demonstrated high performance, with an average accuracy (96.23%), kappa (93.56%), recall (96.58%), precision (98.08%), F1-score (97.29%) and specificity (98.43%). The study provides findings that are consistent with theoretical expectations. Consistent with theoretical expectations, the findings deepen understanding of recursive and nonlinear neural dynamics in design creativity cognition and guide future research.