During the Nine Years’ War, limitations of state capacity required that English imperial policy makers delegate substantial authority to provincial governors and assemblies in North American colonies. Proximity to sites of conflict, along with access to developed regional financial networks, gave provincial leaders relative efficiency when planning and executing military campaigns. Although useful in the short term, imperial policy makers considered the influence of provincial leaders like William Phips in Massachusetts to be a threat to their centralized authority in metropolitan London. Consequently, North American colonial wars revealed a tension in the transatlantic imperial relationship between the metropolitan English state and English colonies—namely, that peripheral expansion required delegation but that same delegation threatened central authority that English authorities considered necessary for sovereignty. This tension reached a breaking point on the issue of monetary policy. Phips’s advocacy for colonial monetary autonomy would ultimately provoke his removal as governor and imprisonment.

Models allow us to expose, explore, and excavate our assumptions. This is especially true for the sorts of assumptions that concern scholars of marginalization and resistance, who aim to show how patriarchy, colonialism, and related structures shape our lives. Yet within this scholarship, there is a recurrent skepticism toward practices of modeling, particularly formal or idealizing practices. These critiques portray modeling as anything from necessarily sexist to perniciously universalizing to oppressive. While these claims are mistaken, they nevertheless share a crucial and underappreciated undercurrent: alienation. I argue that alienation provides a more fundamental and more precise framework for evaluating modeling practices. This reframing clarifies the normative stakes of exclusionary modeling while preserving formal techniques for the projects that they are especially well-positioned to promote: exposing entrenched assumptions, resisting “obfuscatory accommodation,” and facilitating engagement across epistemic and political divides.

This document presents some advances in personalised and precision nutrition that were addressed in the IUNS-ICN 2025 Congress at August 2025 including the role of biomarkers in personalised and precision nutrition research, personalised and precision nutrition approaches to routine health care services, implications for public health, personalised and precision nutrition around the world, machine learning and precision nutrition, and personalised dietary guidelines alongside population-based policies.

This article examines the 1928 German–Soviet Alai–Pamir expedition as a moment when different scientific traditions, political ambitions and bodily practices met in the high-altitude borderlands of Central Asia. Focusing on the mapping of the Fedchenko glacier, it argues that knowledge emerged not simply from instruments and protocols, but from the difficult encounter between bodies, technical tools and a resistant glacial landscape. The glacier thus became more than a physical object of study; it was an epistemologically charged terrain where ways of knowing were tested and made visible. German scientists, drawing on alpine traditions of glaciology, emphasized precision, discipline and methodological control. Soviet participants, by contrast, highlighted endurance, improvisation and collective struggle, casting physical hardship as proof of revolutionary commitment and shaping a distinctly ideological form of scientific masculinity. By tracing these entanglements of body, landscape and ideology, the article presents the expedition as an example of how science operates not only as a cognitive project, but also as a deeply embodied and politicized practice.

Neuromyths persist as pseudoscientific misconceptions in education despite repeated debunking. This study examines the foreign language effect (FLe) on neuromyth discernment through two sub-studies. Using mixed experimental designs, we found task-dependent patterns of language effects: FL enhanced discernment of highly discernible neuromyths, while native language facilitated identification of low-discernibility neuromyths. Negative framing amplified FL advantages, whereas information richness suppressed discernment, an effect mitigated by FL for medium-discernibility neuromyths. These findings suggest that neuromyth susceptibility may vary across language and contextual conditions, providing preliminary theoretical and empirical implications for future language-sensitive approaches to teacher training and neuromyth mitigation.

In German written language, demonstrative expressions like diese or die play an important part in connecting discourse referents and making larger stretches of discourse coherent. But what makes a writer decide to use a proximal (diese-dieser-dieses, hier) or a distal (die-der-das, da) demonstrative variant? Using a free writing production experiment, we investigated the role of two types of factors suggested to drive demonstrative variance in German written text: the higher-order variable of discourse genre and a number of local structural variables reflecting the prominence of discourse referents, such as the distance between demonstrative and antecedent and the syntactic function or clause position of the demonstrative clause. We asked 100 participants to write emails to a friend (a narrative type of text) and a local authority (an expository text) about an event on the basis of a given scenario. The results indicate that discourse genre by far exceeds the effect of local variables as driver of demonstrative variance. As such, this study complements earlier work on German demonstrative use and corroborates existing findings in other languages through offering an explanatory framework for the understanding of the discourse conditions responsible for the majority of demonstrative choices in German written text.

For several decades, social and cultural anthropology has been enmeshed in an antiformalist mood—a shared sensibility that valorizes disruption, emergence, and complexity over stability and pattern; celebrates flexible concepts resistant to systematization; and treats theoretical frameworks with suspicion. Initially revolutionary, this antiformalism has long since become mainstream, settling into recognizable conventions. This article traces antiformalism’s manifestations across diverse theoretical moments, from post-structuralism and practice theory through material and ontological turns, showing how form nevertheless persisted—often disavowed but relied upon—within ostensibly antiformalist approaches. We argue that the alternation between formalism and antiformalism constitutes something like the beating theoretical heart of anthropology, operating both at the macro level of half-century disciplinary shifts and at the microlevel of individual arguments where formal and anti-formal moves remain necessarily interwoven. Against this background, we detect an emergent tonal shift: a rising enthusiasm for form manifest in renewed attention to social and cultural regularities as puzzles worthy of explanation, and in a different valuation of conceptual work that emphasizes robustness, sharp edges, and shareability. We map this new formalist sensibility and identify its characteristic epistemic virtues—coherence, corrigibility, and collaboration—which distinguish it from both earlier structuralisms and recent antiformalist approaches, positioning anthropology as a diverse yet collective comparative endeavor.

People living with dementia are at risk of going missing. The goal of this project was to develop case scenarios for health service providers, service recipients, and care partners to facilitate dialogues about managing risks related to going missing. This paper presents 10 case scenarios, based in real events, created to describe factors related to missing incidents of people living with dementia. Scenarios were developed following qualitative analysis of dementia-related missing incident reports from 515 MedicAlert Foundation Canada® hotline call summary notes, 1760 missing incident reports from three Canadian police departments and one search and rescue unit, and the experiences of two families. The case scenarios were reviewed by five participants for comprehensibility and validity. The case scenarios are an educational tool for health service providers, first responders, care partners, and persons living with dementia to use when discussing ways to manage risks of going missing.

Diets low in diverse fibre-rich plant foods contribute to the rise of chronic disease. The BIOME study (NCT06231706; 6-week parallel randomised controlled trial) in 399 adults (35–65 years; BMI 18·5–40 kg/m2; fibre intake < 20 g/d) investigated a whole-food plant blend containing > 30 ingredients, rich in (poly)phenols, fibre and micronutrients. Participants were randomised (1:1:1) to the blend (30 g/d), an isoenergetic control (bread croutons, 28 g/d) or probiotic (Lactobacillus rhamnosus, 15bn CFU/d). Analysts were blinded to allocation. The primary outcome was change in ‘favourable’ and ‘unfavourable’ gut microbiome species (ZOE Microbiome Health Ranking 2025); secondary outcomes included blood metabolites, symptoms, stool output, anthropometry, hunger, sleep, energy and mood. A crossover sub-study explored postprandial glucose, hunger and mood. Of 349 participants analysed (fifty excluded), self-reported adherence was > 98 %. The 30+ plant blend resulted in more species changing relative abundance at 6 weeks v. control (57 v. 14 species-level genome bins (SGB), P < 0·001) and probiotic (57 v. 4 SGB, P < 0·001). There were no significant between-group differences in microbiome health ranks of significantly changing species (increasing or decreasing). Blend participants self-reported reduced indigestion, constipation, heartburn and flatulence and increased energy v. control (all P < 0·05). Six related but no serious adverse events occurred. In the sub-study, adding the blend to a high-carbohydrate meal (v. meal alone) reduced hunger, increased fullness and energy (3-h incremental AUC, all P < 0·05), with no effect on postprandial glucose. This 30+ plant blend represents a simple strategy to modify gut microbiome composition and benefit gastrointestinal symptoms in healthy adults.

Young children who experience symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) rely heavily on caregivers for emotional support. Yet, caregivers who are overwhelmed (or “flooded”) by children’s emotional expressions may not provide effective responses, particularly if they also engage in parent-to-child aggression (PCA). Over 12 months, partnered caregivers (N = 448, Mage = 33.80, 52.5% female, 62.7% non-Hispanic White) of a child age 3–5 years who was eligible for Head Start completed surveys and interviews to assess parental emotional flooding, PCA, and children’s trauma exposure and PTSD symptoms. Most children (89%) were exposed to potentially traumatic events, including 74% during the study. Male caregivers’ emotional flooding predicted maintenance of children’s PTSD symptoms over time, regardless of the degree of PCA engaged in. Female caregivers’ emotional flooding predicted maintenance of children’s PTSD symptoms only among those who engaged in high levels of PCA. Caregivers’ experience of emotional flooding may impact children in ways that maintain their PTSD symptoms, including modeling of ineffective emotion regulatory processes or children’s internalization of emotions to avoid negative parenting behaviors. Even at low levels of PCA, men’s emotional flooding may be impactful, potentially via parental withdrawal. Interventions addressing caregivers’ distress when managing children’s PTSD-related emotions are indicated.

This article analyzes Southern cotton interests and the agricultural politics within the Roosevelt Administration, offering insights into how market conditions can shape reform agendas and the considerable opportunities for capture that accompany ambitious reform agendas that rely on interested experts. It shows that Southern cotton interests within the Administration were divided into interest groups, depending on their market position, that mapped onto a broader national constellation of agricultural interest groups. These groups competed among themselves for capture of a reform agenda that was adjudicated by the responses of the cotton market to different interventions.