Niall Crumlish (1974 – 2025) was a profoundly compassionate psychiatrist, uniquely gifted music journalist, and cherished husband, father, son, brother, and friend. He embodied humility, kindness, and compassion in all he did. Niall qualified in medicine from University College Dublin (UCD) in 1997; obtained membership of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 2002; graduated with a Masters degree (MSc) in Transcultural Mental Healthcare from Queen Mary University of London in 2009; and obtained the degree of Doctor of Medicine (MD) from UCD in 2014. During his clinical training, Niall spent 18 months at St John of God Mental Health Services in Mzuzu, Malawi, a country which left a deep impression on him. In 2010, Niall was appointed as Consultant General Adult Psychiatrist at St James’s Hospital, Dublin with the Camac sector where his sense of humour and generosity left a lasting impression on all who worked with him. Niall was an especially gifted writer about music with an unrivalled depth of knowledge and sensibility. He wrote voraciously for Hot Press magazine from 1993 onwards, where his contributions were widely acclaimed. Through his writings in various publications and on his blog ‘Psychiatry and Songs’, Niall created a body of work that is elegant and intelligent, eloquent and heartfelt, intimate and universal.

While deplatforming has become an increasingly common strategy to combat online harm and far-right extremism, its effects on the followers of extremist groups—who are key supporters and play a crucial role in spreading and sustaining these ideologies—remain underexplored. On August 10, 2018, Twitter (now X) deplatformed one such far-right extremist group, the Proud Boys, along with their affiliated accounts. Leveraging this intervention, our research addresses a key knowledge gap by examining the impact of deplatforming on the cohesion of extremist group followers. Specifically, we investigate whether deplatforming leads to fragmentation or reinforces unity among the group’s followers. We assess cohesion through three theoretical lenses: task commitment, social commitment, and sense of belonging. By analyzing over 12 million tweets from approximately nine thousand Proud Boys supporters between August 1, 2017, and September 1, 2019, we find that deplatforming had a limited effect on reducing group cohesion. Instead, it may have prompted followers to seek broader networks and external interactions, leaving overall cohesion largely intact. This study offers important insights into the resilience of online extremist communities and the limitations of deplatforming as a strategy to disrupt them. Understanding these dynamics is essential for developing more effective approaches to counter online extremism and promote safer digital spaces.

The cycling of carbon in riverine systems is a critical component of global carbon cycle research. However, the sources and performances of riverine carbon in the Qinling Mountains, a pivotal hydrological nexus in China, remain poorly understood. This study investigates the seasonal variations of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentration in the Tianyu River within the Qinling Mountains. By utilizing a combination of carbon isotopic signatures (Δ14C-δ13C) and the stepped-combustion method, we examined the sources of DOC and the contribution ratio of each end-member. Our findings reveal that: (1) the concentrations and dual carbon isotope ratios of DOC in the Tianyu River are influenced by regional climatic factors, exhibiting distinct seasonal patterns; (2) the 14C age of DOC in the Tianyu River is comparatively older than the global average for rivers but younger than that of China’s three major rivers (the Yellow, Yangtze, and Pearl Rivers); and (3) the DOC mainly comes from exogenous sources, with a proportion of about 85.8%–88.4%. Vegetation and riverine sediments are identified as primary contributors. These findings suggest that exemplary ecological preservation exists within the Qinling region while operating within an efficient carbon cycling system. This investigation provides initial insights into how regional climatic conditions influence riverine carbon cycles and enhances our understanding of biogeochemical processes related to carbon.

Animals routinely suffer violence by humans, especially during war, but it is unclear how much people in conflict environments express concern for animal welfare. Based on a 2,008-person survey in Ukraine in May 2024, we find that respondents are anthropocentric, prioritizing human over animal suffering; biocentric, regarding both as important; or, in a small minority, zoocentric, emphasizing animal over human suffering. Experimental priming on violence against animals during the Russia–Ukraine war has limited effect on changing attitudes toward animal welfare, but it does increase resource allocation to animal relief organizations. A war crimes punishment experiment also shows that while respondents sanction perpetrators of human suffering more severely than perpetrators of animal suffering, violence against animals is still strongly penalized, indicating appreciation for animal rights, justice, and accountability. We reflect on the implications of our findings for speciesist versus posthumanist understandings of suffering during war.

Cette étude propose une relecture inédite de la physique élémentaire d’Averroès à partir de trois questions laissées ouvertes par les textes d’Aristote : le statut des qualités premières, l’existence d’une intensité maximale de ces qualités, et la possibilité pour les corps simples d’exister à l’état pur. En croisant les commentaires au De caelo, au De generatione et corruptione et aux Meteorologica, son apport majeur consiste à faire apparaître, dans un corpus souvent lu à travers le seul prisme péripatéticien, l’influence structurante de Galien. En articulant les schèmes hylémorphiques d’Alexandre d’Aphrodise avec la théorie galénique des puissances naturelles, Averroès élabore une théorie du sensible inédite, critique à l’égard d’Avicenne, selon laquelle le cosmos est un système dynamique clos, dans lequel le mélange perpétuel, orchestré par le mouvement céleste, donne lieu à ce que l’on peut appeler une complexion cosmique : non pas un équilibre absolu, mais une somme réglée de complexions relatives, à la mesure de la diversité du sensible.

Psychotherapy chatbots have attained remarkable fluency, skill and ubiquity – having become the single most frequent reason people use artificial intelligence. Their uncanny ability to engage and validate is a two-edged sword – useful for the majority of users who are experiencing problems of everyday life or have milder mental disorders, but dangerous for the minority who have more severe problems (e.g. psychosis, bipolar disorder, self-mutilation, suicide, antisocial impulses, eating disorders, conspiracy theories, religious and political extremism). Chatbots are created to make money, without meaningful quality control, safety guardrails and external regulation. They will likely be misused to create addiction, reduce human contact, invade privacy, allow exploitation and create opportunities for marketing and political propaganda. Chatbots also make mistakes (’hallucinations’), deceptively cover them up and sometimes go rogue (acting outside the parameters set by their human programmers). Psychotherapy practitioners and associations are curiously complacent about the rapid emergence of artificial intelligence competition. Their passivity reflects ignorance about the power of chatbots, denial of their likely impact and arrogance regarding their capacities (e.g. ‘no machine will ever replace me’). This is both incorrect and foolhardy – human therapists expect to win in competition for most healthier patients and must train or retrain to do things artificial intelligence does poorly – working with the more seriously ill and in settings and situations that are more idiosyncratic, chaotic or quickly changing. If we can’t work with artificial intelligence, we are likely to be replaced by it. I will describe: (a) benefits of chatbot therapy, (b) its terrifying dangers, (c) its likely impact on human therapy and training and 4) ways we can adapt to the artificial intelligence threat.

Let $\Sigma$ be an alphabet and $\mu$ be a distribution on $\Sigma ^k$ for some $k \geqslant 2$. Let $\alpha \gt 0$ be the minimum probability of a tuple in the support of $\mu$ (denoted $\mathsf{supp}(\mu )$). We treat the parameters $\Sigma , k, \mu , \alpha$ as fixed and constant. We say that the distribution $\mu$ has a linear embedding if there exist an Abelian group $G$ (with the identity element $0_G$) and mappings $\sigma _i : \Sigma \rightarrow G$, $1 \leqslant i \leqslant k$, such that at least one of the mappings is non-constant and for every $(a_1, a_2, \ldots , a_k)\in \mathsf{supp}(\mu )$, $\sum _{i=1}^k \sigma _i(a_i) = 0_G$. In [Bhangale-Khot-Minzer, STOC 2022], the authors asked the following analytical question. Let $f_i: \Sigma ^n\rightarrow [\!-1,1]$ be bounded functions, such that at least one of the functions $f_i$ essentially has degree at least $d$, meaning that the Fourier mass of $f_i$ on terms of degree less than $d$ is at most $\delta$. If $\mu$ has no linear embedding (over any Abelian group), then is it necessarily the case that

\begin{equation*}\left | \mathop {\mathbb{E}}_{({\textbf {x}}_1, {\textbf {x}}_2, \ldots , {\textbf {x}}_k)\sim \mu ^{\otimes n}}[f_1({\textbf {x}}_1)f_2({\textbf {x}}_2)\cdots f_k({\textbf {x}}_k)] \right | = o_{d, \delta }(1),\end{equation*}

$\to 0$

$d \to \infty$

$\delta \to 0$

In this paper, we answer this analytical question fully and in the affirmative for $k=3$. We also show the following two applications of the result.

1. 1. The first application is related to hardness of approximation. Using the reduction from [5], we show that for every $3$-ary predicate $P:\Sigma ^3 \to \{0,1\}$ such that $P$ has no linear embedding, an SDP (semi-definite programming) integrality gap instance of a $P$-Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) instance with gap $(1,s)$ can be translated into a dictatorship test with completeness $1$ and soundness $s+o(1)$, under certain additional conditions on the instance.

2. 2. The second application is related to additive combinatorics. We show that if the distribution $\mu$ on $\Sigma ^3$ has no linear embedding, marginals of $\mu$ are uniform on $\Sigma$, and $(a,a,a)\in \texttt{supp}(\mu )$ for every $a\in \Sigma$, then every large enough subset of $\Sigma ^n$ contains a triple $({\textbf {x}}_1, {\textbf {x}}_2,{\textbf {x}}_3)$ from $\mu ^{\otimes n}$ (and in fact a significant density of such triples).

This article examines historical perceptions of the territorial extent of Bod, the Tibetan toponym for ‘Tibet’. In a bid to establish what area second-millennium authors (and audiences) may have pictured when this toponym was invoked, we analyse instructive passages from five historiographical works, mostly dating from between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries. The rough-hewn maps of Bod ‘Tibet’ that emerge from this procedure differ quite radically from one work to the next, and at times even between different passages from a single source. While one work may see ‘Tibet’ as the territory directly centered on the Tibetan Plateau’s south-central river valleys, another source may forward an image of a ‘Tibet’ that is thrice as large. Works may also allow for shifts in its borders from one political period to the next, or incorporate multiple incongruous territorial descriptions. This material helps answer what ‘Tibet’ meant in different periods and places, and to different people—questions that have only poorly been studied outside of modern political history. One relevant finding, among others, is that the notion of a ‘Tibet’ that covers a large part of the Tibetan Plateau, incorporating for instance sites in contemporary eastern Qinghai, was not in fact a modern innovation.

This article explores the systems of policing that emerged in the early Cape Colony (1652–1830). Contrary to previous historical scholarship that understood the institution to be largely nonexistent or of marginal importance to the colony’s political economic development, this article argues that the Cape colony’s systems of policing, which doubled as ad hoc military organizations, were not so much weak as privatized. It shows how this persistent tendency was motivated by the Dutch East India Company’s desire to maximize profits—though it manifested differently in different parts of the colony. Moreover, this article demonstrates that the mercantile economy that the company installed at the Cape ensured that private policing would become a vehicle of indigenous dispossession. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to the field of African carceral studies and understandings of processes of racialization in the early Cape.

This article is the introduction to the Special Issue on The Constitution of Political Economy. It provides an overview of six articles which in distinctive yet overlapping ways explore three key issues. First, how the economy and the polity are embedded in society. Second, how interdependence shapes institutional arrangements. Third, how different levels of aggregation determine levels of policy-making, notably the importance of intermediate institutions.

A new species of Blastulospongia Pickett and Jell, 1983 from the middle Cambrian Devoncourt Limestone, Georgina Basin, Australia exhibits distinct perforation patterns characteristic of sphinctozoans. Recognition as a sphinctozoan-grade sponge confirms the poriferan affinity of this enigmatic genus, which appeared prior to the development of other hypercalcified sponge forms of chaetetids and stromatoporoids. Blastulospongia bouliaensis new species occurs together with four species of primitive spicular radiolarians: Echidnina irregularis Won in Won and Iams, 2002, Parechidnina aspinosa Won in Won and Below, 1999, Palaeospiculum reedae Won in Won and Below, 1999, and Palaeospiculum devoncourtensis Won in Won and Below, 1999. Micro-computed tomographic (MCT) analysis of Parechidnina aspinosa reveals its skeletal construction through the fusion of unirayed spicules, indicating a close phylogenetic link with archeoentactinids. Blastulospongia bouliaensis n. sp. and Palaeospiculum devoncourtensis represent promising Miaolingian accessory species for biostratigraphy during the Drumian-Guzhangian interval.

UUID: http://zoobank.org/a74cdd4d-6bc3-427b-bf4c-d4f0b79a5c91

A large empirical literature examines how judges’ traits affect how cases get resolved. This literature has led many to conclude that judges matter for case outcomes. But how much do they matter? Existing empirical findings understate the true extent of judicial influence over case outcomes since standard estimation techniques hide some disagreement among judges. We devise a machine learning method to reveal additional sources of disagreement. Applying this method to the Ninth Circuit, we estimate that at least 38% of cases could be decided differently based solely on the panel they were assigned to.