Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) pose risks to human health and the environment, making the development of efficient technologies to reduce their emissions a priority. Catalytic oxidation represents a simple, efficient and environmentally friendly method for eliminating VOCs. Herein, a spinel CuCo2O4/biochar/attapulgite (ATP) composite was successfully synthesized via a sol–gel method using waste walnut shell powder as both a complexing agent and a combustion promoter. The effect of the mass ratio on toluene degradation performance was systematically investigated. The results indicated that when the mass ratio of CuCo2O4/ATP to the biomass precursor was optimized to 1:4, the catalyst exhibited excellent catalytic oxidation performance for toluene degradation, achieving 99% conversion at 300°C along with high stability. The introduction of biochar induced the formation of abundant oxygen vacancies on the spinel surface and effectively suppressed the agglomeration of CuCo2O4 particles. Moreover, the rich functional groups on biochar improved toluene adsorption, favouring the subsequent catalytic oxidation. The current study offers a cost-effective strategy for VOC abatement by taking advantage of minerals and biomass.

Drawing on foundational work in the history of emotions, this article explores the significance of evangelical children’s search for salvation in postwar America. Reading midcentury denominational publications and children’s letters through an affective lens, this article asks how emotion, not merely belief, made evangelical childhoods. As evangelical communities passed down a conversion script teaching their children what to feel and how to feel it, kids found themselves caught between the horrors of the bomb, traditions that invoked religious fear, and the gathering force of therapeutic psychology that sought to cultivate feelings of well-being. While evangelical adults imagined that kids who lacked assurance of salvation were experiencing a problem of belief, I argue that children’s doubts exposed tensions inherent in the emotional script of conversion. These enduring tensions took on new significance in the age of the therapeutic, as the pursuit of inner peace emerged as a challenger to more transcendent claims of salvation as peace with God. Thus, even as the children of the 1950s and 1960s tried their best to follow a tried-and-true conversion script, their search for proper feelings recast the meaning of salvation itself and subtly aligned evangelicalism with the new therapeutic self of postwar America.

Standard portfolio-choice models treat cash as fungible. Using positions and transfer records for 46,016 Chinese investors, we show that brokerage cash is nonfungible and that cash-source effects refresh and decay. We label inflows from savings transfers as “cold” and trading-recycled funds as “hot” and construct a cash-temperature measure tracking these dynamics. Investors allocate colder cash to safer stocks, controlling for gains and losses, trading intensity, and rebalancing. Quasi-experimental variation from China’s 2016 IPO reform supports a causal interpretation. A preregistered experiment links cold framing to loss aversion; a model with temperature-dependent sensitivity to gains and losses rationalizes the evidence.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments recommended quarantine to those who had close contact with infected individuals. We conducted a large-scale retrospective survey to study the consequences of such quarantine for labor outcomes. A sizable fraction of quarantined workers experienced reductions in hours worked and earnings, not only during quarantine but also after quarantine. Even uninfected workers experienced negative labor impacts, likely capturing the pure effects of quarantine independent of the effects of COVID-19 symptoms. Non-regular workers and workers without remote work options were more negatively affected by quarantine. We estimate that the quarantine resulted in a large reduction in the aggregate hours and that the reduction is mainly due to the scarring effects.

We hypothesize that the public assesses U.S. Supreme Court nominees in light of the contemporaneous Court’s partisan composition. In a preregistered conjoint experiment (n = 9,895), we find that Democrats and Republicans weigh nominee partisanship more heavily when their party is losing the Court and less heavily when their party already enjoys a secure majority. Consistent with affective polarization and threat-based political psychology, however, they care just as much about partisanship when the Court is split as when the other party enjoys a strong majority – even though the new Justice would swing the Court only in the former scenario.

A positive integer N is said to be an infinitary harmonic number (IHN) if the harmonic mean of its infinitary divisors is integral. It is still an open problem whether or not there exist infinitely many IHNs. Cohen and Hagis [‘Infinitary harmonic numbers’, Bull. Aust. Math. Soc. 41 (1989), 151–158] showed that there exist at most finitely many IHNs with a fixed number of I-components. We give an explicit Nielsen-type upper bound for the number of IHNs. We also consider a class of general infinitary amicable numbers and obtain the Borho-type upper bound for them.

The discipline of political science lacks a systematic understanding of how scholars studying Middle East politics prepare for and navigate in-country research, even as fieldwork plays a vital role in contemporary scholarship about the region. Drawing on evidence from an original survey of scholars studying the Middle East and North Africa, we identify a training–practice misalignment wherein 38% of respondents reported having received no formal training before entering the field despite almost all respondents claiming to have conducted fieldwork. Qualitative evidence from open-ended responses reveals the frustration that many scholars experience due to their lack of formal training and subsequent dependence on informal networks and knowledge. Conflict, authoritarianism, state surveillance, and repression in public space—characteristics that increasingly are prevalent in many parts of the world—have long shaped the practice of fieldwork in the Middle East, rendering our findings significant beyond this region alone. The article discusses implications of this misalignment for this subfield and the discipline more broadly, as well as potential pathways forward.

The physical structures in which urban life occurs are an underappreciated determinant of how grassroots urban politics unfolds. In many rapidly growing cities, housing scarcity forces residents into multifamily buildings that create daily exposure to neighbors. We argue that these exposures affect political behavior by shaping residents’ access to political information and capacity for collective action. We focus on the informal, vernacular architecture of West Africa’s dominant urban housing form—the compound house. Compound house residents in urban Ghana participate more in politics than similar residents of other housing types. Leveraging an original survey, including novel measures of tenants’ spatial network centrality within their residential buildings, we suggest that key mechanisms for this relationship emerge from the effects of architectural design on visibility and social ties among co-tenants. Ultimately, built environments must be studied alongside demographic environments to best understand contextual effects on political behavior.

Pooling of gastropod samples is frequently used in surveys of the neurotropic nematode Angiostrongylus cantonensis to reduce cost and processing time. Here we highlight a potential limitation of this technique using the snail Theba pisana as an example. Pooled samples tested negative using a high-sensitivity qPCR assay, whereas subsequent individual testing revealed positive cases. This pattern is consistent with a dilution effect, where low parasite DNA concentrations could lead to false-negative results. These findings suggest that pooling may reduce diagnostic sensitivity in regions where infection intensities are low and should be applied with caution.

This position paper chronicles and critiques my attempts to help establish sport as a field of application for applied linguistics. In this way, it is a nontraditional article: a first-person, autobiographical, position paper. As background to this endeavor, the paper first acknowledges the critical role of collaborative publications and the establishment of a research network. The paper then explores the affordances and complications associated with building a sports-based community of applied linguistics, especially given preexisting scholarship in sports linguistics, as well as considerable scholarship in the related discipline of communication studies. The paper then briefly recounts my own research in sports linguistics with the aim of bringing to consciousness my goals and purpose. Drawing on Bakhtin’s imagined audience, I reflect on how these motivations not only shaped my research agenda but, in turn, my conceptions of the relationship between linguistics and sport and applied linguistics. I then turn to Bernstein to further reflect on my classification of sports linguistics – the discipline, its knowledge and knowers – and its influence on my attempts at community building. As a position paper, I conclude with some insights for readers who find themselves engaged in similar attempts at community building.

This study presents a generalised theory that describes the thermodynamical processes during mixing of a moist aircraft exhaust with the ambient air and allows one to decide whether or not a contrail forms. Usage of alternative fuels like hydrogen or ammonia increases the moisture content in aircraft plumes compared to current kerosene combustion. Our analysis compares the thermodynamic plume evolution for the classical mixing line and a novel generalised formulation. Additionally, both formulations are used to evaluate the limiting ambient temperature, above which an aircraft does not produce a contrail. We find that the inaccuracies introduced by the classical mixing line cancel each other out, leading to negligible differences between both formulations. Furthermore, the impact of potential heat and water vapour recuperation systems on contrail formation behind fuel-cell-propelled aircraft is investigated. Reducing the exhaust’s thermal energy by technical means increases the contrail formation propensity. Especially, if fuels with high hydrogen content are used, plumes with reduced heat content could reach supersaturation values above $ 500{\%}$. This can trigger liquid water droplet formation directly from the gas phase, a process absent in conventional contrail scenarios, and may increase the number of formed ice crystals drastically. A concurrent increase in ice crystal numbers and contrail formation propensity would increase the contrail-cirrus climate impact. To mitigate this scenario, our analysis identifies requirements on the reduction of exhaust water vapour to suppress contrail formation by technical means and reduce the potential contrail climate impact by fuel-cell-propelled aircraft.

A persistent puzzle in the study of public opinion is why political information often produces minimal attitude change despite reliably influencing beliefs. We argue that this duality reflects belief relevance—the extent to which specific beliefs bear on attitudes. Using conversations with large language models (LLMs), we elicit deeply held issue attitudes and the “focal beliefs” people use to justify those attitudes. We then randomly assign participants to receive an LLM-generated counterargument targeting either their focal belief, an issue-relevant but unmentioned belief (“distal belief”), or a placebo. In experiments with two large online convenience samples, counterarguments targeting the aforementioned beliefs successfully decrease belief strength, with effects persisting after 10 days. More importantly, focal belief counterarguments produce larger and more durable attitude change than distal counterarguments. These findings suggest that political information can successfully shift political attitudes and provide new evidence for the role of belief relevance in persuasion.

In this paper, we show that for each sufficiently large integer $H$, there is a real cubic number $\alpha$ and a rational number $r$, both of height smaller than $H$, such that $0\lt \alpha -r\lt 272/H^4$. The exponent $4$ of $H$ in this inequality is best possible. The numbers $\alpha$ and $r$ are both constructed explicitly. We also show that a necessary and sufficient condition on $(u,v)$ under which there is a positive constant $c_1=c_1(d,u,v)$ such that the inequality $|\alpha -\beta | \geq c_1 H(\alpha )^{-u} H(\beta )^{-v}$ holds for all real algebraic numbers $\alpha$ of degree $d \geq 2$ and all real algebraic numbers $\beta$ of degree $d-1$ is $u \geq d-1$ and $v \geq d$.

The worldwide adoption of automatic milking systems (AMSs) has expanded, attracting growing interest from researchers. Although several reviews have already been carried out regarding the features of AMS in confined systems, a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of the literature on automated milking in pasture-based systems is still lacking. Therefore, this review set out to provide a bibliometric approach focused on pasture-based AMS to explore and map the extent of research in the scientific literature. Initially, a comprehensive search was carried out in the Web of Science and Scopus databases. Then, a four-step PRISMA evaluation was applied on 235 identified articles, resulting in a final sample of 45 articles. Most studies were conducted in Europe (44%), in research herds (79%), involving Holstein-Friesian cows (76%), using automated milking from Lely (57%) and DeLaval brands (30%). White clover and perennial and annual ryegrass are the most commonly used pastures among the countries (87.5% vs. 75%). The main topics (33%) investigated over studies were milk production, composition and efficiency of AMS on pasture, followed by animal behaviour (27%), animal nutrition (16%), heat stress (9%), methane emissions (7%), health disorders (2%), economic viability (2%), somatic cell count and mastitis (2%) and energy consumption (2%). Concentrate allocation and heat stress were identified as emerging research areas that deserve greater attention in future studies. This study contributes to our understanding of scientific developments, trends and research gaps regarding pasture-based AMSs.

We commend developing a processual, relational and experiential psychosocial framework for exploring the human impacts of crises, disasters and extreme events that encompasses multidisciplinary contributions interactively. We suggest a paradigm shift employing the notion and properties of liminality, because this refers directly to change and meets the challenges we outline.