Although bronze bells from the Zhou dynasty (c. 1046–256 bce) have been widely studied, their roles within their ontological contexts remain underexplored. This article integrates archaeological evidence, textual records and posthumanist theories to reconsider how the capacities of ancestors and bells were configured and how the personhood of living and deceased elites was embodied in the Zhou worlds. Focusing on the tomb (M190) of Lord Qiu of Zeng (r. c. 675–650/650–625 bce), the study examines how the Zhou ontologies instantiated in this specific case. Qiu’s inscribed bell set was originally commissioned to emulate ancestral de and invoke their numinous power against the competing Chu state. However, the haphazard deposition of the bells and the deliberate disintegration of their rack in his tomb suggest a subsequent derealization of their capacities following the rapprochement between Zeng and Chu. In this funerary context, Qiu’s personhood was re-embodied alongside the reconfiguration of the capacities of ancestors, bells and burial goods, demonstrating how the relationship between the living, deceased, ancestors and ritual media shifted in response to changing historical circumstances.

This article develops an innovative quantitative analysis of the drivers of state–NGO relations in the field of human rights, specifically focusing on their political drivers. Drawing on cross-national survey data from 2,000+ reported interactions between NGOs, national and EU governmental actors in 26 EU Member States, we examine how national governments’ political orientation, the level of politicisation of human rights issues, and multilevel governance dynamics shape the frequency and nature of state-NGO and EU-NGO interactions. Our multilevel regression models show that NGOs’ relations with conservative governments are less collaborative, though not less frequent, than with progressive ones. For highly politicised human rights issues, interactions between governmental actors and NGOs are less frequent and less collaborative. NGOs facing conservative governments report more frequent and more collaborative interactions with EU institutions, consistent with multilevel ‘venue-shopping’ strategies. These findings highlight the role of political context in shaping European human rights governance.

In July 1954, while making glacier mass-balance measurements in Northwest Greenland just below the boundary of the dry-snow facies, a team led by C.S. Benson documented a rain-on-snow event triggered by an atmospheric river. This produced extensive surface melt and notable ice layers, lenses and percolation columns in the snowpack that were tracked in subsequent years in snow pits dug nearby. Since 2000, numerous surface-melt events in the dry-snow facies have been documented by satellite observations. We compare and contrast the 1954 event with recent melt events to highlight challenges in monitoring melting in Greenland. Satellite sensors can accurately map melt extent across the ice sheet but cannot reliably quantify the melt intensity. Snow pit and ice core measurements can assess melt intensity but are too localized to capture melt extent. Reanalysis of the 1954 event adds an additional caveat: the extensive surface-melt event produced features only on two of the four sides of a large snow pit, evidence that the notable 1954 event could easily be missed in an ice core extracted years later. This suggests that analysis of historical melt events, using ice cores, probably underestimates both the spatial extent and temporal frequency of past melt events.

Structures in tokamak plasmas are elongated along the direction of the magnetic field and short in the directions perpendicular to the magnetic field. Many tokamak simulation codes take advantage of this by using a field-aligned coordinate system. However, field-aligned coordinate systems have a coordinate singularity at magnetic X-points where the poloidal magnetic field vanishes, which makes it difficult to use field-aligned coordinate systems when simulating the core and scrape-off layer simultaneously. Here, we present an algorithm for grid generation and computing geometric quantities in a standard field-aligned coordinate system that avoids the singularity and allows one to conduct two-dimensional gyrokinetic axisymmetric simulations in X-point geometries. Convergence tests of advection, boundary value problems and geometric quantities all show greater than first-order convergence even in the vicinity of the X-point. We also demonstrate the geometric consistency of our algorithm with an example simulation of the spherical tokamak for energy production, which shows machine-precision particle conservation.

The rapid advancement of the miniaturization techniques for high-frequency transceivers, radars, and communication systems operating in the D-band (110–170 GHz) has positioned circular dielectric waveguides (CDWGs) as a promising transmission-line alternative. Yet, their potential has not been fully exploited. This work fills this gap by introducing novel, compact CDWG-fed lens antenna solutions that deliver excellent gain and impedance matching performance. A low-loss, low-cost, and flexible CDWG made of low-density polyethylene is used to excite dielectric lens antennas of various sizes, contours, and materials, enabling a systematic evaluation of the impact of lens geometry on antenna performance. Through detailed electromagnetic simulations and experimental validations, lenses of different sizes and contours are designed. The proposed CDWG-lens configuration achieves measured broadband matching better than 17 dB and stable high gain across 115–130 GHz. Measured gains of 21–23 dBi for lenses with diameter of 10.6 mm and gain factor of 27–28 dBi for lenses with diameter of 20 mm confirm the high aperture efficiency and novelty of this approach. A strong agreement between the simulation and the measurement results is also observed. These compact and efficient lens antennas combined with the advantages of CDWG feed, can be integrated as a part of advanced system applications in the D-band frequency range like radar sensing and communications.

In this work, we investigate the dynamics of particles accelerated by electromagnetic wave pulses under the effects of a radiation reaction as described by the Landau–Lifshitz model. The radiation reaction breaks the invariant used to predict both the critical carrier amplitude required for efficient particle acceleration and the particle’s final ejection velocity. Moreover, it alters the dynamical regimes predicted by models that neglect it. Numerical simulations of single-particle dynamics, performed using both the full dynamical equations and the canonical averaged formulation, support the analytical results.

The 2023 revision of the EU Horizontal Guidelines introduced a dedicated framework for sustainability-oriented cooperation agreements, marking the first systematic attempt to integrate environmental objectives into EU competition law. Yet, almost two years after they entered into force, DG COMP has not received a single request for informal guidance under the new provisions. This policy commentary explains this apparent policy failure by reconstructing the process through which sustainability concerns entered EU competition policy after the 2019 European elections and the European Green Deal. Drawing on historical-institutionalist process tracing, we show that the resulting adjustments were shaped by political urgency rather than gradual policy learning, and that the 2023 Guidelines reflected cautious compromise rather than transformative change. We then analyse why uptake has remained negligible: multinational firms face steep cross-border enforcement risks, particularly from jurisdictions such as the United States, where sustainability agreements can trigger antitrust liability. We conclude by assessing the EU’s strategic options (retreat, international convergence, or domestic regime stabilisation) and argue that the last of these offers the most realistic path.

This article identifies a potential authorial signature in the opening lines of Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile. The adjacent letters LVCAN appear in a central position of emphasis in the poem’s first two lines and constitute the core of a signature that can be extended in multiple directions to form longer intexts such as LVCANI SVM (‘I am Lucan’s’), LV(canus) AN(naeus) M(arcus), LVCANI MVSIS (‘with the Muses of Lucan’) and LVCANI M. VIS CERA DEXTRA (‘the power of M. Lucanus with his right hand on the wax’, or ‘the power of M. Lucanus on the wax on the right-hand side’). The article proposes that this multiform signature is accompanied by signposts to help identify it and that it engages with models of such wordplay in Aratus, Lucretius, Virgil and Ovid.

Scholars have increasingly discussed the concept of European Militant Democracy, that is, the EU’s defense of Article 2 TEU values against defiant Member States. But does EU law have anything to say about national militant democracy, specifically on measures such as bans of political parties? The possible role that EU law has to play in this area has so far been overlooked. Using the proposed ban of the AfD as an example, this Article discusses whether and under what circumstances EU law is applicable to national party bans. Arguing that national political parties fulfill an essential function for representative democracy in the EU, the Article finds that EU law is applicable to national party bans both within the context of elections to the European Parliament as well as in purely internal situations. Arguing that the concept of democracy in Article 2 TEU nevertheless allows for militant democratic measures such as party bans, this Article then carves out specific standards that national party bans must comply with as a matter of EU Law.

We propose a methodology to infer collision operators from phase space data of plasma dynamics. Our approach combines a differentiable kinetic simulator, whose core component in this work is a differentiable Fokker–Planck solver, with a gradient-based optimisation method to learn the collisional operators that best describe the phase space dynamics. We test our method using data from two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations of spatially uniform thermal plasmas, and learn the collision operator that captures the self-consistent electromagnetic interaction between finite-size charged particles over a wide variety of simulation parameters. We demonstrate that the learned operators are more accurate than alternative estimates based on particle tracks, while making no prior assumptions about the relevant time scales of the processes and significantly reducing memory requirements. We find that the retrieved operators, obtained in the non-relativistic regime, are in excellent agreement with theoretical predictions derived for electrostatic scenarios. Our results show that differentiable simulators offer a powerful and computational efficient approach to infer novel operators for a wide range of problems, such as electromagnetically dominated collisional dynamics and stochastic wave–particle interactions.

This article integrates Triple-helix and institutional logics perspectives to diagnose how professional, market and state logics generate risks in university research, and how hybrid governance can mitigate them. Conceptually, it advances a cross-level risk analysis (individual, organizational, system) and a triple-temporal mitigation design that aligns short-term relational routines, mid-term interface infrastructures and long-term institutional and policy change. The synthesis extends existing work on selective coupling and institutional complexity by linking specific risk mechanisms to sequenced interventions. It further refines research on boundary organizations and intermediaries by positioning interface roles within system-level coordination, and clarifies how openness, sovereignty and mission pressures map across logics within responsible research and innovation and open-science agendas. Overall, the study offers a parsimonious and actionable framework for steering collaborative research under conditions of institutional plurality.