Obesity and overweight in pregnant women increase pregnancy and neonatal morbidity with a risk of metabolic syndrome for children in later life. Maternal preconceptional bariatric surgery reduces maternal and paediatric outcomes but may induce fetal nutritional deficiencies and intrauterine growth restriction through placental reprogramming. The aim of this study was to describe feto-placental unit modifications induced by obesity, and the effect of bariatric surgery performed before gestation, on a diet-induced obese rat model. One month after surgery, rats of ‘control’, ‘obese’ and ‘bariatric surgery’ groups were mated and then sacrificed at D19 of gestation. Clinical description, immuno-histochemistry and molecular analyses were performed on feto-placental units. Obesity induces placental modifications including lipid accumulations, increased inflammation and oxidative stress. Some of these modifications are partially restored by maternal preconceptional bariatric surgery. On the other hand, a reduction in the expression of markers of glucose transport, insulin function and amino acid transport, after bariatric surgery was observed. This phenotype may lead to fetal caloric restriction, adoption of a ‘thrifty phenotype’ and subsequently fetal growth restriction. These preliminary findings highlight the importance of a close follow-up of women who have undergone bariatric surgery and their children.

The second Trump administration has shaken the foundations of US leadership in global health, with this column assessing rapid shifts in global health governance. By analyzing how the administration’s anti-science ethos, foreign assistance cuts, and multilateral disengagement have undermined global solidarity, the column considers the destabilizing impacts on global health and examines how other states, regional bodies, and international organizations are responding to this US decline. This examination reveals both strains for global health promotion and resilience within a changed governance landscape.

Paleolake coring initiatives result in large datasets from various proxies taken at different resolutions, ranging from continuous scans to samples collected at coarser intervals. Higher-resolution data (e.g., core-scan X-ray fluorescence [XRF]) can detect short-duration changes in the paleolake and help identify unit boundaries with precision; however, interpreting the causes of such changes may require sampling and more intensive laboratory analysis like X-ray diffraction (XRD). This study applies a published wide and deep learning model, developed for the Olduvai Gorge Coring Project (OGCP) 2014 cores from the Pleistocene Olduvai basin, Tanzania, to reconstruct the mineral assemblages from saline-alkaline paleolake Olduvai using core-scan XRF data and core lithology. A classification model (predicting mineral presence or absence) and a regression model (predicting relative abundances of minerals) yielded predictions for two OGCP cores (2A and 3A), which were compared with published XRD mineral data and detailed core sedimentological descriptions. The models were excellent at identifying dolomite-rich layers, carbonate-rich intervals, intervals of sandstone within claystone, and altered tuffs within claystone and at predicting whether illitic or smectitic clays dominate. The models struggled with less-altered tuffs and with zeolites in non-tuff sediments, especially when XRD identified chabazite and erionite (rather than phillipsite) as the dominant, non-analcime zeolite.

La Viña rock shelter is a relevant archaeological site for understanding the late Middle and Upper Palaeolithic cultural development in northern Iberia as evidenced by the Mousterian, Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean and Magdalenian bone and lithic industries, parietal engravings and human subsistence remains recovered during the 1980s excavations by J. Fortea in the western and central excavation areas. This paper aims to present 16 new radiocarbon dates, which are added to the previous radiocarbon dates obtained, using different analytical methods on bone and charcoal. These are now 57 dates in total. Bayesian models have been applied to assess and discern the chronology of the archaeological sequence in each sector of the rock shelter. The results provide details on the chronostratigraphy of each excavation area, documenting the duration of the different technocultural phases and confirming in-site postdepositional events.

In sociology, aesthetics have become an important lens for exploring the sensory dimensions of political and economic processes, with research on urban aesthetics contributing significantly to this field. However, much of this work focuses on how aesthetic forms serve the interests of political and economic elites, portraying aesthetic value as a direct product of political ideologies. While these approaches have shown that urban aesthetics are shaped by power struggles, they pay limited theoretical attention to less straightforward aspects of aesthetic politics—such as cases where clashing values, imperatives, and commitments meet. This gap is particularly pronounced in places shaped by violent histories, where the value of urban beauty might be inevitably entangled with loss, ambivalence, and co-existence with unwanted materialities. This article proposes an approach that foregrounds the dilemmas and compromises inherent in urban aesthetic politics, focusing on the varied practices through which people negotiate how to care for urban aesthetic value over time. I develop this approach through a case study of Klaipėda, Lithuania—a city shaped by layered aesthetic transformations, from state annexation to socialist modernisation to post-Soviet nation-building and Europeanisation. Using mixed-methods research, the article highlights differences in how people articulate what counts as good and bad aesthetics and which forms of material care—or neglect—are “appropriate” to sustain the city’s desirable aesthetic appeal. In doing so, the article reveals complex gradations of value underlying seemingly coherent aesthetic ideals of Europeanness.

We develop several $\ell ^p$-operator norm inequalities for $k\times k$ block matrices defined on the $\ell ^p$-sum of Banach spaces. Using these inequalities, we obtain p-numerical radius and spectral radius bounds for $k\times k$ block matrices. We deduce a p-numerical radius bound for the Kronecker product $A\otimes B$, where $A\in {M}_k(\mathbb {C})$ is a $k\times k$ complex matrix and $B\in \mathcal {L}(\mathbb {H})$ is a bounded linear operator on a complex Hilbert space $\mathbb {H}$. This improves and extends Holbrook’s bound $w(A\otimes B)\leq w(A)\|B\|.$ If $\|A\|_{\ell ^p}$ and $w_p(A)$ denote the $\ell ^p$-operator norm and p-numerical radius of $A\in {M}_k(\mathbb {C})$, respectively, then it is shown that

$$ \begin{align*} \frac{1}{2}\|A\|_p+\mu_p(A) \leq w_p(A), \end{align*} $$

$\mu _p(A)$

$\ell ^p$

$\frac {1}{2}\|A\|_p= w_p(A)$