As the number of ethnic minority politicians increase across countries like the United Kingdom and the United States, so too have instances in which these officeholders act against the communities they descriptively represent. In this contribution, we introduce the concept of paradoxical representation which we argue functions through neoliberal, post-racial scripts of color-blindness and meritocracy. Similar to research on gender representation which calls into question assumptions that substantive representation will follow unproblematically from women’s descriptive representation (Celis and Childs 2012), we argue that ethnic minority representatives can act as “post-racial gatekeepers.” This means paradoxically working against rather than for marginalized ethnic minority groups (Saini, Bankole, and Begum 2023). Through political discourse and policymaking, these representatives construct and “gatekeep” hegemonic ideas around race, racism, gender, and migration.

Migrant labor exploitation is widespread in developed countries, which host growing populations of undocumented migrants. While denouncing by migrants is essential to prosecute exploitative employers, an undocumented community actively hiding from the state is unlikely to whistleblow. I consider an intervention providing migrant farmworkers in Italy information and incentives to report on their racketeers. I leverage the staggered rollout of the intervention to study its effects in a difference-in-differences framework. The intervention empowered migrants to whistleblow, increased the prosecution of criminal organizations responsible for racketeering migrants, and raised awareness among natives, who became more favorable toward immigration and parties supporting it. These findings highlight the conditions under which undocumented migrants can take political action for their socioeconomic advancement. Unlike other integration policies which have been shown to backlash, highlighting migrants’ vulnerability to exploitation might foster solidarity and more liberal immigration attitudes among natives.

In this paper, we establish a definitive result which almost completely closes the problem of bounded elementary generation for Chevalley groups of rank $\ge 2$ over arbitrary Dedekind rings R of arithmetic type, with uniform bounds. Namely, we show that for every reduced irreducible root system $\Phi $ of rank $\ge 2$, there exists a universal bound $L=L(\Phi )$ such that the simply connected Chevalley groups $G(\Phi ,R)$ have elementary width $\le L$ for all Dedekind rings of arithmetic type R.

Early adversity increases risk for child mental health difficulties. Stressors in the home environment (e.g., parental mental illness, household socioeconomic challenges) may be particularly impactful. Attending out-of-home childcare may buffer or magnify negative effects of such exposures. Using a longitudinal observational design, we leveraged data from the NIH Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes Program to test whether number of hours in childcare, defined as 1) any type of nonparental care and 2) center-based care specifically, was associated with child mental health, including via buffering or magnifying associations between early exposure to psychosocial and socioeconomic risks (age 0–3 years) and later internalizing and externalizing symptoms (age 3–5.5 years), in a diverse sample of N = 2,024 parent–child dyads. In linear regression models, childcare participation was not associated with mental health outcomes, nor did we observe an impact of childcare attendance on associations between risk exposures and symptoms. Psychosocial and socioeconomic risks had interactive effects on internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Overall, the findings did not indicate that childcare attendance positively or negatively influenced child mental health and suggested that psychosocial and socioeconomic adversity may need to be considered as separate exposures to understand child mental health risk in early life.

In 2021, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) moved to integrate climate risks into its Article IV surveillance of member states. While the IMF has not traditionally been at the forefront of climate change efforts, this decision involved defining climate change as a risk to macro-economic stability. I argue that the integration of climate change into IMF surveillance can be understood as a case of international organisation (IO) boundary work taking place via the mechanism of economisation: an economic institution addressing a (traditionally non-economic) issue as an economic issue. The study identifies crucial factors shaping this boundary expansion, particularly the agency of IMF staff, as well as preferences within the IMF Executive Board, and institutional ideas. The straightforward integration of physical and transition climate risks is in contrast to the contestation surrounding the integration of mitigation policy. The findings contribute to the literature on IOs and their boundaries, change within the IMF, and the environmental political economy. The analysis reveals the role of IMF staff in this boundary work and, in addition, that institutionalised ideas and the heterogeneous preferences among member states acted as scope conditions limiting how far this economisation could go.

In this paper, we give a complete coarse classification of strongly exceptional Legendrian realizations of the connected sum of two Hopf links in contact 3-spheres. This is the first classification result about exceptional Legendrian representatives for connected sums of link families.

Affective polarization (AP), a concept that summarizes intense partisans’ animosity towards opposing parties and positive feelings towards their own, has recently received increasing attention. Despite a growing interest in Latin American polarization, there are very few empirical studies on the range and depth of dislike and distrust towards political adversaries in the region, and how this impacts the quality of democracies. This research note uses survey data collected after ten election cycles in six countries to estimate the scope and depth of AP in the region. We measure the extent of polarization in Latin America compared to other Western nations, assess its evolution, and makes some inroads to explain who drives AP. On aggregate, Latin America does not show large AP scores, yet there are clear signs of an upward trend. More than a widespread social phenomenon, the evidence suggests that AP is driven by large intense minorities.

Since Key and Allport, scholars have argued that racial context affects political behavior, with some finding out-group contact increases intergroup hostility and others showing the opposite. We argue that Americans exist in multiple racial contexts simultaneously that may overlap or conflict, helping to explain past discord. Using novel data, we document in-group embeddedness among the four largest U.S. ethnoracial groups for three kinds of racial context: geographic, social, and psychological. These three contexts are only weakly correlated, we find, with social ties exhibiting distinctly high rates of in-group segregation. We next examine the relationship between racial contexts and political attitudes, showing that individuals who are highly embedded across contexts express notably different views than those who experience cross-cutting pressures. Our results underscore a need for greater care and specificity when examining the relationship between “racial context” and political phenomena.

Schistosomosis in animals due to Schistosoma spindale significantly burdens India’s livestock economy because of high prevalence and morbidity and is mostly underdiagnosed from the lack of sensitive tools for field-level detection. This study aimed to clone, express the 22.6-kDa tegument protein of S. spindale (rSs22.6kDa) and to utilise it in a dot enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay for serodiagnosis. RNA was extracted from adult worms recovered from the mesenteries of slaughtered cattle to amplify the gene encoding the 22.6-kDa protein. In silico analysis revealed the protein’s secondary structure, consisting of 190 amino acids forming alpha helices (47.89%), extended strands (17.37%), beta turns (8.95%), and random coils (25.79%), with α helices and β sheets in the tertiary structure. Two conserved domains were noted: an EF-hand domain at the N-terminus and a dynein light-chain domain at the C-terminus. Phylogenetic studies positioned the S. spindale sequence as a sister clade to Schistosoma haematobium and Schistosoma bovis. The gene was cloned into a pJET vector and transformed into Escherichia coli Top 10 cells, with expression achieved using a pET28b vector, BL21 E. coli cells, and induction with 0.6 mM isopropyl-β-d-thiogalactopyranoside. The protein’s soluble fraction was purified using nickel-chelating affinity chromatography, confirmed by sodium dodecyl sulfate–polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and immunoblotting, identifying a distinct immunodominant 22.6-kDa protein. The diagnostic utility was validated using a dot enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay which demonstrated a of sensitivity of 89.47% and specificity of 100%. The study records for the first time the prokaryotic expression and evaluation of the 22.6-kDa tegumental protein of S. spindale, highlighting its potential as a diagnostic antigen for seroprevalence studies in bovine intestinal schistosomosis.

The aim of this study was to investigate the antioxidant effect of alpha-lipoic acid (α-LA) in dairy cows and its metabolic mechanism. Thirty Holstein cows weighing 550 ± 25 kg, 200 ± 15 days of lactation and calving 2–3 times were randomly divided into three groups, ten cows in each group. Different doses of α-LA were added based on body weight: 0 (CTL), 30 (LA-L) and 60 (LA-H) mg/kg per head per day; 7 days adaptation period, 30 days formal period. Milk production was recorded daily during the test period. Milk and blood samples were collected on the last day. ELISA kits and automatic biochemical analyser were used to detect the indicators in blood; serum metabolites were detected and analysed by non-target metabolomics. The results of the study showed that the addition of α-LA significantly increased milk yield; blood concentrations for HDL, triglyceride, cortisol and triiodothyronine were significantly elevated; and levels of glutathione reductase and nitric oxide synthase were significantly reduced in LA-L group as compared to CTL group. The concentrations of IL-1β, IL-2, TNF-α, IgG and IgA were significantly higher after supplementation with α-LA. Metabolomics analysis revealed 13 and 15 differential metabolites each in positive or negative modes. Methylmalonic acid levels were significantly higher following α-LA supplementation compared to CTL group, as were D-lactose, D-maltose and oleanolic acid levels in LA-L group. In summary, α-LA can enhance milk production, improve antioxidant capacity and immunity, and is more beneficial for animal production and economic benefits at 30 mg/kg.

In the winter of 2022–2023, hundreds of the Atlantic puffins (Fratercula arctica) appeared dead in the coast of the Canary Islands, a rare event considering their cold-living habits, normally occupying the North Atlantic Ocean. In this work, investigation about the parasites present in the Atlantic puffins found in the biggest islands of the Archipelago was carried out from a population portion. Necropsies of 39 birds were made and, during the examination of the urinary tracts, helminths were found. Morphoanatomical analysis under microscope allowed to identify them into Renicola genus with high similarity to Renicola sloanei. After that, DNA was extracted and NADH dehydrogenase subunit 1 gene were amplificated by a polymerase chain reaction method followed by sequencing and phylogenetic analysis. The molecular results demonstrated that in fact R. sloanei was the helminth parasite present in the urinary tracts of the Atlantic puffins found in the Canary Islands.