This article examines the legal framework for offshore CO2 sequestration in South Korea, paying particular attention to how to ensure the protection of the marine environment from CO2 sequestration in sub-seabed geological formations. It analyses the relevant international regulatory framework, including the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the 1972 London Convention and the 1996 London Protocol. It then examines the Korean national legal framework relating to offshore CO2 sequestration. In the absence of detailed regulations on the process of CO2 sequestration in sub-seabed geological formations in South Korea, the article suggests detailed regulations regarding site selection, assessment of potential risks, monitoring and long-term liability to ensure environmental safety and security from offshore CO2 sequestration, which should comply with the 1996 Protocol and relevant guidelines. The development of detailed Korean national regulations ensuring compliance with international rules and standards could serve as best practices driving offshore CCS in the Asia-Pacific region.

This article examines the everyday experiences of the Egyptian minority in Milan, Italy, focusing on challenges arising from the lack of formal recognition for their religious affiliations—Islam and Coptic Orthodoxy—which are central to their ethnic identity. Drawing on Talal Asad’s notion of recognition, Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres’ coloniality framework, it critiques how European policies conflate secularization with security, marginalizing non-European communities. Italy’s legal system highlights this tension: while de jure constitutional protections guarantee religious freedom, de facto bureaucratic and political barriers exclude minority faiths from equal standing. Egyptian migrants must navigate this imbalance, where theoretical rights rarely translate into practical access, forcing them to continually adapt their religious and ethnic identities in a marginalizing society. The article shows how religious invisibility sustains marginalization, contrasting Europe’s multicultural ideals with exclusionary practices. It reveals how colonial legacies shape migrant experiences and restrict rights.

This study explored mental workload recognition methods for carrier-based aircraft pilots utilising multiple sensor physiological signal fusion and portable devices. A simulation carrier-based aircraft flight experiment was designed, and subjective mental workload scores and electroencephalogram (EEG) and photoplethysmogram (PPG) signals from six pilot cadets were collected using NASA Task Load Index (NASA-TLX) and portable devices. The subjective scores of the pilots in three flight phases were used to label the data into three mental workload levels. Features from the physiological signals were extracted, and the interrelations between mental workload and physiological indicators were evaluated. Machine learning and deep learning algorithms were used to classify the pilots’ mental workload. The performances of the single-modal method and multimodal fusion methods were investigated. The results showed that the multimodal fusion methods outperformed the single-modal methods, achieving higher accuracy, precision, recall and F1 score. Among all the classifiers, the random forest classifier with feature-level fusion obtained the best results, with an accuracy of 97.69%, precision of 98.08%, recall of 96.98% and F1 score of 97.44%. The findings of this study demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method, offering insights into mental workload management and the enhancement of flight safety for carrier-based aircraft pilots.

Distinguishing early domesticates from their wild progenitors presents a significant obstacle for understanding human-mediated effects in the past. The origin of dogs is particularly controversial because potential early dog remains often lack corroborating evidence that can provide secure links between proposed dog remains and human activity. The Tumat Puppies, two permafrost-preserved Late Pleistocene canids, have been hypothesized to have been littermates and early domesticates due to a physical association with putatively butchered mammoth bones. Through a combination of osteometry, stable isotope analysis, plant macrofossil analysis, and genomic and metagenomic analyses, this study exploits the unique properties of the naturally mummified Tumat Puppies to examine their familial relationship and to determine whether dietary information links them to human activities. The multifaceted analysis reveals that the 14,965–14,046 cal yr BP Tumat Puppies were littermates who inhabited a dry and relatively mild environment with heterogeneous vegetation and consumed a diverse diet, including woolly rhinoceros in their final days. However, because there is no evidence of mammoth consumption, these data do not establish a link between the canids and ancient humans.

Do populist governments bend their economic policies to the preferences of bondholders? Populist governments should be a “least likely” case for the market discipline hypothesis. Populist parties typically run on platforms that scapegoat wealthy elites as “enemies of the people” and hence should be more resistant to changing policy positions in the face of market pressure, given their reluctance to alienate their base. Employing most-different case studies of the Five Star Movement/Lega coalition in Italy and Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary, we find that populists do bend to market pressure but that this “disciplining effect” does not stem primarily from foreign investors. Rather, it was the inaction of domestic investors in bond auctions that caused these governments to reverse course on headline economic policies. Because domestic investors served as both governments’ “buyers of last resort,” they needed to maintain their favor amidst foreign capital flight.

Housing scarcity is a widespread social and economic problem. Prior studies have attributed this scarcity to local control over land use, which has been seen as making policy makers more responsive to small electorates. Challenging this argument, we suggest that smaller jurisdictions have stronger incentives and greater capacity to raise tax revenue by building housing. Therefore, expanding the electorate that policy makers are responsive to could lead to a more restrictive housing policy. To explore this question empirically, we study a reform that consolidated some Danish municipalities, increasing the size of their jurisdiction. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that consolidated municipalities issue fewer permits and complete less housing than smaller jurisdictions. Our study thus shows that politicians permitted more housing when they were accountable to a smaller electorate. This upends conventional wisdom and suggests that local control need not be at odds with more liberal land use policy.

Portable medical equipment (PME) is inconsistently cleaned and disinfected, resulting in contamination that increases the risk of healthcare-associated infections. A virtual reality PME cleaning and disinfection training module was designed and tested at multiple healthcare facilities. Barriers identified during an initial phase led to improvements in the second phase.

Studying deep-water shark species presents inherent challenges stemming from the difficulty in accessing their habitats, coupled with factors such as low population densities, intricate behaviours, and complex biological attributes. The integration of citizen scientists, particularly fishers, offers a valuable avenue to make use of their life-long insights and expertise, thus facilitating the acquisition of crucial data that can effectively enhance the realm of shark research. Our collaborative engagement with fishers since 2017 has yielded an extensive documentation concerning elasmobranchs in the Caribbean region of Puerto Rico providing a unique opportunity to formally record species hitherto unreported. This is exemplified by the first documentation of the smalltooth sandtiger shark (Odontaspis ferox (Risso, 1810)). Despite its broad geographic range and widespread distribution in temperate and tropical marine environments, there is a lack of comprehensive scientific understanding and limited available knowledge regarding this species. A noteworthy finding on December 30, 2020, near Rincón (northwest coast) in Puerto Rico, disclosed a large shark that an experienced fisher had captured as an unidentified by-catch at a depth of 325 m. Through an interdisciplinary approach using molecular (355 bp, Cytochrome Oxidase Subunit 1) and morphological techniques, we successfully confirmed the identity of the specimen as a female smalltooth sandtiger shark. Given the limited information available (e.g., diversity, abundance, behaviour, reproduction, distribution) on shark species in the coastal and deep waters of Puerto Rico, this report provides valuable new data that can significantly contribute to the conservation efforts to protect these enigmatic yet ecologically vital predators.

Early Miocene land mammals from eastern North America are exceedingly rare. Over the past several decades a small, but significant, vertebrate fauna has been recovered by paleontologists and citizen scientists from the Belgrade Formation at the Martin Marietta Belgrade Quarry in eastern North Carolina. This assemblage has 12 land mammal taxa, including beaver (Castoridae), stem lagomorph, carnivorans (Mustelidae, Ailuridae), horses (Equidae), rhinoceros (Rhinocerotidae), tapir (Tapiridae), peccary (Tayassuidae), anthracothere (Anthracotheriidae), entelodont (Entelodontidae), and protoceratid (Protoceratidae). Taken together, the biochronology of this Maysville Local Fauna indicates a late Arikareean (Ar3/Ar4) to early Hemingfordian (He1) North American Land Mammal Age (NALMA). This interval, which includes the Runningwater Chronofauna, documents numerous important Holarctic immigrants, including Amphictis, Craterogale, and cf. Menoceras found at this locality. Strontium isotope stratigraphy (SIS) of shark teeth collected in situ from the Belgrade Formation yield an age of 21.4 ± 0.13 Ma, which validates the age of interbedded land mammals within this unit. It also is consistent with the late Arikareean (Ar3/Ar4) biochronology and Aquitanian Neogene marine stage. New SIS analyses of oysters (Striostrea gigantissima) and clams (Chione) from this mine, previously assigned to late Oligocene or Late Miocene, are significantly older (28.0 ± 0.22 Ma and 27.6 ± 0.26 Ma, respectively) than the land mammals. Depending upon stratigraphic interpretations, these may confirm an older marine facies within the Belgrade Formation. This locality is important because of its marine and terrestrial tie-ins that facilitate intercalibration of both NALMAs and Cenozoic marine stages.

In the first part of the paper, we prove a mirror symmetry isomorphism between integral tropical homology groups of a pair of mirror tropical Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces. We then apply this isomorphism to prove that a primitive patchworking of a central triangulation of a reflexive polytope gives a connected real Calabi-Yau hypersurface if and only if the corresponding divisor class on the mirror is not zero.