What would an approach to public humanities that centers the principles of LANDBACK, a movement that locates liberation for Indigenous people in “putting Indigenous Lands back into Indigenous hands,” look like? In this conversation with Megan Red Shirt-Shaw, Meredith McCoy, and Elizabeth Rule—facilitated by Jennifer Guiliano and Roopika Risam—the team behind the Landback Universities project explores the possibilities and urgency of public humanities informed by Indigenous ways of knowing, cultural protocols, and the responsibility of universities to undertake repair work to be in right relation with Indigenous communities they have dispossessed. Topics addressed in this conversation include the limits of “decolonization” as a university discourse and buzzword that, at best, results in land acknowledgments—brief statements about the Native nations whose lands universities occupy, typically without any commitment to address the university’s ongoing participation in dispossession; the tensions between diversity, equity, and inclusion and “decolonization,” which undercut very real, decolonial calls for land restoration and the remaking of systems of power on campuses; the ethics of collaborations on humanities-related initiatives with Indigenous communities; and negotiating right-wing politics that curtail opportunities for this work.

Significant improvements have been achieved to enhance the patient-centricity of clinical research, including the development and utilization of novel clinical trial endpoints. These include endpoints that harness outcomes that are important to patients and reflect the patients’ lived experiences. This may take the form of utilizing variables such as days alive and out of hospital (DAOH) and quality-of-life adjusted outcomes. The use of composite outcomes can be used to enrich patient-centricity by weighting or ranking events. These approaches have several nuances that should be considered including selecting appropriate events, defining outcomes, how to elicit or construct weights, and whose opinions to consider. After weights have been determined, a variety of approaches exist to combine weights with outcomes and make comparisons between groups. The approaches, including the win ratio, weighted win ratio, desirability of outcome ranking (DOOR), multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA), and variations of time-to-first composite event analyses, have unique advantages and challenges depending on the clinical scenario. While improving patient-centric outcomes is of high importance to multiple stakeholders, more comparative work is needed to characterize the implications of alternative approaches.

Research into solar radiation modification (SRM) offers tentative hope of averting some of the risks of otherwise unavoidable climate change. Yet such technologies come with novel risks. Risk–risk, or risk trade-off analysis has been proposed as a governance tool to evaluate the desirability of development of such potential climate interventions, but most references to such analysis appear primarily as rhetorical efforts to argue for continued SRM research. A detailed review of the leading methodological proposal reveals serious practical and ethical shortcomings arising in both the framing and current methodologies of risk-risk analysis. Methodological inconsistencies and asymmetries are identified, and related to underlying political and ideological presumptions rooted in modernist technocratic social imaginaries. The shortcomings mean ethical questions are not resolved, interaction effects between possible responses are downplayed and other potential exceptional responses ignored. Rather than identifying possible risk-superior pathways, in this case risk-tradeoff analysis – embedded in a technocratic risk management repertoire – seems likely to encourage excessive reliance on SRM. While methodological improvements could be made to risk–risk analysis approaches, effective future governance urgently needs a novel, genuinely precautionary, risk management repertoire that would help humanity live with uncertainty, support meaningful action to avoid worst-case outcomes, and reflect an ethics of care.

This article presents a short selective history of contemporary collecting at the Smithsonian Institution. I explain what contemporary collecting is and show how contemporary collecting in the 1960s and 1970s produced histories of political reform movements and participatory democracy. I argue that many material records would not exist today if it had not been for a small group of committed curators who pioneered this practice in the absence of policy guardrails—and often despite a lack of institutional support. I present a brief overview of contemporary collecting methods and outcomes to argue that it is more important than ever for us to collect evidence of diverse political activity in our current moment—a moment in which cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian, are being attacked by executive orders issued by President Donald Trump, despite their long-standing reputation for maintaining truth and public trust in times of political change and contestation. The article concludes by suggesting how people can approach this work today.

Marine microorganisms play a crucial role in biogeochemical cycles, especially in the surface microlayer (SML), which differs from adjacent subsurface waters (SSW). In this study, we sampled the SML and SSW at 20 sites along the western Antarctic Peninsula during the summers of 2015 and 2019, examining microbial, viral and environmental differences. We focused on phototrophic protists, specifically Phaeocystis-like species, known for their high dimethylsulphoniopropionate (DMSP) contents, which can be released through viral lysis. DMSP is a precursor to dimethylsulphide (DMS), a gas influencing Earth’s climate. We hypothesized a significant relationship between Phaeocystis-like abundance and DMSP concentration, with strong interactions with their specific viruses (V4) in the SML. Most biotic variables showed higher mean values in the SML, although these differences often were not statistically significant. DMSP concentrations correlated with Phaeocystis-like species abundance in both layers (R2 = 0.482, P ≤ 0.01; R2 = 0.532, P ≤ 0.01, respectively), whereas V4 abundance significantly correlated with Phaeocystis-like species only in the SML (R2 = 0.572, P ≤ 0.01). These results suggest stronger interactions between viruses and DMSP-rich hosts in the SML, potentially increasing DMS emissions to the atmosphere and impacting climate regulation.

Radiocarbon (14C) activity in aquatic environments is usually different from that of the atmosphere, the result being that organisms that grow in these different environments will have different 14C ages, even though they are contemporary. This age offset in marine samples is known as the “marine reservoir effect.” The marine calibration curve takes this effect into account as a global approximation, but local variations due to ocean dynamics and other factors must be individually studied and corrected for. With a littoral of more than 11,000 km and a great interest in dating malacological marine samples, Mexico has scarce local reservoir effect studies. Most of the available data come from studies done in the 1960s and 1990s. In this study, we present new reservoir effect corrections for four sites in the Pacific Ocean with positive ΔR values as expected, and one from the Caribbean Sea with a negative average value of ΔR. The results were obtained by dating known-age shells from the malacological collection of the Natural History Museum Felipe Poey, in Havana, Cuba. This new data will be useful to do more precise reservoir effect corrections to malacological samples of the region, with special interest in contexts where it is difficult to date other kinds of organic samples, due to difficulties in their preservation.

A fundamental question in relation to academic freedom is the setting of research agendas. In relation to this issue, this article first points to the great diversity of research as a result of the complex structure of the research ecosystem. Against this backdrop, the article continues by discussing six different steps in setting a research agenda. This, in turn, leads to a comparison of the two main approaches to set up a research agenda: bottom-up and top-down. Finally, the article presents recent tendencies and limitations to research agendas.

Buildings are major global energy consumers, accounting for 20%–40% of total energy use in developed nations, exceeding industrial and transport sectors. This rising consumption, caused by population growth, higher living standards, and pervasive energy-intensive technologies, underscores the urgent need for enhanced energy efficiency in the built environment. These measures are vital for environmental sustainability, societal well-being, and balanced development.Reducing building energy demand is both an environmental and societal challenge, requiring a holistic approach. This includes energy efficiency, renewable energy adoption, and occupant behavioural changes, balancing technical and societal challenges to achieve net-zero aspirations. Achieving net-zero aspirations demands collaboration among stakeholders, including governments, developers, and building occupants. We invite contributions on the role of buildings in urban energy reduction, focusing on services technologies, new design initiatives, and AI in building management. The importance of existing building archetypes and their potential for energy demand management through efficient envelopes and technological advances is also a key consideration. We welcome various formats, including literature reviews, research papers, and case studies, that use both quantitative and qualitative data to analyse pilot projects, stock modelling, or city-scale proposals.

We study the computational complexity of converting between different representations of irrational numbers. Typical examples of representations are Cauchy sequences, base-10 expansions, Dedekind cuts and continued fractions.