The predator Chrysoperla externa (Neuroptera: Chrysopidae) has great potential for its use in biological pest control programs. In order to assist future biological control programs that use Chrysopidae as a control agent, this research aims to study the behaviour of the green lacewing, C. externa, consuming two-spotted spider mites, Tetranychus urticae (Acari: Tetranychidae). In the laboratory, experiments were carried out to determine the predation behaviour of C. externa on different densities of adults of the two-spotted spider mite, T. urticae (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64 prey). For comparison purposes, the behaviour of C. externa was also studied using eggs from the alternative prey Ephestia kuehniella (Lepidoptera: Pyralidae). The functional response was determined by logistic regression of the number of mites consumed as a function of the initial number of prey using polynomial logistic regression. The random equation was used to describe the parameters of the functional response. The predator C. externa showed a type II functional response consuming both E. kuehniella eggs and T. urticae adults. The results obtained will allow to define the best strategy for the use of green lacewings in the biological control of the two-spotted spider mite, T. urticae.

Gelman v. Uruguay (2011) was a watershed moment in Uruguayan civil society’s quest for accountability, prompting official repeal of the country’s 1986 Amnesty Law. Much scholarship about the case centres around the immediate aftermath of the decision, largely on initial compliance and cautious optimism for accountability. Yet the analysis of a longer timeframe reveals mixed results. The article examines how initial momentum unravelled as conditions for compliance weakened amid backlash against the judgment. It reveals the challenges with implementing criminal accountability measures, even in established democracies with otherwise strong human rights records, and argues for the importance of understanding compliance as a non-linear process.

In February 1799, the British East India Company rounded up French civilians in Pondicherry and put them on a ship loaded with prisoners of war. The ship continued its journey to Portsmouth in England, by way of the Cape of Good Hope and St Helena. Handwritten lists were the main tool used to select these deportees. If analyzed superficially, colonial lists can seem to depoliticize the violence of deportation by presenting it as the answer to technical problems. Instead, this article approaches the list as a media technology employed by colonial and military officials, and thereby highlights its iterative rather than fixed nature. The lists were unstable and based on contingent and constantly evolving information that bureaucrats and army officers on the ground inherited from previous colonial regimes, as well as from local populations. The act of listing encapsulates a tension between the agents who identified, categorized, selected, and trapped people on paper, and the tactics of these people, who sometimes found creative ways to jam this process. As illustrated by the breakup of “mixed race” families, these paper documents also reveal the conflicts and contradictions that ran within the imperial state between the twin imperatives of maintaining both security and humanitarian principles.

The present paper develops a unified approach when dealing with short- or long-range dependent processes with finite or infinite variance. We are concerned with the convergence rate in the strong law of large numbers (SLLN). Our main result is a Marcinkiewicz–Zygmund law of large numbers for $S_{n}(f)= \sum_{i=1}^{n}f(X_{i})$, where $\{X_i\}_{i\geq 1}$ is a real stationary Gaussian sequence and $f(\!\cdot\!)$ is a measurable function. Key technical tools in the proofs are new maximal inequalities for partial sums, which may be useful in other problems. Our results are obtained by employing truncation alongside new maximal inequalities. The result can help to differentiate the effects of long memory and heavy tails on the convergence rate for limit theorems.

In early modern Venice, credit was ubiquitous, with various lenders offering long- and short- term loans. This article traces the structure of the Venetian credit market in the eighteenth century and examines the borrowing opportunities available to the local population, focusing in particular on consumer credit. The research studies how people approached credit in a pre-industrial society, and what factors may have shaped the ways through which they accessed borrowing. More broadly, how did Venetian households cope with uncertainty? Was the local credit market able to offer borrowers multiple, equally viable options? The article explores the interaction between the supply and demand for credit, emphasising the organised nature of the Venetian market. Ultimately, it argues that even loans that appeared to have unfavourable conditions could, in practice, be quite attractive to borrowers.

Dementia is a progressive and irreversible deterioration in cognition that has a significant impact on the person’s activities of daily living and quality of life. Currently, there is no curative treatment for dementia, and the treatments used in clinical practice have limited therapeutic reach. We begin this descriptive review with a discussion of apolipoprotein E4 (apoE4) and its role in the pathogenesis of dementia. We consider the molecular involvement of statins and why they are no longer clinically indicated in mild cognitive impairment or mild to moderate dementia. We then explore the evidence regarding the effects of statins and cyclodextrins on apoE4, presenting evidence in support of and against their neuroprotective effects in cognitive impairment. Although the studies on cyclodextrins have all been on animals, they provide a strong background for a potential research hypothesis for future clinical trials in the treatment of dementia.

The measured markups in the U.S. have been increasing since the 1980s. This paper quantitatively evaluates the impact of surging mergers and acquisitions (M&As) on the aggregate markup. We propose a dynamic general equilibrium model featuring heterogeneous firms, endogenous markups, and an M&A market to explore the aggregate implications of M&As under different antitrust policy regimes. Firms are heterogeneous in productivity, while more productive firms are larger in size and charge a higher markup, and the M&A market is characterized by a search and matching process. Successful purchases of other firms improve the productivity of the acquirer but also raise its markup. We calibrate the impact of M&As on markups at the firm level to the data counterpart. Our quantitative results show that surging M&As account for about 60% of the 9.75 percentage points increase in aggregate markup in the U.S. from the 1980s to the 2010s. The quantified model also generates changes in the markup distribution comparable to the data.

This article explores the relationship between ethnic diversity and intermarriage in Vojvodina, Serbia, a highly diverse region with a history of shifting political landscapes. Unlike many studies focusing on migration, this research examines autochthonous settings from a quantitative perspective, offering insights into how diversity and intermarriage intersect locally. Findings indicate that greater ethnic diversity is generally associated with higher interethnic marriage rates within sub-regions. However, these rates have not always paralleled changes in diversity, especially during disruptions like the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. The study reveals that declining diversity tends to reduce intermarriage by creating more homogeneous marriage markets, while intermarriages may also―albeit intermittently, under specific political circumstances, and indirectly―influence diversity trends. Results highlight small social distances and permeable ethnic boundaries among Vojvodina’s ethnic groups, though significant ethnic asymmetries remain. This study contributes to understanding the dynamics of diversity and interethnic relations, specifically through marriage, within national minority contexts.

In “Everything is Tuberculosis,” author John Green assesses the intricacies of the communicable condition, TB, as a source of significant morbidity and mortality globally over centuries. Despite available vaccines, treatments, and protocols, tens of millions are infected and over a million persons will die from TB in 2025 alone. In searching for answers to mitigate this global scourge, however, Green looks past a key factor — specifically the role of law — as a primary tool for prevention and control.

This article provides a Construction Grammar (CxG) analysis of the Complex Modifier Construction (CMC) in English and an investigation of its productivity in World Englishes with a particular focus on African and South-East Asian Englishes. By examining data from the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE), we seek to establish whether the productivity of the construction correlates with the developmental phase of the variety of English in Schneider’s Dynamic Model of Postcolonial Englishes, or whether language contact, and particularly the typological profiles of the local substrate languages (head-initial versus head-final syntax), affects productivity. We find that evolutionary progress is indeed a relevant factor insofar as the most advanced ‘Inner Circle’ varieties are concerned, but we also observe substantially lower productivity in the African varieties of English when compared to the South-East Asian Englishes represented in the corpus. As the main substrate languages in the African countries under study have head-initial syntax and those in the South-East Asian countries head-final syntax, we conclude that the productivity of complex premodifiers is affected by the multilingual situation in these regions and propose that language contact should be considered more closely as an explanatory factor in future studies of constructional productivity in World Englishes.

This article is a theoretically oriented discussion of noticeable creative syntactic innovations. On the basis of three case studies (the ‘X-much’ construction (racist much?), the ‘extrasentential not’ construction (I like this movie. Not.) and the ‘because X’ construction (Can’t come to the party, because headache.)), we explore the idea that language users may deliberately create novel syntactic constructions by recycling and creatively blending existing constructions. At least two of the constructions discussed here (X much and extrasentential not) are probably not products of informal, natural daily language use, but may have originated (or at least have been propagated) in well-crafted, scripted media language geared towards younger audiences, who in turn have spread these constructions in their communities and beyond. Because X seems to have taken a slightly different route. The main motivations for these three rather noticeable creative innovations may be the Maxim of Extravagance and the Maxim of Wittiness, in Keller’s (1994) sense. We suspect that because X is perhaps less noticeable, or deviant, and pragmatically more complex than the other two constructions, which provides their speakers with more ‘syntactic fireworks’.

This article presents an exploratory study of an innovative future adverb construction, going forward, typically meaning ‘in the future, from now on’ (e.g. What does this mean going forward?). Going forward probably originated in the domain of business in or around the 1970s. In this study, the spread of going forward is examined on the basis of over 1,500 examples from six genres of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), covering the years 1990–2019. The data is analysed in terms of four morphosyntactic variables, and the developments in the frequency of going forward are analysed using variability-based neighbour clustering. The results show that, in the 1990s, going forward had a modest rate of occurrence mainly in texts having to do with business and finance, but its frequency rose sharply in the 2000s and the 2010s. At the same time, the discourse contexts in which it appeared broadened from business and finance to other domains. The syntactic contexts of going forward show that it has become an adverb. The results highlight the need to incorporate social meanings such as domain preferences in the description of grammatical constructions. They also illustrate the need to consider constructional innovations at the lexical end of the grammar–lexicon continuum, in addition to highly grammaticalised constructions.

Linguistic creativity and productivity have become active topics of research, especially amongst scholars who employ insights from Construction Grammar (CxG) in their analyses. The question of how creativity should be defined and operationalized has in particular emerged as a major point of discussion and debate (e.g. Hoffmann 2018, 2024; Bergs 2018; Bergs & Kompa 2020), and the psychological, contextual and interactional factors that underlie creative language use have received a great deal of attention in recent work (e.g. Hoffmann 2018, 2020, 2024; Herbst 2018; Turner 2018; Hartmann & Ungerer 2023). These studies have substantially increased our understanding of linguistic creativity and productivity, but there are still many open questions about their mutual relationship as well as their connection to related phenomena, such as extravagance (Haspelmath 1999; Eitelmann & Haumann 2022; Trousdale & Norde 2025). In this special issue, the authors investigate a variety of questions related to creative language use and productivity, each providing new insights into the ongoing discussion of the nature of linguistic innovation in the context of English.

A coset partition of a group G is a set partition of G into finitely many left cosets of one or more subgroups. A driving force in this research area is the Herzog–Schönheim Conjecture [15], which states that any nontrivial coset partition of a group contains at least two cosets with the same index. Although many families of groups have been shown to satisfy the conjecture, it remains open.

A Steiner coset partition of G, with respect to distinct subgroups $H_1,\dots ,H_r$, is a coset partition of G that contains exactly one coset of each $H_i$. In the quest of a more structural version of the Herzog–Schönheim Conjecture, it was shown that there is no Steiner coset partition of G with respect to any $r\geq 2$ subgroups $H_i$ that mutually commute [1]. In this article, we show that this result holds for $r=4$ mutually commuting subgroups provided that G does not have $C_2\times C_2\times C_2$ as a quotient, where $C_2$ is the cyclic group of order $2$. We further give an explicit construction of Steiner coset partitions of the n-fold direct product $G^*=C_p\times \ldots \times C_p$ for p prime and $n\geq 3$. This construction lifts to every group extension of $G^*$.

Rallidae are frequent colonists of oceanic islands and are often susceptible to introduced predators. The Tristan Moorhen Gallinula nesiotis was endemic to Tristan da Cunha, South Atlantic and is thought to have gone extinct in the late nineteenth century. The closely related Gough Moorhen G. comeri was introduced to Tristan da Cunha from neighbouring Gough Island in 1956. We report historical records of their spread across Tristan da Cunha and the results of a population survey undertaken in February–March 2024. Gough Moorhens are now found across the entire island wherever there is suitable habitat from sea level to above 900 m elevation. Gough Moorhens prefer fern bush habitat on the Base, the plateau above the steep coastal cliffs. The total population is approximately 41,500 birds (95% confidence interval 24,000–72,000). Our density estimates (3–6 birds/ha) are similar to estimates for Gough Moorhens on Gough Island before the post-2021 population decline and are at the higher end of densities reported for oceanic island rallids, suggesting that the Tristan da Cunha population may be near carrying capacity.

Karl Popper introduced a metaphor of demarcation for identification of claims that should not be classified as scientific. This metaphor still dominates the philosophical discussion on pseudoscience. We show that it has hampered the discussion in several ways, most importantly by blocking the insight that determining whether some particular claim is pseudoscientific usually requires specialized scientific expertise. We conclude that it would be better to give up this metaphor and leave room for the two tasks of defining pseudoscience (a task for philosophers) and diagnosing potential cases of pseudoscience (a task for experts in the respective areas of science).