Rapid demographic changes and heavy reliance on informal care pose significant challenges to meeting long-term care (LTC) needs in China. Understanding changes in unmet LTC needs across different times and places can inform future LTC system planning and care resource allocation, identifying emerging care needs and services gaps in different regions. Drawing on data from 6,030 urban and 5,070 rural residents in the Chinese Longitudinal Health Longevity Survey 2005–2017/18, this study investigates variations in unmet LTC needs across different age groups, periods and birth cohorts among Chinese older adults and their place-based rural–urban differences. We applied the age-period-cohort interaction model to disentangle the three temporal processes, and found that, overall, rural older adults experienced higher risk of unmet LTC needs and had larger variation in age effects, yet the age, period and cohort effects on unmet needs among rural older people differed from their urban counterparts. Although ‘younger’ older adults (aged below 85) had fewer care needs than older adults, they had a higher risk of experiencing unmet needs. The risk of having unmet needs did not change significantly over the 12 years, though unmet LTC needs were more pronounced among more-recent cohorts than previous generations, especially in urban areas. The findings contribute to the social gerontology debate regarding changing patterns in unmet LTC needs, and provide crucial policy insights, underscoring the necessity of targeted interventions to address ‘younger’ older adults’ care needs and increased investmed in the formal LTC system to tackle the escalating care gap.

The concept of the organic serves as a keyword capturing emerging practices and epistemologies through which Africans navigate increasingly toxic lifeworlds. Noting a growing preoccupation with this term, the authors unpack its meaning based on their ethnographic fieldwork concerning two East African idioms: kienyeji and kiasili. What it means to be(come) organic is tied to older notions such as life flow, tradition, and the natural. Tracing how this concept engages with central themes in Africanist debates, the authors demonstrate that an Africanist theorizing about it foregrounds critical claims about the vitality of bodies and the viability of environments.

This article deals with multilayer substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) six-port junctions with embedded carbon resistive films. SIW six-ports usually employ reactive power dividers, which degrade the amplitude and phase balance when the six-port is terminated with mismatched power detectors. The associated impairments are studied and two SIW six-port junctions with improved isolation and output matching are designed for K-/Ka-band applications to overcome these limitations. The proposed designs differ with respect to the configuration of the output ports making the underlying six-port topology applicable for different layout requirements. Measurements of the fabricated components validate the concept. The six-ports are compact, fully shielded and can be integrated in multilayer printed circuit boards.

This article sets out to explain why Nigeria was unable to prevent the loss of heritage objects in the 1960s and 1970s. Obvious answers to this question would include the limited enforcement capacity of the African state and the complacency of European and North American art dealers. “How Our Heritage Is Looted” argues, however, that a colonial legal category, namely “antiquity,” played a key role in creating an ineffective enforcement regime for cultural property theft. The mismatch between the ordinary meaning of the term “antiquity,” denoting a remnant of an ancient civilization, and the kinds of modern crafts that the state wanted to protect ultimately resulted in the inability of Nigeria’s colonial preservation statute to convey clear rules to customs officers and museum curators about what exporters could take out of the country. Nigeria’s heritage law thus constituted a project of legal meaning-making whose failure facilitated illicit commerce.

In this paper, a low-profile antenna with characteristic of reconfigurable of dual bands’ pattern for 5G New Radio (NR) communication is proposed to mitigate the problems of signal fading and multipath propagation. The design incorporates a turnstile-shaped patch, a circular patch with etched rectangular slots and a discontinuous ring patch. The circular patch with etched rectangular slots and discontinuous ring patch are placed in the same plane to obtain dual band characteristic. The discontinuous ring patch works as a near-field resonant parasitic unit to improve the front-to-back ratio values at the resonance points and adjust the beam direction. Eight diodes are loaded to control the connection states of the rectangle slots on the circular patch. By combining an electric dipole formed by diode-controlled slot with a magnetic dipole formed by the turnstile-shaped patch, then a dual-band antenna with diverse patterns is designed. The measured results show that the designed antenna has dual-band characteristics and operates in the bands of 3.39–3.62 GHz and 4.77–5.01 GHz with peak gains of 3.6 dBi and 4.2 dBi, respectively. Furthermore, the measured radiation pattern results show that it is feasible to reconfigure the pattern in both bands simultaneously at 45° intervals.

Reducing loneliness amongst older people is an international public health and policy priority, with signs of decreasing importance in the UK. A growing body of research on tackling loneliness indicates it is a complex challenge. Most interventions imply they address loneliness, when in fact they offer social connectedness to address social isolation and can inadvertently responsibilise the individual for the causes and solutions for loneliness. This article presents research that explored loneliness in an underprivileged community in South Wales through interviews and focus groups with nineteen older people and eighteen local service providers. Their perspective supports a growing body of evidence that loneliness amongst older people is driven by wider structural and socio-cultural exclusion. Interventions to build social connections will be more effective if coupled with policies that reverse the reduction in public services (including transport and healthcare), and challenge socio-cultural norms, including a culture of self-reliance and ageism.

Al-Hoorie et al. (2024: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1–23) illuminate a validation crisis within the second language (L2) Motivational Self System (L2MSS), revealing empirical flaws in its current measurement. Their analysis indicates a persistent lack of discriminant validity among the system’s constructs, issuing a fundamental challenge in distinguishing the concepts. These findings, echoing previous concerns, underscore a pressing need for theoretical refinement and methodological rigor within the field, leading the authors to advocate for a temporary halt in L2 self-studies to address these issues comprehensively. This commentary discusses the call for a substantive moratorium presented by Al-Hoorie et al. (2024: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1–23) as a necessary step toward resolving persistent challenges in the field. By highlighting historical issues and suggesting pathways for theoretical diversification and methodological advancement, I aim to foster a productive dialogue on motivational psychology in language learning while ensuring empirical robustness.

The obligation of stability generally requires host States to maintain a relatively stable regulatory framework to mitigate political risks facing foreign investments. It has played a significant role in international investment tribunals’ review of host States’ renewable energy transition policies. This paper critically reviews tribunals’ interpretation of the obligation with a particular focus on the Spanish cases involving renewable energy incentive schemes. It canvasses the two ‘dimensions’ adopted by investment tribunals in the interpretation of stability, namely the protection of legitimate expectations and States’ right to regulate for public purposes. Examining the contents of the two dimensions separately, this paper argues that legal stability should be disentangled from the notion of legitimate expectations and be assessed through the reasonableness of regulatory changes per se. It further argues that an intrusive interpretation of legal stability lacks legal and institutional bases; instead, more deferential standards should be adopted in the review of renewable energy transition policies.

Bioethics education in residency helps trainees achieve many of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education milestones and gives them resources to respond to bioethical dilemmas. For this purpose, The Providence Center for Health Care Ethics has offered a robust clinical ethics rotation since 2000. The importance of bioethics for residents was highlighted as the COVID-19 pandemic raised significant bioethical concerns and moral distress for residents. This, combined with significant COVID-19-related practical stressors on residents led us to develop a virtual ethics rotation. A virtual rotation allowed residents flexibility as they were called to help respond to the unprecedented demands of a pandemic without compromising high quality education. This virtual rotation prioritized flexibility to support resident wellbeing and ethical analysis of resident experiences. This article describes how this rotation was able to serve residents without overstraining limited bandwidth, and address the loci of resident pandemic distress. As pandemic pressures lessened, The Providence Center for Health Care Ethics transitioned to a hybrid rotation which continues to prioritize resident wellbeing and analysis of ongoing stressors while incorporating in-person elements where they can improve learning. This article provides a description of the rotation in its final form and resident feedback on its effectiveness.

Dietary Mn intake may have a beneficial effect in reducing cancer risk; however, its association with thyroid cancer (TC) risk remains inadequately understood. Additionally, Mn was associated with inflammation markers. Thus, we examined whether dietary Mn intake emerges a protective role against TC and whether this preventative effect has an interaction with IL1 receptor type 1 (IL1R1) rs3917225. The prospective study was designed at National Cancer Center in Korea between October 2007 and December 2020 including 17 754 participants. We identified TC cases by following participants until December 2020. Mn intake was collected using a semiquantitative food frequency questionnaire (SQFFQ). Genotyping was performed to determine IL1R1 rs3917225. The hazard ratios (HR) and 95 % confidence interval (CI) were calculated with a Cox proportional hazards model. We ascertained 108 incident TC cases throughout follow-up duration. Dietary Mn intake was found to be inversely associated with TC risk (HR (95 % CI)=0·64 (0·44, 0·95)). However, IL1R1 rs3917225 seemed to modify this association; the protective effect was limited to G-allele carriers (HR = 0·30 (0·11, 0·86), P interaction=0·028). A higher dietary Mn was suggested to be a protective factor against TC. Additionally, we drew a potential biological interaction between Mn intake and IL1R1 rs3917225 with a greater effect among individuals with a minor allele. This implies that when considering the cancer-preventive role of Mn, it is important to account for the influence of inflammatory gene participation.

In this work, we propose a novel approach for tomato pollination that utilizes visual servo control. The objective is to meet the growing demand for automated robotic pollinators to overcome the decline in bee populations. Our approach focuses on addressing this challenge by leveraging visual servo control to guide the pollination process. The proposed method leverages deep learning to estimate the orientations and depth of detected flower, incorporating CAD-based synthetic images to ensure dataset diversity. By utilizing a 3D camera, the system accurately estimates flower depth information for visual servoing. The robustness of the approach is validated through experiments conducted in a laboratory environment with a 3D printed tomato flower plant. The results demonstrate a high detection rate, with a mean average precision of 91.2 %. Furthermore, the average depth error for accurately localizing the pollination target is impressively minimal, measuring only 1.1 cm. This research presents a promising solution for tomato pollination, showcasing the effectiveness of visual-guided servo control and its potential to address the challenges posed by diminishing bee populations in greenhouses.

We study a maximal average along a family of curves $\{(t,m(x_1)\gamma(t)):t\in [-r,r]\}$, where $\gamma|_{[0,\infty)}$ is a convex function and m is a measurable function. Under the assumption of the doubling property of $\gamma'$ and $1\leqslant m(x_1)\leqslant 2$, we prove the $L^p(\mathbb{R}^2)$ boundedness of the maximal average. As a corollary, we obtain the pointwise convergence of the average in r > 0 without any size assumption for a measurable m.

This paper presents a pattern reconfigurable antenna that accomplishes wideband and multibeam characteristics. The antenna design comprises a cross-slot radiator as the primary element and reconfigurable partially reflecting surface (PRS) layer placed above and below the cross-slot radiator. This configuration allows the antenna to adapt its radiation patterns effectively. The choice of the cross-slot radiator is based on its capability to offer wideband characteristics. The PRS layer consists of a precisely arranged array of 4×4 unit cells, incorporating PIN diodes into both the upper and lower PRS layers. The direction of radiation pattern can be changed by altering operating states of the PIN diodes on the PRS layer. The antenna operates in three distinct states, each exhibiting a unique radiation pattern. The antenna produces broadside, backward, and bidirectional radiation patterns. It demonstrates effective pattern reconfigurability across the frequency range of 3.10–3.86 GHz (21.71%), with a peak gain of 9.60 dBi. The simulated and measured results of the antenna are found to be in good agreement.