The extraction of salt from seawater is one of the most direct ways of exploiting the marine environment. In the historic period, the production of salt formed an important component of the global economy. In temperate locations such as Ireland, archaeological evidence of extracting salt from seawater comprises a range of expressions and locations dictated by the energy resource required. This article presents the results of the first archaeological excavations of a saltworks complex in Ireland, at two sites that produced salt from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Partial excavation of a seventeenth-century complex at Ballyreagh Lower revealed a crude structure that was not capable of supplying all of the area’s needs. By contrast, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pan site at Broughanlea shows a step-change in scale, efficiency, and infrastructure that reflects new economic networks in a country predominantly relying on agricultural produce.

Despite the tremendous waste due to Medicaid fraud and abuse, not much scholarly attention has been paid to state variation in the investigations. This study explores the factors influencing variations in Medicaid fraud and abuse investigations across U.S. states, with a focus on the role of All-Payer Claims Databases (APCDs) and state political context. To test the impacts of price transparency and political factors, we built a dataset spanning eight years (2014 to 2021) and covering 49 states, excluding North Dakota. We then conducted a fixed-effects panel data analysis based on the results of a Hausman test. The impact of APCDs is statistically significant, suggesting its association with more fraud and abuse detection. A Democratic governor tends to be associated with fewer Medicaid fraud investigations. The findings of this research demonstrate that the operation of APCDs can influence the number of Medicaid fraud investigations conducted by Medicaid Fraud Control Units (MFCUs). Moreover, political discretion plays a role in the number of state investigations into Medicaid fraud and abuse.

For which choices of $X,Y,Z\in \{\Sigma ^1_1,\Pi ^1_1\}$ does no sufficiently strong X-sound and Y-definable extension theory prove its own Z-soundness? We give a complete answer, thereby delimiting the generalizations of Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem that hold within second-order arithmetic.

Understanding the process of seeking long-term care (LTC) in old age helps identify what contributes to delays and inequalities in accessing it. Current research highlights the roles of individual and policy factors, but pays little attention to how these factors interact. This qualitative study aims to fill this gap by identifying facilitating factors and mechanisms in the initial approaches to LTC policies. It examines care-seeking in two towns in northern Italy, where a demand-based approach, high fragmentation and poor coordination pose significant challenges. In a bottom-up approach to policy implementation, the experiences and perspectives of both care-seekers and professionals are integrated. Indeed, the data collection (April 2023–May 2024) triangulates 100+ hours of participant observation and semi-structured or vignette-based interviews. The study finds that care-seeking entails three interrelated steps: recognising care needs, being willing to receive LTC, and reaching an entry point. At each stage, three mechanisms operate at intrapersonal and interpersonal levels and can be promoted by LTC policies to facilitate care-seeking, especially for those experiencing barriers. The mechanisms are (1) taking the initiative to raise awareness of care needs and share information about available solutions; (2) fostering trust between professionals and care-seekers, who often rely on confidential relationships to discuss care arrangements; and (3) combining primary information with tailored guidance on the local offer, enabling care-seekers to make informed decisions. The findings provide actionable insights into policies and practices that facilitate care-seeking, and offer a conceptual framework that explains the driving factors behind this process and its mechanisms.

The Mountain West Clinical & Translational Research Infrastructure Network (MW CTR-IN), hosted at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the National Institutes of Health, began as a partnership among 13 major U.S. public universities across 7 MW Institutional Development Award (IDeA) States, stretched across 1/3rd of the U.S. land mass and encompassed almost 1/3rd of all IDeA States. The mission of the MW CTR-IN is to build and enhance infrastructure capacity to increase CTR in the MW region. This case study describes the Clinical Pilot Projects Program (CP3) processes and tools used to support this objective through its selection of applications to fund, supporting applicants and funded investigators, and providing guidance and oversight during the funding period. The MW CTR-IN has funded 152 single-investigator pilot projects, 7 multisite pilot projects, 13 developmental team grant projects, and 14 community-engaged projects. These projects have also led to over $92M in extramural grant funding, 308 presentations, and 1,124 peer-reviewed publications. The methodologies and expertise we gained can assist other CTR networks in developing efficient pilot project programs that have been evaluated and demonstrated to improve CTR initiatives, especially through the use of a custom portal.

The Central Indian Tectonic Zone (CITZ) formed during the Mesoproterozoic north-south collision between the Bundelkhand and Bastar Cratons. The origin of the deformation of the Late-Paleoproterozoic Lower Vindhyan Group (LVG), which occurs in the sedimentary basin adjacent to and north of the CITZ, is debated, with previous researchers supporting synsedimentary processes. To investigate the possibility of a collisional origin, we collected and analysed litho-structural data from the LVG and the Mid-Paleoproterozoic Mahakoshal Supracrustal belt (MSB), which lies within the CITZ. We report, for the first time, diverse structures from the LVG, such as various types of buckle folds including kink-folds, reverse faults and, most importantly, 5–20 meters long outcrops of pop-up structures, which are commonly encountered in fold-thrust belts. However, the adjacent MSB showes relatively complex polyphase deformation with three major deformation stages that produced: (i) E-W-trending regional foliation and diversely oriented folds (D1), (ii) E-W oriented steep folds associated with a large-scale shear zone along the Son-Narmada South Fault (D2) and (iii) local cross-folds (D3). Based on our field observations in the LVG and the MSB, we additionally propose and substantiate, through geological cross-sections and a kinematic model, that the LVG deformed between the D3 and the deposition of the Upper Vindhyan Group. Unlike previous studies, which attributed the deformation structures of the LVG to seismic or soft-sediment processes, our findings confirm that the Mesoproterozoic collision along the CITZ deformed the LVG as the deformation front, aided by detachment folding, propagated into it.

Fossil crinoids from the Ordovician–Silurian boundary interval (~ 443.8 million years) are known from relatively few locations worldwide due to a near-global unconformity that formed from eustatic sea-level fall. This rock record bias has severely hindered study of the timing, magnitude, biogeographic signature, and extinction mechanisms of the Late Ordovician mass extinction (LOME). Crinoids underwent a significant faunal transition between the Late Ordovician and early Silurian that resulted in major shifts between dominant clades, but the driving mechanisms and precise timing of this transition remain unclear. Anticosti Island (Québec, Canada) preserves one of the few Late Ordovician–early Silurian successions of highly fossiliferous, shallow-water rocks that includes the Ordovician–Silurian boundary, making fossils from this region instrumental for better understanding the LOME and Ordovician–Silurian crinoid faunal turnover.

Here we report on a new flexible crinoid, Anticosticrinus natiscotecensis n. gen. n. sp., from the Ordovician–Silurian boundary of Anticosti Island. Phylogenetic analysis of Middle Ordovician–early Silurian flexibles recovers Anticosticrinus natiscotecensis n. gen. n. sp. as a member of family Anisocrinidae. We quantified stratigraphic age uncertainty of A. natiscotecensis using a Bayesian approach for estimating tip-occurrence times in a phylogenetic context. Although results do not provide unequivocal support for the specimen’s precise stratigraphic age, the maximum a posteriori estimate indicates a late Hirnantian age. Regardless of its true age, recognition of Anticosticrinus natiscotecensis provides additional data for evaluating the timing of extinction in flexible crinoids, their diversification and increasing dominance during the Silurian, and crinoid faunal turnover between the Ordovician and Silurian.

UUID: http://zoobank.org/864738dd-3fc9-435b-a83c-e19fd4f6Ad9d

Motivated political reasoning is a central phenomenon in political psychology, but no scholarly consensus exists as to its cause. In one influential account, motivated political reasoning is caused by goals to control emotional states. This explanation is often assumed, but has rarely been tested empirically. It implies, I argue, that individual differences in how people control their emotions (i.e., in emotion regulation strategies) should influence outcomes caused by motivated political reasoning, such as perceptual divides over politically relevant facts. I hypothesize such perceptual divides to be negatively associated with emotional acceptance and positively associated with cognitive reappraisal—two key emotion regulation strategies. I test these hypotheses in the specific context of reasoning about facts related to immigration politics in Denmark using a mix of experimental and cross-sectional survey data from three nationally representative samples of the Danish voter population (total N = 4186). In the specific context of the present study, the results do not support the often-assumed idea that motivated political reasoning is driven by efforts to regulate emotions. These findings raise important questions about the conditions under which emotion regulation might play a role in motivated political reasoning.

This study explores the potential of applying machine learning (ML) methods to identify and predict areas at risk of food insufficiency using a parsimonious set of publicly available data sources. We combine household survey data that captures monthly reported food insufficiency with remotely sensed measures of factors influencing crop production and maize price observations at the census enumeration area (EA) in Malawi. We consider three machine-learning models of different levels of complexity suitable for tabular data (TabNet, random forests, and LASSO) and classical logistic regression and examine their performance against the historical occurrence of food insufficiency. We find that the models achieve similar accuracy levels with differential performance in terms of precision and recall. The Shapley additive explanation decomposition applied to the models reveals that price information is the leading contributor to model fits. A possible explanation for the accuracy of simple predictors is the high spatiotemporal path dependency in our dataset, as the same areas of the country are repeatedly affected by food crises. Recurrent events suggest that immediate and longer-term responses to food crises, rather than predicting them, may be the bigger challenge, particularly in low-resource settings. Nonetheless, ML methods could be useful in filling important data gaps in food crises prediction, if followed by measures to strengthen food systems affected by climate change. Hence, we discuss the tradeoffs in training these models and their use by policymakers and practitioners.