This article opens with a mystery: why was Zizang 子臧 assassinated in the seventh century bce, and why was his assassination justified in the Zuozhuan by his fondness of snipe-feather caps? It is well established that feathers were a common item of clothing in early and medieval China, used to confer status, to flaunt wealth, to embellish rituals. This article argues that there may also have been accompanying beliefs surrounding their use; beliefs that feathers might bestow upon the wearer certain imagined characteristics of the birds from which they came. It uses case studies of soldiers and their relationship to brown-eared pheasants, dancers and their relationship to long-tailed pheasants, and immortals and their relationship to cranes and egrets. Finally, it returns to Zizang's snipe-feather cap, and suggests reasons for his fate.

The Thamudic D script is only partially deciphered. This article attempts to advance our understanding of the script by identifying all the Thamudic D glyphs and their phonemic values with varying degrees of certainty. It also discusses the major writing formulae associated with this script type and offers a few notes on the language it inscribes.

On the basis of textual scrutiny and intertextual comparisons, this study highlights that Vādidevasūri's attribution of a quotation to the Cārvāka/Lokāyata philosopher Udbhaṭabhaṭṭa in the Syādvādaratnākara is, in fact, part of a broader passage sourced from Arcaṭa's Hetubinduṭīkā and, consequently, its expungement from the corpus of source material attributed to the Cārvāka/Lokāyata authors is suggested.

Adopting a human rights-based approach, this paper scrutinizes the treatment of illicit trafficking in cultural property as a human rights issue. The study focuses on the Iraqi contribution to the international agenda, revealing that Iraq co-sponsored at least 13 UN resolutions on the restitution of illegally expropriated cultural property, actively contributing to the negotiation of others, along with submitting its legal opinions on the drafts of relevant international documents, starting from as early as 1936 to culminate with the calls to stop cultural plunder feeding Western markets since the 1990s. Centering the Iraqi voices and adopting a critical decolonial rights-based perspective, the study showcases how illicit trade in cultural property clearly emerges as a violation of a state’s permanent sovereignty over its wealth and resources, negatively impacting its ability to guarantee the right to pursue economic, social, and cultural development for its people, as well as to freely dispose of their resources, the key components of the right to self-determination.

Arithmetic-geometric mean sequences were already studied over the real and complex numbers, and recently, Griffin et al. [‘AGM and jellyfish swarms of elliptic curves’, Amer. Math. Monthly 130(4) (2023), 355–369] considered them over finite fields $\mathbb {F}_q$ for $q \equiv 3 \pmod 4$. We extend the definition of arithmetic-geometric mean sequences over $\mathbb {F}_q$ to $q \equiv 5 \pmod 8$. We explain the connection of these sequences with graphs and explore the properties of the graphs in the case where $q \equiv 5 \pmod 8$.

In this article, I propose a Kantian framework for moral trust – trust in another person to only act with us in morally permissible ways. First, I derive an understanding of trustworthiness from Kant’s second formulation of the Categorical Imperative. I argue that trustworthiness embodies a moral imperative, guiding us to act in ways that are reliable and recognizable as conducive to engaging in trusting relations. However, this alone is not enough, as it does not provide a means to assess whether someone is truly committed to the moral law and thus morally trustworthy. Therefore, in the second part, I explore a basis for assessing their moral conduct found in a local version of the Kingdom of Ends: given an ideal or archetype of a morally perfect interpersonal relationship, an archetype of the morally trustworthy agent allows us to comparatively assess the moral disposition of fellow agents.

The incidence of congenital malformations (CM) among non-Hispanic White American (NHWA) mothers was reviewed to identify and evaluate the geographic differences in the most frequent CM subtypes associated with smoking and other risk factors. Data on CM were obtained from 150,775 children (2000-2004) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Risk factors associated with CM development were the mother’s age < 21 and > 35 years, body weight gain during pregnancy, anemia, diabetes mellitus, eclampsia (cases of preeclampsia were omitted), smoking, and alcohol use during pregnancy. Among smoking mothers, the most common CM was omphalocele, club foot, cleft lip, and polydactyly. The highest incidences (CM/10,000 births/year) of observed CM in children of smoking mothers were clubfoot, 25.51 cases (Utah), cleft lip, 22.47 (South Dakota), polydactyly, 21.23 (North Dakota), and omphalocele, 13.14 (Montana). The presence of maternal comorbidities, tobacco and alcohol consumption, and their association with other environmental factors can affect the incidence of CM in NHWA mothers. Further comparisons among the American states regarding the overall changes in CM over the last two decades should uncover crucial outcomes in terms of CM and smoking.

This study investigated the helminths of the mixed invasive population of Darevskia armeniaca and D. dahli, collected during two field trips in Denyshy, Zhytomyr region, Ukraine, in 2023. In total, 67 adult lizards (35 D. armeniaca and 32 D. dahli) were examined. Molecular and morphological approaches were used to identify the parasites. The analyses revealed six helminth species, including four nematodes (Toxocara cati, Strongyloides darevskyi, Oswaldocruzia sp., and Spirurida gen. sp.), one trematode (Pleurogenes claviger), and one cestode (Mesocestoides litteratus). Toxocara cati had the highest prevalence, found in cysts located primarily on the liver and in the body cavity of the hosts. The qualitative and quantitative comparative assessment of the helminth community suggests that, due to the introduction of these lizards, most helminth species from their native range have been lost. Additionally, most local helminth species have not yet adapted to parasitising these lizards as normal hosts of their life cycle.

The crystal structure of etrasimod has been solved and refined using synchrotron X-ray powder diffraction data and optimized using density functional theory techniques. Etrasimod crystallizes in space group P1 (#1) with a = 10.6131(5), b = 10.7003(5), c = 11.1219(8) Å, α = 72.756(2), β = 76.947(2), γ = 77.340(1)°, V = 1159.28(6) Å3, and Z = 2 at 298 K. The crystal structure contains O▬H⋯O hydrogen-bonded etrasimod dimers, which lie in layers approximately parallel to the (2,0,−1) plane. The amino group of each molecule forms an intramolecular N▬H⋯O hydrogen bond to the carbonyl group of the adjacent carboxylic acid group. The powder pattern has been submitted to ICDD for inclusion in the Powder Diffraction File™ (PDF®).

We examine the maximum dimension of a linear system of plane cubic curves whose $\mathbb {F}_q$-members are all geometrically irreducible. Computational evidence suggests that such a system has a maximum (projective) dimension of $3$. As a step towards the conjecture, we prove that there exists a three-dimensional linear system $\mathcal {L}$ with at most one geometrically reducible $\mathbb {F}_q$-member.

Grazing is a crucial component of dairy farms across many regions of the world. This review explores challenges related to grazing infrastructure and opportunities for future improvement. Farmers who aim to increase pasture utilisation face heightened inter-animal competition necessitated by pasture restriction to achieve target post-grazing sward heights. Increasing the frequency of fresh pasture allocation beyond once per day has been observed to reduce milk production in primiparous animals, due to intensified competition for limited feed resources. Implementing grazing paddocks tailored for 24- to 36-hour allocations helps to mitigate inter-animal competition while concurrently preventing the grazing of fresh regrowth. Crucial to this approach is establishing farm roadway infrastructure that allows access to all sections of the grazing platform. However, the development of these roadway networks has often occurred without a comprehensive assessment of their impact on the efficiency of the dairy herd’s movement between grazing paddocks and the milking parlour. The efficiency of the dairy herd’s movement is most significantly influenced by the location of the milking parlour within the grazing platform. Extreme walking distances or challenging terrain on farm roadways may have an impact on milk production per cow. Factors such as farm roadway surface quality and width significantly influence cow throughput on farm roadways. Recent studies have highlighted inadequate roadway widths on many farms relative to their herd size, while surface condition may also be limiting cow throughput on these farms. Enhancing roadway width and surface condition of farm roadways may improve labour efficiency on commercial farms.

According to the ‘rigorist’ interpretation, the imperfect duty of (e.g.) beneficence does not permit agents to fail to perform any beneficent act that is available to the agent in order to pursue some nonmoral interest, whereas on the latitudinal interpretation, agents are permitted to fail to do so. I defend the latitudinal interpretation by criticising recent defences of rigorism offered by Jens Timmermann and Pauline Kleingeld, arguing that they conflict with important features of Kant’s moral theory, and that the latitudinal interpretation better coheres with Kant’s overall view.

The concept of interaction classes (iClasses) for multi-environment trial data was introduced to address the problem of summarising variety performance across environments in the presence of variety by environment interaction (VEI). The approach involves the fitting of a factor analytic linear mixed model (FALMM), with the resultant estimates of factor loadings being used to form groups of environments (iClasses) that discriminate varieties with different patterns of VEI. It is then meaningful to summarise variety performance across environments within iClasses. The iClass methodology was developed with respect to a FALMM in which the genetic effects for different varieties were assumed independent. This was done for pedagogical reasons but it was pointed out that the accuracy of variety selection is greatly enhanced by considering the genetic relatedness of varieties, either via ancestral or genomic information. The focus of the current paper is therefore to extend the iClass approach for FALMMs which incorporate such information. In addition, a measure of stability of variety performance across iClasses is defined. The utility of the approach for variety selection is illustrated using a multi-environment trial dataset from the lentil breeding programme operated by Agriculture Victoria.

We argue that the controversial Barrett appointment and President Trump’s norm-violating rhetoric posed risks to the Supreme Court’s ability to generate acceptance of a 2020 election intervention. We fielded four nationally-representative survey experiments to measure the Court’s ability to generate public acceptance of an election intervention across key events during the election period. Results show that public acceptance changed substantially across events. The Court lacked the ability to induce acceptance, particularly among Democrats, after the election. Only after the Court dismisses the Republican-led election challenge does acceptance rebound. The Court’s ability to generate public acceptance regarding election disputes appears tenuous.