Situated amidst the breathtaking Himalayas and the Arabian Sea, Pakistan grapples with escalating environmental challenges, compounded by the impending threat of climate change. This article delves into the imperative of reshaping primary education in Pakistan to address the pressing issues of environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. The article endeavours a content analysis of the themes prevailing in the primary textbooks which uphold anthropocentric and capitalist values. Recognising education as a catalyst for change, the article argues for a paradigm shift, particularly within the realms of primary school science and general knowledge education, by integrating eco-justice pedagogies and contemplative approaches. Prevailing educational paradigms, heavily influenced by Western perspectives, often reinforce anthropocentric and capitalist ideologies that prioritise human exploitation of nature. To address these inherent shortcomings, the article advocates for cultivating a love for nature from an early age as a means of fostering a profound connection between children and the natural world.

The popularity of keeping domesticated cats (Felis catus) indoor-only or outdoor-indoor varies according to geographical location, and both have risks and benefits. Walking cats (e.g. on leashes) may enable mitigation of roaming risks while providing outdoor access, but the practice of walking cats appears relatively uncommon and is yet to be examined in the literature. Semi-structured online interviews (21 participants across seven countries) were conducted to explore cat walking perceptions and experiences in owners who currently practise it. Interview recordings were transcribed and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Five main themes were generated: (1) Benefits of walking; (2) Challenges around walking; (3) Safety for walking; (4) Cat individuality and walking; and (5) Attitudes about walking across geographic contexts. Themes highlighted that participants perceived benefits of walking for both cat and owner but faced challenges largely due to dogs and their owners in addition to judgment from others in the community. The main priorities of walking were seen to be ensuring safety and attending to the individual needs of each cat. Reactions to cat walking appeared to vary according to local norms and attitudes about cats and owner-cat relationships. The subjective nature of both the concept and practice of cat walking was also emphasised. These findings provide an initial base for what the experience of walking cats can be like and highlight that further research to directly investigate the welfare impacts of walking on cats and their owners is now needed.

In the age of post-neoliberal globalization, complex interdependence has resulted in the integration of many economies and the industries within them and led to varied national and subnational political and economic responses. These forces have enabled the rise of a new political economy that requires the contextualized comparative sector approach (CCSA). This article advances a research agenda that contends theoretical and empirical leverage for explaining heterogeneity and assessing generalizability is gained by taking contextualized comparisons to the sector level of analysis. The CCSA identifies the multidimensional effects of sectors, uncovering new sites of inquiry connected to sectoral structural attributes, context-specific sectoral organization of institutions, and social and political constructions of sectors. Sectors are thus contexts that are embedded in multilevel contexts involving state and nonstate actors alike. Scholarship on industrial policy, technology and innovation, environmental transition, and regulation and governance demonstrates the analytical power and theoretical value of combining contextualized comparisons and sectoral analysis, which have been overlooked by the overly macro- or micro-level studies dominant in international and comparative political economy. The various strategies of the approach and a stepwise discussion of a research design underscore the possibilities for theory development and testing, adjudication of competing explanations, and case-specific discoveries.

Seasonal changes and cyclical human activities (such as periodic fishing bans, Wolbachia-based mosquito population control, and school term breaks) have significant impacts on population dynamics. We propose a general switching dynamical model to describe these periodic changes. The existence, uniqueness and stability of positive periodic solutions are thoroughly investigated. The results are stated in terms of an introduced threshold value. To demonstrate their practicability, the obtained results are applied to two biological situations.

This article contributes to theories of music and affect, highlighting listeners’ affective engagement with music as a key site for the operation of power and ideology. I take as a case study listeners’ experiences of Hindustani music in performance. In contrast with work that emphasizes the capacities of musical affect to transcend social boundaries and operate separately from (or prior to) signification, I show how the affective practices of listening in this context contribute to the reproduction of existing discourses and social formations. Drawing especially on work by Sara Ahmed, I suggest that a useful starting point for understanding how affect intersects with structures of power is to examine the affective economies and the affective orientations that shape live musical listening.

Recognizing disability as a socially created category, a lived experience with real-world consequences, and part of a critical analytical framework, disability historians have illuminated core aspects of modern American history. With some frequency, however, both scholars and community members conflate disability with ableism. At other times, disability is presented as a category or identity separate from questions of power, privilege, and marginalization. It is common too that scholarly works focused on locating and defining ableism narrow or neglect historical context or specificity. In framing understandings of ableism around disability, many of us have largely ignored how ableism shape-shifts, how it is connected to other systems of power, or how the defining elements of ableism ebb and flow. This article calls on us to focus on the system of power itself—historicizing ableism. Making this move expands who we can write about, what sources we look at, and what purposes our historical work serves.

We aimed to compare the concordance between the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) and the Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status (RBANS), as cognitive screening tools to detect mild cognitive impairment (MCI) in a South African adult community sample (N = 370).

The MoCA showed acceptable internal consistency, agreement with the RBANS and good criterion-related validity. The MoCA demonstrated fair performance, compared to the RBANS, for predicting MCI, with AUCs of 0.711 (English) and 0782 (Afrikaans). Using the recommended cut-off score of 26/30, the MoCA showed high sensitivity but low specificity. Sensitivity and specificity were optimal when the cut-off scores were lowered to 25/30 (English) and 24/30 (Afrikaans). MoCA scores were significantly associated with language, sex, age and education.

While these findings demonstrate applicability of the MoCA in screening for and identifying mild cognitive difficulty in this population, our findings suggest that modifications are needed to improve differentiating between normal aging and MCI. Until a culturally adapted version of the MoCA is developed and validated for this population we suggest lowering the cut-off score to 25/30 (English) and 24/30 (Afrikaans) to reduce false positive NCD diagnoses. Demographic factors (age, sex, language and education) also need to be considered.

Almost 50 years have passed since Sartori introduced to the world one of the most famous innovations in the history of political science: a new party systems typology. Despite many criticisms and refinements since then, Sartori's typology still constitutes, as stated by Peter Mair in 1990, “the most effective and exhaustive framework within which to contrast the properties of different party systems”. In the current research note, and taking into consideration that previous typologies have not yet been that successful, we propose a new classification of party systems – which not only embeds the notion of polarization into the typology, but also allows us to populate the “polarized pluralist” type beyond Sartori’s “centre-based” (Italian) model – in Asia, a continent almost completely ignored by Sartori in his seminal work. Using an original dataset that includes the most important characteristics of party systems in the region and building on Sartori's original conceptualization, we examine to what extent party systems in Asian democracies, both contemporary (Bhutan, East Timor, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka and Taiwan) and historical (Bangladesh 1991–2006, Kyrgyzstan 2010–2020, Myanmar 2015–2020 and Thailand 1992–2013), have changed. Our discussion of a new party system typology is particularly relevant and important to Asia, as its many new democracies still need to shift from plurality electoral rules adopted during the early post-independence periods to more mature, power-dispersing political institutions that accommodate their rich ethnic and religious diversity, as it happened in Europe after the World Wars.

Recent scholarship on conservative constitutionalism in the United States focuses near-exclusively on the development of originalism as a method of constitutional interpretation. Before conservatives turned to originalism to counter the perceived threats of an activist judiciary in the 1980s, however, this article demonstrates that conservatives employed a very different interpretive philosophy to counter a very different perceived threat. To do so, this article reconstructs the history of a conservative legal movement that predated “the” conservative legal movement. Indeed, this article uncovers how conservatives employed natural law philosophy to respond to the elite legal academy’s seemingly morally foundationless positivism during the Cold War. The network of natural lawyers that sustained this earlier movement was deeply indebted to the Natural Law Institute (NLI), an academic initiative of the University of Notre Dame established in 1947. By framing the founding fathers’ natural law philosophy as a bulwark of individual liberty against the encroachments of legal realists, World War II-era totalitarians, and Cold War communists, the NLI created what the political scientist Amanda Hollis-Brusky has termed a “political epistemic network.” In concluding, this article suggests that recovering the history of the NLI’s epistemic network reveals the importance of natural law to the making of conservative constitutionalism during the Cold War.

This paper departs from the ballot to examine dropout decisions in congressional elections from 1980 to 2022. I draw on an original dataset of 26,000 U.S. House candidates who were voted on in the primary or raised money but were not on the ballot. Moving beyond the ballot reveals new patterns of strategic candidate exit. While prior work focused on differences in the entry of experienced candidates, I find that experienced candidates who struggle to raise money are more likely to exit. In addition, the relationship between early fundraising and dropout decisions has changed dramatically over time. Experienced candidates who fail to make early fundraising inroads are far more likely to drop out today than in previous decades. The exit of experienced candidates has important implications for the choices that voters have. The findings provide new evidence of how money shapes the trajectory of campaigns well before the election.

The 2024 Noto Peninsula earthquake forced many residents to evacuate to Special Needs Shelters (SNS)—facilities designed to accept individuals requiring special consideration, such as older adults and those with sensory disabilities. This case report describes a woman in her 90s with untreated cataracts and hearing loss, who was neglected and abused by her son. After evacuation, she was diagnosed with cataracts at the shelter and referred for surgery, significantly improving her vision and her ability to undertake activities of daily living. SNS can serve as a gateway to medical services for those deprived of adequate health care. Integrating medical services into disaster response plans and deploying professionals at these shelters is crucial for improving health outcomes and quality of life for vulnerable individuals. This case highlights how appropriate shelter services with seamless medical care connections can enhance evacuees’ long-term well-being beyond the immediate disaster response.

This article analyses the October 7th 2023 Hamas attack on Israel through the lens of the Genocide Convention, arguing that these actions constitute genocide under international law. Drawing on international case law, the analysis demonstrates how Hamas’ actions meet both the physical element and specific intent requirements for genocide, evidenced by its ideology, systematic policies and leadership statements. The article also examines how reverse accusations of genocide against Israel have functioned as a rhetorical shield to deflect recognition of Hamas’ own genocidal actions. It analyses the legal implications for state parties and the international community.

Panic disorder, characterised by sudden episodes of intense fear or anxiety, affects 1–4% of the population. Symptoms include rapid heartbeat, chest pain and fear of dying. Panic disorder often co-occurs with substance dependence and major depression. This review article examines pharmacological treatments, focusing on antidepressants and benzodiazepines, but also considering antipsychotics and anticonvulsants. It overviews the history of antidepressants and benzodiazepines in the treatment of panic disorder and their mechanisms of action. The results of a recent Cochrane Review network meta-analysis are then presented and contrasted with six current national and international treatment guidelines. Rankings of the various drugs in terms of efficacy, tolerability and safety are summarised, along with levels of evidence and lines of recommendation as a treatment option (first-, second or third-line, or reserved for treatment-resistant cases).

From the near-Earth solar wind to the intracluster medium of galaxy clusters, collisionless, high-beta, magnetized plasmas pervade our universe. Energy and momentum transport from large-scale fields and flows to small-scale motions of plasma particles is ubiquitous in these systems, but a full picture of the underlying physical mechanisms remains elusive. The transfer is often mediated by a turbulent cascade of Alfvénic fluctuations as well as a variety of kinetic instabilities; these processes tend to be multi-scale and/or multi-dimensional, which makes them difficult to study using spacecraft missions and numerical simulations alone. Meanwhile, existing laboratory devices struggle to produce the collisionless, high ion beta ($\beta _i \gtrsim 1$), magnetized plasmas across the range of scales necessary to address these problems. As envisioned in recent community planning documents, it is therefore important to build a next generation laboratory facility to create a $\beta _i \gtrsim 1$, collisionless, magnetized plasma in the laboratory for the first time. A working group has been formed and is actively defining the necessary technical requirements to move the facility towards a construction-ready state. Recent progress includes the development of target parameters and diagnostic requirements as well as the identification of a need for source-target device geometry. As the working group is already leading to new synergies across the community, we anticipate a broad community of users funded by a variety of federal agencies (including National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Department of Energy and National Science Foundation) to make copious use of the future facility.

For shallow ponds to be contenders for the venue of the emergence of life on Earth, they would have had to provide sufficient protection from ultraviolet (UV) radiation to allow for the preservation of organic molecules. Shallow ponds of a variety of compositions are proposed for early Earth, many of which may have provided ample shielding effects by attenuating UV light via absorption by (in)organic ions. Here, we present an experimental setup designed to simulate an irradiated water column to investigate the preservation/degradation of organic molecules and by proxy the attenuation of UV radiation in ponds of diverse compositions. In this setup, we dissolved glycine in ultrapure water, ferrocyanide and carbonate pond simulants and irradiated for several days. Our findings indicate that glycine’s photochemical degradation under UV irradiation is minimal in the carbonate pond, though significant in the ferrocyanide pond and in ultrapure water, where it breaks down into diverse products including formamide, glycinamide, glycinmethylester and acetaldehyde. Though ferrocyanide is a potent UV absorber, our experiments show ferrocyanide ponds to be transiently UV-shielding environments due to the removal of ferrocyanide by UV-induced precipitation of goethite and pyrite mineral assemblages and subsequent photodegradation of glycine in the cleared water column. Our results further suggest that hypersaline, carbonate ponds may present stable environments for prebiotic chemistry while providing ample UV attenuation, ultimately protecting the integrity of organic molecules. This work contributes to understanding the interplay between UV irradiation and (in)organic compounds in ponds and the suitability of those ponds for the onset of prebiotic chemistry on Earth, Mars and other celestial bodies.