The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of climate change on state fragility in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). To do this, we estimate a country-time fixed effects panel data model using the two-way fixed effects estimator over the period 1995 to 2020 for 45 SSA countries. Our results show that climate change increases fragility in SSA; specifically, rising temperatures and decreasing rainfall increase the social, economic, political and security fragility of SSA countries. The study also reveals that gross domestic product, population growth, migrant remittances, foreign direct investment, natural resources, inflation and agricultural price volatility are mechanisms through which climate change exacerbates state fragility. Based on these results, we recommend climate change adaptation measures such as increasing water storage to cope with periods of extreme drought, growing climate-smart crops, and the introduction of environmental public policies.

A Schur multiplier is a linear map on matrices which acts on its entries by multiplication with some function, called the symbol. We consider idempotent Schur multipliers, whose symbols are indicator functions of smooth Euclidean domains. Given $1<p\neq 2<\infty $, we provide a local characterization (under some mild transversality condition) for the boundedness on Schatten p-classes of Schur idempotents in terms of a lax notion of boundary flatness. We prove in particular that all Schur idempotents are modeled on a single fundamental example: the triangular projection. As an application, we fully characterize the local $L_p$-boundedness of smooth Fourier idempotents on connected Lie groups. They are all modeled on one of three fundamental examples: the classical Hilbert transform and two new examples of Hilbert transforms that we call affine and projective. Our results in this paper are vast noncommutative generalizations of Fefferman’s celebrated ball multiplier theorem. They confirm the intuition that Schur multipliers share profound similarities with Euclidean Fourier multipliers – even in the lack of a Fourier transform connection – and complete, for Lie groups, a longstanding search of Fourier $L_p$-idempotents.

We examined the effect of transition to electronic medical records on the antimicrobial stewardship service (AMS) in our healthcare service, finding significant increases (P < 0.001) in the number and type of prescribed restricted antimicrobials identified for review, number of patients seen, and AMS intervention significance post transition.

The attitudes toward genomics and precision medicine (AGPM) measure examines attitudes toward activities such as genetic testing, gene editing, and biobanking. This is a useful tool for research on the ethical, legal, and social implications of genomics, a major program within the National Institutes of Health. We updated the AGPM to explore controversies over mRNA vaccines. This brief report examines the factor structure of the updated AGPM using a sample of 4939 adults in the USA. The updated AGPM’s seven factors include health benefits, knowledge benefits, and concerns about the sacredness of life, privacy, gene editing, mRNA vaccines, and social justice.

This research examines whether high temperatures and exposure to childhood rainfall and heat shocks are a cognitive drag on children in Uganda. First, it asks whether students perform worse on a test on hotter days. Second, it examines whether previous longer-term exposure to high temperatures and unusual rainfall influences current test scores and educational outcomes. The analysis shows that high temperatures on test dates harm test performance, especially for girls and children younger than ten, implying additional temperature control considerations for particular demographics. The analysis of childhood climate shocks, which employs within-parish distributions of rainfall and heat, shows that children who experience rain or heat above the $80^{th}$ percentile of the parish distribution from birth until age 4 have worse learning outcomes in math, English, or local language literacy.

Considered a staple of the French press since at least the nineteenth century, the fait divers—a catch-all category for short, often sensational news items such as murders, petty crimes, and suicides—has been taken up and transformed in West African cultural production. This essay focuses on the transformations and transpositions of the fait divers tradition in the work of Senegalese writer Aminata Maïga Ka (1940–2005), arguing that her short stories and novels inflect earlier treatments of the journalistic genre while staging a broader critique of the liberalization of the media in Senegal during the 1970s and 1980s. Ka’s works offer a window onto the entangled histories of postcolonial literary production and the emergent popular press in Senegal. Specifically, she updates and expands Ousmane Sembène’s rescripting of the French fait divers in his short story “La Noire de …” (1961/1962) and the landmark film from 1966 by the same title.

The theory of punctuated equilibria, introduced in paleobiology, postulates enduring morphological stability in species interrupted by rapid phenotypic change at speciation events. It played a pivotal role in evolutionary biology, reshaping perspectives and triggering a conceptual shift by redefining species as discrete and enduring entities, and paving the way for a hierarchical model of the organic world. This hierarchical approach initially faced limited attention but experienced a resurgence in the new millennium. The revived interest in hierarchical models, integrating genomics, computational methodologies, and complex systems sciences, has provided a more comprehensive theoretical foundation for understanding biological evolution. This resurgence has fueled empirical studies across various disciplines, from genomics to paleobiology, offering a potential unifying theory within the biological sciences.

This paper posits the efficacy of the hierarchy theory of biology as a comprehensive, unifying framework for understanding the organic world. Despite its generality, the theory remains agnostic to specific mechanisms, allowing flexibility to accommodate diverse biological models. Through its application to speciation analysis, the hierarchy theory unveils causal processes, identifies entities and interactions, and bridges the economic and genealogical hierarchies. Acknowledging its potential for refinement based on empirical data, the hierarchy theory of biology stands as a paradigm, shaping interdisciplinary exploration and inspiring investigations across disciplines.

This article examines how redefining health through the perspectives of One Health, EcoHealth and Planetary Health can enrich Physical Education (PE) by advancing both health and environmental sustainability. While PE and health education are often treated as separate subjects, most PE curricula worldwide emphasise the promotion of an active lifestyle as a key component of health education through PE. This promotion of an active lifestyle is central to the concept of physical literacy (PL), which is a fundamental aspect of quality PE according to UNESCO (2015). This article focuses on how PE, contributing to health education through the promotion of PL, can evolve to incorporate sustainability goals through the recent new definitions of approaches to health. One Health approach underscores the interconnections between human, animal and environmental health, expanding PL to address zoonotic diseases and ecological impacts. EcoHealth highlights the sustainability of ecosystems, promoting PE activities that (re)connect humans with the more-than-human worlds without causing environmental harm. Planetary Health takes a global perspective, encouraging sustainable physical activities that reduce ecological footprints, such as cycling and walking. By integrating these holistic frameworks, PE can nurture not only individual health outcomes but also environmental stewardship and global health awareness. This shift seeks to educate individuals about their PL, but also their responsibility in preserving ecosystems and the planet, fostering a more sustainable and environmentally aware generation through PE.

Transport characteristics and predicted confinement are shown for the Infinity Two fusion pilot plant baseline plasma physics design, a high field stellarator concept developed using modern optimization techniques. Transport predictions are made using high-fidelity nonlinear gyrokinetic turbulence simulations along with drift kinetic neoclassical simulations. A pellet-fuelled scenario is proposed that enables supporting an edge density gradient to substantially reduce ion temperature gradient turbulence. Trapped electron mode turbulence is minimized through the quasi-isodynamic configuration that has been optimized with maximum-J. A baseline operating point with deuterium–tritium fusion power of $P_{{fus,DT}}=800$ MW with high fusion gain $Q_{{fus}}=40$ is demonstrated, respecting the Sudo density limit and magnetohydrodynamic stability limits. Additional higher power operating points are also predicted, including a fully ignited ($Q_{{fus}}=\infty$) case with $P_{{fus,DT}}=1.5$ GW. Pellet ablation calculations indicate it is plausible to fuel and sustain the desired density profile. Impurity transport calculations indicate that turbulent fluxes dominate neoclassical fluxes deep into the core, and it is predicted that impurity peaking will be smaller than assumed in the transport simulations. A path to access the large radiation fraction needed to satisfy exhaust requirements while sustaining core performance is also discussed.

Concentration in animal-based protein industries in the United States continues to garner the interest of policymakers, researchers, and consumers alike. We assess the impacts of industry concentration on animal productivity and downstream prices in the US broiler chicken industry between 1991 and 2019. We compile a dataset that matches annual, plant-level information on ownership and sales for all poultry processing facilities in the United States with market-level wholesale composite prices and bird yields. Consolidation over the last three decades has greatly contributed to industry concentration, leading to higher wholesale composite broiler prices (16.3%) and gains in animal productivity (2.4%).

What factors contribute to closing the turnout gender gap after female enfranchisement? In the wake of franchise expansion, we test whether being a poll officer—and hence being exposed to election management—boosted the politicisation and mobilisation of women. In the context of the Spanish Second Republic (1931–1939), we exploit a lottery that assigned recently enfranchised women to be poll officers in the first election women were allowed to vote (1933). We use an original individual-level panel database and show that women randomly selected as polling officers were as likely to participate in subsequent elections than men, while the gender turnout gap persisted among the rest. Further analyses suggest that being poll officers made women more receptive to political organisations mobilisation strategies, and their presence had positive externalities by encouraging other women to participate. Our findings highlight the potential benefits of exposure to election engineering among groups previously excluded or less engaged with democracy.

The concept of ritual has been all too loosely applied to violence and atrocity with assumptions of repetitiveness, mythic symbolism, and religious overtones. This paper examines a selection of modern cases of atrocity for specific ritual elements: attention to body and spaces as frames for meaning; a prescripted mode of action; and performative enaction of a new millennial or transgressive order. Focal cases include American lynching (nineteenth–twentieth centuries) and militia atrocities in Sierra Leone and Liberia (1990s), while examples of gendered atrocity in ritualized forms (perpetrated by Bosnian Serbs and the Islamic State) are broached in the conclusion. Ritualization is not typical to modern atrocities but allows perpetrating groups to experience meaningfulness in the violent acts they assemble, often in situations of crisis.

A growing number of studies focus on how governments can manage audience costs when they want to back down from international crises. In line with previous studies, especially Kohama et al. (2024), this paper argues that the Japanese government can use a variety of reasons to justify its decisions to de-escalate while minimizing domestic audience costs. I found that governments can reduce audience costs using several rhetorical devices, reinforcing the current understanding of audience costs. However, my design, which presented a fait accompli scenario by China against Japan, yielded significantly different results regarding audience costs compared to previous studies on the subject. Specifically, the results of this study indicate that the public might not value economic development following a fait accompli as highly as in less severe scenarios. The results also suggest that leaders might have a harder time backing down after a loss of territory compared to other forms of provocation.