Sitodiplosis mosellana (Géhin) (Diptera: Cecidomyiidae) is a significant pest of wheat, Triticum aestivum Linnaeus (Poaceae), in Canada. Monitoring currently relies on labour-intensive counts of ovipositing females. Although traps baited with S. mosellana pheromone are used as decision support tools in the United Kingdom, in Canada, they are considered reliable only to indicate adult activity. Recent findings show that variability in pheromone release from commercial lures affects the number of midges captured and limits the reliability of pheromone monitoring. Here, two lure types and two trap types were compared for their ability to attract and retain S. mosellana males. We then compared the number of males captured in pheromone traps with the information provided by other monitoring tools, including emergence traps, soil cores, and ovipositing female counts. Jackson traps with Trécé rubber septa lures captured the most midges. The number of males captured in pheromone-baited traps was not related to overwintering, ovipositing, or emerging populations, suggesting that pheromone traps may not accurately reflect S. mosellana populations under field conditions. Variability in extracted pheromone amount between lures, regional climate, and Canada’s vast wheat-growing area may limit the development of an effective pheromone-based decision support tool for this region. Nevertheless, refinement of lure formulation, standardisation of trapping protocols, and integration of complementary monitoring approaches may enhance trap reliability and support a stronger monitoring system.

Pelmatozoa is an informal grouping of filter-feeding echinoderms including crinoids, paracrinoids, rhombiferans, and eocrinoids that possess a theca, an erect stalk, and feeding appendages. Although crinoids were major constituents of marine communities with high diversity and abundance throughout the Paleozoic, most other pelmatozoans had relatively low species diversity and/or short temporal durations. It has been proposed that these different diversification trajectories could have resulted from crinoids outcompeting other filter-feeding pelmatozoans during the early Paleozoic, although this hypothesis involving niche overlap has never been formally tested. Here, we tested this hypothesis using the incredibly diverse pelmatozoan fauna of the Late Ordovician (Sandbian) Bromide Formation of Oklahoma, which preserves a rich, ecologically complex fauna that developed as a result of the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event. We developed a framework to quantitatively characterize pelmatozoan feeding ecology using multivariate analysis of ecomorphological traits and explored niche space occupation and potential competition between crinoids, rhombiferans, paracrinoids, eocrinoids, and diploporans from the Bromide fauna. Results revealed key ecological factors controlling niche differentiation and showed that crinoids, paracrinoids, and rhombiferans occupy nonoverlapping regions of niche space, indicating competition between groups was unlikely. Although the competition hypothesis was not supported, narrow niche space occupation suggests that paracrinoids and rhombiferans were more ecologically limited than crinoids, which might have played a role in their differential diversification dynamics. These results elucidate both the nature of interactions between pelmatozoan taxa and the potential mechanisms driving their evolutionary trajectories, as well as the complexity of ecological communities that arose during the Ordovician radiation.

A seminal result of Komlós, Sárközy, and Szemerédi states that any $n$-vertex graph $G$ with minimum degree at least $(1/2+\alpha )n$ contains every $n$-vertex tree $T$ of bounded degree. Recently, Pham, Sah, Sawhney, and Simkin extended this result to show that such graphs $G$ in fact support an optimally spread distribution on copies of a given $T$, which implies, using the recent breakthroughs on the Kahn-Kalai conjecture, the robustness result that $T$ is a subgraph of sparse random subgraphs of $G$ as well. Pham, Sah, Sawhney, and Simkin construct their optimally spread distribution by following closely the original proof of the Komlós-Sárközy-Szemerédi theorem which uses the blow-up lemma and the Szemerédi regularity lemma. We give an alternative, regularity-free construction that instead uses the Komlós-Sárközy-Szemerédi theorem (which has a regularity-free proof due to Kathapurkar and Montgomery) as a black box. Our proof is based on the simple and general insight that, if $G$ has linear minimum degree, almost all constant-sized subgraphs of $G$ inherit the same minimum degree condition that $G$ has.

In a retrospective cohort of 6363 neonates admitted to three NICUs, there was no reduction in Staphylococcus aureus acquisition when comparing pre- and post-pandemic incidence rates. While additional infection prevention practices introduced during the pandemic helped prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission, these practices may not have reduced S. aureus transmission to infants.

We analyze the extent to which the prospects for economic development may relate to the environmental damages associated with economic activities. We consider an economic growth framework in which production activities generate polluting emissions which in turn negatively affect production capabilities, and publicly-funded abatement is pursued to mitigate such effects. Since the time preference is endogenously related to capital, abatement affects the size of the discount factor through its implications on capital accumulation. We show that the elasticity of environmental damages affects the optimal tax rate and thus the abatement level, which in turn determines whether the economy will end up in a stagnation or growth regime. This suggests that the cross-country heterogeneity in environmental damages may explain the different development patterns experienced by industrialized and developing economies. Our results are robust to the presence of productive public spending and two alternative forms of capital (clean and dirty capital).

This paper presents a novel robust control method for a hip-assist exoskeleton robot’s joint module, addressing dynamic performance under variable loads. The proposed approach integrates traditional PID control with robust, model-based strategies, utilizing the system’s dynamic model and a Lyapunov-based robust controller to handle uncertainties. This method not only enhances traditional PID control but also offers practical advantages in implementation. Theoretical analysis confirms the system’s uniform boundedness and ultimate boundedness. A Matlab prototype was developed for simulation, demonstrating the control scheme’s feasibility and effectiveness. Numerical simulations show that the proposed fractional-order hybrid PD (FHPD) controller significantly reduces tracking error by 58.70% compared to the traditional PID controller, 55.41% compared to the MPD controller, and 32.32% compared to ADRC, highlighting its superior tracking performance and stability.

The end of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of nationalism as the primary ideological underpinning of Australian identity, defining the broader Australian people as a culturally British, Protestant community. Such developments drew strength from key events of the early twentieth century, such as Australian federation and the Great War. Although historians have conceded that Irish Australians could adhere to the cultural tenets of Anglo-Australia, they have overlooked the extent to which Irish-Australian Catholics, especially those from the middle class, adopted Britishness as an integral part of their ethno-religious identity. Middle-class Catholic individuals, families and groups negotiated the extent of their Irishness to suit their needs within economic, social and cultural spaces dominated by Australia’s Protestant majority. This article argues that the expression of Britishness was an intrinsic part of Catholics’ middle-class ambitions, as they sought to rectify their implicit ‘otherness’ in an Australia committed to a myth of national unity on non-Irish, and non-Catholic, terms.

We establish a polynomial ergodic theorem for actions of the affine group of a countable field K. As an application, we deduce—via a variant of Furstenberg’s correspondence principle—that for fields of characteristic zero, any ‘large’ set $E\subset K$ contains ‘many’ patterns of the form $\{p(u)+v,uv\}$, for every non-constant polynomial $p(x)\in K[x]$. Our methods are flexible enough that they allow us to recover analogous density results in the setting of finite fields and, with the aid of a finitistic variant of Bergelson’s ‘colouring trick’, show that for $r\in \mathbb N$ fixed, any r-colouring of a large enough finite field will contain monochromatic patterns of the form $\{u,p(u)+v,uv\}$. In a different direction, we obtain a double ergodic theorem for actions of the affine group of a countable field. An adaptation of the argument for affine actions of finite fields leads to a generalization of a theorem of Shkredov. Finally, to highlight the utility of the aforementioned finitistic ‘colouring trick’, we provide a conditional, elementary generalization of Green and Sanders’ $\{u,v,u+v,uv\}$ theorem.

The global use of antimicrobial chemicals drastically increased during and after the COVID-19 pandemic owing to heightened awareness of personal and surface hygiene needs. Disinfectants, especially chlorine-based disinfectants (CBDs), were extensively used for surface and equipment decontamination in the domestic, industrial, veterinary and healthcare sectors during the heights of the pandemic. The increased use of disinfectants has resulted in their increased discharge into municipal wastewater systems and surface waters. Our Perspective article considers the One Health challenges associated with the increased discharge of disinfectants into wastewater. One Health is a collaborative approach that ensures the well-being of people, animals and the environment. Wastewater is a common endpoint to the many interactions between people, animals and their environment. The potential One Health challenges and knowledge gaps associated with the constant discharge of low but sublethal concentrations of CBDs into wastewater are discussed. The data gaps point to the risks associated with the unregulated use of CBDs and need for their judicial use.

Burkholderia cepacia is a rare cause of prosthetic valve endocarditis. We report an 18-year-old male with Tetralogy of Fallot and two sequential transcatheter pulmonary valves (Melody and Myval), presenting with persistent bacteraemia unresponsive to antibiotics. Surgical explantation of both valves with homograft replacement and tricuspid repair achieved complete recovery, emphasising surgery in refractory infections.

Historians continue to debate what form colonial rule took in early modern Ireland. This article explores how the reception and resistance to anglicisation, located in the everyday body language of submission and subordination encoded in gesture, might be understood in the experience of colonial rule. Exploring the gestural code operating in early modern Ireland, this article examines the role of body politics in the reception of and reaction to English rule. English ‘manners and apparel’ were central to the project of anglicisation. The body played a central role in representing and articulating social hierarchies in the early modern world. Body language offered a troubling everyday reminder of the inequalities signalled in the — non-reciprocal or non-reciprocated — gestures expected of ‘subordinates’ towards ‘superiors’. If the enforcement of the gestural order was important to the establishment of English rule, this also made gesture a focus for resistance and opposition. A body politics that exploited a shared understanding of the meaning of particular gestures could be drawn on in both everyday politics and collective protests to subvert, resist and retaliate against the political agenda of anglicisation. Looking forward to the eighteenth century and beyond state action, the article calls for more work on gesture.

We introduce a new family of coalescent mean-field interacting particle systems by producing a pinning property that acts over a chosen sequence of multiple time segments. Throughout their evolution, these stochastic particles converge in time (i.e. get pinned) to their random ensemble average at the termination point of any one of the given time segments, only to burst back into life and repeat the underlying principle of convergence in each of the successive time segments, until they are fully exhausted. Although the architecture is represented by a system of piecewise stochastic differential equations, we prove that the conditions generating the pinning property enable every particle to preserve their continuity over their entire lifetime almost surely. As the number of particles in the system increases asymptotically, the system decouples into mutually independent diffusions, which, albeit displaying progressively uncorrelated behaviour, still close in on, and recouple at, a deterministic value at each termination point. Finally, we provide additional analytics including a universality statement for our framework, a study of what we call adjourned coalescent mean-field interacting particles, a set of results on commutativity of double limits, and a proposal of what we call covariance waves.