Just before World War I, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) geographically expanded its trade in the Canadian Arctic to derive profits from Arctic fox fur and secure its position in a global value chain (GVC) delivering fur to metropolitan consumers. The “problem of nature” challenged the company’s business venture. Furthermore, “nature” was made and remade by the HBC’s own capital investments. The fox trade itself changed human ecology. Technology transfers to Inuit modified their hunting regimes to increase the company’s returns of polar bear skins. Though these skins had high potential market value, modes of production introduced by the HBC to the Arctic precluded the company from sending high-quality products to metropolitan dressers. Within a changing Arctic human ecology, the HBC produced one highly valued commodity for the market while producing another from which it could derive only modest profit. The HBC’s fox and polar bear trade at the onset of the last century suggests ways that business empires can set off complex and unanticipated changes in human ecologies and, therefore, the dynamics of nature and business at their very peripheries.

The United States is one of the largest consumers of meat globally. The traditional production of meat contributes substantially to climate change due to the levels of greenhouse gases emitted and the amount of land, water, feed, and other natural resources required to raise animals used for meat. Conventional meat production is also a major source for the emergence of zoonotic diseases and antimicrobial-resistant pathogens. Nevertheless, Americans consume more meat now than at any time in the nation’s history.

Advocates for policy change aimed at addressing the risks currently associated with meat production have typically focused on reducing meat consumption, alternatives to meat, or improving the standards of conventional meat production. These are laudable goals, but an emerging technology now promises meat production that may avoid these risks entirely. Enter “lab-grown meat” — meat cultivated in an efficient and controlled laboratory environment without the need for fields, feed, or even animals.

The technology has been in development for over 100 years but has seen exponential growth in the past five years. What was previously considered a science fiction fantasy became a reality in the United States in 2023, when UPSIDE Foods and GOOD Meat received approval from USDA for sale of their cultivated chicken to U.S. consumers.

This article highlights the benefits and drawbacks associated with lab-grown meat, assesses the existing regulatory framework, and offers considerations for policy reform as regulators address the emergence and scale-up of this important technology.

This article argues that an understanding of male same-sex practices in ancient Greece point towards a queer desirous spectatorship – a male ‘gayze’. Ancient tragic scholarship has often omitted discussion of male same-sex practices, despite using marriage and heterosexual social norms to elucidate meaning in text and performance. This article seeks to redress the exclusion of queer histories and perspectives from understanding tragedy in its social context. The article outlines evidence of male same-sex practices, including pederasty; relates ancient understandings of desire to the gaze; and evidences how and where young men, like those who danced in the tragic chorus, were courted and coveted. The article concludes with a case study of the chorus of young huntsmen from Euripides’ Hippolytus, read through the lens of a desirous gayze.

In a recent think piece for the new-music media site I Care If You Listen, the London-based writer and director Jessica Bailey advocates for accessible notation practices in classical-music pedagogy (‘Earned, Not Learned: How Classical Music Notation is Not Built for Neurodivergent Students’ https://icareifyoulisten.com/2024/06/classical-music-notation/ (18 June 2024)). As an avid pianist with Nonverbal Learning Disorder, Bailey finds numbers and symbols more challenging than words and letters, and she recounts how forbidding conventional music notation was for her. Bailey developed her own workarounds, but advanced music study was essentially off limits. She now wonders what doors might be opened to her and other neurodivergent musicians through even small adjustments to notation systems. Drawing a connection between the accessible pre-grade piano-method books of her childhood and modern digital solutions like Lime Lighter and the Odla tactile console, Bailey ponders how notation technologies might help us ‘reimagine and re-programme the sheet music model’.

Preventing and addressing research misconduct demands more than imploring scientists to do better. It is also essential to address the structural issues that allow misconduct to flourish. With these structural factors in mind, this Special Issue explores the institutional obligations of journals and publishers, research institutions, funders, and the government to promote scientific integrity and advance trust in science. Articles from researchers affected by fraud, science “sleuths,” systematic reviewers, journal editors, academic officials, regulators, and leading experts on research integrity offer a range of ideas for responding to the research misconduct crisis, including increased transparency, stronger journal processes for review and retraction, improved scientific lab culture, and efforts to hold investigators prospectively accountable for scientific integrity, among several others.

Human rights offer to ground global health law in equity and justice. Human rights norms, advocacy, and strategies have proven successes in challenging private and public inequities and in realizing more equitable domestic and global health governance. However, mobilizing human rights within global health law faces enormous political, economic, technological, and epidemiological challenges, including from the corrosive health impacts of power, politics, and commerce. This article focuses on what human rights could bring to three major global health law challenges — health systems strengthening and universal health coverage, the commercial and economic determinants of health, and pandemic disease threats. We argue that human rights offer potentially powerful norms and strategies for achieving equity and justice in these and other key global health domains. The challenge for those working in human rights and global health law is to work nimbly, creatively, and courageously to strengthen the contribution of these instruments to health justice.

We provide two constructions of hyperbolic metrics on 3-manifolds with Heegaard splittings that satisfy certain topological conditions, which both apply to random Heegaard splitting with asymptotic probability 1. These constructions provide a lot of control on the resulting metric, allowing us to prove various results about the coarse growth rate of geometric invariants, such as diameter and injectivity radius, and about arithmeticity and commensurability in families of random 3-manifolds. For example, we show that the diameter of a random Heegaard splitting grows coarsely linearly in the length of the associated random walk. The constructions only use tools from the deformation theory of Kleinian groups, that is, we do not rely on the solution of the geometrization conjecture by Perelman. In particular, we give a proof of Maher’s result that random 3-manifolds are hyperbolic that bypasses geometrization.

L’article présente les résultats d’une double enquête, historique et ethnographique, sur une innovation biomédicale, la xénogreffe, c’est-à-dire la tentative de transplantation d’organes entre l’animal et l’humain. Cette pratique et les nombreux débats qu’elle a suscités donnent à voir des conceptions plurielles de l’animalité et de l’humanité qui ont circulé depuis le xviie siècle jusqu’à aujourd’hui. L’enquête historique souligne notamment l’émergence au xixe siècle d’une conception dualiste de l’échelle des êtres qui a façonné la mise en œuvre de l’expérimentation animale, dont la xénogreffe s’avère l’une des extensions, reposant sur l’affirmation d’une discontinuité entre humains et non-humains. Dans la seconde moitié du xxe siècle, un dispositif gradualiste voit le jour et remet en cause cette discontinuité en imposant une nouvelle conception de l’échelles des êtres. Si le gradualisme est partiellement actualisé dans la situation contemporaine, l’enquête ethnographique révèle également que les scientifiques engagés dans cette innovation s’appuient toujours sur des éléments de discours et des manières de s’engager auprès des animaux cobayes typiques de la conception dualiste. Ces résistances semblent liées aux rapports ambivalents que les expérimentateurs entretiennent aux cobayes, oscillant entre compassion et objectivation.