This case note highlights fundamental errors of law committed by Mabuse J in MM v OM [2024] (3) SA 133 (GP). It demonstrates that the judge failed to appreciate that the phrase “pension interest” as defined in the Divorce Act refers to a benefit held by a retirement fund that only becomes due to be shared when the court dissolves a marriage where one of the spouses is a member of the retirement fund. Most importantly, it is shown that Mabuse J ignored the binding precedent of the Supreme Court of Appeal and failed to consider other judgments of the High Court, which clearly explain that where an exit event from the fund is anything but divorce, there can be no pension interest that the court can order to be shared. This note argues that the law was incorrectly applied in this case, and its approach, reasoning and conclusion must be rejected.

Robot hands are essential components of robots; however, the hand of more complex spatial mechanisms with coupling chains is rarely proposed. This paper proposes a hybrid hand with three underactuated finger plane limbs connected by a flexible closed-loop chain. The degree of freedom (DOF) of the hybrid hand is equal to the number of motors before grasping the object. When the contact force appears between the fingertips and the object, the flexible linkages deform, allowing the hybrid hand to maintain adaptability during contact. As the three fingers make contact with the object, the hybrid hand forms a closed-loop chain with the object, ensuring that the overall DOF remains consistent with the number of motors. Firstly, the hybrid hand’s structural characteristics and DOF are analyzed. Secondly, the kinematics of the hybrid hand are derived, and the relationships among the spring deformation, the kinematics of the fingertip and the input of the hybrid hand are obtained according to the geometric constraints. Thirdly, based on the kinematic results and the principle of virtual work method, the coupling dynamics formula of the hybrid hand is established, and the relationship between the dynamic driving force, dynamic constrained force, spring force and the force acting on the object is solved. Finally, the simulation model of the hybrid hand is constructed in MATLAB to validate the theoretical solution, and the merits of the hybrid hand were confirmed by prototype experiments. This paper aims to support a theoretical foundation for the intelligent control of novel hybrid hands.

In reaction to revolutionary upheaval in the 1790s and 1800s, the British parliament at home and colonial legislatures in the Americas passed their first statutory provisions to govern migration and aliens as such. As this paper argues, in their sustained and varied uses, these “alien acts” were much more than about border and migration controls. In a period of fundamental restructuring of imperial rule and of social statuses within the colonies, they increasingly turned into flexible tools of imperial governance. Taking the British Caribbean in the 1820s and 1830s as a case, the paper examines how alien legislation was reused, and reinvented, in two crucial arenas of imperial reconfiguration: the push for political equality by free people of color and the abolition of the slave trade. By their emphasis on sweeping executive power, various actors on the ground but also in the metropole regarded alien acts as an appropriate legal tool to respond to, to avert or subvert what they regarded as challenges or legal complexities of the age of emancipation. In this way, the alien acts also became a central factor in the reconfiguration of British subjecthood—with far-reaching consequences that their creators and users could never fully anticipate or control.

This study investigates the influence of interlayer cations on the thermodynamics and sorption mechanisms of water in a reference Wyoming montmorillonite. The behaviour of the montmorillonite exchanged with monovalent cations (Li+, Na+, K+, Rb+, Cs+) or divalent cations (Mg2+, Ca2+, Ba2+) is compared. The analysis combines X-ray diffraction (XRD), water sorption isotherms at various temperatures and mid-infrared spectroscopy. Li+, Mg2+ and Ca2+ promote greater water uptake and swelling, whereas K+, Rb+ and Cs+ significantly limit these processes. The behaviour of Na+ and Ba2+ stands out, demonstrating intermediate water uptake and high swelling. Mid-infrared spectral analysis supports these observations. It is shown that a cation’s effect on water uptake and swelling correlates best with the product of its elementary charge and ionic radius rather than with other properties such as the electrostatic potential, solvation enthalpy or chemical hardness. However, differences in isotherm shapes, hysteresis between adsorption and desorption and the variation of isosteric heat with water content suggest the presence of two distinct sorption mechanisms: one involving Li+, Cs+, Mg2+, Ca2+ and Ba2+, and another involving Na+, K+ and Rb+. These findings indicate that isotherm shape and swelling alone do not directly reflect water uptake capacity. These findings thus outline that the chaotropic (structure-breaking) or kosmotropic (structure-making) nature of the cations, along with the complex interplay between cation hydration and TOT layer attraction, may explain the complex observed differences.

Residents’ attitudes towards wildlife and their management can be crucial in population control. Using a novel approach, we examined East Tennessee residents’ tolerance for American black bears and attitudes towards hunting. Most residents viewed black bears positively, tolerated their presence and preferred seeing them in their area. Attitudes were influenced by concern about future encounters, the values and benefits attributed to bears, prior experiences and perceptions of human–bear conflict and conflict frequency, whereas sociodemographic factors were less influential. Support for regulated hunting was influenced by sociodemographic factors more so than cognitive factors. Our findings suggest opportunities for managers to increase tolerance of black bears among residents through outreach emphasizing the benefits of living with the bears and guidance for avoiding negative encounters. Greater trust in the wildlife agency may result from such outreach, potentially leading to greater levels of tolerance among residents of bear-inhabited areas.

A novel type of mass casualty incident (MCI) occurred in Lebanon in September 2024, involving the detonation of weaponized communication devices “pagers and 2-way radios.” The explosions resulted in 2931 injuries and 37 fatalities. This article explores the unique challenges posed by this event. It also highlights lessons learned to improve disaster preparedness and response strategies, emphasizing the importance of flexible triage, resilient communication systems, and comprehensive surge capacity.

Among occultists, Hermetic writers, modern Templar groups, and conspiracy theorists, Michael Psellos has been imagined as a guardian of occult Hermetic knowledge, the secret founder of the Knights Templar, and a key figure in global conspiracy narratives. This article traces the development of this alternative reception in the West and explores its adoption by Turkish conspiracy theorists who, despite their anti-Western stance, have integrated it into their narratives about the New World Order. The dramatic reconstruction of Psellos’ scholarly pursuits in this modern underground reception has created a ‘double reality’ that diverges radically from academic interpretations of Psellos.

The article analyses the Jewish militias that were established in Galicia during the fall of the Habsburg empire in 1918 and the creation of new nation-states. As public order collapsed and the region descended into violence, Jews throughout Galicia took up arms to protect and organize their communities and to take an active part in the transformation of the region. They mirrored the efforts of their non-Jewish neighbors, creating paramilitary forces that aimed to fill the vacuum left behind by the disintegrating imperial state. The militias were more than a means of self-defense. They actively participated in the establishment of the new states’ monopoly on violence but did so on their own terms—integration was only possible through separation. At the same time, the militias served a decidedly internal, Jewish purpose by replacing traditional leaderships and imposing discipline in the community, at times through universal conscription.

We establish some interactions between uniformly recurrent subgroups (URSs) of a group G and cosets topologies $\tau _{\mathcal {N}}$ on G associated to a family $\mathcal {N}$ of normal subgroups of G. We show that when $\mathcal {N}$ consists of finite index subgroups of G, there is a natural closure operation $\mathcal {H} \mapsto \mathrm {cl}_{\mathcal {N}}(\mathcal {H})$ that associates to a URS $\mathcal {H}$ another URS $\mathrm {cl}_{\mathcal {N}}(\mathcal {H})$, called the $\tau _{\mathcal {N}}$-closure of $\mathcal {H}$. We give a characterization of the URSs $\mathcal {H}$ that are $\tau _{\mathcal {N}}$-closed in terms of stabilizer URSs. This has consequences on arbitrary URSs when G belongs to the class of groups for which every faithful minimal profinite action is topologically free. We also consider the largest amenable URS $\mathcal {A}_G$ and prove that for certain coset topologies on G, almost all subgroups $H \in \mathcal {A}_G$ have the same closure. For groups in which amenability is detected by a set of laws (a property that is variant of the Tits alternative), we deduce a criterion for $\mathcal {A}_G$ to be a singleton based on residual properties of G.

Microwaves (MWs) have emerged as a promising sensing technology to complement optical methods for monitoring floating plastic litter. This study uses machine learning (ML) to identify optimal MW frequencies for detecting floating macroplastics (>5 cm) across S, C, and X-bands. Data were obtained from dedicated wideband backscattering radio measurements conducted in a controlled indoor scenario that mimics deep-sea conditions. The paper presents new strategies to directly analyze the frequency domain signals using ML algorithms, instead of generating an image from those signals and analyzing the image. We propose two ML workflows, one unsupervised, to characterize the difference in feature importance across the measured MW spectrum, and the other supervised, based on multilayer perceptron, to study the detection accuracy in unseen data. For the tested conditions, the backscatter response of the plastic litter is optimal at X-band frequencies, achieving accuracies up to 90% and 80% for lower and higher water wave heights, respectively. Multiclass classification is also investigated to distinguish between different types of plastic targets. ML results are interpreted in terms of the physical phenomena obtained through numerical analysis, and quantified through an energy-based metric.