We introduce the concept of a viable generically Gorenstein toroidal crossing (ggtc) space $Y$. This generalizes the concept of Gorenstein toroidal crossing scheme, which in turn generalizes that of a simple normal crossing scheme. On such a space $Y$, we define a sheaf $\mathcal{LS}_Y$, intrinsic to $Y$, by means of an explicit construction. Our main theorem establishes a bijection between the set $\operatorname {LS}_{k^\dagger } (Y)$ of isomorphism classes of log structures on $Y$ over the log point $\operatorname {Spec} k^\dagger$ that are compatible with the ggtc structure and the set $\Gamma (Y,\mathcal{LS}_Y^\times )$ of nowhere-vanishing global sections of $\mathcal{LS}_Y$. The definition of $\mathcal{LS}_Y$ by explicit construction permits the effective construction of log structures on $Y$; it also enables logarithmic birational geometry, in particular the construction, in some cases, of resolutions of singular log structures. Our work generalizes [Gross and Siebert, J. Differential Geom. 72 (2006), 169–338, Theorem 3.22], adapting the original proof with techniques from the theory of $2$-groups and local line bundle systems.

Can economic crises erode ethno-racial solidarity? This study examines linked fate, the belief that one’s life is intertwined with others, during the 2008 recession. Using 2004–2016 American National Election Studies data, we apply time-series analysis to test the racial utility heuristic among Black and Latino respondents. Linked fate declines after the recession, continuing through 2012, but the effect is statistically significant only for Black respondents. Financial hardship shows no direct association with linked fate, yet group trends vary by income and education. These findings suggest that while linked fate may be resilient to individual economic strain, macroeconomic downturns can selectively weaken group-based political cohesion.

The present article focuses on five recent Japanese-language research monographs on the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), authored respectively by Eda Kenji, Mishina Hidenori, Zhou Jun, Takahashi Nobuo, and Suzuki Takashi. The books cover a wide span, reaching from the history of the early years of the CCP through the Communist-Nationalist civil war era, the early years after the founding of the People’s Republic, the implementation of the Great Leap Forward policy, the Cultural Revolution, and until the contemporary Xi Jinping regime. Based on a joint review workshop held at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at Kyoto University in 2025, the article discusses the contributions of the five books and the perspectives of their respective reviewers.

When hearing a label for a visible object, toddlers are also exposed to the visual context surrounding it. Our study investigates the role of the variability of this context during fast mapping in young children. Specifically, we compare word learning in French-learning fourteen- and nineteen-month-olds (N = 41) using visually distinct and identical object pictures in a fast mapping eye-tracking paradigm. The results show a learning effect only in the visually distinct condition. This suggests that toddlers benefit from a variability in visual context during word learning in this crucial developmental period of early lexical acquisition.

Canada has had a meaningful impact on international law through its participation in the development of the case law of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Several arbitral awards involving Canada, even before the establishment of the ICJ’s predecessor, the Permanent Court of International Justice, were instrumental in shaping subsequent jurisprudence in different areas of international law. Canada’s participation in proceedings before the Court, as a party and intervener in contentious cases and as a participant in advisory proceedings, has been rich in legal arguments on fundamental issues, such as the functioning of the United Nations, the ICJ’s jurisdiction, the law of the sea, environmental law, and the law of state responsibility. Perhaps even more significantly, the activities and statements made by Canada’s courts, executive, and legislature are frequently relied-upon examples of state practice in pleadings before the Court. Finally, although Canada has had only one elected judge on the bench of the ICJ, Canadian jurists have frequently served as judges ad hoc and as counsel and advocates for states.

Children produce conditional if-clauses later than other complex constructions, but the source of this delay is debated. On the conceptual complexity explanation, children acquire if-clauses later than other morphosyntactically similar constructions because they are cognitively more complex. On the pragmatic overlap explanation, children produce if-clauses infrequently because other, simpler constructions can convey similar conditional meanings. We tested the two explanations experimentally by eliciting hypothetical language in 3- to 6-year-old children and adults. Children and adults expressed hypotheticality through a variety of grammatical constructions, beyond if-clauses, in accordance with the pragmatic overlap explanation. Across age groups, if-clauses were not delayed compared to other similar constructions, against the conceptual complexity prediction. Still, the data showed important developmental differences: 3- and 4-year-old children rarely expressed conditional meanings, whereas 5- and 6-year-olds were adult-like. These findings suggest that expressing hypothetical thought develops substantially during the preschool years through interacting cognitive, pragmatic, and linguistic factors.

This article examines the claim that experimental neuroscience is key to an improved understanding of actus reus. It focuses on the assumptions made by neuroscientists about the nature of actus reus and their principal conclusion that the voluntary act component thereof is essentially an endogenous process originating in the brain. The article contends that neuroscientists have misconstrued what lawyers and judges mean by actus reus such that their experimental findings on the subject are irremediably flawed.

Conventional thought holds that in formerly glaciated areas straying of anadromous fish from nearby unglaciated areas established contemporary salmon populations. An additional explanation for patterns of salmon life-history diversity and population structure derives from isolation of populations in proglacial lakes. We evaluate evidence for these potentially complementary hypotheses in chum salmon from two previously glaciated North American regions: the southern Alaska Peninsula/upper Cook Inlet and the Salish Sea of northwestern Washington and southern British Columbia. Some chum salmon populations in the southern Alaska Peninsula are genetic outliers compared with other nearby populations, while Salish Sea chum salmon populations have greater region-wide genetic divergence and lower gene diversity. Within-population genetic diversity and among-population divergence in both study areas support a hypothesis of salmon persistence relying on cryptic isolation and freshwater-resident (trout-like) life histories in proglacial lakes. We find that ice age adaptation of salmon to a trout life history helps explain aspects of contemporary population structure and life-history diversity.

Philosophy needs a methodology, including rules about burden of proof, in order to resolve many of its classic issues. Law might seem to provide a helpful model for assigning burdens of proof. However, candidate rules that distribute burden of proof according to form, degree of belief, and consequences all fail to help when inspected closely. This gap makes it difficult to see how to resolve many of the most important philosophical issues.

Biofabrication practices in Biodesign commonly rely on preformed cultures, standardized strains, and established protocols, often without critically addressing their provenance and ecological implications. This tension is particularly evident in SCOBY cultivation, where microbial cultures are frequently exchanged as fragments with uncertain origin. In response, and informed by Regenerative Ecologies frameworks, that advocate for ecological literacy and situated engagement with living systems, this contribution addresses how SCOBY can be grown ‘from scratch’. The investigation draws on a doctoral study engaging with acetic fermentation practices in Thailand and Germany, including apprenticeships, foraging, and solo experimentation with vernacular techniques. These experiences demonstrated that SCOBY can emerge from situated ecologies, highlighting the adaptive and relational nature of this microbial process. Building on these insights, this paper introduces an open-source method enabling practitioners to grow SCOBYs through engagement with situated plants and microbes. From these insights, Situated Growing Design is proposed as an emerging trajectory and practical approach for translating regenerative aspirations into growing material practices that foster closer engagements with bioregional configurations.

We present Opto-chromogenesis, a projection-mapping framework for spatiotemporal design of growth, photosynthesis, and pigmentation in bioprinted photosynthetic living materials. Extrusion-printed hydrogels containing the cyanobacterium Fremyella diplosiphon are illuminated with calibrated patterns of light that allow us to design and regulate macroscale biomass distribution and the Complementary Chromatic Acclimation of the bacteria. The platform combines projector-based, spectrally tunable light delivery with 3Dscan guided geometric registration to impose defined photon irradiance on complex constructs. Experiments show that self-shading drives pigment shifts, lateral light intensity gradients produce differentiated growth, and targeted UV laser exposure can suppress growth, and projection mapping provides a novel method for modulating growth and color change. By outlining projector selection criteria, analysis of lab-scale growth studies and non-invasive monitoring techniques that demonstrate parallel screening of illumination conditions, the paper establishes a basis for creating a photosynthetic architectural material that can adapt its color to changing lighting condition and capture CO2.

As East-Central Europe shifted from empires to nation-states, financial insecurity became an everyday reality. Ordinary people found themselves suddenly cut off from their savings and vulnerable to the rapid devaluation of new national currencies. Focusing on the Polish-Czechoslovak border, this article discusses the Teschen Savings Bank in the divided city of Teschen (Cieszyn/Český Těšín). It traces the protracted yet futile efforts of Český Těšín’s leaders to recover Czechoslovak residents’ deposits stranded in Poland. Drawing on negotiation records from the local, regional, and national levels, the article demonstrates how financial entanglements inherited from the imperial era persisted into the postwar order. It further shows how the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the Czechoslovak state seemed to have obstructed meaningful resolution. Ultimately, it argues that the government’s failure to address these deeply felt grievances eroded public trust and contributed to the unraveling of the interwar political order.

It is no secret that international law has been under strain in recent years given the global rise of populism, authoritarianism, protectionist policies, and states’ strategic retreat from multilateral institutions, including, notably, various international dispute settlement (IDS) mechanisms. This trend includes states withdrawing from international tribunals1 and from provisions on investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) in recent international investment agreements (IIAs) or from treaties altogether.2 The withdrawal from such mechanisms, which some publicists dubbed an “assault on international adjudication,” has reinforced the fundamental assumption that the international legal order’s success remains inextricably tied to states’ submission of their international disputes to adjudication or other peaceful dispute settlement mechanisms.3

This demonstration presents a biodesign toolset developed through three years of situated research in a BSL-1 biological laboratory. The project investigates how more-than-human sensibilities can be articulated within conventional lab environments typically structured around human-centred biological experimentation. Adopting a “Becoming cyanobacteria” stance informed by the philosophy of becoming, the author positions the laboratory as a shared field observed from a microbial scale, with particular attention to cyanobacteria’s phototactic behaviours and optical sensing. The toolset includes a redesigned biodesign lab notebook, a DIY phototaxis toolbox built with physical computing and 3D printing, mixed-reality systems using HoloLens 2, and a custom VR application, Cyano Vision, which visualises cyanobacteria’s sensorial relations to light from a non-human perspective. Rather than proposing a universal methodology, these tools function as situated artefacts that materialise one possible configuration of more-than-human biodesign practice. Through hands-on engagement and documented use cases, attendees are invited to reflect on how biodesign infrastructures, tools, and experimental protocols might be reoriented to better accommodate non-anthropocentric ways of knowing and designing within laboratory settings.

Accurate short-term precipitation forecasts predominantly rely on dense weather-radar networks, limiting operational value in places most exposed to climate extremes. We present TUPANN (Transferable and Universal Physics-Aligned Nowcasting Network), a satellite-only model trained on GOES-16 RRQPE. Unlike most deep learning models for nowcasting, TUPANN decomposes the forecast into physically meaningful components: a variational encoder–decoder infers motion and intensity fields from recent imagery under optical-flow supervision, a lead-time-conditioned MaxViT evolves the latent state, and a differentiable advection operator reconstructs future frames. We evaluate TUPANN on both GOES-16 and IMERG data, in up to four distinct climates (Rio de Janeiro, Manaus, Miami, La Paz) at 10–180-min lead times using the CSI and HSS metrics over 4–64 mm/h thresholds. Comparisons against optical-flow, deep learning, and hybrid baselines show that TUPANN achieves the best or second-best skill in most settings, with pronounced gains at higher thresholds. Training in multiple cities further improves performance, while cross-city experiments show modest degradation and occasional gains for rare heavy-rain regimes. The model produces smooth, interpretable motion fields aligned with numerical optical flow and runs in near real time due to the low latency of GOES-16. These results indicate that physically aligned learning can provide nowcasts that are skillful, transferable, and global.