This article analyses the American influences that contributed to Polish Jewish violinist Bronislaw Huberman’s (1882–1947) establishment of the Palestine Symphony Orchestra in 1936. Although Huberman is remembered for his pivotal role in the orchestra’s creation, his political and musical vision was significantly shaped by his visits to the United States, beginning in the 1920s. These experiences transformed him into a prominent advocate of the Pan-Europe movement and a vocal critic of the Nazi regime. This paper argues that American ideals and cultural dynamics played a crucial role in shaping the orchestra’s identity and vision. Ultimately, it demonstrates that the Palestine Symphony Orchestra’s formation was not solely rooted in its German origins but was also influenced by American values and aspirations.

Antimicrobial stewardship programs (ASP) serve as a valuable resource to healthcare institutions. This commentary explores a real world demonstration of the potential advantages and pitfalls of using artificial intelligence (AI) in ASP, both in supporting the development of institutional guidelines and in providing a cost-effectiveness analysis of these protocols, as well as the caution that should be exercised when involving AI in stewardship.

International Humanitarian Law (IHL) seeks to restrain violence in war, yet its influence depends not primarily on codification or formal commitment, but on how legal judgment becomes embedded within military institutions. This article examines how IHL became operationally consequential in the United States military through a process of institutional translation. Drawing on new institutionalist perspectives, it traces how Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps officers secured sustained access to command decision-making by rendering humanitarian norms operationally intelligible and strategically relevant. Across four historical episodes—from the postwar creation of an independent JAG Corps, through Vietnam and Grenada, to the consolidation of Operational Law in the Gulf War and its subsequent strain in counterterrorism operations—the article shows how legal expertise became embedded within planning cycles, targeting processes, and rules of engagement. This institutionalization produced a structural paradox: IHL gained unprecedented influence by becoming useful to military strategy, yet that very usefulness reshaped the meaning of restraint within strategic decision-making. The article argues that law’s influence in war is conditional and institutionally mediated: the pathway that makes legal norms consequential also exposes their humanitarian content to strategic redirection.

The answer to the question, “Is Roger Bacon’s scientific practice scientific?” concerns an assessment of whether Bacon’s scientific practice exhibits traits of modern science. This paper uses the theoretical framework proposed by Hon and Goldstein (2023) for defining modern science, which identifies three salient, constitutive features: commitment, methodology and technique. These features function together as a skeleton of the argumentative structure which combines presuppositions and rules of inference to reach a conclusion. The fundamental assumption is that scientific knowledge is argumentative. Against this background we examine three scientific results that Bacon included in his Opus majus. Although Bacon’s methodology involves the use of geometrical proofs and his technique employs diagrams and geometrical analysis of the relations embedded in them—both features seemingly indicative of modern scientific practice—a characteristic alien to modern practice surfaces in the feature Hon and Goldstein refer to as “commitment.” Specifically, Bacon’s commitment is rooted in theology and its dependence on sacred scripture. It is this characteristic that sets Bacon’s scientific practice apart from modern science. In a nutshell, Bacon’s commitment implies that final causes are not directly and fully known from the natural world but are revealed through scripture. Consequently, since understanding the nature of a thing requires knowing all four Aristotelian causes, those ignorant of sacred scripture cannot grasp the final cause and thus miss the true nature of the thing. It thus follows that Bacon’s approach is not what we associate with modern science.

The article compares children’s singing behaviours from China and England, using similar materials and research protocol. In total, N = 5,037 singing performances were collected from Chinese and English Primary school students who had received no specialist singing training other than in their regular music classes. Chinese participants showed a similar level of development across different age groups as their English peers, with assessed singing competency generally increasing with age, especially for children aged ≤ 8 years. Girls generally showed more advanced singing behaviour developmentally than boys in the various age groups in both countries. Any sex difference in singing behaviour was smaller for younger children (age < 7 years).

We use economic experiments to study a fundamental question in political economy: Do voters understand the benefits of taxes? Participants play an economic game as members of a virtual society composed of computer players. In each round, the players earn low or high income, see the distribution of income, and then vote for low or high taxes. We test whether participants vote rationally for high taxes when poor and low taxes when rich, following a classic model in political economy, or whether they focus on the burden of taxes more than the benefits. Across three experiments, poor players voted against high taxes 30% to 50% of the time, and they were more opposed when the same policy was labeled “taxes” than when it was labeled “sharing.” In Experiment 2, Singaporean participants opposed taxes at about the same rate as those of Americans in Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, participants’ opposition to taxes persisted when they received low income every round. These results support the burden hypothesis: voters focus more on the burden of paying taxes than on the benefits they provide. We reflect on what the results imply for the politics of taxes.

In this single-center, retrospective cohort study of 1169 patients requiring outpatient parenteral antimicrobial therapy, complications (i.e., bloodstream infections or venous thrombosis) occurred more frequently in patients with midlines (6.4 per 1,000 line-days) than peripherally inserted central catheters (1.1 per 1,000 line-days), adjusted hazard ratio 3.60 (95% confidence interval 1.66–7.81).

Domain-specific epistemic priorities determine which procedures for solving computational models are accepted in a given domain. Tractability assessments thus depend on how disciplines resolve epistemic trade-offs, and ignoring this domain-specificity renders the notion of tractability underspecified. I argue that recognizing domain-specific tractability standards reveals an overlooked challenge to model transfer: skepticism about a model’s suitability as a computational device in the new domain. Based on the case of a hybrid agent-based model in macroeconomics, I demonstrate that this challenge can sometimes be mitigated by reformulating the model’s representational mode to align with the new domain’s tractability standard.

Neonatal ectopic atrial tachycardia is a rare arrhythmia that may be resistant to conventional therapy. We report a neonate with persistent foetal tachycardia refractory to flecainide and digoxin. Ivabradine resulted in rapid and sustained heart rate reduction without haemodynamic compromise. This case supports ivabradine as a therapeutic option in neonatal automatic tachycardias when standard treatments fail.

Octocorals of the genus Heliopora are known to be abundant and to be capable of building large mono-specific stands on Indo-Pacific coral reefs. They have a calcium carbonate skeleton and although they are zooxanthellate, they have been observed to resist threats that have a negative impact on other reef-building corals, such as long periods of elevated seawater temperatures, and population outbreaks of predators, such as corallivorous Acanthaster crown-of-thorns sea stars. On the other hand, Heliopora corals can be harmed by aggressive competitors for space, but how they attack Heliopora is not well documented. Here, we illustrate examples from Indonesia in which Heliopora corals are overgrown and overtopped by corals of Porites rus and the genus Montipora. The nature of these interactions is discussed, and a hypothetical future scenario is presented in which Heliopora may become a more successful competitor and a more common reef coral species than it is today.

How do armed groups waging asymmetrical wars assert political and legal subjectivity in an international order that historically excluded them? This article recovers the FLN’s groundbreaking legal activism during the Algerian War of Independence, arguing that it staged the most far-reaching challenge of its kind to international humanitarian law’s (IHL) imperial order from below through South–South legal politics. Acting as norm entrepreneurs, FLN jurists contested the existing limits on IHL’s scope and applicability while developing new institutional practices of insurgent normativity that established a disseminable model for other armed groups. In doing so, they put forward a set of legal arguments and practices that helped structure how later armed groups would invoke and substantially develop IHL under conditions of asymmetry. Based on previously inaccessible Algerian, Southern African, and state socialist archival materials, this article deepens existing accounts of normative change by reconstructing the concrete legal practices, institutional strategies, and legal-political thought through which Southern actors challenged IHL and international organizations from the margins of the international order.

From late sixteenth century, Bijapur’s sultan, Ibrahim Adil Shah II (r. 1580–1627 ce), used nauras—a polyvalent term used extensively within the Sanskrit aesthetic realm—on his kingdom’s cultural artefacts as well as political and administrative insignia. An avid music lover, he is renowned for his Dakani work on music titled Kitāb-i Nauras (circa 1580s). Portrayed by previous scholars as religiously unorthodox, Ibrahim Adil II and nauras are located chiefly within narratives of Bijapur’s political instability and the sultan’s indulgence in leisure over statecraft. Recent scholarship has challenged such notions but no study focuses on the reasons for nauras’ crossover to the political domain or its appearance on state insignia. This article offers new insights by locating the sultan within a matrix of Indic, Turco-Mongol, and Islamicate sovereignty practices. In doing so, it argues that Ibrahim Adil II strategically employed the corporeal, religious, aesthetic, and polyvalent dimensions of nauras to forge a uniquely personalized embodied cosmic kingship practice to govern a multicultural populace. In particular, this article elucidates that the realms of art, aesthetics, and kingship were not mutually exclusive in the Indic or Islamicate worlds and that nauras was a rational manoeuvre to elevate the ruler above courtly factions and religious differences.

Following a global 2024 blood culture bottle shortage, we implemented a multidisciplinary stewardship intervention to reduce utilization. Upon supply normalization in 2025, a durable 34.8% reduction in utilization was maintained without increasing sepsis-related mortality, demonstrating that crisis-driven shifts can successfully establish a sustainable “new steady state.”