Drawing upon a large longitudinal qualitative study on lived experiences of food aid in England, we question contemporary academic and policy categorisations and portrayals of food aid. Contrary to ideas of a diverse food aid sector offering choice and dignity, we identify clear uniformity in the language participants use to describe different forms of food charity; any organisation which offers food for free or at very low cost to take away is predominantly described as a ‘food bank’. Simultaneously, however, we find marked inequalities in lived experiences of food charity by gender, age and race and ethnicity, and clear indications that demographically oriented exclusion is ever-present in food aid. We argue that the key fault line shaping lived experiences of the UK community food sector is not the ‘type’ of provision but demography (age, gender and parenthood, race and ethnicity) and yet inequalities remain broadly ignored in discussions of UK food aid. In doing so, we provide a critical contribution to scholarship on the changing nature of welfare pluralism and the lived experience of poverty today.

This study compares postnominal finite relative clauses and their translation equivalents in a parallel corpus of German and English. Of particular interest are cases where one language, generally English, used a syntactically and semantically reduced nominal modifier instead of the finite relative. Such contrasts in language use are linked to contrasts in their grammars whereby German has been described as having a “tighter fit” in general between forms and their corresponding semantic representations and English a “looser fit.” This same typology is now seen as operating in actual usage as well, even though both languages share the same finite structure plus numerous reduced modifiers. The data presented here illustrate how the tight-fit/loose-fit typology can be extended into quantitative predictions for testing on cross-language corpora and they support a hypothesized correspondence between grammatical variation and performance variation.*

Iran is one of the most stigmatised countries of the twenty-first century: having been sanctioned by the US since 1979, the Islamic Republic was declared part of the ‘axis of evil’ by President George W. Bush in 2002, and from 2006 onwards, it has been subject to multilateral, comprehensive and wide-reaching economic sanctions. In June 2025, this discursive and economic attack on Iran transitioned to direct military bombardment. For the United States and its allies, Iran is a pariah state. This stigmatisation of Iran is an example of the kinds of practices that contribute to the social construction of the international order, whereby some countries are designated as ‘inside’ and others as ‘outside’ the community of established states. Needless to say, Iran has been placed firmly in the ‘outside’ category ever since 1979. At the same time as accepting and even at times embracing this ‘outsider’ status, however, Iran has also sought to raise its own international standing and to be accepted as an ‘insider’.

Dielectric lens antennas provide significant advantages for various radar-based applications. While an ellipsoidal geometry is often utilized due to its beneficial antenna characteristics and its point-like feed into the lens, its length and antenna reflections are drawbacks for some applications. In this work, we investigate the design of a Fresnel-based lens antenna to overcome these limitations. A quasioptical design is presented, highlighting its ability to reduce internal reflections of lens antennas. Additionally, the effects of the number of Fresnel steps and manufacturing tolerances are analyzed. Measurements validate the design and demonstrate the reduction of internal reflections by more than 13 dB, leading to an increased measurement range in a Tank Level Probing Radar scenario and a size and weight reduction of 41% and 34%, respectively.

On both sides of the Mediterranean, the first substantial attempts at distinguishing Salafis from Wahhabis took place in the aftermath of the First World War. Examining why this process occurred and how it unfolded provides valuable historical insights, especially into the initial conceptualisations of Salafism. In post-war Europe, the newly invented notion of a so-called Salafi movement emerged for intellectual and political reasons as a foil to the Wahhabi movement—of which it was supposed to represent the good twin. In Arab societies, it was the popularisation and conceptual expansion of the word ‘Salafi’ that eventually caused some Muslims to distinguish it from ‘Wahhabi’ in the late 1920s and allowed others to use ‘Salafi’ as a synonym for ‘Wahhabi’. In each of these cases, the criteria that past intellectuals employed to demarcate the two categories (or not) help us to infer how they understood Salafism and why they outlined its history or its genealogy in the way that they did.

This article argues that the stock of personal names in Frisian can be enriched by means of omitting the diminutive suffix in diminutive names. Although suffix subtraction is not a common morphological process, either in general or in Frisian, assuming this process for this particular type of personal name formation provides an insightful and plausible analysis. The analysis also underlines the importance of paradigmatic relations in morphology, as formalized in Construction Morphology.*

This article examines how the discursive logic of quasi-markets in Swedish university real-estate management enables depoliticisation while consolidating state control. Sweden is a distinctive case where universities are public agencies, yet most campus property is owned by Akademiska Hus AB, a profit-seeking corporation wholly owned by the state. Using interpretive policy and frame analysis of legislation, government decisions, and public debate, we trace how market rents were introduced and justified. We show that depoliticising narratives portraying academics as fiscally unaccountable and university space as wasteful legitimise New Public Management reforms. Extending the ‘ghost in the machine’ metaphor, we demonstrate how political logics permeate welfare governance but are rendered less visible. The quasi-market sustains centralised control and fuels distrust between universities and government, risking a cycle of expanding quasi-market instruments and reduced institutional autonomy. Diminished autonomy may in turn have implications for academic freedom.

While digital product innovation offers unprecedented opportunities for incumbent firms to create competitive advantages, its fluid and iterative nature presents distinctive cognitive challenges. There is limited empirical literature explaining the role of constructive cognitive characteristics of executives in differentiating the successful pursuit of digital product innovation. Drawing on upper echelons theory and the attention-based view, we examine how chief executive officer (CEO) cognitive flexibility enables incumbent firms to pursue digital product innovation. Through a mixed-methods approach combining a field survey of 178 machine-building firms and a scenario-based experiment with 134 participants, we demonstrate that CEOs with higher cognitive flexibility achieve superior digital product innovation outcomes by facilitating insightful information acquisition and processing. This relationship is strengthened when CEOs engage in more boundary spanning activities and when firms possess greater social capital. Our study contributes to strategic leadership research by demonstrating how CEO cognitive flexibility enables incumbent firms to navigate the cognitive demands of digital product innovation, while enriching our understanding of how adaptive attention patterns shape strategic adaptation in increasingly digitized environments.

This paper evaluates how a major policy shift—the suspension of the gold standard in September 1931—affected employment outcomes in interwar Britain. We use a new high-frequency industry-level dataset and difference-in-differences techniques to isolate the impact of devaluation on exporters. At the micro level, the break from gold reduced the unemployment rate by 2.7 percentage points for export-intensive industries relative to non-export industries. At the aggregate level, this effect stimulated the labor market, the fiscal outlook, and economic growth. Devaluation was therefore an important initial spark of recovery from the depths of the Great Depression.

The Genebank Standards for Plant Genetic Resources recommend that genebanks periodically monitor the change in viability of their stored germplasm to ensure timely regeneration. The Australian Grains Genebank (AGG) has been recording germination data on orthodox seeds from tropical grain crops, stored under long-term storage (−20°C), for 40 years. Real-time viability data, collated from germination tests carried out on seedlots which had been in storage for a minimum of 20 years, from six agriculturally important grain crops (Sorghum bicolor, Phaseolus vulgaris, Glycine max, Vigna radiata, Cajanus cajan and Vigna angularis) was analysed by probit analysis. For each species independently, a common loss in viability was observed for all seedlots showing a consistent decline in viability during storage; with observed longevity estimates (σ; time for viability to fall by 1 NED/probit) of 17.4, 30.7, 33.2 49.6, 48.8, 63.5 and years for Vigna angularis, Cajanus cajan, Phaseolus vulgaris, Glycine max, Sorghum bicolor, and Vigna radiata, respectively. Common values of σ were subsequently used to determine species-specific viability monitoring intervals, based on the results of the last germination test. Dynamic monitoring intervals are a cost-efficient strategy that will avoid the over-use of seed through too frequent viability monitoring whilst still ensuring the timely regeneration of material. With funding shortfalls often reported as the main contributing factor to regeneration and viability testing backlogs, the ability for genebanks to maximise cost-efficiencies, where possible, is paramount to secure the genetic integrity of stored germplasm; particularly as collections continue to grow.

The emergence of a cohort of Malaysia-born writers producing works in English from metropolitan centres in the West alongside a growing body of Mahua (or Malaysian Chinese) literature, whose practitioners are ethnic Chinese based primarily in Taiwan and writing in Chinese, constitutes two principal trajectories in contemporary Malaysian literature. Yet, comparative discussions between Anglophone and Sinophone Malaysian literatures remain scarce. This paper seeks to address this gap by proposing the Nanyang (literally, the “South Seas”) as a decolonial framework that reveals how these literatures delink from colonial legacies and state-centric imaginaries while enacting epistemic disobedience through pluriversal engagement. The Nanyang as a pluriverse does not merely entail the coexistence of these distinct literary traditions but emerges as a non-hierarchical space of convergence for Anglophone and Sinophone Malaysia, both in the literary worlds constructed by their authors and the cultural spaces they inhabit. By examining Tash Aw and Ng Kim Chew as exemplars of Anglophone and Sinophone Malaysian literary trajectories, respectively, this paper illustrates how these marginalised literary traditions converge through complex negotiations of nationalist, global, and diasporic hegemonies, reimagining the Nanyang as a pluriverse of routes and relationality. This reframing also positions the Nanyang as a site of “stateless poetics” and the “diasporic local,” concepts that challenge institutionalised paradigms of Malaysian literary and cultural production, which continue to marginalise non-Malay linguistic traditions. The paper concludes by gesturing to other Southeast Asian littoral imaginaries to support ongoing Global South dialogues on relationality, plurilingualism, and decolonial aesthetics.

We report the case of a 15-year-old male patient with severe pulmonary regurgitation who successfully underwent Alterra Adaptive Prestent implantation through the right jugular vein because of bilateral femoral vein occlusion.

Brain development and face morphology are related through underlying biological mechanisms, namely embryonic neuroectodermal processes. This study examined whether the facial parameters identified in children can help understand the neurodevelopmental impact of prenatal exposures on child behavior. We studied 9- to 10-year-old children of European descent from Generation R Study (N = 2,779) with three-dimensional face photographs. With an AI model of a 3D graph autoencoder, each facial shape was compressed into 200 traits representing facial morphology. We examined associations of traits with internalizing and externalizing behaviors and attention problems. Next, select prenatal substance and micronutrient exposures were related to facial traits using adjusted linear regression analyses. We identified a robust association between one specific facial trait and attention problem scores (β = −1.47, p = 0.038). This trait features chin retrusion, mild nasal contour variation, nose tip protrusion, and overall facial asymmetry. Higher prenatal vitamin D and folic acid concentrations were associated with more facial curvature (β = 0.0001, 95%CI: 0.00001 to 0.0002, p = 0.002; and β = 0.0003, 95%CI: 0.00002 to 0.0005, p = 0.03 accordingly), while prenatal tobacco smoking showed a negative association both until the mother became aware of pregnancy (β = −0.008, 95%CI: −0.0135 to −0.0014, p = 0.02) and throughout pregnancy (β = −0.006, 95%CI: −0.0113 to −0.0005, p = 0.03). Findings suggest that facial morphology may serve as a marker of impaired neuroectodermal development. Leveraging its association with attention problems enabled a robust examination of prenatal exposures’ impact. The associations of maternal smoking, vitamin D, and folic acid concentrations with facial morphology provide insights into the origins of neurodevelopment.

Estimates of marine reservoir corrections (ΔR) in the southeastern Arabian Sea region are limited. To better constrain the region’s marine reservoir corrections, additional pre-bomb radiocarbon records are needed. In this context, a coral core from the Lakshadweep archipelago in the southeastern Arabian Sea has been analyzed to measure its radiocarbon content. Pre-bomb radiocarbon values from the coral record are used to estimate the marine reservoir correction value of the region. The mean ΔR value of the Lakshadweep region is calculated to be –128 ± 130 yr. The comparison of available ΔR values from the Arabian Sea region shows that the mean ΔR value of the eastern Arabian Sea is significantly lower than that of the northern and western Arabian Sea. The low ΔR values from the eastern Arabian Sea likely indicate the influence of relatively 14C-enriched Bay of Bengal water in the region.