An adverse in utero experience negatively impacts perinatal growth in livestock. Maternal heat stress (HS) during gestation reduces placental growth and function. This progressive placental insufficiency ultimately leads to fetal growth restriction (FGR). Studies in chronically catheterized fetal sheep have shown that FGR fetuses exhibit hypoxemia, hypoglycemia, and lower anabolic hormone concentrations. Under hypoxic stress and nutrient deficiency, fetuses prioritize basal metabolic requirements over tissue accretion to support survival. Skeletal muscle is particularly vulnerable to HS-induced placental insufficiency due to its high energy demands and large contribution to total body mass. In FGR fetuses, skeletal muscle growth is reduced, evidenced by smaller myofiber size and mass, reduced satellite cell proliferation, and slower rate of protein synthesis. Disruptions in skeletal muscle growth are associated with mitochondrial dysfunction, including reduced pyruvate flux into the mitochondrial matrix and lower complex I activity in the mitochondrial electron transport chain. This review summarizes current research on the mechanisms by which HS-induced placental insufficiency affects skeletal muscle growth in the fetus, with an emphasis on myogenesis, hypertrophy, protein synthesis, and energy metabolism. The evidence presented is primarily drawn from experiments using chronically catheterized fetal sheep exposed to maternal HS during mid-gestation. Additionally, we explore emerging nutritional strategies aimed at enhancing skeletal muscle growth in animals with FGR. These strategies hold promise not only for improving reproductive efficiency in livestock affected by prenatal stress but also for their translational relevance to human pregnancies complicated by placental insufficiency.

Recent years have witnessed a “juridical turn” in Chinese environmental governance, emphasising and encouraging legal mobilisation and litigation deployment by citizens to address environmental grievances in either individual or collective forms. This legalisation movement has spawned a budding, socio-legal field of Chinese environmental justice (CEJ), with an ostensible trend towards the legal empowerment of community organisations as “autonomous” litigants representing public interests. Drawing on extensive qualitative data, this study examines how plural, fluid state–society relations are manifested, animated, and permeated in the interactive processes of the CEJ. The analysis reveals four emergent modes of political–organisational connections—the state’s challengers, allies, servants, and subordinates—all of which depend on how the Chinese state interprets their motives for using the law and engaging in litigations, and anticipated effects their legal mobilisation can generate or diffuse in society. The bounded community mobilisation within the CEJ has also embodied the continuing state supremacy and the growing legal responsiveness in the Chinese approach to modernisation. Future theoretical and policy implications for the participatory effectiveness of community organisations in the CEJ are also discussed.

Most of what we know about organized criminal violence comes from research on illicit narcotics markets. Yet criminal groups also fight to capture markets for licit commodities, as evidenced by Sicilian lemons and Mexican avocados. When do organized criminal groups violently expand into markets for licit goods? We argue that rapid increases in the share of a good’s export value create opportunities for immediate profit and future market manipulation. These opportunities lead to violence as groups expand their territorial holdings and economic portfolio. We provide subnational evidence of our mechanism using data on avocado exports from Mexico, and address reverse causality with Google Trends data on the popularity of web searches for “avocado toast.” We also provide cross-national evidence by combining data from the Atlas of Economic Complexity, V-Dem, and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). We find that increases in a country’s share of global export value for agricultural goods are associated with more homicides—but only where organized criminal groups are present.

Let $n\ge2$, $s\in(0,1)$, and $\Omega\subset\mathbb{R}^n$ be a bounded Lipschitz domain. In this paper, we investigate the global (higher-order) Sobolev regularity of weak solutions to the fractional Dirichlet problem

\begin{equation*}\begin{cases}(-\Delta)^su=f \ \ & \text{in}\ \ \Omega,\\u=0 \ \ & \text{in}\ \ \mathbb{R}^n\setminus\Omega.\end{cases}\end{equation*}

Precisely, we prove that there exists a positive constant $\varepsilon\in(0,s]$ depending on n, s, and the Lipschitz constant of Ω such that, for any $t\in[\varepsilon,\min\{1+\varepsilon,2s\})$, when $f\in L^q(\Omega)$ with some $q\in(\frac{n}{2s-t},\infty]$, the weak solution u satisfies

\begin{equation*}\|u\|_{W^{t,p}(\mathbb{R}^n)}\le C\|f\|_{L^q(\Omega)}\end{equation*}

for all $p\in[1,\frac{1}{t-\varepsilon})$. In particular, when Ω is a bounded C1 domain or a bounded Lipschitz domain satisfying the uniform exterior ball condition, the aforementioned global regularity estimates hold with $\varepsilon=s$ and they are sharp in this case. Moreover, if Ω is a bounded $C^{1,\kappa}$ domain with $\kappa\in(0,s)$ or a bounded Lipschitz domain satisfying the uniform exterior ball condition, we further show the global BMO-Sobolev regularity estimate

\begin{equation*}\left\|(-\Delta)^{\frac{s}{2}}u\right\|_{\mathrm{BMO}(\mathbb{R}^n)}+\left\|\nabla^{s}u\right\|_{\mathrm{BMO}(\mathbb{R}^n)}\le C\|f\|_{L^q(\Omega)}\end{equation*}

for some $q\in(\frac{n}{s},\infty]$, which is sharp in the sense that the BMO norm can not be improved to the $L^\infty$ norm.

An explosion of survey experimental research shows that public support for nuclear use is alarmingly high and malleable. Thus, nuclear nonuse may depend on elite restraint. Can elites be counted on to resist nuclear use? How do national security elites think about nuclear weapons, and what does this imply for potential nuclear use and our understanding of public–elite gaps in political behavior? Drawing on the literature on public opinion formation, I argue that two features of public attitudes toward nuclear weapons help explain elite–public gaps on nuclear weapons: low salience and low knowledge. I then test this explanation using parallel preregistered survey experiments assessing support for nuclear use across three samples: the US public before the Ukraine conflict; the US public after the Ukraine conflict began; and a highly elite sample of US military officers and strategists, also after the Ukraine conflict began. While the US public is willing to support nuclear use, US national security elites are significantly more reluctant. Among the public, respondents for whom nuclear weapons are a high-knowledge or high-salience issue behave more like elites: they are less likely to support nuclear use. The findings have important implications for survey experimental research, scholarship on nuclear weapons, public opinion formation, and elite–public gaps in political behavior.

Why are some firms more successful than others in obtaining privileged treatment from their government? Trade policy, as an unusually targeted tool, offers a rich context to understand such questions of special-interest politics and corporate power. Studying decisions on anti-dumping petitions in the United States, we introduce a novel source of privileged treatment. We argue that firms with more linkages throughout the domestic economy enjoy a privileged political position. Benefits to these firms extend indirectly to a wider set of constituents, which allows firms to assemble broader coalitions and to portray protectionist policy as more than purely particularistic politics. We provide evidence for this argument by developing original measures of linkages between firms, derived from over 600,000 customer–supplier relationships among industries, matching them with data on anti-dumping petitions filed by US firms, written briefs filed by members of Congress on behalf of these firms, and the geographic distribution of industries. Our account identifies a new explanation of differences in the political influence of firms, underscores the relevance of domestic production networks in politics, and offers a novel perspective on cleavages and coalitions in trade politics. Our results also suggest that the expansion of global supply chains, long considered a hallmark of political power, has weakened the clout of some of the largest firms by limiting their domestic footprint.

If panpsychism is true then consciousness pervades the cosmos, and there exist many more conscious subjects than other worldviews contemplate. Panpsychism’s explanatory story about how human material composition and complexity grounds human consciousness seems to entail that there exist, notably, various conscious subjects within human organisms. Given the plausibility of the thesis that consciousness confers moral status – a thesis many panpsychists endorse – questions thus arise about the wellbeing of these inner subjects. In this article I raise the possibility that the lives of our inner subjects may not be morally suitable to a sophisticated centre of consciousness of the sort that likely exists, for example, inside various of our brain areas. Panpsychism, indeed, seems on the face of it to generate a good deal more suffering, in this way, than other worldviews. If that is correct, panpsychists who would embrace theism, and theists who would embrace panpsychism – for example pantheists – should be given serious pause. If panpsychism positively compounds the problem of evil, then one may have to choose between panpsychism and theism.

Women and Property inheritance is a complex issue in India. The Hindu Succession Laws give women inheritance rights on ancestral, acquired, and agricultural land. This has led to an increase in their bargaining power and a consequential increase in transaction costs, which ideally should challenge the ex-ante and ex-post HSAA 2005, Coasean cooperative equilibriums. While the normative Coasean theorem propounds the dismantling of cooperation with the rise in bargaining, the Hobbesian framework believes that cooperation can exist through coercion. This process, in which women have bargaining rights yet cooperate, happens through “covert coercion.” Despite increased bargaining powers, women are conflicted between inheritance and maintaining familial ties, where covert coercion forces them to let go of inheritance. The article investigates this conflict women face through the lens of Law, normative Coasean and Hobbesian frameworks, psychological costs, and their Lived Reality. Further, this article investigates various efficiency criteria.

Aprocta bainae Mutafchiev & Kinsella sp. nov, collected from the orbits of a flammulated owl, Psiloscops flammeolus (Kaup) (Strigiformes: Strigidae), from Montana, USA is described based on light and scanning electron microscopies. Additionally, fragments of 18S and 12S rRNA genes of the new species are provided. Based on the molecular data of the 18S gene, A. bainae n. sp. was included in a monophyletic clade of the genus Aprocta. Aprocta ophthalmophaga Stossich, 1902 and Aprocta colaptidis Schuurmans-Stekhoven, 1950 are considered species inquirendae. Aprocta colaptidis Schuurmans-Stekhoven, 1951, a homonym of A. colaptidis Schuurmans-Stekhoven, 1950, is considered a species incertae sedis.