A metasurface (MTS) antenna with wideband radiation and low radar cross section (RCS) performance is proposed. The design is based on a two-step RCS reduction (RCSR) strategy applied to a reference antenna – a conventional 4 × 4 square patch array MTS antenna that exhibits stable broadside radiation within 5–6.5 GHz. In the first step, the patch array of the reference antenna is reconfigured into a quasi-chessboard MTS using the principle of reflection cancellation, enabling wideband RCSR under both x- and y-polarized incidences. In the second step, guided by the antenna scattering theory based on characteristic modes, six slots are etched on the ground plane to further enhance RCSR under x-polarized incidence. Characteristic mode analysis is employed throughout the design process to simultaneously analyze radiation and scattering behaviors. Compared with the reference antenna, the proposed MTS antenna maintains similar radiation performance while achieving monostatic RCSR bandwidths of 3.7–11.3 and 4.7–11.3 GHz for x- and y-polarized incident waves, respectively. It also demonstrates significantly broader RCSR bandwidths compared to a metallic plate of the same size.

In this paper, a novel series–parallel stable platform is proposed, and its kinematic and dynamic models are established. The relationship between the length, speed, and acceleration of rolling and pitching electric push rods is analyzed. The workspace of the series–parallel stable platform is determined, and the singularity and interference are analyzed. The state-machine-based control system of the stable platform is designed. An experimental environment of the principle of the real-time control system based on dSPACE was built. A position–speed double closed-loop experiment, simulating mounting carrier of the random signal tracking, and system comprehensive performance experiment were conducted to verify the accuracy of the kinematics and dynamics model of the series–parallel stable platform and the rationality and stability of the control system.

Evidence regarding the association between dietary choline intake and mortality in individuals with diabetes remains limited. This study aimed to evaluate the relationship between dietary choline intake and all-cause, CVD and cancer-related mortality among adults with diabetes. A total of 4712 participants with diabetes were included from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2007–2018 cycles. Dietary choline intake was estimated using two 24-h dietary recalls, and mortality outcomes were ascertained via linkage to National Death Index records through 31 December 2019. Cox proportional hazards models and Kaplan-Meier analyses were employed to assess the associations between choline intake and mortality. Restricted cubic spline models were used to examine potential non-linear relationships, and threshold analyses were conducted to identify inflection points. Over a median follow-up of 6·42 years, 805 deaths were documented, including 267 from CVD and 126 from cancer. A U-shaped association was observed between dietary choline intake and all-cause mortality (Pfor non-linearity < 0·0001). Compared with the lowest quartile, multivariable-adjusted hazard ratios for all-cause mortality were 0·64 (95 % CI 0·47, 0·88) for the second quartile, 0·59 (0·43, 0·82) for the third and 0·69 (0·43, 1·09) for the highest quartile. No significant associations were found between choline intake and either CVD or cancer mortality. These findings indicate a U-shaped relationship between dietary choline intake and all-cause mortality in individuals with diabetes, with intakes between 286·77 and 538·86 mg/d associated with the lowest risk – providing potential implications for dietary guidance in diabetes management.

Mao’s violent collectivization and forced labour campaigns during China’s Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) led to as many as 45 million deaths in what is widely regarded as the worst famine in human history. Drawing on a corpus of over 300 interviews with famine survivors, I apply a mixed-methods approach to examine the impact of mass state repression on how such survivors speak about a repressive regime that remains in power. Exploiting variation in county-level mortality rates, I find that interviewees exposed to more intense state violence do not publicly voice more explicitly negative attitudes towards the state, but they do possess more latent negative sentiments. Furthermore, I use the establishment and subsequent dissolution of communal canteens – a key repressive institution through which the state functioned as the sole food distributor during a time of extreme scarcity – as an analytical lever to show that although some survivors may be unwilling to express grievances directly against an enduring regime that perpetrated mass violence, they readily express negativity towards a long-dead institution.

For the most part, the ongoing Thomistic debate over the nature of lying presupposes that speech has one primary end: to reveal the speaker’s mind or soul. Within this framework, a lie is disordered speech. In this paper, I formulate a polyvalent Thomistic theory of speech acts that affirms that human vocalizations have multiple ends in the order of nature, including functions that do not involve signification, a claim supported by evidence from studies of primate vocalization and by evidence from studies of contemporary speech act theory in the philosophy of language. With this theory in hand, I propose that not every deliberately willed spoken falsehood constitutes a lie, including false claims made to enemy spies and Nazi officers, because not every spoken falsehood involves disordered speech.

The Generalised Baker–Schmidt Problem (1970) concerns the Hausdorff measure of the set of $\psi$-approximable points on a non-degenerate manifold. Beresnevich-Dickinson-Velani (in 2006, for the homogeneous setting) and Badziahin-Beresnevich-Velani (in 2013, for the inhomogeneous setting) proved the divergence part of this problem for dual approximation on arbitrary non-degenerate manifolds. The divergence part has also been resolved for the $p$-adic setting by Datta-Ghosh in 2022, for the inhomogeneous setting. The corresponding convergence counterpart represents a challenging open question. In this paper, we prove the homogeneous $p$-adic convergence result for hypersurfaces of dimension at least three with some mild regularity condition, as well as for some other classes of manifolds satisfying certain conditions. We provide similar, slightly weaker results for the inhomogeneous setting. We do not restrict to monotonic approximation functions.

Alexander Crichton’s Inquiry (1798) was one of the first systematic English-language works on mental disorder. Although a general physician rather than a specialist, Crichton sought to explain how emotions, attention and the nervous system interacted to produce disturbance. His description of inattention is now regarded as the earliest English medical account of what we would call an attention disorder. He drew extensively on German case reports, vivid accounts of melancholy, delusion and violence. He highlighted how delusion could coexist with calm, purposeful behaviour, influencing both medical and legal views of responsibility. Modern historians see Crichton as a synthesiser rather than an originator, but his Inquiry remains an ambitious attempt to ground the study of mental disorder in physiology, observation and compassion.

This paper presents a comprehensive experimental investigation into the shock characteristics associated with a low-thrust, low-shock separation mechanism incorporating Mild Detonating Cord (MDC) within a rubber bellow interface. Two test configurations were developed with varying explosive charge masses to study their influence on pressure generation and shock propagation. Linear accelerometers and high-speed pressure transducers were employed to capture transient dynamic responses at both piston and cylinder interfaces. The results demonstrate a significant reduction in peak pressure and shock levels, especially in the second test configuration, where the explosive mass was reduced to 60% of the initial configuration. The shock response spectrum (SRS) analysis confirms that the lower charge mass leads to proportionally reduced shock amplitudes across the frequency range of interest. Furthermore, comparative assessment of shock levels reveals a significant reduction of shock levels as compared to conventional separation mechanisms, such as a flexible linear-shaped explosive charge (FLSC) mass or a separation bolt actuated with a pyro cartridge. The experimental pressure values are shown to correlate well with theoretical predictions, validating the design approach. These findings provide critical insights into tailoring explosive-based separation mechanisms for sensitive payload environments, highlighting the importance of confined detonation and charge optimisation in mitigating pyroshock.

A novel family of statistical distributions, called enriched truncated exponentiated generalized family, is theoretically developed to model heavy-tailed data. One of the three-parameter sub-models of this family derived from log-logistic distribution is comprehensively studied. The statistical properties are explored, including moments and Fisher information matrix. In addition, tail-heaviness is studied using the tail-index approach. The method of maximum likelihood is used for parameter estimation, and existence and uniqueness of these estimators are shown. The flexibility of the new family is further validated by applying to the Norwegian fire insurance claim dataset. The goodness-of-fit measures are used to illustrate the adequacy of the proposed family of distributions. Furthermore, a backtesting procedure is conducted for well-known risk measures to assess the accuracy of the right tail fit.

In this article we study the theories of the infinite-branching tree and the r-regular tree, and show that both of them are pseudofinite. Moreover, we show that they can be realized by infinite ultraproducts of polynomial exact classes of graphs, and provide a characterization of the Morley rank of definable sets in terms of the degrees of polynomials measuring their non-standard cardinalities. This answers negatively some questions from [2], where it is asked whether every stable generalised measurable structure is one-based.

United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples — status in Canadian law — Indigenous children, youth, and families