This essay problematizes the place of “culture” in Africa-China studies whereby culture is often sidelined as the devalued supplement to political-economic data. Instead, cultural narratives and processes are inseparable from how knowledge and Africa-China relationality are made. We consider how multi-directional reflexivity about the production of a knowledge object (“Africa-China/China-Africa”) intervenes in both outdated forms of Cold War-inflected area studies and emergent hawkish nationalist scholarship. This essay considers Africa-China as method, an approach based in transregional theorizing and relational analysis that attends to the politics of knowledge production and resists instrumentalization of scholarly findings by imperialist or ethnonationalist agendas.

The trend towards health-conscious consumption has led the food industry to enhance the nutritional content of staple products like yoghurt. This review explores the integration of nutrient-rich fruit peels into yoghurt, emphasizing both health benefits and technological advancements. Fruit peels, which are frequently discarded as agro-industrial waste, are abundant in nutrients, antioxidants and dietary fibres, which can boost yoghurt's nutritional profile. Incorporating fruit peels not only supports waste reduction and sustainability but also contributes to the added value of yoghurt products. Technological innovations have made it possible to efficiently process and incorporate these peels while preserving their benefits. The review evaluates various methods such as fermentation, drying and grinding and their effects on yoghurt's taste, texture and shelf-life. Additionally, it considers consumer acceptance and market potential for these enhanced yoghurts. Overall, this approach highlights the promise of fruit peels as functional ingredients, promoting health benefits and advancing yoghurt production technologies.

This study adopts a temporal lens to integrate opportunity logic with institutional theory, examining how varying and unpredictably evolving institutions across countries shape firm innovation. Focusing on nascent industries – where institutional environments are not only diverse but also characterized by irregular and rapid change over time – we theorize a U-shaped relationship between institutional uncertainty and digital product innovation. We further explore how design iteration, as a form of temporally distributed adaptive action, enables firms to navigate uncertainty and capture innovation opportunities in dynamic institutional contexts. Drawing on a sample of 4,619 firms from 50 countries in the global mobile app industry, our empirical findings support these propositions. This research advances a dynamic, time-sensitive perspective on institutions and innovation, offering key insights for emerging markets, like China, where firms operate amid rapid and unpredictable institutional transitions.

The visibility of Karl Marx in England had a “major breakthrough” according to Kirk Willis (1977): the publication of the first volume of Das Kapital in English in 1887. Although Willis provides a quantitative description of mentions of Marx based on library records, book circulation statistics, and newspaper references, the attribution of the effect of Marx’s visibility to a single event remains a simplification of a complex process. The specificities of late Victorian society and the fact that Marx wrote his theoretical works in German contributed to his near anonymity in England up to the second half of the 1880s. The liberal radical roots of the left-wing intellectuals and of the working class movements, together with the strong parliamentary tradition, constituted a challenging environment for the spread of Marx’s name. With data from Google Ngram, this study adopts the synthetic control method and finds that 1886 is a breakthrough year for the mentions of Marx in England. This is combined with a qualitative analysis of primary and secondary sources and of the contextual nature of the interest in Marx in several literary genres. The paper complements Willis’s study by shedding light on the developments preceding 1887. In this period the surge of interest in Marx was driven by a growing fear of socialism and his mentions shift from partly generic to distinctly political. This shift was triggered by a combination of factors, including the economic crisis and rising unemployment of the mid-1880s, episodes of social unrest, key editorial developments, and the efforts of Edward Aveling, Eleanor Marx, and many others in promoting the socialist cause. These conditions broadened public perceptions of socialist imminence and contributed to the semiotic diffusion of Marx’s name even before 1887.

An adult female great curassow (Crax rubra) and an adult female crested guan (Penelope purpurascens) were examined post-mortem and found to harbour trematode flukes in their pulmonary air sacs and coelom, with severe pathological changes. Seven trematode specimens (four from C. rubra and three from P. purpurascens) were stained with hydrochloric acid–carmine for optical microscopy, while four specimens (two from each bird species) were submitted to molecular analysis. Morphological and molecular analyses identified the specimens as Circumvitellatrema momota. Phylogenetic analysis showed that C. momota from different geographical origins constitutes a single species within the subfamily Cyclocoelinae and is clearly distinct from other cyclocoelid genera. This is the first documented case of C. momota infecting members of the Cracidae family. These findings highlight the importance of monitoring parasitic infections in captive and free-ranging cracids under conservation programmes.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used in medical practice to complete tasks that were previously completed by the physician, such as visit documentation, treatment plans and discharge summaries. As artificial intelligence becomes a routine part of medical care, physicians increasingly trust and rely on its clinical recommendations. However, there is concern that some physicians, especially those younger and less experienced, will become over-reliant on artificial intelligence. Over-reliance on it may reduce the quality of clinical reasoning and decision-making, negatively impact patient communications and raise the potential for deskilling. As artificial intelligence becomes a routine part of medical treatment, it is imperative that physicians recognise the limitations of artificial intelligence tools. These tools may assist with basic administrative tasks but cannot replace the uniquely human interpersonal and reasoning skills of physicians. The purpose of this feature article is to discuss the risks of physician deskilling based on increasing reliance on artificial intelligence.

This article critically examines the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) ruling on the preliminary objections in Sudan v. United Arab Emirates, focusing on the implications of the UAE’s reservation to Article IX of the Genocide Convention. It evaluates the Court’s interpretation of the scope and effect of such reservations, contrasting it with precedents set in Bosnia v. Serbia and The Gambia v. Myanmar. Drawing on the ICJ’s jurisprudence, principles of state responsibility, and international criminal law, the article highlights significant tensions and ambiguities in the Court’s approach to admissibility, complicity, and provisional measures. The study incorporates insights from the International Criminal Court and UN Human Rights Council resolutions to contextualise the legal and factual matrix. Ultimately, it argues for a more coherent doctrinal framework to address the impact of reservations on treaty obligations and jurisdictional competence in genocide-related disputes.

This paper is concerned with a duality between $r$-regular permutations and $r$-cycle permutations, and a monotone property due to Bóna-McLennan-White on the probability $p_r(n)$ for a random permutation of $\{1,2,\ldots, n\}$ to have an $r$th root, where $r$ is a prime. For $r=2$, the duality relates permutations with odd cycles to permutations with even cycles. For the general case where $r\geq 2$, we define an $r$-enriched permutation as a permutation with $r$-singular cycles coloured by one of the colours $1, 2, \ldots, r-1 $. In this setup, we discover a bijection between $r$-regular permutations and enriched $r$-cycle permutations, which in turn yields a stronger version of an inequality of Bóna-McLennan-White. This leads to a fully combinatorial understanding of the monotone property, thereby answering their question. When $r$ is a prime power $q^l$, we further show that $p_r(n)$ is monotone. In the case that $n+1 \not\equiv 0 \pmod q$, the equality $p_r(n)=p_r(n+1)$ has been established by Chernoff.

Microscopic epibionts are important components of an intertidal ecosystem. However, because the epibionts are established on habitats provided by basibiont (host) organisms, the epibionts are affected by both the characteristics of basibionts and the ambient environmental conditions. Here, we hypothesised that variations in the epibiont community were affected by the mobility, size, and surface roughness of the basibiont organisms, as well as by environmental conditions, which was tested over a one-month period in spring. Epibionts growing on 16 basibiont species belonging to Gastropoda, Bivalvia, Polyplacophora, and Echinoidea were collected from a rocky shore in Niigata, Japan. Most of the epibionts collected were diatoms, and the highest cell density of the epibionts was recorded on the surfaces of the limpet Cellana toreuma. The epibiont community changed significantly from April to May and was also shaped by the characteristics of the basibionts. The results indicated that basibionts with sessile, large, or smooth surfaces had higher taxonomic richness, Simpson diversity, and cell density of the epibionts than those with mobile, small, or rough surfaces. Multivariate analysis of the epibiont community confirmed the importance of these basibiont characteristics and the survey month. Six groups of epibiont communities were identified based on their contrasting sample communities, and each had its own indicator species. The results indicate that both environmental changes from April to May and changes in basibiont species promote changes in the epibiont community in this coastal region.

Spatial studies of British Victorian cities have been historically limited either in scope or specificity due to the unwieldiness of census data. However, over the last decade, the digitization of historical source material has created new possibilities for the exploration of geodemographic patterns. For the case of Manchester, the “shock city” of the British Industrial Revolution, these advancements are especially pertinent in order to settle long-standing debates as to the extent of segregation in the city. This article presents a method for the highly granular georeferencing of census data for the Manchester Township for the second half of the nineteenth century by drawing on historical material, including geographic and commercial surveys. Linking households to specific buildings presents increased possibilities for studies of heterogeneity and neighborhood patterns at a micro-scale. This approach ultimately lays the groundwork for future revisitations of nineteenth-century cities and the traditional claims that have been made around their urban dynamics.

We combine mathematical modeling, population growth data, archaeological survey data, and GIS analysis to project that tens of thousands of archaeological sites will be destroyed by development in Illinois by the year 2100. Climate-driven migration from less hospitable areas of the United States is likely to contribute to the growth and expansion of existing municipalities, converting millions of hectares of natural and agricultural land into urban land. A scenario of 1% annual growth over the next 80 years will impact about 55,000 sites in the state, most of which are undocumented. The damage is likely to be even more severe in other areas of the world as the global trends of population increase and urbanization accelerate the expansion of large urban areas in archaeologically rich regions.

Hyman Minsky stands as one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century. His contributions to macroeconomic theory are primarily situated within the post-Keynesian tradition. This paper provides a concise overview of the fundamental elements of Minsky’s theoretical framework, focusing on his principal insights, the financial instability hypothesis, and its broader implications. Although Minsky developed his theory predominantly during the 1980s, it remained largely overlooked until the emergence of the global financial crisis in 2008. The present study seeks to evaluate the socioeconomic conditions and prevailing perceptions during the intervening period that contributed to the marginalisation and underappreciation of Minsky’s approach and policy recommendations. In so doing, the paper critically analyses several potential explanations for the relative neglect of his theoretical contributions.

Several recent works have explored Wassily Leontief’s distinction between standard econometrics, which he called “indirect statistical inference,” and a “direct induction” he called “direct observation.” These works usually understand Leontief’s direct induction through the lens of input-output analysis. I argue that this is too narrow a perspective. Instead, I show how this distinction stemmed from Leontief’s (1929, 1932a) econometric work, when he developed a statistical technique for determining supply and demand curves. From lesser-known published texts by Leontief from this period, as well as unpublished material from the archives, it appears that Leontief’s distinction was in part borrowed from Jacob Marschak (1931) when they were both in Germany. Like Marschak, Leontief distinguished between two epistemic strategies: indirect, using data from the marketplace, i.e., price-quantity data; or direct, using specific data separately on buyers (e.g., household surveys) and on sellers (e.g., plant surveys). This result fundamentally revises our understanding of Leontief’s view of econometrics.

This paper investigates the causal effects of sovereign debt crises in a sample of 50 defaulting economies between 1870 and 2010. As default is potentially endogenous, we use the narrative approach to identify plausibly exogenous episodes. We find economically and statistically significant costs of up to 3.2 percent of GDP before recovering to the pre-crisis level after five years. The average aftermath, however, conceals a large heterogeneity by default cause. Defaults originating from negative supply shocks, political crises, or adverse terms of trade are associated with higher costs. Demand shocks, in contrast, have a moderate effect that is quickly reversed.