The Occlutech Atrial Flow Regulator is a self-expandable double-disc nitinol device with a central fenestration designed to create a calibrated communication across the interatrial septum. It has been used in adult patients with heart failure and pulmonary hypertension. Its use in the paediatric population or adults with CHD has been published in several case reports and case series. This study aims to review the potential, efficacy, and safety of this device in the paediatric and adult populations living with CHD, as well as in paediatric patients with pulmonary hypertension or advanced heart failure.

Party system classifications have been central in political science, especially until Sartori's influential typology in 1976. However, recent years have seen diminished attention to such classifications. Western European party systems have significantly transformed, particularly over the last 15 years due to multiple crises, affecting their core structure, or what Sartori termed ‘patterns of interparty competition.’ This raises questions about whether these changes have undermined the very concept of systemness, making classifications irrelevant. This research note redefines party systems based on the number and composition of relevant political poles (governing alternatives) and, through a long-term analysis of Western Europe (20 countries since 1945), assesses their degree of systemness. Results indicate that many systems have become ‘non-systems,’ with fluctuating and unstable party poles. Most Western European systems have exhibited this ‘non-system’ type for at least half of legislatures since 1989, thus making classifications only short-lived snapshots and inevitably useless for long-term accounts.

How should Jewish settlers live in the new environment? This question preoccupied early Zionist professionals, seeking to employ science in the service of Jewish “acclimatization.” This article focuses on the work of a specific man of science: nutrition scholar Moshe Wilbushewich, who lived and worked in Palestine since 1924 until his death in 1952. Much of Wilbushewich’s work in the interwar period was devoted to investigating the question, how to compensate for the physical inferiority of Jewish- compared to Arab workers, through nutrition and psychotechnics. As a scholar of nutrition, he performed scientific analyses of ingredients and dishes from the Palestinian kitchen and encouraged Jewish settlers to adopt some of them to make their nutrition more adjusted to the conditions of the land, and hence more “rational.” As I show, although Zionist experts embraced an environmental approach to “revitalizing” Jewish bodies, their perceptions were nonetheless shaped by assumptions about racial difference and hierarchy– between Arabs and Jews, and between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews.

The ontological complexity of the twentieth-century Cold War motivates this special issue’s investigation of how social scientists conceptualize institutional novelty and change. We begin by noting the peculiar elision of the Cold War as an explanatory mechanism in mainstream sociology, even while sociologists have theoretical tools for making sense of the phenomenon: war, schema, field, world systems, and empire. All are useful; none are sufficient. We locate the explanatory problem in a tension between notions of structure and event that has organized debate in historical social science for several scholarly generations, and offer a new intellectual tool – medium durée – as a way forward. Medium durée describes phenomena that have sufficient cohesion as ideas and relationships to endure over time, yet remain sufficiently unfixed and ambiguous as to enable multifarious action and sensemaking. Our notion of medium durée is substantially informed by the articles and commentaries assembled for this special issue, which represent three years of dialogue among the authors as well as audiences in serial panels at the 2022 and 2023 annual meetings of the Social Science History Association.

In recent years, the question of naturalism in the study of religions has been increasingly debated. Primarily, these discussions converge in the widely held view that naturalism is the only way for religious studies as an academic enterprise to exclude supernaturalist assumptions from its methodology. While I fully agree with this view, I argue that naturalism is usually formulated with the help of metaphysical assumptions, which are problematically embodied in the location problem, that is, the problem of how to locate certain phenomena, such as meanings and values, in the order of nature. By unfolding the dynamic between the elements of the location problem, I show that the kind of naturalism based on Wittgenstein’s thought prevents the location problem from arising and can serve as a balanced version of naturalism for use in the study of religion. While metaphysical naturalism often leads to dilemmas, within Wittgenstein’s kind of naturalism, it seems possible both to maintain anti-supernaturalism in the study of religion and to resist the metaphysical temptations hidden in our assumptions about language. These two features make Wittgenstein’s naturalism truly methodological.

This work investigated the effect of zinc oxide nanoparticles functionalized with curcumin (ZnO(np)+CUR) supplementation during the in vitro maturation (IVM) of bovine oocytes on the in vitro embryo production and the cellular antioxidant response. A total of 1,625 cumulus-oocyte complexes (COCs) were cultured in the maturation medium in the absence (0 µM - control) or presence of different concentrations of ZnO(np)+CUR (3 µM, 6 µM or 12 µM). After IVM, COCs were destined either to 1) in vitro embryo production or 2) analysis of reactive oxygen species production, superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity, catalase (CAT) activity and total antioxidant capacity (FRAP). The results demonstrated that the addition of 6 and 12 µM ZnO(np)+CUR during in vitro maturation showed a higher rate of blastocyst production when compared to the control (p < 0.05). However, only 12 µM ZnO(np)+CUR treatment showed higher rates of embryo production when compared to 3µM ZnO(np)+CUR treatment. Supplementation of IVM medium with 6 µM ZnO(np)+CUR reduced ROS production (p < 0.05) compared to control and 12 µM ZnO(np)+CUR treatments. Also, the treatment containing ZnO(np)+CUR at 12 µM had lower SOD activity after IVM than control treatment. In conclusion, the best outcome for in vitro embryo production was obtained when 6 and 12 µM ZnO(np)+CUR was added during IVM of bovine oocytes. However, this improvement in in vitro embryo production was not associated with either the reduction of ROS production or SOD and CAT activities.

Larinus minutus Gyllenhal (Coleoptera: Curculionidae) has been credited with the successful biological control of Centaurea diffusa Lamarck (Asteraceae) in British Columbia, Canada. However, another seed head-feeding weevil agent, Bangasternus fausti Reitter (Coleoptera: Curculionidae), has recently been detected on C. diffusa in British Columbia, and it is unclear how it is interacting with L. minutus. If phenological differences between the two species allow B. fausti to exclude L. minutus from seedheads, and if B. fausti continues to have a low survival rate, populations of C. diffusa may begin to resurge. As a first step in studying the interactions of L. minutus and B. fausti, we compared their phenology and life histories across their known Canadian range and explored the relationship between their abundance and environmental predictors. We quantified adult abundance in the field and collected seed heads from which we reared each species. We found that B. fausti is active earlier than L. minutus, but it is generally found in lower abundance. The abundance of B. fausti had a positive relationship with mean annual precipitation, whereas L. minutus did not have any significant relationship with environmental predictors. Taken together, our study clarifies the life history of B. fausti in Canada in relation to L. minutus. If B. fausti precludes colonisation of seedheads by L. minutus but remains a less effective agent, continued range expansion of B. fausti may reduce the efficacy of C. diffusa biological control.

This article studies the optimal boundary regularity of harmonic maps between a class of asymptotically hyperbolic spaces. To be precise, given any smooth boundary map with nowhere vanishing energy density, this article provides an asymptotic expansion formula for harmonic maps under the assumption of $C^1$ up to the boundary.