In their article Objective Standards of Medical Judgment: A Myth of Abortion Law, Graber et al. explore the different legal standards for evaluating if a physician properly offered abortion care under a medical exception to states’ abortion restrictions. While this piece focuses tightly on the use of legal standards to limit access to abortion care, it should be understood in the broader context of a legal and political environment that is increasingly shifting the locus of medical decision-making power from the medical profession to state actors. We agree with Graber et al. that physicians should use their voices to speak out and educate the community on the medical decision-making process. But we are concerned that some state and legal actors are intentionally looking to improperly encroach upon the practice of medicine.

The population dynamics of the epiphytic lichen Lobaria pulmonaria were studied in spruce forests within Paanajärvi National Park (Karelia), which has seen no major disturbances during the last 190 to 270 years. Studies for the period 2015–2021 showed a rise in thallus number and area, with a larger proportion in the ontogenetic spectrum being young, non-reproductive thalli (virginal 1). Sexual reproduction was low, with fertile thalli comprising less than 1% of the total. Salix caprea and Populus tremula trunks served as the main growth surfaces for Lobaria pulmonaria in the northern taiga forests. Furthermore, Salix caprea offered the optimal environment for thalli to grow and develop. In a few instances, the colonization of new substrata was observed. Climate change is expected to have a positive impact, allowing the species’ range expansion at its northern border.

Despite the routine assessment of decisional capacity in the clinical context, the concept of capacity is contested, and its measurement is flawed. For example, scholars and clinicians disagree about the criteria for demonstrating capacity. There is further lack of consensus about whether some types of medical decisions should require more evidence of capacity. Moreover, there is robust literature demonstrating that formal capacity assessment instruments are not always valid and reliable.

This Article focuses on these and other issues, namely the fact that (in)capacity as currently understood is often not viewed relationally and contextually. (In)capacity is viewed as a cognitive property of an individual — an individual has capacity or does not. However, properly conceived, (in)capacity is constituted in interaction with others (e.g., health care providers, family, friends) and one’s environment, and mediated through one’s body and experience of health, illness, or disability. When this reality is not acknowledged, clinicians, caregivers, family members, and others miss opportunities to strengthen patients’ decisional capacity by modifying how they communicate with patients and by changing patients’ environment to improve decision-making. In fact, not acknowledging the relational and contextual nature of (in)capacity likely leads to weakening of patients’ decision-making abilities and the unnecessary disqualification of patients from contemporaneous decision-making, which subsequently negatively affects patient interests in maintaining autonomy and bodily integrity and experiencing wellbeing.

This Article will foreground the relational and contextual nature of (in)capacity and address problems with capacity assessments for adult patients in the medical decision-making context, propose reforms to the capacity assessment process, and conclude by discussing the implications of these arguments in other decision-making contexts.

Section 1 introduces the notion of transcendental arguments as arguments from the necessary conditions of possibility. What distinguishes them from other forms of deductive reasoning is the so-called transcendental conditional of the logical form ‘p is possible only if q’. Section 2 outlines three models for such arguments, analysing transcendental conditionals in terms of material implication, strict implication, and presupposition (semantic and pragmatic). Section 3 considers competing interpretations of Kant’s Refutation of Idealism presented in the B-edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. Section 4 summarises the main results of the paper.

Let A be an abelian variety over a number field $\mathsf{K},$ with algebraic closure $\bar{\mathsf{K}}$. Assuming the Mumford–Tate conjecture for A, we show that the isogeny class of A over $\bar{\mathsf{K}}$ contains only finitely many isomorphism classes of bounded Faltings height. As the Mumford–Tate conjecture is known for many abelian varieties, our theorem is unconditional in those cases.

This essay compares and contrasts the disciplines of sociology and law and society. I then outline how sociology can enrich law and society with stronger theory-building and better linkages of theoretical frameworks to empirical data. I next consider how law and society can enrich sociology, including by encouraging sociologists to take seriously law’s constitutive nature and to engage more directly with their work’s normative implications. Throughout, I draw primarily on research on U.S. immigration enforcement, which is both my area of study and a site of rich cross-pollination between the two fields.

Prior research on technology entrepreneurship has been grounded almost exclusively in capitalist frameworks developed in the Global North. We argue that context matters, and that scholars should examine technology entrepreneurship in the roughly half of the world where socialism provides the economic foundation. As a step in this direction, we investigate how the principle of common prosperity shapes technology entrepreneurship in socialist contexts. Focusing first on China – a global technological leader and one of the world’s largest generators of patents – we show through two cases that concern for the poor is not incidental but integral to technology entrepreneurship under socialism. We then extend the analysis to a second socialist context outside China, demonstrating the broader relevance of common prosperity for understanding the relationship between technology entrepreneurship and poverty alleviation. Taken together, these cases suggest that research on technology entrepreneurship should move beyond Global North capitalist assumptions and instead account for societal context, particularly the socialist emphasis on common prosperity. Incorporating such perspectives invites scholars to reconsider the role of technology and entrepreneurship in advancing the common good and reducing poverty.

This article deals with late antique Jewish and Christian discourse on social hierarchy, martyrology, and attitudes toward the law and the commandments. I place Jewish and Christian attitudes to martyrdom in late antiquity within the larger system of the commandments. Beyond the circumstantial connections between martyrdom and the affirmation or violation of laws, I argue that martyrdom constitutes an important lens for the examination of the rule of the law and for the negotiation of socio-religious hierarchies. I argue that the elevation of martyrdom creates inner tension vis-à-vis the idea of life-long righteousness based on adherence to the law. I discuss the construction of martyrdom as the final and ultimate commandment, necessary for reaching a state of perfection. Through addressing a case where martyrdom is presented as competing with, if not substituting, a life according to the law, I discuss the theme of an upside-down world, which appears in both Christian and Rabbinic literature, concerning martyrs. In this framework, I discuss the view of martyrdom as a kind of stairway to heaven—an instrument for rapid advancement allowing to overtake those who lived according to the law—and the unique perception of law and martyrology in the fourth-century Syriac-Christian Book of Steps, which places the martyrs below the perfect.

Tendon-driven Continuum Robots (TDCRs) excel at operating in confined and complex environments due to their inherent flexibility and high degrees of freedom. Despite these advantages, achieving precise control in multi-section TDCRs remains challenging because of their infinite degrees of freedom, nonlinear behaviour, and coupled tendon actuation. This paper introduces a generalised virtual actuation space framework that significantly simplifies kinematic modelling and control of multi-section TDCRs. By formulating a novel concept of virtual actuation space that converts each bending section of the TDCR two-input actuation system, the proposed method reduces the complexity of TDCR modelling and control, enabling unique and simplified representations of each section. Furthermore, the formulation decouples each section via a generalised tendon mapping matrix that handles coupling effects. Experimental validation on a two-section TDCR demonstrates tracking performance with a root mean square error below 3 mm, corresponding to approximately 1% of the robot’s length. These results confirm the method’s efficacy in improving TDCR precision for minimally invasive surgery, industrial applications, and other constrained environments.

We describe the marine horsehair worm Nectonema shimadai sp. nov., which was parasitic in a snapping shrimp (Alpheus sp.) collected at 4 m depth from the coastal water of Kikaijima Island, Japan, northwestern Pacific. The nematomorph was a female, 49 mm in length and 340 μm in width, salmon-pink when alive, with a translucent anterior body region and a distinct anterior chamber. The 18S sequence from N. shimadai sp. nov. was 12.8%, 9.8%, 9.6%, and 9.3% divergent in Kimura 2-parametar (K2P) distance from Nectonema sp. parasitic in the isopod Natatolana japonensis, Nectonema sp. parasitic in the crab Chionoecetes bairdi, N. munidae, and N. agile, respectively. In an 18S tree, N. shimadai sp. nov. was the sister taxon to a clade comprising three decapod-parasitic species, and species sharing the same host group or ocean were not monophyletic. The tree may reflect genetically distant warm- and cold-water lineages within decapod-parasitic nematomorphs.