Despite the destruction it inevitably engenders and the opposition it often elicits, war remains a near-human universal. There is almost no society, across time or place, that has not experienced some form of violent conflict, whether internally or against its neighbors or adversaries. The most common explanations for the causes of war and conflict tend to center around social and material factors, such as conflicts over resources, territory, or regime type. Certainly, these factors play a role in many conflicts, but they cannot alone explain every war. Other arguments, however, drawn from evolutionary psychology and biological anthropology, based on fundamental aspects of human nature with regard to male coalitionary psychology, do posit specific sources for conflict that provide an underlying platform for its emergence and can help explain its wide variety across time and space. A comprehensive and accurate understanding of the nature of war must include these considerations.

The “home–field” dichotomy has long been a core assumption of fieldwork in political science. As in other social science disciplines, political scientists rely on these categories to contextualize our research within particular time–space nexuses and to separate our personal lives and private dwellings and institutions from our sources, participants, and broader research environments. Although the spatial, temporal, and emotional divisions between our “homes” and “fields” have always been arbitrary, they are increasingly blurred when we use remote and online methods for research, especially for qualitative studies. This article problematizes the home–field dichotomy within the context of remote and online political science field research. We contend that the overlap of our homes and fields in digital fieldwork poses different challenges for our professional boundaries than offline research, particularly in terms of separating our personal and research lives, mitigating risk, and protecting our mental health. Given the growing use of remote and online methods, we argue that the discipline of political science must account more seriously for the muddling of our homes and fields to support rigorous, transparent, and ethical empirical research.

Ventricular assist devices, such as the HeartMate 3, are routinely used to support patents with failing ventricular function. However, extrinsic obstruction of the outflow graft has been identified as a complication associated with the HeartMate 3. We report a case of a patient with transposition of the great arteries (d-TGA), status post-Mustard procedure with severe systemic (right) ventricular dysfunction who developed extrinsic obstruction of theoutflow graft, 6 years after implant, leading to a significant reduction in HeartMate 3 flow. This patient required the placement of multiple stents to fully address the diffuse stenosis of the outflow graft. This case underscores the technical challenges involved in managing extrinsic obstruction of theoutflow graft in patients with this anatomy and highlights the importance of a tailored, multidisciplinary approach. It emphasises the need for careful planning around stent overlap, outflow graft angulation, and catheter and wire positioning in the context of complex anatomical and device-related interactions.

For both Hegel and Badiou, love is one vehicle through which the transition from substance to subject concretely occurs, despite their respective conceptions of this transition differing drastically. Although (amicably) critical of Hegel’s Logic, Badiou—the first systematic continental philosopher since Hegel—never expressly reproaches Hegel’s conception of love, as outlined in both the Logic and the Realphilosophie lectures, but it is not Hegelian love which Badiou champions. His possible criticisms of Hegelian love can only be discerned through his explicit critiques of the Logic, in which he faults Hegel’s denial of absolute difference. Given that Badiouian love is conceived precisely as the subjective experience of absolute difference, his critique of Hegel must play a more significant role in his conceptual rehabilitation of love than is immediately evident. This paper teases out Badiou’s critique of Hegel and examines what it illuminates regarding his conception of love, as well as Hegel’s. I conclude that Badiou’s conception highlights an aspect of Hegelian love which Hegel himself does not sufficiently emphasize, but it remains too one-sided on its own and thus forces one to continue to decide in favour of Hegel.

A clay from Weslatiya that is widely used in Tunisian ceramic production has abundant reserves but generates significant waste, posing environmental concerns if not handled appropriately. This study explores the valorization of this local clay by incorporating ceramic waste (chamotte) and quartz sand to produce eco-friendly materials, in line with sustainability and circular economy principles. X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy analyses reveal that incorporating chamotte at levels exceeding 15% by weight improves the material’s properties. The Young’s modulus of the composite increases to 80 GPa, more than 2.5 times that of the basic clay. Chamotte can replace up to 30% of quartz sand without significantly affecting densification or porosity while preserving structural integrity. This approach offers flexibility in terms of material composition, enhancing performance and promoting sustainability by reusing waste materials for high-performance ceramics in industrial applications.

Recognizing the distributed nature of agency in human–AI interactions, this article proposes a framework for examining the power dynamics that undergird the use of generative AI (GenAI) for language learning. Drawing on Darvin and Norton’s model of investment, it adopts a critical sociomaterial lens to cast a light on the entanglement of bodies, objects and discourse in these interactions, while highlighting how issues of positioning, access to resources, and ideological reproduction emerge from this perspective. Human agency both interacts with and is constrained or amplified by the functionalities of GenAI. To invest in agentive GenAI practices that enable meaningful learning and the achievement of their own intentions, learners must not only recognize the power of GenAI to steer interactions and promote specific ways of thinking, but also resist fully delegating the production of meaning and texts to technology. Cultivating critical digital literacies that recognize how power operates in human-AI interactions is integral to fostering reflexive, inclusive and equitable language learning and teaching in the age of GenAI.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Mid-Atlantic States expanded guardianship to include habitual drunkards. Legislators in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey empowered courts to put habitual drunkards under guardianship, a legal status that stripped them of their rights to own property, enter into contracts, make wills, and, in some states, even vote. Amid the dramatic nineteenth-century expansion of male suffrage, the habitual drunkard signified a masculine failure of self-government that disqualified propertied men from the privileges of full citizenship. The struggle to define habitual drunkenness, detect the habitual drunkard, and put him under guardianship transformed the courtroom into an arena for contesting the thresholds of compulsion, policing respectable manhood, and drawing the borders of full citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States.

Bentonite is mined globally for use in commercial and industrial applications. In these applications, smectite content and composition are the paramount factors of the bentonite material and control its properties. As bentonite composition and properties can vary significantly over a large mining district or within a single mine, quality control is required including: mineral composition, especially smectite content; cation exchange capacity (CEC); exchangeable cation composition; and smectite crystallochemical features. Differences in bentonite composition locally or over a spatial area stem from the different geological settings present throughout bentonitization. The study aims were to: (1) determine the layer charge (LC) variation of dioctahedral smectite over the Bavarian mining district and within individual mines in the area; and (2) assess the error in smectite content calculations based on CEC data resulting from the actual range of experimentally determined LC values. This information has been missing in the scientific literature, as previous LC methods were laborious or subject to assumptions, making a comprehensive study over a large spatial area impractical. This study employed the use of the recently developed efficient and precise spectroscopic ‘O-D method’, which enabled the LC measurement of 40 samples from eight mines in the Bavarian bentonite mining district, covering an area of 250 km2, within the North Alpine Foreland Basin. Results showed LC values calibrated against the alkylammonium method (LC (AAM)) generally ranged between 0.29 and 0.30 eq per formula unit (FU), with only 10% of samples showing LC values >0.31 eq/FU. This narrow LC range has positive implications for the accuracy of determining smectite content calculated from CEC data, during routine quality control of Bavarian and other bentonites. The average error of the CEC-based smectite contents resulting from LC variations was, on average, ±3 wt.%.

This longitudinal survey examined the effect of the National Healthcare Safety Network’s (NHSN) recently updated Clostridioides difficile test method definition on reporting of hospital-onset C. difficile. Among six hospitals with ≥ 5 years of data available, the updated NHSN definition was associated with improved concordance between predicted versus reported cases.