Studies on magistracies have emerged as a solid and important trend in the scholarship on the Roman Republic over the last quarter of a century, and have enabled important connections between institutional history, prosopography, and the exploration of political practice and culture. There are at least three recent additions to this distinguished body of work. Grégory Ioannidopoulos has written a full-scale treatment of the quaestorship, which appears a mere five years after the monograph on the same topic by F. Pina Polo and A. Díaz Fernández.1 While overlaps in coverage and argument are inevitable, there are also significant differences. Ioannidopoulos does not include a prosopography, but focuses at length on terminological issues. The whole first part is taken up by a discussion of the titulature of quaestors, and the focus then turns to the systematic treatment of the ‘institution’ (the function of the college, the rules on eligibility, the election process, and so forth) and the powers it entailed at Rome and overseas. The outcome is an impressively full and thorough treatment, which warrants as close attention as its predecessor, and will be profitably consulted side by side with it. Its central ambition is to elucidate a number of important issues of public law; the remit of the discussion is wider, though, and encompasses the contribution of the quaestorship to the development of the empire as well as issues of political practice and culture; the treatment of the bond between promagistrates and quaestors, necessitudo (pp. 633–3) is especially rewarding.

Benthic gastropods are not commonly useful for biostratigraphic zonation. The gastropod genus Plocezyga is abundant throughout the marine units of the Desmoinesian through Virgilian Pennsylvanian strata in the United States. The protoconch of Plocezyga gives evidence that it had a planktonic time within its life cycle, which would give it a wider regional distribution. It has been found that Plocezyga is able to biostratigraphically zone the Pennsylvanian of the United States by use of first-occurrence range zones. The upper Atokan stage through the Virgilian Stage can be zoned using of the first occurrences of Plocezyga conica, P. excellens, P. ampla new species, P. costata, P. subquadrata, P. ornata, P. acuminata, P. obscura, and P. procera new species. The lower and upper boundary of the Desmoinesian as well as the lower boundary of the Missourian Stage are defined by these gastropod zones. Six new species are proposed: Plocezgya ampla from upper Desmoinesian units; Gamizyga lenterotunda from Missourian units; and Plocezyga pingurestis, Plocezyga procera, Cyclozyga promohumera, and Cyclozyga diversarevolvi from Virgilian units.

UUID: http://zoobank.org/d070c5ad-b65f-4ab1-842f-36058704a335

At times of political catastrophe, what spaces remain for disenfranchised voices? This essay explores an early seventeenth-century compendium of urban folksongs, compiled by Feng Menglong (1574–1646), to explore a new kind of political action outside the institutions of the state—the act of transmission, that is, the recording of materials from the past or present for the moral cultivation of posterity. When Feng inserts non-elite voices into this process by recording and transmitting their poetry in a textual record that takes account of their regional and oral features, inflected by differences of class and gender, his act is both inclusive and meaningfully political. Feng’s act of transmission sustains voices—including those of the marginalized—whose circumstances otherwise render them precarious. Transmission thus draws attention to the forward-looking acts that can shape future practice and theory, on the basis of the very voices being obstructed by the mainstream realities of their time.

In total, 75,000 to 250,000 Asian civilians died building the Thailand-Burma Death Railway under Japanese military orders during the Second World War. Among these were women whose experiences remain overlooked or marginalized in histories about the Death Railway. This microhistory of the Kudo Butai war crimes trial draws on recent scholarship on the relational and structural aspects of victimization and agency to study the sexual abuse and broader experiences of women on the railway. It focuses on the experiences, strategic acts, and survival choices of the following women who appear in trial records: the nineteen-year-old orphan sexually tortured to death, “Siamese lady friends” of some defendants, and the Chinese dresser’s wife who helped POWs. By identifying the relational and structural conditions contributing to sexual violence on the railway, this study demonstrates that the overwhelming experience of women under Japanese military occupation was one of the widespread vulnerability to sexual violence.

The passage 10.185–8 in the Aeneid raises two difficult issues, which have not been satisfactorily resolved so far. The first issue is textual and concerns the word Cinyras/Cunarus in 185. The second vexed issue concerns the meaning of crimen amor vestrum in 188. The present paper summarizes the main discussions on this passage and tries to offer a new interpretation to it.

Often overshadowed by the GI Bill, the National Youth Administration (NYA) supervised the first federal need-based financial aid program in the United States. Tracing the origin of federal aid back to the era of the NYA reveals that the rationale for need-based assistance rests closer to the core of the American policymaking tradition. This article contributes to previous histories of the NYA by demonstrating how its decentralized implementation empowered local college officials who jeopardized the program’s needs-based intent. Meanwhile, this localized administration also facilitated the NYA’s unusual and relatively successful support for Black college students.

This article advances research on ‘collective securitisation’ by theorising how ostensibly separate securitisation processes within different international organisations (IOs) interact and shape each other’s policy outcomes. Focusing on climate change adaptation within the United Nations (UN) and European Union (EU), the study uses an extensive database of documents (1972–2023) and interviews with officials to trace these dynamics. The analysis reveals that the UN initially securitised climate change through a risk-oriented approach emphasising long-term risk management, subsequently influencing the EU’s adaptation policies. Conversely, the EU intermittently reintroduced threat-based framing into the UN, highlighting recursive interactions between these organisations. Findings suggest key moments of cross-organisational influence, notably during the audience acceptance and policy output stages. By incorporating insights from transnational policy learning and norm diffusion, the paper theorises precisely how and when these interactions occur, enriching the analytical framework of Collective Securitisation. This article contributes to understanding how international organisations’ securitisation processes interact and shape climate adaptation policies, emphasising the nuanced interplay between threat-based and risk-based logics.

Consuming whole grains (processed cereal grains containing all the bran, germ and endosperm), and whole-grain foods such as bread, porridge and pasta made from them, is universally recognised as beneficial for health. This is consistently shown through reduced risk and incidence of chronic diseases such as CVD, type 2 diabetes and some cancers with higher whole grain and whole-grain food intakes. Despite this, and the promotion of whole-grain foods in many food-based dietary guidelines, their consumption by the majority of global populations remains below levels predicted to improve health, particularly in the UK and Ireland. This paper (a) describes how whole grains and whole-grain foods can be better identified by consumers and food manufacturers through adoption of standard definitions and food-labelling processes, (b) summarises predicted benefits associated with higher whole-grain consumption and (c) discusses how developing population-based strategies to increase whole-grain consumption can beneficially affect dietary fibre intake, using the Danish Whole-Grain Campaign as a model for success. We suggest that the forthcoming ISO definition of whole grains as a food ingredient together with conditions of use should be adopted as soon as possible in the UK and Ireland. The health benefits of consuming more whole grain are unequivocal and should be recognised by including whole grains in dietary guidance, preferably with a minimum intake level for improved health. Public Health Agencies in the UK and Ireland should work in partnership with academics, industry and retailers to raise the profile of whole grains and whole-grain foods to improve population health.

It is well established that childhood adversity is associated with both negative physical and mental health outcomes. Recent research posits that 1) there may be developmental periods for which the effects of adversity are most influential on brain development and 2) abuse and neglect may be associated with different developmental mechanisms linking psychopathology. This study used seven years of longitudinal data to investigate how abuse and neglect during three developmental periods (early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence), as well as chronicity of maltreatment across these developmental periods, are associated with young adult mental health outcomes (ages 20–21), and how changes in adolescent task-based functional connectivity during cognitive control (between ages 14–15 and 18–20 years) may mediate these associations. Hypothesized mediation models were tested via structural equation modeling (SEM). Significant indirect effects indicated that chronic abuse predicted higher depressive symptoms and higher substance use through stronger dACC–insula connectivity. In contrast, significant indirect effects revealed that neglect during adolescence predicted lower substance use and lower depressive symptoms through weaker dACC–insula connectivity. These results suggest that differential patterns of connectivity changes within the salience network during cognitive control may be associated with risk and resilience for future depression and substance use in young adulthood.

We introduce a novel class of bivariate common-shock discrete phase-type (CDPH) distributions to describe dependencies in loss modeling, with an emphasis on those induced by common shocks. By constructing two jointly evolving terminating Markov chains that share a common evolution up to a random time corresponding to the common shock component, and then proceed independently, we capture the essential features of risk events influenced by shared and individual-specific factors. We derive explicit expressions for the joint distribution of the termination times and prove various class and distributional properties, facilitating tractable analysis of the risks. Extending this framework, we model random sums where aggregate claims are sums of continuous phase-type random variables with counts determined by these termination times and show that their joint distribution belongs to the multivariate phase-type or matrix-exponential class. We develop estimation procedures for the CDPH distributions using the expectation-maximization algorithm and demonstrate the applicability of our models through simulation studies and an application to bivariate insurance claim frequency data. In particular, the distribution of the latent common shock component present in correlated count data can be estimated as well.

Precambrian organic-walled microfossils preserved in fine-grained sedimentary rocks constitute the earliest fossil record of eukaryotic life. The Mesoproterozoic–Neoproterozoic transition coincided with major innovations in the evolution of early eukaryotes, including the radiation of crown-group lineages, represented in these rocks by candidate red algae, green algae, and fungi. However, the diversity of these early eukaryotes is yet to be fully explored. Here, we present a systematic description of the microfossil assemblage preserved in exceptional detail within sedimentary phosphatic nodules and bands in the Diabaig Formation of the ca. 1-Ga Torridon Group of northwest Scotland. Recent work has highlighted the lacustrine or estuarine nature of its depositional environment and confirmed that these fossils may include the oldest known non-marine eukaryotes. We identified 11 morphotaxa from newly collected material, including the new genus and species Minimarmilla multicatenaria, two undoubted eukaryotes, and two probable eukaryotes. The latter include Pterospermopsimorpha sp., and a new network-forming unnamed taxon. These microfossils present an important window on eukaryotic diversification in non-marine aquatic environments during the Mesoproterozoic–Neoproterozoic.

UUID: http://zoobank.org/5829c401-04fc-4229-9136-3963275826c6

The presence of the zebrette goby (Tigrigobius zebrellus) is reported for the first time in the Canary Islands, as well as in the eastern Atlantic. A new established colony around the floating docks of the Marina Santa Cruz de Tenerife harbour has been studied. Over two hundred individuals at different developmental stages have been counted. Its restricted distribution and population characteristic show that it has an established population but with no evidence of expansion to its vicinity. Our study indicates that the population of this exotic species could be easily eradicated to avoid any possible negative impact on local benthic communities. However, if such measures are not soon implemented by the local government this study can also be used as the early invasion stage of an exotic fish species across the Canary Islands.

Two books came out in this review period that set out to investigate monuments that were once considered amongst the wonders of the ancient world but of which no trace remains today: the Pharos of Alexandria is reconstructed by Andrew Michael Chugg and the Colossus at Rhodes explored by Nathan Badoud.1 These monuments were initiated within a few years of each other and both were completed around 283 bc. The Colossus was short lived, destroyed by earthquake in the 220s bc; the lighthouse lasted much longer, perhaps surviving several earthquakes in an increasingly depleted state, the initial, most damaging one occurring in the late eighth century ce. Their complete absence from the physical landscape since then has always fuelled imaginative and academic speculation as to their form. Both authors spend considerable time on the legacy of these speculations and the way that subsequent fantasies have shaped our imagination, particular in terms of the Colossus of Rhodes straddling the harbour, a foot on each promontory. Maerten van Heemskerck’s 1570 illustrations of the Octo mundi miracula was key to the creation of this fantasy, one that Badoud traces not only in European tradition but also to early nineteenth-century Japan and of course to the Statue of Liberty with her rayed head. Heemskerck’s image of the Pharos was equally influential. It shows the Pharos as a spiral tower springing from a wide cylindrical base leading up to a colonnaded rotunda from which spews smoke, omitting the sculpture that is so prominent on ancient coins.