The obesogenic maternal environment can lead to cardiac hypertrophy in the offspring. The aim of this study was to investigate whether (-)-epicatechin (Epi) modify the expression of genes related to pathological cardiac hypertrophy (CH), and its physiological pathway, in offspring obese by programing. Four groups of eight male offspring Wistar rats of 110 days were randomly selected to control groups [C and offspring of maternal obesity (MO)] or to Epi groups (C + Epi or MO + Epi). In heart tissue, we evaluated the size of the ventricular walls and cavities, presence of fibrosis, mRNA and protein of Myh6, Myh7, Anp, Bnp, Acta 1, Col1a1, Akt, and Mtor. We observed an increase of the heart weight/body ratio in groups treated with Epi. Only in MO group, heart area and its perimeter were increased, as well as Myh7 and Anp mRNA. We found a significant decrease of fibrosis area in male offspring treatment with Epi. In Epi group Anp mRNA was decreased whilst Anp protein in MO group was increased; further, a decrease in Col1a1 protein was found in MO group. In conclusion, the maternal obesity activates pathological CH markers reactivating fetal cardiac genes involved in histological changes observed in cardiac tissue. Epi treatment decreased the content of collagen area and expression of some fetal cardiac genes participating in this pathway in offspring of maternal obesity.

Globally, prejudicial attitudes toward women persist. By taking anti-discriminatory stances, value-oriented organizations – e.g., political parties and religious denominations – can tap into group identities to shape their members’ attitudes. We know much less about the role of organizations that are not inherently value-oriented – such as sports teams – in accomplishing the same. Yet, as various campaigns by sports teams worldwide indicate, this is precisely what non-value-oriented organizations increasingly attempt to do. Can football team fandom be leveraged to promote gender-egalitarian attitudes? We address this question with data from a national survey in Brazil and a survey experiment conducted in partnership with a major Brazilian football club. We find that while football team identity is salient and may be leveraged to change displayed social attitudes, the Club’s anti-sexism campaign inadvertently increased men’s expressed prejudice toward women in football – although it may have also improved institutional trust among women.

Previous research has shown that motor information influences visual and semantic tasks. However, not much is known about the specific influence of structural, action-relevant information on language processing. In the current study, participants were instructed to observe a prime graspable object (e.g., a frying pan) that could be presented with the action-relevant component (that is its handle) oriented either toward the left or toward the right. Subsequently, they performed a property verification task on a following target word, which could describe an action-relevant (e.g., handle) or action-irrelevant (e.g., ceramic) characteristic of the just-encountered object. They were required to make a keypress response with either a key on the same side as the depicted action-relevant component of the prime object (that is compatible key) or on the opposite side (that is incompatible key). Results show that property verification judgements for action-relevant words were faster in the spatially compatible condition than in the spatially incompatible condition, whereas judgements for action-irrelevant target words were not affected by spatial compatibility. These findings suggest that spatialized object properties are not mandatorily linked to manual response biases. Rather, this link seems to be modulated by trial-by-trial changes in conceptual focus.

Research on extremism has increasingly incorporated a gender perspective, revealing how the politics of extremism and gender fuel one another. Yet most evidence of the gendered politics of extremism is on far-right and Islamist non-state actors, neglecting other forms, including state-sanctioned extremism in which the state is complicit with the violent effects of extremism. This article investigates a type of state-sanctioned extremism, wherein nationalist movements, supported to varying degrees by governments, seek to “protect” Buddhism across Asia. Gendered motives, forms, and impacts of political extremism can be observed in Buddhist Protectionism movements, manifesting in societal conflict, hate speech and other acts of violence and intolerance against ethnic and religious minorities. We ask to what extent gender norms and structures affect the motives, forms, and impact of Buddhist extremism using an original dataset encompassing nationally representative surveys and qualitative research in selected communities in Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar. We find that extremist discourses and practices exist on a Buddhist Femonationalist Continuum across the three cases with misogyny and anti-Muslim threat narratives played up, both affirming the power of masculine hegemony and justifying the use of violence to control minority populations and women.

Expert institutions are increasingly expected not only to provide the best professional expertise but also to ensure equal presence of women. Yet while descriptive gender representation in bureaucracies and courts is extensively researched, we largely lack studies of women’s presence on expert advisory bodies. Drawing on large-n data on the composition of Norwegian expert advisory commissions, the paper investigates and evaluates how the share of women on these commissions has developed over the last half-century. It finds that while overall gender parity was achieved in recent decades, women remain strongly under-represented among commission chairs, particularly academic chairs, and among academic members from the powerful economics discipline. Normatively speaking, the developments toward parity are promising, and we find no empirical indication that proportional representation and competence requirements are in tension. On the contrary, persistent gender gaps among economists on commissions and academic chairs may endanger adequate provision of expertise into policy-making.

Historians of empire have long been interested in how interpersonal relationships between coloniser and colonised did or did not conform to imperial ideologies. Yet, the relationships that developed between European and Indian officers in the East India Company’s armies remain underexplored. This is an important omission, because the armies employed thousands of people and represented a significant point of cross-cultural contact, while also being governed by a distinct set of rules and conventions. This article uses the variety of materials generated by a controversy in the Fifth Light Cavalry, Madras Army to understand the nature and limits of what contemporaries called friendships. Both interested parties and neutral onlookers testified to the existence of friendships and factions that bridged race and rank. Indian officers sought the goodwill of their superiors to ensure their professional security, while British officers looked to Indian allies for information and legitimacy. Although existing scholarship has often assumed that British and Indian officers led largely separate lives, the scandal in the Fifth Light Cavalry demonstrates instead that British and Indian officers could, and did, form parties defined by shared objectives. When disputes broke out between rival British officers, however, Indian allies risked becoming collateral damage, while British officers who sided with Indian friends were punished for violating social codes. Through this controversy, we see how and why hierarchies of race and rank were contested, as well as the mechanisms whereby they were ultimately preserved intact.

Language-switching sometimes causes delayed responses, especially when switching from the later-acquired languages (here, L2) to the dominant native language (L1). It is well-established that language proficiency plays a role in production, but what about language context (i.e., the ratio of L1 and L2)? We investigated language context within two language production processes: “top-down” (naming pictures) and “bottom-up” (reading words aloud). We suggest that switch cost asymmetry was not only affected by language context, but also by production modality. In picture naming, the degree of inhibition relies largely on the activation level of the predominant language in the language context, whereby affects the asymmetry. However, the asymmetry disappears when language processing only requires reading aloud words with orthographically unique and constrained to one language. We provide evidence with dynamics of inhibition in different language contexts, suggesting that future study should continue to explore the flexibility of production processes in bilingual speakers.

This paper examines the history of the ‘lower cavity’ of the gastrointestinal tract, a distinctive anatomical feature in Greco-Roman medicine that described a second stomach-like organ in the large intestine. It traces how a bipartite model of the digestive system emerged in fourth-century bce Greek medical and philosophical thought and persisted in the works of influential figures such as Galen, Vesalius, and Glisson, despite shifts in terminology, anatomical observations, and physiological theories. The study demonstrates that this understanding arose primarily from three complementary factors: a specific terminology that paired the stomach with a lower cavity, systematic animal dissections that revealed pronounced caeca in certain species, and emerging physiological theories that required separate bodily receptacles for digested food and residues. Through this case study, the paper illuminates how premodern anatomical knowledge was articulated by a constant negotiation between animal bodies, human bodies, and past textual authorities, facilitating the surprising longevity of ideas like the ‘lower cavity’ in the gastrointestinal tract.

This article takes up a philosophical examination of the Latter-day Saint theological conception of the eternal significance of sex. I first argue that the straightforward way of interpreting the theological claims about the eternal significance of sex appear to be incoherent. The main worry has to do with certain commitments Latter-day Saints take up with respect to the nature of disembodied spirits. Disembodied spirits don’t have bodies. As such they lack the characteristic features of embodied things. And sex is as bodily a feature as any we confront in the course of our lives. I will argue that these conceptual obstacles can be overcome by attending to distinctive aspects of the Latter-day Saint conception of divine creation. Doing so offers an interesting alternative way of conceptualizing the essences of premortal (disembodied) spirits. In particular, it motivates explicating their essences in terms of what Plantinga calls world-indexed properties. With the explication in hand, I show that not only are charges of incoherence avoided, but the new perspective gives a unified account of a variety of apparently disparate aspects of Latter-day Saint theology.

The numbers of robots in organizations grow at an increasing rate. However, very little is known about how robotization (i.e., the implementation of robots at work) affects the work characteristics of the jobs it impacts. This qualitative study focuses on exploring the influence of industrial robots on perceived work characteristics. Eighteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with production line workers and supervisors of four Spanish manufacturing companies. Results showed benefits in physical demands, perceived skill variety, and improved social relationships. We found inconsistent results for job complexity, task variety, and autonomy. Based on our findings, we suggest specific moderators that may be influencing the relationship between robotization and some work characteristics. The findings of our study contribute to the existing literature by expanding work design theory, providing empirical evidence on the influence of an antecedent of work characteristics (robotization), and suggesting several moderators.

We extend a result of Lopes and Thieullen [Sub-actions for Anosov flows. Ergod. Th. & Dynam. Sys. 25(2) (2005), 605–628] on sub-actions for smooth Anosov flows to the setting of geodesic flow on locally CAT($-1$) spaces. This allows us to use arguments originally due to Croke and Dairbekov to prove a volume rigidity theorem for some interesting locally CAT($-1$) spaces, including quotients of Fuchsian buildings and surface amalgams.

This case note highlights fundamental errors of law committed by Mabuse J in MM v OM [2024] (3) SA 133 (GP). It demonstrates that the judge failed to appreciate that the phrase “pension interest” as defined in the Divorce Act refers to a benefit held by a retirement fund that only becomes due to be shared when the court dissolves a marriage where one of the spouses is a member of the retirement fund. Most importantly, it is shown that Mabuse J ignored the binding precedent of the Supreme Court of Appeal and failed to consider other judgments of the High Court, which clearly explain that where an exit event from the fund is anything but divorce, there can be no pension interest that the court can order to be shared. This note argues that the law was incorrectly applied in this case, and its approach, reasoning and conclusion must be rejected.

In reaction to revolutionary upheaval in the 1790s and 1800s, the British parliament at home and colonial legislatures in the Americas passed their first statutory provisions to govern migration and aliens as such. As this paper argues, in their sustained and varied uses, these “alien acts” were much more than about border and migration controls. In a period of fundamental restructuring of imperial rule and of social statuses within the colonies, they increasingly turned into flexible tools of imperial governance. Taking the British Caribbean in the 1820s and 1830s as a case, the paper examines how alien legislation was reused, and reinvented, in two crucial arenas of imperial reconfiguration: the push for political equality by free people of color and the abolition of the slave trade. By their emphasis on sweeping executive power, various actors on the ground but also in the metropole regarded alien acts as an appropriate legal tool to respond to, to avert or subvert what they regarded as challenges or legal complexities of the age of emancipation. In this way, the alien acts also became a central factor in the reconfiguration of British subjecthood—with far-reaching consequences that their creators and users could never fully anticipate or control.