The application of integrative taxonomic approaches is useful to species delineation based on a combination of distinct types of characters, here morphological features and ribosomal DNA sequences. In this study, we surveyed ectoparasitic nematodes of the subfamily Merliniinae in cultivated and natural environments in Iran. Results of morphological and morphometrical studies, light and scanning electron microscopic observations, and molecular analyses allowed us the identification of fourteen known and one unknown species including representatives of the genera Amplimerlinius (five species), Geocenamus (one species), Merlinius (three species), Nagelus (two species), Paramerlinius (one species), Scutylenchus (two species), and Telomerlinius (one species). The unknown species, Scutylenchus sp., characterized by having 35–50 incisures at mid-body; lateral field with 6 longitudinal incisures; lip region slightly offset by a constriction, flattened at front end; bearing 5–7 annuli; cephalic framework not refractive; stylet robust, 18.3–27 μm long; post anal intestinal sac absent; tail elongate conical, dorsally convex, with 24 (19–28) annuli in ventral side, ending to a smooth terminus and males common; spicules 24.5–31 μm long. The phylogenetic analyses were carried out using molecular data from nuclear ribosomal DNA (rDNA) genes viz. D2–D3 expansion segments of the large ribosomal subunit (28S rRNA), partial small ribosomal subunit (18S rRNA), and internal transcribed spacer (ITS). The molecular variability of D2–D3 expansion segments of the 28S rRNA and partial 18S rRNA was low in this family in comparison to the ITS region, which could be a more helpful molecular marker in species and genus identification.

Coronary cameral fistula is a rare congenital anomaly and clinical presentation depends on the location of the defect, degree of shunting, and associated complications. We present a case of coronary cameral fistula where segmental analysis by echocardiogram helped us to avoid misdiagnosis as a ventricular septal defect.

This research work presents an implantable antenna that operates at 5.8 GHz. By using a radiator with a loop-based design, the antenna can be made smaller. Radiator is made up of three connected rectangular loops. On the substrate’s back side, an I-shaped ground plane is used. As substrate and superstrate, polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) with dimensions of 7 mm × 5 mm × 0.3 mm is used. The conducting sections are made using copper foil that is 30 µm thick. The suggested antenna is examined by the implantable medical device using realistic human scalp phantom models and a homogenous skin box. Simulated study revealed that it operates around 5.8 GHz with a bandwidth from 5.69 to 5.92 GHz. The specific absorption rate was 0.28 and 0.26 W/kg for skin box and human scalp phantoms, respectively, at 1 mW input power across 1 g volume tissue.

In recent years, Western governments have invoked the values of universal human rights to justify large-scale military operations. Critical theorists have often responded that these campaigns serve not to promote peace, stability, or prosperity, but to entrench Western economic and political power, often in ways that have been devastating for local populations. However, Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine casts doubt on whether assumptions about Western dominance will continue to furnish adequate accounts of global armed conflict. Critical theorists base many of their views on what is sometimes called ‘memory politics’, meaning that they cite histories of Western militarism, colonialism, racism and economic exploitation as backdrops to current policies. In this article it is argued that they will only be able to explain a conflict like the Ukraine war with credibility by incorporating into their memory politics the left’s own histories of supporting autocratic regimes.

An ultra-wideband (UWB) and compact-size four-port multiple input multiple output (MIMO) antenna with a footprint of 34 mm × 34 mm fed by an asymmetric coplanar strip (ACS) is investigated. The proposed antenna is composed of four orthogonally placed identical modified elliptical-shaped radiators and achieves an impedance bandwidth of 3.4–12.2 GHz. By etching two inverted L-shaped slots in the radiator element, WLAN band and X-band are rejected in the operating communication range. Because of the usage of a meander line decoupler, the isolation enhancement at the 8–12 GHz band is achieved and the isolation is more than 18 dB for most of the UWB range. The performance of the proposed antenna is studied in terms of isolation between each port, radiation pattern, current distribution, gain, envelope correlation coefficient, diversity gain, and total active reflection coefficient. The compact size and reduced complexity make the proposed design highly suitable for portable devices.

The aim of this review is to provide an overview of dietary interventions delivered during pregnancy for the prevention of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM). GDM increases the risk of adverse pregnancy and neonatal outcomes, and also increases future cardiometabolic risks for both the mother and the offspring. Carrying or gaining excessive weight during pregnancy increases the risk of developing GDM, and several clinical trials in women with overweight or obesity have tested whether interventions aimed at limiting gestational weight gain (GWG) could help prevent GDM. Most dietary interventions have provided general healthy eating guidelines, while some had a specific focus, such as low glycaemic index, increased fibre intake, reducing saturated fat or a Mediterranean-style diet. Although trials have generally been successful in attenuating GWG, the majority have been unable to reduce GDM risk, which suggests that limiting GWG may not be sufficient in itself to prevent GDM. The trials which have shown effectiveness in GDM prevention have included intensive face-to-face dietetic support, and/or provision of key foods to participants, but it is unclear whether these strategies could be delivered in routine practice. The mechanism behind the effectiveness of some interventions over others remains unclear. Dietary modifications from early stages of pregnancy seem to be key, but the optimum dietary composition is unknown. Future research should focus on designing acceptable and scalable dietary interventions to be tested early in pregnancy in women at risk of GDM.

A newly discovered Spanish description of Kongo increases our knowledge of the country, joining Filippo Pigafetta’s famous account to expand our knowledge of Kongo in this early period. This research shows that the MS was written in 1587 or 1588 and was written by Carmelite Diego de la Encarnación. It adds details on the history of the country, daily life culture, and links to other Carmelite works, including an unpublished chapter of an account by Diego de Santissimo Santo and shows the author could have written a longer but well-known account in the Vatican Library. It includes extensive quotations from the new text.

In light of ongoing debates about income targeting in the welfare state, this article explores how the design and outcomes of income targeting policies are related to popular targeting preferences. Based on the unique combination of fine-grained opinion and policy indicators in a multilevel analysis, the results show that targeting preferences are indeed empirically related to targeting policies. However, whether these preferences are affected more by the de jure targeting design or the de facto targeting outcome seems to vary between two very different policy domains. In the case of unemployment benefits, the results suggest positive policy feedback: support for high-income targeting increases when unemployment benefits are designed to benefit those with previously higher incomes. For income taxation, by contrast, the results suggest negative policy feedback. In that case, it is not so much the de jure design but rather the de facto outcome that matters: the more taxes effectively work to the advantage of higher-income earners, the less support there is for a tax that levies the same amount on everyone, regardless of income.

This article offers an overview of the recently rediscovered archives of the Conseils de Guerre—the military court—of colonial Congo (1885–1960). As a long-considered lost collection of court records encompassing seventy years of testimonies of colonial military crimes, these archives offer unparalleled insights on the complex relation between law, impunity, and armed violence in colonial Central Africa. The article first sheds light on the history of those records and on their ongoing digitization in the context of debates about the contested heritage of Belgian “displaced” colonial public archives. It then sketches out several promising avenues for academic research and public history projects that they could help document, notably on the controversial history of violence in the Belgian empire and on the multifaceted nature of African agency under colonial rule.

The global transition towards diets high in calories has contributed to 2.1 billion people becoming overweight, or obese, which damages male reproduction and harms offspring. Recently, more and more studies have shown that paternal exposure to stress closely affects the health of offspring in an intergenerational and transgenerational way. SET Domain Containing 2 (SETD2), a key epigenetic gene, is highly conserved among species, is a crucial methyltransferase for converting histone 3 lysine 36 dimethylation (H3K36me2) into histone 3 lysine 36 trimethylation (H3K36me3), and plays an important regulator in the response to stress. In this study, we compared patterns of SETD2 expression and the H3K36me3 pattern in pre-implantation embryos derived from normal or obese mice induced by high diet. The results showed that SETD2 mRNA was significantly higher in the high-fat diet (HFD) group than the control diet (CD) group at the 2-cell, 4-cell, 8-cell, and 16-cell stages, and at the morula and blastocyst stages. The relative levels of H3K36me3 in the HFD group at the 2-cell, 4-cell, 8-cell, 16-cell, morula stage, and blastocyst stage were significantly higher than in the CD group. These results indicated that dietary changes in parental generation (F0) male mice fed a HFD were traceable in SETD2/H3K36me3 in embryos, and that a paternal high-fat diet brings about adverse effects for offspring that might be related to SETD2/H3K36me3, which throws new light on the effect of paternal obesity on offspring from an epigenetic perspective.

Soybean is one of the chief crops producing protein and oil for human consumption. Wild soybean, the ancestor of cultivated soybean, possesses high seed protein content; therefore, it is a valuable genetic resource that could enhance protein content in the cultivated varieties. To identify the genes responsible for increasing protein content in wild soybean, a population comprising 113 BC4F6 chromosome segment substitution lines (CSSL) was developed from a cross between soybean cultivar ‘Jackson’ and wild soybean accession JWS156-1. The CSSL population was cultivated in the field conditions for 3 years (2018, 2019 and 2020), and the seeds harvested from each line were analysed for protein and oil contents by InfraTec Nova instrument. Quantitative trait locus (QTL) analysis with 243 SSR markers identified 12 QTLs associated with seed protein, oil and protein + oil contents. Among these QTLs, qPro8 and qPro19, two major and stable QTLs for protein content, were detected on chromosomes 8 and 19, respectively. No QTL for oil content was detected in the vicinity of qPro19, indicating that qPro19 did not influence the seed oil content. The effect of qPro19 was validated using near-isogenic lines (NILs) of qPro19. By introducing the qPro19 allele from wild soybean into another soybean variety, ‘Tachiyutaka’, a BC4 line, T-678, that showed enhanced seed protein content, without reducing the seed oil content. This study implied that the qPro19 allele from wild soybean could be a potential genetic resource for breeding programmes aimed to improve soybean seed quality.

The study evaluated whether the direction (inhibitory or facilitative) of the phonological neighborhood density effect in English spoken word recognition was modulated by the relative strength of competitor activation (neighborhood type) in two groups of English-dominant learners of Spanish who differed in language experience. Classroom learners and heritage learners of Spanish identified spoken English words from dense (e.g., BEAR) and sparse (e.g., BOAT) phonological neighborhoods presented in moderate noise. The phonological neighborhood was separately manipulated at word onset (cohort) and word offset (rhyme). Classroom learners were overall slower in recognizing spoken words from denser neighborhoods. Strongly active (onset) neighbors exerted inhibitory effects in both classroom and heritage learners. Critically, weakly active (offset) neighbors exerted inhibitory effects in classroom learners but facilitative effects in heritage learners. The results suggest that the activation of both within and cross-language neighbors should be considered in determining the direction of neighbor effects in bilingual lexical processing.

Three clay materials (codded MY3, KG and KK) from western Cameroon were selected and investigated for the production of refractory bricks. Samples MY3 and KG are kaolinite-rich materials, having clay mineral contents of 88% and 72%, respectively, whereas KK is a sand-rich material with a total clay content of 44%. Chamottes were prepared using each clay, and the ground chamottes were later used in the refractory formulation, with each raw clay used as a binding phase. After firing, the X-ray diffraction analyses of all of the refractory bricks indicated the same mineral assemblage made of quartz, cristobalite and mullite. The cristobalite is due to high-temperature conversion of quartz, whereas the mullite is due to clay mineral conversion. The evaluation of the linear shrinkage, physical properties (including bulk density and open porosity) and mechanical testing through refractoriness under load and compressive strength indicates that all of these clays could be used as raw materials for standard clay refractory materials. These results stand as a proof for the potential for these locally available materials to be used as raw materials for refractories that could be locally produced to reduce the cost of access to refractory raw materials faced by industries located in Cameroon.

Progressive constructions in Germanic are usually studied as progressive constructions—that is, exclusively so. I characterize this as a top-down approach to aspect, which, I argue, harbors the risk of overlooking relevant language-specific structures that are similar in form and meaning. This paper, therefore, advocates taking a bottom-up approach. Based on a case study of the prepositional progressive in Dutch (aan het-progressive), I claim that this approach is of added empirical and theoretical value. Drawing on construction-based theories, the relevant patterns—dubbed situational constructions—are analyzed in terms of horizontal constructional links.*