Replacing soiled bed linens is a common practice in intensive care units . We identified dust-driven transmission of carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii correlated with changing bed linens by air sampling and genome-based analysis. This uncovers a hidden airborne route, which needs to be considered to design countermeasures against multidrug-resistant organisms.

La Marmotta is one of the best-preserved Early Neolithic lakeshore settlements in the Mediterranean, yet its chronology has remained poorly defined. Previous interpretations relied mainly on decoration-based ceramic classifications and a limited radiocarbon dataset, hindering our understanding of the site’s occupational dynamics and its role in the wider European Neolithic. This study presents a revised chronological framework grounded in 35 radiocarbon determinations, including 22 new dates on short-lived botanical remains and selected wooden artifacts. The samples were carefully selected from well-documented contexts to minimise post-depositional disturbance and analyzed using Bayesian modeling. Radiocarbon results were interpreted in parallel with a detailed reassessment of ceramic artifacts and decorations. This integrated approach suggests that ceramic variability does not reflect a succession of different phases, but rather the cultural diversity of a single, dynamic community.

Despite the burgeoning international literature on the history of sexual violence, the topic of incest has received limited attention from historians. This article examines hitherto restricted archival files on thirty-seven offenders who were convicted of incest in the independent Irish state under the Punishment of Incest Act 1908 and, in doing so, provides a rare glimpse into exploitative sexual practices within Irish families in the decades after independence. The findings show that incest perpetrators were effectively a male preserve and that incest was almost always an abusive relationship that persisted over an extended period of time. The article also reveals that victims were invariably younger than offenders, some incest offenses involved alcohol, violence, and threats, many cases resulted in pregnancy, motherless children appear to have been vulnerable, and most of these crimes were premeditated and non-consensual. The article concludes by capturing the limitations of the 1908 Act in neglecting to cover sexual acts other than vaginal intercourse and embrace a broader range of family relationships.

Through the examination of a criminal trial that took place in Vienna in January and February 1968, this article explores postwar Austria’s treatment of pornography. It argues that the 1950 law criminalizing pornography in Austria was a product of the Second Republic’s consensus-driven politics and emphasis on international obligations under a 1923 international treaty against obscenity. The spectacle of the presiding judge berating defendants on trial in 1968 sparked public outrage and calls for legal reform. The Austrian government strove to liberalize the country’s obscenity laws but soon abandoned these efforts. Through a comparison to Denmark and West Germany, the article suggests that the failure of legislative reform in Austria resulted from an emphasis on political consensus and on international law, as well as the terms of the debate over pornography after the 1968 trial, focused on restraining judicial power rather than artistic liberties and free speech.

On 28 May 2025, the Higher Court of Appeal in Hamm (Germany) delivered a pioneering judgment in the case Lliuya v. RWE. The Court confirmed that German private nuisance law was applicable in the transnational context, and that the greenhouse gas emissions of the energy company RWE contributed to climate change and its adverse impacts. Based on the evidence provided, the Court concluded that the normative threshold of ‘imminence’ of a future, first-time property impairment was not reached. This article assesses the Court’s reasoning and the challenges it faced in determining ‘imminence’, considering conflicting scientific evidence. Against the backdrop of a legal and scientific analysis, the article argues that the physical laws underpinning climate change, and the scientific assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, form a baseline of ‘best available science’ for the legal assessment of climate risks. Case-specific evidence that deviates from this baseline requires careful consideration. Furthermore, the legal interpretation of causally relevant evidence must depend on whether the science provides a qualitative or a quantitative statement.

In this paper, we extend the concept of polynomial-type exceptional units to the ring of integers of an arbitrary algebraic number field. We investigate the number of these polynomial-type exceptional units on general algebraic varieties. By employing the Chinese remainder theorem and Hensel’s lifting technique, we derive an exact counting formula for the number of these exceptional units on a smooth closed subscheme under the assumption of good reduction. Furthermore, using the Lang–Weil inequality, we establish an asymptotic estimate for the counting function. In particular, we prove that for varieties of degree at most two, the error term can be significantly improved, yielding a sharper asymptotic bound.

We give new analogues of Andrews’ celebrated spt-function identity using basic hypergeometric transformations due to Verma and Jain [‘Transformations between basic hypergeometric series on different bases and identities of Rogers–Ramanujan type’, J. Math. Anal. Appl. 76(1) (1980), 230–269].

Beginning in 1998 under the first Tri Council Policy Statement (TCPS 1), Canadian political science has been increasingly subject to standardized institutional ethics review for work involving human participants. Some contend that this ethics regime has overburdened the social sciences with clinically-oriented and legally risk-averse processes. In turn, this may create an ethics chill that pushes social scientists, particularly graduate students, away from human participant research. To date, however, there has been no empirical demonstration of this phenomenon within political science. Has Canadian institutional research ethics review under TCPS chilled human participant-driven research production in political science doctoral theses? This article tests the ethics chill hypothesis using an original dataset of English and French political science PhD dissertations across 11 Canadian universities from 1990 to 2019. Its results suggest no concrete evidence of an ethics chill under TCPS.

The aim of this study was to investigate the predictive validity of a proposed revision of the Nutri-Score and the current Nutri-Score by investigating associations between the diet quality scores measured in mid-pregnancy and the risk of dispensed prescription of medications for hypertension up to 11 years following delivery and blood pressure mid-pregnancy. The study population (n 70 730) were participants in the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study. Food intake was assessed in mid-pregnancy using a validated FFQ. Nutritional scores for each food item were calculated based on content of energy, sugars, saturated fat, salt, fibre, protein, fruit, vegetables and legumes. Diet quality scores were derived using energy-weighted means of nutritional scores. Anti-hypertensive medications were registered in the national prescription database. We estimated hazard ratios (HRs) with 95 % CIs using Cox regression models. During a mean follow-up of 6 years, 4736 (6·7 %) women were dispensed prescription for medications for hypertension. There was a non-linear association between diet quality and hypertension medication. Compared with the median diet quality score, poorer diet quality (90th percentile of the score) was associated with higher risk of medications for hypertension (HR = 1·08, 95 % CI 1·02, 1·14) and cross-sectional high diastolic blood pressure (OR = 1·18, 95 % CI 1·03, 1·32). Both diet quality scores yielded similar results overall. Poorer diet quality during pregnancy, assessed with a proposed version, and the current Nutri-Score, was associated with a higher risk of medications for hypertension, indicating its usefulness as a valuable tool for guiding consumers and improving public health.

Acute liver failure is a rare disease characterized by acute presentation of liver injury in the absence of cirrhosis that poses significant morbidity and mortality. Neurological manifestations, including hepatic encephalopathy, cerebral edema and intracranial hypertension, are frequent. The incidence of intracranial hypertension in acute liver failure has declined, which is a likely reflection of the impact of early and adequate intervention, but it holds a poor prognosis. This review summarizes the key concepts relating to pathophysiology, diagnosis and management of intracranial hypertension in acute liver failure. Clinical and biochemical predictors aid in early recognition and use of prophylactic or targeted management. Validated invasive and noninvasive intracranial pressure monitoring are important in the management of intracranial hypertension. The use of invasive intracranial pressure monitoring in acute liver failure has been limited due to the expected risk of hemorrhage secondary to coagulopathy. The risk associated with invasive monitoring is better assessed with the use of viscoelastic testing when compared to conventional coagulation tests. Management of intracranial hypertension includes strategies that target the reduction of cerebral blood volume and cerebral volume.