Data on the distribution of iodine in the urine and breast milk of lactating women are limited. This study aimed to establish a formula to assess iodine status in lactating women by evaluating the fractional iodine excretion in urine and breast milk. A 3-d 24-h iodine metabolism survey in 2021–2023 was conducted on fifty-four pairs of lactating women and infants in Tianjin and Luoyang, China. We used the 24-h dietary record and salt weighing method to assess daily iodine intake (DII). Iodine excretion in breast milk and urine was measured. The median 24-h urinary iodine concentration and breast milk iodine concentration were 135·06 μg/L and 150·26 µg/L, respectively. When the DII was between 240 μg/d and 600 μg/d, the predicted value of fractional breast milk iodine excretion was 31·48 % (95 % CI: 27·16 %, 36·22 %). When the daily iodine excretion was between 258 μg/d and 476 μg/d, the fractional urine iodine excretion (59·09 %) and fractional breast milk iodine excretion (40·91 %) were stable. DII can be derived from the spot urinary iodine concentration as follows: urinary iodine concentration (μg/L) × (0·0009 L/h/kg × 24 h/d) × body weight (kg) ÷ 0·59 ÷ 0·94 = DII (μg/d). In conclusion, lactating women with adequate iodine delivered approximately 31·48 % of the DII to their infants. A stable proportion (59·09 %) of iodine excretion was discharged through urine, which was used to assess the iodine status based on the spot urinary iodine concentration of lactating women. This study was registered at ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT04492657).

Increasing numbers of children and young people (CYP) are presenting with common mental health difficulties. In 2017, the UK government outlined a service transformation plan which led to the development and implementation of Mental Health Support Teams (MHSTs), to deliver evidence-based interventions in schools for mild to moderate mental health difficulties. This service evaluation aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of individual interventions delivered by MHST practitioners trained to deliver low-intensity cognitive behavioural interventions to CYP with mild to moderate mental health difficulties, within one service based in the South East of England. Four hundred and fifty-nine CYP engaged in an individual intervention delivered by MHST practitioners between January 2021 and December 2022. Interventions were delivered either online via video call or face-to-face. All children and their parents/carers were invited to complete two routine outcome measures (Revised Children’s Anxiety and Depression Scale (RCADS), and Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ)) at baseline and post-intervention. Outcome data demonstrated significant improvements across all child- and parent-rated RCADS anxiety and depression scales. Significant improvements were also shown for both child- and parent-rated SDQ total difficulties and impact scores. These all showed effect sizes ranging from medium to large. Girls presented higher scores pre- and post-intervention compared with boys apart from the OCD subscale; gender was not a predictor of improvement in the majority of analyses. Individual, low-intensity cognitive behavioural interventions delivered in this MHST service were effective in reducing symptoms of emotional and behavioural difficulties in CYP with mild to moderate mental health difficulties.

Key learning aims

1. (1) Understand the context of Mental Health Support Teams (MHSTs) as an early intervention service within school settings.

2. (2) Learn about the impact of MHST-delivered interventions on symptoms of emotional and behavioural difficulties in children and young people.

3. (3) To gain an understanding of how boys and girls may respond differently to MHST-delivered interventions.

Cosmogenic 7Be and 10Be are effective tracers for studying atmospheric dynamics and Earth’s surface processes, with over 90% of these isotopes reaching the surface via wet deposition. However, the characteristics and influencing factors of 7Be and 10Be wet deposition remain unclear in different regions, limiting the precision of these nuclides as tracers of environmental change. This study analyzes the annual variation of 7Be and 10Be wet deposition in Xi’an and examines the impact of precipitation on their deposition. Ultra-trace levels of 7Be and 10Be in precipitation were synchronously measured using state-of-the-art accelerator mass spectrometry. One-year (July 30, 2020 to September 3, 2021), high-frequency (individual rain events) and time-synchronized series of observations of 7Be and 10Be wet deposition data (n = 49) were analyzed. The total annual wet deposition fluxes of 7Be and 10Be in central China (34.22°N, 109.01°E) for 2020/21 were (218 ± 24) × 108 atoms·m–2·yr–1 and (314 ± 16) × 108 atoms·m–2·yr–1, respectively. Precipitation amount, intensity, and duration were quantitatively analyzed for their effects on total wet deposition flux, mean concentration, washout ratio, deposition velocity, and scavenging coefficient of 7Be and 10Be during individual rain events. The results indicate that precipitation amount is the most significant factor influencing the wet deposition flux of both nuclides.

This article delves into the often-overlooked scholar Robert Greene, a Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, who authored works in both religion and natural philosophy. Greene made significant contributions to the debate on the interplay between reason and faith, with his primary target being John Locke, whose epistemology and views on the relationship between reason and faith he considered detrimental to religion. This article examines Greene’s criticism of Locke’s views on the relationship between reason and faith within its institutional context, shedding new light on Locke’s early reception at the University of Cambridge.

In East Jerusalem, the vast majority of Palestinians contest the legitimacy of the Israeli state’s claim to sovereignty. This necessarily affects how Palestinians engage with the state in pursuit of goods and services. But how? Using data from 55 interviews and original observational and experimental survey data from a representative sample of East Jerusalemites, I show that civilians’ engagement with each good, service, and institution of the state is a function of their perceptions of the state’s legitimacy, or right to rule, in that sector. Civilians will avoid engagement with goods, services, and institutions that explicitly affirm the state’s claims to monopolized sovereign rule, without forsaking essential goods and services. This article empirically illustrates that the same individual will make different choices with respect to each state sector, and in doing so builds on the burgeoning recognition of sector-level choices in the citizen claim-making literature.

The primary policy response to population aging in advanced economies has been to raise the mandatory retirement age. However, these policies have reignited calls for differentiated retirement ages that take into account variations in work intensity. This paper utilises microdata to examine the relevance and feasibility of this concept in Europe. It first quantifies career arduousness using SHARE wave 7 retrospective ISCO4-digit data on careers in combination with US O*NET working conditions data. Then, using SHARE follow-up data collecting (bad)health and death information about wave 7 respondents, it estimates (healthy) life expectancy by career arduousness decile, combining econometrics and life table methods. Findings reveal a life expectancy gap between the least and most arduous careers of 4to 4.2 years. Healthy life expectancy differences are slightly larger, ranging from 6.9 to 9.1 years. Also, women’s healthy life expectancy seems to be somewhat more impacted by arduousness.

What is the nature of America’s liberal inheritance? These days, prominent political thinkers—pro-liberals, anti-liberals, and postliberals alike—seem to agree, following Louis Hartz, that American liberalism is individualist, Enlightenment liberalism grounded in Lockean teachings. This is a mistake. We would do better to understand American political thought as defined not just by Enlightenment liberalism but also by Exodus liberalism, the latter of which has been expressed primarily (though not exclusively) in African American political thought. It is in the complex interplay between these two liberal traditions that we can better understand the nature of, and the possibilities for, American liberalism and American politics. This essay tells part of the story of how political scientists came to neglect Exodus liberalism, then envisions a more comprehensive approach to American political thought—a desegregated American political thought.

This article examines how the entry of commercial lenders (CLs) transforms microfinance markets, focusing on borrower outcomes and market-wide spillovers. Using detailed credit registry data, we show that increased competition improves loan terms for both graduating and staying borrowers, generating sustained benefits. Our setting also allows us to document what happens when entry fails and entrants retreat following a crisis. Despite increasing defaults, borrowers who graduate to banks experience long-term gains, particularly through lower borrowing costs. Our findings highlight the broader benefits and risks of fostering competition in microfinance, providing valuable insights for policymakers and financial inclusion initiatives.

In January 1939, Sir Hubert Wilkins became the first Australian to set foot on several islands and the mainland along the Ingrid Christensen Coast, Antarctica, leaving records reaffirming Australia’s claim to the area at three landing sites. Prior to 2022, only the third of these sites had been identified. Wilkins had indicated that the first of the landings, that of 8 January 1939, was in the Rauer Islands and the second, that of 9 January 1939, at the western end of Vestfold Hills. We prove that these attributions are incorrect. An integrated analysis of all reports on the expedition over the period 3–11 January 1939 and the contemporaneous imagery and film footage, along with modern photographs, establishes that the 8 January 1939 landing was on Skipsholmen, the northernmost island of the Svenner Group, and that Wilkins landed at Macey Peninsula on 9 January 1939. These two important heritage sites should now be visited to locate and record the relics left by Wilkins. This research raises the question of whether Wilkins’ landings and sovereignty actions in 1939 are of greater significance to Australia’s Territorial claim to the area than Mawson’s questionable sighting and naming of Princess Elizabeth Land in 1931.

A century and a half of paleoneurological study of synapsids has provided invaluable insight into the evolution of their brain, sense organs, behavior, and physiology. Here, we review and discuss the evidence for parental care, brooding, intraspecific combat, display, and gregariousness, and conclude that evidence for higher levels of social interactions and communication is piling up and may soon push the origin of sociality in the mammalian lineage to the middle Permian. We also review the paleoneurological cues (the trigeminal canals, parietal foramen, and inner ear) that support a new evolutionary hypothesis in which the homeogene MSX2 mutated early in the probainognathian cynodonts and changed their biology towards a more mammalian condition. This includes the loss of the parietal foramen, inflation of the cerebellar vermis, maintenance of a fur pelt, and appearance of mammary glands, some 247 million years ago. This was followed by the origin of the ability to whisk 241 million years ago, and that of endothermy 233 million years ago, as indicated by the evolution of the trigeminal and semicircular canals, respectively. Finally, we review the immense progress made in the study of encephalization and support that probainognathians went through a neurosensory revolution during the Triassic. Their newly acquired small body size, fur, and nocturnal lifestyle generated sensory input that affected the evolution of all their sensory organs, leading up to the development of the modern mammalian brain.

Within a new Keynesian model of monetary policy with both backward- and forward-looking variables, we investigate the impact of risk aversion by assuming that the central bank is endowed with recursive preferences à la Hansen and Sargent (Hansen and Sargent, 1995). We establish that, since in this model inflation and output are forward-looking, under discretion the optimal policy is found by solving two distinct fixed-point problems: the former pertains to the central bank’s optimization exercise, the latter to the identification of the equilibrium expectations of the forward-looking variables. We show that, in the presence of forward-looking variables, the optimal policy differs from the robust policy chosen by a central bank endowed with quadratic preferences and subject to Knightian uncertainty, confuting the equivalence established by Hansen and Sargent (2008) when only backward-looking variables enter into the laws of motion regulating the dynamics of the economic system. Through our analysis we show: i) how a risk-averse central bank selects a more aggressive policy than one furnished with the standard preferences of a canonical DSGE model; ii) that the “divine coincidence” established within traditional linear-quadratic formulations between inflation and output stabilization no longer holds.

Ambiguity, in the decision-theoretic sense, means that agents are unable to identify unique probabilities for some events that they care about. Ambiguity characterizes many real-life situations, but many important questions surrounding it are still open. Descriptively, we know that people typically perceive and are sensitive to ambiguity in certain kinds of situations. Intuitively, this is well justified. Normatively, however, many think that ambiguous beliefs and ambiguity sensitivity are irrational. This raises questions such as: Why are people sensitive to ambiguity? Does it lead to inferior decisions, in particular given people’s usual decision environments? An interesting clue is that there are many examples of social contexts in which ambiguity benefits everyone involved. Hence, we investigate the possibility that ambiguity sensitivity is ‘ecologically rational’ or adaptive in a multi-agent, strategic setting. We explore the viability of ambiguity sensitive behaviour using evolutionary simulations. Our results indicate that ambiguity sensitivity can be adaptive in strategic contexts, and is especially beneficial when agents have to coordinate.

We consider twist diffeomorphisms of the torus, $f:\mathrm {T^2\rightarrow T^2,}$ and their vertical rotation intervals, $\rho _V(\widehat {f})=[\rho _V^{-},\rho _V^{+}],$ where $\widehat {f}$ is a lift of f to the vertical annulus or cylinder. We show that $C^r$-generically, for any $r\geq 1$, both extremes of the rotation interval are rational and locally constant under $C^0$-perturbations of the map. Moreover, when f is area-preserving, $C^r$-generically, $\rho _V^{-}<\rho _V^{+}$. Also, for any twist map f, $\widehat {f}$ a lift of f to the cylinder, if $\rho _V^{-}<\rho _V^{+}=p/q$, then there are two possibilities: either $\widehat {f}^q(\bullet )-(0,p)$ maps a simple essential loop into the connected component of its complement which is below the loop, or it satisfies the curve intersection property. In the first case, $\rho _V^{+} \leq p/q$ in a $C^0$-neighborhood of $f,$ and in the second case, we show that $\rho _V^{+}(\widehat {f}+(0,t))>p/q$ for all $t>0$ (that is, the rotation interval is ready to grow). Finally, in the $C^r$-generic case, assuming that $\rho _V^{-}<\rho _V^{+}=p/q,$ we present some consequences of the existence of the free loop for $\widehat {f}^q(\bullet )-(0,p)$, related to the description and shape of the attractor–repeller pair that exists in the annulus. The case of a $C^r$-generic transitive twist diffeomorphism (if such a thing exists) is also investigated.

Type 2 diabetes (T2D) incidence has been steadily increasing over the past few decades. Several studies have evaluated the effect of plant-based, vegetarian or vegan diets on the risk of T2D, although their potential benefits need to be confirmed and characterised. We performed a literature search up to 10 July 2025, using the terms/keywords related to plant-based index (PDI), vegetarian/vegan diets and T2D. We included observational non-experimental studies evaluating adherence to such diets in adult subjects assessing T2D risk. We specifically considered overall PDI and related healthy PDI (hPDI) and unhealthy PDI (uPDI), assessing intake of different food groups. We included 36 studies published between 1999 and 2025. We found an inverse association between adherence to vegetarian/plant-based dietary patterns and T2D risk. This association was stronger, though statistically imprecise, for the vegan diet (RR = 0·65, 95 % CI 0·42, 1·00) and for lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet (RR = 0·68, 0·57, 0·82). For studies using plant-based indices, the RR were 0·82 (0·69, 0·82), 0·76 (0·69, 0·82) and 1·13 (0·98, 1·30) for overall PDI, hPDI and uPDI, respectively. In the dose–response meta-analysis, overall PDI and hPDI showed an inverse and almost linear association with T2D risk. Conversely, adherence to uPDI directly correlated with T2D risk. Overall, adherence to vegan/vegetarian diets may reduce T2D risk, while an unhealthy plant-based diet appears to linearly increase disease risk, indicating caution in the consumption of such unhealthy foods even if of plant origin. The beneficial association between vegetarian and healthy plant-based diets may have major public health implications.