Understanding the evolution of the cosmic star formation rate density (SFRD) is key to uncovering how the Universe arrived at its present state. This paper presents a novel and efficient method to estimate the local SFRD, which uses supervised machine learning to first identify a population of star-forming galaxies (SFGs). Next, star-formation rates (SFRs) are determined using the 1.4-GHz radio-continuum emission detected by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP). Specifically, a gradient-boosted decision tree model was imple-mented to classify extragalactic sources from the Beck et al. (2022) catalogue as either galaxies or quasars using RACS-mid and WISE photometry. The full sample, consisting of 389,392 sources, was partitioned into a 70%-15%-15% split for training, validating, and testing. The optimised model achieved a weighted F1 score of 0.93 and an accuracy of 0.94 on the test dataset, ultimately classifying 336,674 sources as galaxies and 52,718 sources as quasars. Using the resulting z <0.1 depth-matched galaxy sample and the photometric redshift predictions from Beck et al. (2022), a modified 1.4-GHz SFR calibration was determined, yielding a local, completeness-corrected, z < 0.1 SFRD of (1.4 ± 0.5) × 10−2 M⊙ yr−1 Mpc−3 using 11,293 sources. This value is consistent with previous results. Thus, this study demonstrates the feasibility of using supervised learning to identify large populations of SFGs in order to investigate the SFRD evolution. This presents an exciting prospect for future, deeper surveys such as EMU, which will enable the cosmic SFRD to be probed out to higher redshifts.

Street-level scholarship has increasingly turned to how organizations and frontline providers respond to crisis. Yet crises evolve, and street-level organizations may vary in how they relate to state entities that coordinate crisis response efforts. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of the homelessness criminalization crisis in Austin, Texas, this article shows how the rise and rapid implementation of a punitive approach, focused on removing visible encampments, intensified crisis acuity, which increased provider ambiguity, fractured coordination, and exacerbated harm. Public providers, closely tied to the city, could at times mitigate harm for people in visible encampments but risked complicity as police enforcement rapidly escalated. In contrast, nonprofit providers were separate from city efforts and focused on the most vulnerable, yet their separation paradoxically limited their ability to influence outcomes or reduce harm. Drawing on nonprofit studies’ focus on public–nonprofit differences and social work’s critique of state-provider entanglements under conditions of criminalization, these findings show how intensifying crisis acuity and differential organizational-state relationships shape frontline adaptation and coordination. Criminalizing homelessness harms homeless individuals and the service systems designed to support them, underscoring tradeoffs in both public provision and government–nonprofit collaboration.

How do foreign investors respond to domestic electoral politics? A political investment cycle dynamic predicts investments increase before elections while an uncertainty and delay hypothesis anticipates investment declines in advance of elections. This study adjudicates these competing expectations, arguing that foreign firms locate their investments based, in part, on electoral predictability. We theorize that firms prefer to invest in locations holding clear-winner elections, and avoid close-call elections, where the outcome is uncertain. We test this theory in the context of U.S. congressional elections, arguing that legislators provide access to public resources, policy influence, and coordination across levels of government, and therefore investors benefit from stable representation. Using geolocated data on greenfield foreign direct investment (FDI) announcements in the United States from 2003 to 2017, we find that FDI announcements rise significantly in election years—but only in districts with clear-winner elections. Mediation analysis shows that increased federal appropriations partly explain this pattern, consistent with our argument that electoral predictability enhances firms’ ability to secure political support. These findings reveal a political bias in global capital allocation: politically monopolistic districts attract more investment, while vibrant electoral competition deters it—raising fundamental concerns about the interplay between democracy and money.

Cereal rye (Secale cereale L.) cover crop provides a multitude of benefits, including soil conservation and weed suppression. Cereal rye biomass is positively correlated with weed suppression; however, high biomass is not always feasible. The weed-suppression potential of cereal rye grown under conditions that do not support high biomass is unknown. In such cases, other mechanisms, such as reduced soil temperature and nutrient depletion, may contribute to weed suppression. The objective of this study is to determine the impact of cereal rye biomass levels on soil water, temperature, nutrients, and, in turn, weed emergence patterns. Cereal rye was planted at four seeding rates (0, 20, 40, and 80 kg ha-1) and terminated at three timings (6, 4, and 2 weeks before planting cotton). Soil water and temperature were continuously monitored using automatic sensors. Soil nutrient content was analyzed from samples taken before cereal rye planting and at each termination timing. Weed seedling emergence was assessed throughout the summer. Cover crop termination timing had a greater influence on biomass production than seeding rate; delaying termination by four weeks resulted in 70 to 150% more biomass. High cereal rye biomass levels reduced maximum soil surface (0-10 cm) temperature by up to 7 C and thermal amplitude by 10 C before crop planting. Cereal rye significantly reduced soil nitrogen content but had minimal effect on phosphorus and potassium. A minimum biomass production of 2 t ha-1 is necessary for 30-50% weed suppression, whereas moderate (2 to 4 t ha-1) and high biomass levels (6000 kg ha-1) provided 60-70% and >90% weed suppression, respectively. The time for 50% weed seedling emergence was delayed by 18 days under high cereal rye biomass compared to fallow. Overall, our findings indicate that cereal rye suppresses weeds through multiple mechanisms, explaining suppression even at low biomass levels.

This article engages health humanities scholarship that approaches biomedical knowledge as cultural and pedagogical, and that treats patient experience, clinician reports, medical images, and other quotidian patient and/or health-provider texts as interpretive sites. This work fleshes out the intelligibility of patient voices as constitutive of a cartography of presence. Drawing on queer theory and the onco-humanities, I argue that clinical cancer settings operate through choreographies that both organize bodies and feature tactical refusals. Autobiographical experience rendered as pathography—often dismissed as anecdotal—is approached here as research evidence and as animating practices of resistance within regimes of biomedical authority. Methodologically, the article juxtaposes close readings of two sets of artifacts: (1) Tactic, the first widely broadcast cancer-focused educational television series (produced by the American Cancer Society and NBC) and (2) a hauntological archive summoned from my 2025 to 2026 Stage IV lung cancer documents; a constellation of clinical and autobiographical traces—fieldnotes, clinical care-provider reports, and medical images. Read together, these materials reveal how cancer—reimagined as an “epidemic of signification”—has long functioned as a pedagogical project aimed at managing uncertainty, disciplining affect, and sustaining optimism as a mode of governance. By placing a contemporary patient-curated archive in dialogue with mid-century public cancer pedagogy, the article traces queer pedagogical practices that rewrite the normative from cancer’s margins. It advances the concept of tactical choreographies to name how cancer patients inhabit, reroute, and on occasion, refuse the pedagogical demands of medicine under conditions of institutional invisibility, necropolitical abjection, and state violence.

How is an off-the-books exchange governed under strong formal regulation? This article answers this question through a mechanism-based reanalysis of 216 interviews conducted in Amsterdam and Rotterdam in 1997–1999, focusing on 46 traceable cases of undeclared or informally compensated activity. Treating the corpus as a historical welfare-state baseline, not evidence of current prevalence, this article shows that informal exchange was governed at the transaction level through three linked mechanisms. Moral norms distinguished necessity-based side activities from abusive undeclared work; trust relations filtered access to low-visibility opportunities; and community-based enforcement stabilised repeated exchange through reputation, reciprocity, monitoring, and selective exclusion. These mechanisms mattered where formal work was blocked, weakly rewarding, administratively risky, or incompatible with care obligations. This article contributes to institutional economics by specifying how informal institutions shape the legitimacy, accessibility, durability, scale, and visibility of exchange under strong formal regulation.

In the early postcolonial period, Eastern Nigerian women increasingly entered the sex industry because of poverty, the Civil War, and limited employment opportunities. Drawing on archival records, oral histories, and newspapers, I examine local and transnational sex work among Eastern Nigerian women, highlighting their strategic decisions—from migrating to lucrative urban centers to developing social skills to attract clients. By framing sex work as labor rather than moral decadence, I challenge dominant moralistic discourses, positioning sex workers as economic agents who accumulated wealth and invested in businesses and property.

The COVID-19 pandemic unfolded alongside an unprecedented ‘infodemic’ that reshaped public engagement with science, health, and authority. This study examines how online infodemics translated into collective resistance and influenced population health through political mobilisation. Using structural equation models across six European countries, I conceptualise resistance as a latent construct – captured by residential mobility and protests opposing vaccines, lockdowns, and public health measures linked to populist radical right (PRR) movements – acting as a behavioural bridge between digital information environments and epidemic outcomes. The findings reveal a robust infodemic–resistance–epidemic pathway: greater exposure to infodemic content consistently predicts stronger opposition to non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and vaccination. This effect is strongest in Germany and Italy, where PRR networks amplified narratives of ‘elite overreach’ and ‘freedom under threat’, transforming online discontent into organised mobilisation. In other countries, resistance appears weaker and more pandemic-specific. By integrating informational, political, and epidemiological processes, the analysis shows how epidemics can evolve into politicised collective behaviour that undermines compliance and sustains transmission. The results highlight populist mobilisation as a key amplifier of epidemic risk and suggest that effective responses must rebuild trust, depoliticise health communication, and address structural sources of grievance.

The Gas Dynamic Trap (GDT) facility at the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics continues experimental studies in support of the Gas-Dynamic Multiple-Mirror Trap (GDMT) project – a prospective neutron source and thermonuclear reactor concept based on open-ended magnetic confinement. During the 2024–2025 upgrade campaign, key engineering systems and diagnostic suites were substantially modernised to address critical physics and technology challenges for the GDMT development. Three key research and development directions were pursued. First, a conductive wall stabilisation system was designed to suppress magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) instabilities at high plasma beta. Second, a new second-harmonic X-mode electron cyclotron resonance heating (ECRH) system operating at 54.5 GHz with 0.8 MW power was commissioned. Preliminary experiments demonstrated increased electron temperature compared with non-ECRH heated plasmas. Third, proof-of-principle experiments on bulk plasma fuelling using a Marshall gun injector were successfully performed, supporting further development towards a high-repetition-rate injector. These results provide essential experimental validation and technological groundwork for the GDMT project, demonstrating progress towards high-beta plasma operation, efficient heating schemes and particle balance control in open magnetic traps.

Most studies on modern state formation assume that enhanced state capacity and institutionalization increase clarity and predictability. We argue that this view fails to consider ambiguity politics—a form of governance in which formal and informal institutions are inconsistent, unclear, or ill-defined, thereby creating space for multiple interpretations, practices, and procedures. Combining inductive insights from research in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and deductive engagement with different strands of literature, we developed a typology that distinguishes mechanisms of ambiguity politics according to the level at which the ambiguation takes place (elite/administrative) and the intentionality of it (strategic/accidental). Although ambiguity politics is particularly visible in conflict and postconflict settings, we show that it is not inevitably a temporary stage toward greater order and predictability but rather a persistent feature of governance in various contexts.

This study investigates the nuanced challenges of fine-grained word sense disambiguation (WSD) tasks with regular polysemy detection (RPD) of the named entity, focusing on evaluating the trade-offs between encoder and decoder-based model performance and computational efficiency. The datasets, including Chinese Wordnet 2.0 (CWN) as sense inventory, the Social Media Corpus (PTT) for user-generated content, and the Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus (ASBC) for formal linguistic data, were chosen to provide a diverse and representative framework for evaluating both common nouns and proper nouns with regular polysemy in Taiwan Mandarin. This analysis evaluated ten encoder- and decoder-based models, assessing their performance on two tasks. The encoder-based models demonstrate comparable accuracy to the decoder-based models on WSD tasks (77.5% vs. 78.5%), and similarly strong performance in RPD tasks (84.2% vs. 83.8%). On a large-scale all-words WSD task, the encoder model not only outperformed the decoder model but also generated substantially lower carbon emissions – an eight-fold reduction. These differences underscore the trade-offs between model architecture and task-specific performance, highlighting the necessity for balancing performance and energy efficiency in the design and application of language models, advocating for sustainable and eco-friendly practices in natural language processing development.

Speakers of pitch-accent languages, such as Japanese, are often overly sensitive to pitch cues, which may affect second language (L2) suprasegmental learning. The present study examined whether sensitivity to non-pitch cues (i.e., second formant, duration and amplitude rise time) is associated with more accurate perception of L2 English word stress following phonetic training. A total of 115 Japanese English-as-a-foreign-language learners were assessed on pitch and non-pitch dimensions of auditory processing and assigned to experimental or control groups. The experimental groups received perceptual phonetic training on English word stress, cued not only by pitch, but also by non-pitch information (duration, intensity and vowel quality). Results showed that brief training significantly enhanced prosodic perception of trained words. Importantly, auditory processing exhibited dimension-specific effects: more precise processing of non-pitch cues was associated with superior perception and greater training gains, whereas pitch sensitivity was unrelated to learning outcomes.

BIOARC (Bioregional Mineralisation with Agricultural Resources for Construction) explores how agricultural residues and regional microbial resources can be combined to create low-impact construction materials rooted in local ecological contexts. Working across four European bioregions, the project investigates wheat in Poland, sunflower in France, hops in Germany, and rice in Italy as feedstocks for the development of construction boards, insulation materials, acoustic panels and partition wall systems.

The project combines agricultural by-products with biomineralisation processes, in which microorganisms induce the formation of calcium carbonate minerals that act as natural binders within plant-based composites. Alongside biomass resources, BIOARC has isolated mineralising bacterial strains from limestone-rich and calcium-rich environments within each participating region, establishing a bioregional approach in which both material feedstocks and microbial agents originate from the same local context.

The demonstration presents a biomineralised construction prototypes alongside the agricultural residues, bacterial cultures and microscopy imagery that underpin its development. Together, these artefacts communicate the transformation from regional agricultural by-products and environmental microbial communities into construction-oriented materials. By linking agriculture, biotechnology and construction, BIOARC demonstrates how place-based material systems can support circular value chains, reduce reliance on conventional mineral-intensive products, and contribute to more resilient and regenerative approaches to the built environment.

The Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) framework recognizes that preconception exposures influence offspring health, yet paternal nutrition has received little attention compared to maternal diet. To better understand this emerging area, we undertook a systematic evidence mapping exercise in accordance with the PRISMA 2020 guidelines to develop an evidence gap map (EGM). Seventy-five studies examining paternal preconception diet and offspring health outcomes were identified, including sixty animal experiments and fifteen human observational studies. Animal studies consistently showed that paternal high-fat or low-protein diets impaired offspring metabolism, and that targeted dietary interventions such as omega-3 fatty acids or methyl donors, mitigated these effects. Human studies were fewer, narrower in scope, and largely focused on famine exposure or single food group intakes, with no randomized trials and only half of the studies accounting for maternal diet. Offspring outcomes were limited to birthweight and adiposity, with little investigation of cardiometabolic, neurodevelopmental, mental health, or other chronic disease–related outcomes. The current evidence therefore suggests that paternal diet may influence offspring health, but highlights major methodological and conceptual gaps in human research. By mapping the scope and limitations of the existing evidence, this study provides a roadmap for future Paternal Origins of Health and Disease research, and underscores the need to develop paternal-inclusive preconception nutrition strategies and public health interventions to improve intergenerational health.