This article explores how predictions about future nanotechnological and neuropharmaceutical applications to medicine further anti-ageing discourse in the present. Products of both research areas enable physiological augmentation, with uses way beyond accepted traditional goals of medicine. But most “nanodreams” have not come to fruition, yet; as such, much popular scientific writing about nanotechnology is “thoroughly science-fictional” in how it imagines its future. Projections about these technologies contribute to devaluing the ageing experience and neglecting the need to address challenges of ageing in the present. To make these points, this article will read two speculative texts alongside one another: a piece of creative science fiction and a predictive popular science account. Ray Kurzweil’s How to Create a Mind propagates brain–computer interfaces, and Jeffrey Moore’s The Memory Artists deals with neuropharmaceuticals. Such parallel reading risks conflating different genres, narrative forms and contexts, obfuscating the purpose and possibilities of either genre. But it helps illustrate how ideas of an augmented human species have begun structuring social belief systems that shine through creative writing that joins in pitching, rather than effectively critiquing, these technologies as holding the fountain of youth.

Generative A.I. deepfake images, videos, and other content, overtaking social media apps and other digital content, commonly referred to as A.I. slop, are creating a media ecosystem defined by content chaos. The decisions of big tech companies to program algorithms that favor, and reward in monetary terms, overly emotionally triggering material continue to amplify information pollution. As a climate media scholar, the author argues that popularizing information pollution terminology, which labels generative A.I. slop as contaminating social media apps and platforms, would focus attention on the social and political harms. This content fuels disinformation campaigns and is diminishing public trust. In addition, labeling A.I. slop with a pollution metaphor brings into the lens more readily the environmental harms of generative artificial intelligence. Examples discussed include the cratered monetary value of AI-generated art, the A.I. agent-only social network Moltbook, misinformation and disinformation following extreme weather disasters, and a creative direct action by anti-data center activists in Quilicura, Chile.

“Global net zero” refers to a scientifically informed target of balancing greenhouse gas emissions globally to limit the adverse impacts of climate change, as well as to a politically determined international goal with a 2050 deadline. Amid a proliferation of state and nonstate commitments to the goal, research on the politics of net zero remains limited. Numerous scholars have conceptualized this goal as an international norm. This article challenges this conceptualization, arguing that net zero is more appropriately understood as an aspiration. I show how this conceptualization elucidates important climate governance challenges and helps to set more accurate expectations about the effectiveness of standards and enforcement mechanisms for achieving the goal. I argue that the case of net zero undermines conjectures in current theorizing on aspiration in international politics, especially the expectation that actors will not face social consequences for failing to achieve international aspirational goals provided they make at least some progress. This expectation relies on assumptions about aggregate welfare improvement without giving full consideration to how goal setting facilitates potentially cost-inducing blame shifting.

Liouville field theory has long been a cornerstone of two-dimensional quantum field theory and quantum gravity, which has attracted much recent attention in the mathematics literature. Timelike Liouville field theory is a version of Liouville field theory where the kinetic term in the action appears with a negative sign, which makes it closer to a theory of quantum gravity than ordinary (spacelike) Liouville field theory. Making sense of this “wrong sign” requires a theory of Gaussian random variables with negative variance. Such a theory is developed in this paper, and is used to prove the timelike DOZZ formula for the $3$-point correlation function when the parameters satisfy the so-called “charge neutrality condition.” Expressions are derived also for the k-point correlation functions for all $k\ge 3$, and it is shown that these functions approach the correct semiclassical limits as the coupling constant is sent to zero.

We show that, for a finite spectrum $X$, Spanier–Whitehead duality induces an isomorphism between the cohomological and homological Atiyah–Hirzebruch spectral sequences. As an application, it follows that Poincaré duality for a Poincaré duality complex that is oriented over a ring spectrum $\mathcal{R}$ induces an isomorphism between the two spectral sequences.

Based on the past year’s traffic stats to the Humanities Indicators web site, the submitted article takes a question-based approach to answer what Americans seem most interested in learning about the humanities. Using infographics and short summary paragraphs, the report walks through key data points about the current state of the humanities using the most recent available data from the federal government or surveys conducted by the project.

The Timor green pigeon Treron psittaceus, endemic to Timor, Rote, and adjacent satellite islands (eastern Indonesia and Timor-Leste), is declining because of severe hunting pressure and forest conversion. During 2002–2025, we conducted > 1,400 field days of surveys throughout the species’ range. Prior to 2000, most records were from Indonesian West Timor. Since 2000, most records (93%) and nearly all individuals (98%) have been observed in Timor-Leste, primarily within Lautem District. The scarcity of recent records throughout much of the species’ range, including Camplong (last record 1991), Bipolo forest (last record 1999), elsewhere in West Timor (last record 2005) and Rote (four records of 1–2 birds during 2004–2013), suggests that only a small, declining population persists. The population in Indonesia is possibly nearly extinct (and probably functionally so), and that in Timor-Leste is predicted to be lower than current estimates suggest. We conservatively estimate the global population to be 100–500 individuals distributed across eight sites, and consider it plausible that the population size lies towards the lower end of this estimate. A population of > 50 birds is likely restricted to a single site, Nino Konis Santana National Park, underscoring the species’ precarious status. We advocate for a reassessment as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List. Effective action plans are required in both Indonesia and Timor-Leste. In Lautem, community-based conservation efforts will be crucial to reduce hunting pressure. Further surveys should focus on Mount Timau (West Timor), and Lautem, Manatuto and Manufahi Districts (Timor-Leste).

Today’s landscape of public archaeology foregrounds intentional practices, ensuring that archaeologists are aware of our actions and their repercussions. While we are intentional in our planning and implementation of public projects, this article argues that we are not adequately prepared for ending them. Many projects die for various reasons, get passed on to new generations of practitioners, and some simply come to a natural ending. A lack of discussion around project death, however, leads to unintentional endings or confusing continuities. Public archaeology is an intense emotional experience, and feelings of betrayal can emerge when a practitioner or the community partner exits the partnership unexpectedly. This article explores these issues from the perspective of an American scholar at a small public university and asks what an intentional ending to a public archaeology project looks like. It also asks how we can co-create and co-manage such an intentional ending with our community partners. Rather than fear the death of a project, there may be power in embracing the grief of ending a collaboration and soothing the emotional rupture. Finally, it concludes by suggesting that a rite of passage or celebration of the end may be necessary to mark the project as complete, allowing the partners to mourn and move on.

This study explores whether the ability to process grammatical evidentiality is compromised in older adults speaking Turkish and Korean, two languages that grammatically encode evidentiality. Building on previous research that suggests cognitive demands associated with language structures may reduce processing capacity in older adults, we conducted self-paced reading experiments using sentence contexts involving grammatical evidentials. We tested adult groups of young (N = 44, ages 19–27) and older (N = 37, ages 48–70) speakers of Korean and young (N = 31, ages 18–31) and older (N = 42, ages 50–85) speakers of Turkish. The results indicate that both language groups rated mismatched evidential verb forms as unacceptable, with Turkish speakers more likely to interpret mismatches as acceptable than Korean speakers. Notably, older Korean adults exhibited longer reading times (RTs) for direct evidential mismatches, while older Turkish adults showed longer RTs for indirect evidential verbs, suggesting age-related disruptions in processing. The findings only partially support the hypothesis that predicts grammatical processing differences in older compared to younger adults.

The history of the notion of “war crimes” spans at least ten centuries. As far as the Western hemisphere is concerned, it starts some time in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, absorbs normative content during the following centuries, appears as a phrase in the eighteenth century, takes juridical shape and becomes an accepted notion in the nineteenth century, and starts being enforced as a category of criminalized violations of the laws of war with greater regularity in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Today, war crimes constitute one of the “core” categories of recognized international crimes. During that long process of normative development, a core set of rules and prohibitions crystallized to form a body of law first referred to as the laws and customs of war and later as international humanitarian law (IHL) when those laws and customs came to be accepted as truly international. Various means of enforcement – reprisals, hostage-taking, reparations – would be tried over time to give this body of law and its prohibitions a degree of coercive power and deterrence. Slowly, the idea that individual criminal responsibility should attach to the violation of some of the most important prohibitions of IHL came to be accepted as an alternative to what had proven to be ineffective means of enforcement. The notion of “war crimes” grew out of this process, and the list of conduct coming under that umbrella expanded significantly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries under the combined pressures of violent historical events and the prosecutorial and codificatory efforts that resulted from those events. The twentieth century witnessed the general acceptance of the notion of war crimes, their recognition as norms of customary international law, their frequent domestic and international enforcement, the refinement of their legal contours, their expansion into new territories including non-international armed conflicts, and the creation of institutions, jurisdictional principles and mechanisms geared towards the effective enforcement of those offences and prohibitions.

Adaptation has been embedded into Homer’s Odyssey since its origins in the oral traditions of ancient Greece. With each new age, creative artists find fresh ways to re-tell the story of the poem’s world and its protagonist—who is himself known for his adaptability—recasting his adventures and quest for home in ways that speak to the concerns of the contemporaneous moment. The range of these adaptations has been vast, with the epic being appropriated sometimes for diametrically opposed purposes: in support of imperialism or to contest it; as a vehicle for patriarchal dominance or feminist autonomy; as a narrative in support of refugees or condemning the indigenous inhabitants of certain lands. Some of these works have themselves become foundational, inspiring stories and genres in their turn, and with the imminent release of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation, we have a new chance to see what the Odyssey might be in our current moment.

Parliaments at all levels of government do not necessarily resemble the society they represent. Such parliaments are generally more masculine, less diverse in terms of ethnicity and region, and older than the population. Focusing on youth’s underrepresentation, we are interested in why young people do not get elected. Using the German local elections as a case and looking at a random sample of 100 German municipal elections comprising more than 6400 candidates, we find that youth’s underrepresentation stems to a large degree from their underrepresentation in the candidate pool. In addition, we also discover that youth face some disadvantages in the electoral process. However, these disadvantages are subtle, in that parties are less likely to put young candidates on the top and most electorally advantaged list positions. Voters, in turn, do not generally vote less for young candidates, but they vote less for them if youth occupy a top list position.

This study investigates whether and how interacting with ChatGPT may offer a context that supports perspective shifting and the development of cognitive flexibility, defined as the capacity to move between etic (outsider) and emic (insider) perspectives. Drawing on individual interviews with students enrolled in an advanced university-level Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) French course focused on marketing and advertising in France, this qualitative study examines students’ perspectives on their experiences using ChatGPT to conduct market research on French consumer needs and preferences. The analysis reveals that while students expressed concerns about the legitimacy, authenticity, and cultural positioning of AI-generated content, the interactive and conversational nature of the tool enabled some students to experiment with culturally unfamiliar roles, adopt emerging emic stances, and reflect on the limits of their interpretive frameworks. However, co-creative engagement or shared agency with ChatGPT was not automatic and depended on prompt design, tolerance for ambiguity, and the negotiation of subjective positioning. Rather than facilitating perspective transformation, ChatGPT-supported interactions appeared to foster more modest but meaningful shifts in interpretive positioning and dialectical thinking. The study points to prompt literacy as crucial for fostering more dynamic partnerships with ChatGPT and enabling students to explore alternative perspectives and roles in ways that support the development of intercultural competence in the L2 classroom.