As museums confront the virtualization of cultural life, institutional discourse often succumbs to “virtual panic,” framing the future primarily around technological adaptation. Rather than treating this digital turn as a threat or a trend, this essay argues that the crisis presents an opportunity for the museum to reclaim its vital humanistic function as a counter-environment to the frictionless speed of contemporary life. Drawing on Hartmut Rosa’s critiques of societal acceleration, I theorize virtual panic as a misguided effort to render the gallery as seamless as a digital feed, which risks reproducing conditions of alienation. Grounded in my personal experience revisiting Picasso’s ‘Girl Before a Mirror’ (1932) across decades, I examine how the gallery acts as an attentional sanctuary, where artworks invite modes of attention that counter habits of distraction. The museum’s power lies in its productive friction: its ability to sustain slowness, ambiguity, and perceptual depth. Conceived as a sphere of resonance, in Rosa’s sense of the term, the museum emerges as a site for scaffolding self-reflective engagement with the past, present, and possible futures through meaningful encounters with works of art. In an age of simulation, museums remain indispensable by offering a rare space to encounter resistance and resonance.

Paul Howard Skuse (1909–1994) was a Boston patrolman and naval officer in the Pacific theater of World War II and the Korean War who served from 1946 to 1958 as a police adviser in Okinawa (Ryukyu Islands). Afterwards, he became a police adviser in Indonesia, Laos, and Vietnam working under the United States Agency of International Development (USAID)’s Office of Public Safety (OPS). Skuse’s career provides a window into US clandestine operations during the Cold War in Okinawa and Southeast Asia that have remained largely hidden from public view and are left out of most history books.

Costa Rica has been one of the most stable democracies in Latin America since 1953. However, the 2022 election gave rise to a populist leadership combining confrontational tactics, attacks on institutions, and pressure on press freedom. While previous studies document democratic backsliding across Latin America, Costa Rica’s case remains understudied. This article proposes the concept of “democracy under strain,” a condition distinct from backsliding, in which systematic executive pressure on democratic conditions coexists with institutional resilience. Drawing on Bermeo’s (2016) framework, I operationalize this concept through three indicators: decline of press freedom, institutional delegitimization, and decreasing citizen support for democracy. Using a mixed-methods strategy and combining Latin American Public Opinion Proyect survey data, press freedom indexes, and journalistic reports, the evidence shows that institutions remain formally intact and citizen disapproval of anti-press aggression is high, yet pressure is sustained and without historical precedent.

Chemsex is a pattern of using specific drugs with the intent of enhancing the sexual experiences of men who have sex with men. Chemsex participation is often motivated by a desire for community connection or enhanced sexual pleasure. Many individuals who participate in chemsex can mitigate much of the associated risk and report limited, if any, harm. However, for some, chemsex can be problematic, precipitating or exacerbating mental health issues. Despite increasing amounts of research into chemsex, there is no consensus about how to best support people who participate in chemsex when they present for psychological therapies. In the absence of specific clinical guidelines, this paper explores the intersection of chemsex and mental health problems. Principles of affirming and non-stigmatising, assessment, formulation, and intervention strategies are discussed, and recommendations are made throughout. Drawing on contemporary evidence, we present cognitive behavioural approaches to supporting service users who participate in chemsex with anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. By enhancing cultural safety and tailoring existing evidence-based treatments, therapists can improve engagement and outcomes for individuals who engage in chemsex. We recommend an inclusive approach that champions service user choice, paired with a sensitive, sex-positive, and trauma-informed perspective. Therapists within Talking Therapy services are well placed to support service users who participate in chemsex and have co-occurring mental health difficulties.

Key learning aims

1. (1) To understand what chemsex is, what motivates chemsex participation, and the distribution of potential risks.

2. (2) To understand the intersection of sexuality, chemsex, and co-occurring mental health difficulties, including the role of pleasure, identity, shame and community.

3. (3) To identify the key barriers experienced by people who participate in chemsex when accessing mental health services, such as negative staff attitudes or fear of stigma.

4. (4) To explore cognitive behavioural approaches to working with people who participate in chemsex, and associated common mental health difficulties (anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder).

5. (5) To identify practical strategies to engage service users who participate in chemsex.

Semantic textual similarity (STS) is to measure semantic equivalence between sentences; it plays an important role in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The major core of STS is text representation. This paper studies how to obtain a sentence skeleton for text representation in STS. Unlike most existing syntax models, we propose a skeleton-based reinforcement learning method to identify the skeleton and construct sentence representations. Parallel networks are adopted to extract features of different dimensions in the sentence. In the framework of parallel networks, two sentence representation models are designed: context constrained LSTM (CC-LSTM) and Adorned skeleton LSTM (AS-LSTM). CC-LSTM builds the sentence representation by constraining the word context. AS-LSTM constructs the sentence representation through using the identified skeleton and its qualifiers. Our approach achieves good results without using external resources. Especially AS-LSTM, which outperforms the state-of-the-art without using external resources in the SICK dataset.

Telemental health, including telepsychiatry, has become a core component of Qatar’s mental healthcare system, enabling remote psychiatric assessment, therapy and follow-up care. Its rapid adoption during the COVID-19 pandemic facilitated timely intervention, reduced out-patient no-show rates and improved access across populations. Services have expanded to include allied digital interventions such as tele-occupational and tele-speech therapy, delivered within a hybrid care model. Operating within a national telemedicine framework, telemental health in Qatar demonstrates feasibility and sustained utility beyond the pandemic. Continued development will require investment in infrastructure, clinician training and telepsychiatry-specific policies to ensure safe, effective and equitable care.

Feminist environmental educators have been calling for new ways of dismantling traditional separations such as nature–culture for reconfiguring human–environment relations. The Common Worlds Research Collective is an interdisciplinary research network made up of educators and researchers that conduct feminist and anticolonial pedagogical and methodological work concerned with more-than-human worlds. This visual essay takes inspiration from the inventive ways the Common Worlds Research Collective are thinking and practising with concepts. This visual essay introduces commoning, worlding and inheriting as concepts for rethinking practice. It shows how re-viewing photographic documentation taken of a waste project with young children and educators opens up pedagogical possibilities for attending to children’s complex and entangled relations with waste. This visual essay demonstrates how creative, experimental and feminist methods can reconfigure children’s relations with waste and invites educators to apply these approaches in their own contexts.

Migratory hosts are key vectors of long-distance parasite dispersal. In the North Atlantic, migratory connectivity of avian hosts suggests that diplostomid trematodes with broad host specificity could potentially exhibit widespread distributions. However, host migration does not necessarily result in successful parasite dispersal. We investigated the diversity and distribution of Diplostomum spp. infecting freshwater salmonids in Greenland and the Faroe Islands using a metabarcoding approach. In Greenland, infection prevalence in Arctic char and Atlantic salmon ranged from 0% to 100% across locations. Molecular analysis revealed four lineages, including the first records of Diplostomum sp. 6, 7, and 9 (Locke et al. 2010a; 2010b), and a novel lineage/species showing 92.6–94.2% sequence identity to its closest relatives. In contrast, no evidence of diplostomid infection was found in brown trout and Atlantic salmon collected from sixteen streams in the Faroe Islands. The presence of a novel, locally abundant (28.9% prevalence) parasite lineage/species in Greenland, the affinity of these parasite assemblages with those in North America, the lack of overlap with Icelandic and Norwegian communities, and the absence of diplostomids in Faroese salmonids indicate limited bird-mediated dispersal of diplostomids across the North Atlantic. We propose that a ‘short transmission window’ at high latitudes during the breeding season, combined with specific avian migration routes, may limit long-distance dispersal and promote regional isolation between Nearctic and Palearctic diplostomid communities across the North Atlantic.

Screen-based reading has frequently been associated with lower comprehension than reading on paper, a phenomenon known as screen inferiority. Although cognitive capacity, linguistic knowledge, and digital usage vary across learners, it remains underexplored how individual-difference factors shape medium effects in second-language (L2) reading among adolescents. We investigated how reading on paper versus tablets affects L2 reading comprehension among 240 Korean eighth graders learning English and whether medium effects are moderated by working memory, L2 proficiency, and tablet experience. Participants completed comprehension tests under both conditions, along with a reading span task, a proficiency test, and a tablet-usage questionnaire. Results showed that participants performed worse on tablets than on paper; these gaps were larger among learners with higher spans and proficiency. In contrast, tablet experience did not interact with reading medium. These findings underscore the need for explicit instruction to support effective L2 reading on digital devices, even for high-performing learners.

Investment law is an oft-overlooked, yet vital, component of the ideological apparatus upholding the fossil-fuel industry. Despite mounting pressure for divestment, large institutional investors continue to fund fossil-fuel firms, in part, by citing the prudent-person principle (PPP), which requires trustees to act as “prudent persons.” To grasp the rationales underpinning contemporary capitalism, it is fruitful to illuminate the PPP’s history. The genealogy of the principle’s emergence in 1830 and subsequent connections to the Chicago school between 1952 and 1994, reveals its tendency to reinforce predominant market actors and expand financial-market logic. Chicago economists and lawyers disseminated the neoliberal financial theories of modern portfolio theory and the efficient-market hypothesis while tying them to the PPP and promoting its US enactment. During the 1990s and 2000s, regulators and pension fund managers adopted these efforts and successfully lobbied to expand the EU’s financial market through a similar PPP regulation, further consolidating the PPP’s influence in the contemporary financial sphere.

We present the second data release (DR2) of Spectra and Polarisation in Cutouts of Extragalactic sources from RACS (SPICE-RACS). SPICE-RACS DR2 is derived from the third low-band epoch of the Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey (RACS-low3) and covers the entire sky from the South celestial pole up to a declination of $+{49}^{\circ}$; approximately 87.5% of the celestial sphere. We produce ‘cutout’ spectral cubes in Stokes I, Q, U around 4 million radio sources and extract spectra towards 5 million radio components. Across our observed band of 799.5–1 087.5 MHz we find an rms noise of $\sim\!{200}\,\unicode{x03BC}\text{Jy}/\text{PSF}$, an angular resolution of $\sim\!{15}^{\prime\prime}$, and residual wide-field instrumental polarisation on the order of 0.1%. After de-duplication, our polarisation catalogue contains the detection of $2.5\times10^5$ ($3.4\times10^5$) Faraday rotation measures (RM) for components with a linearly polarised signal above $8\sigma$ ($6\sigma$). This places SPICE-RACS DR2 as the largest single RM catalogue ever produced by nearly an order of magnitude; the number of RMs in our catalogue alone is $\sim\!{5}$ times larger than every previous RM catalogue combined. Our resulting RM grid has an areal density of $6.7 \substack{+1.8\\-1.7}\,\mathrm{deg}^{-2}$, providing an effective ‘resolution’ of $\sim\!{23}^{\prime}$, and reveals striking features across the sky. The broad-band RMs have a median uncertainty of $\sim\!{2}\mathrm{rad}\,\mathrm{m}^{-2}$, and include complexity metrics and information from the time domain. The breadth and quality of the SPICE-RACS DR2 dataset will enable a new generation of RM science. Further, SPICE-RACS will provide an ideal reference for forthcoming deep polarisation surveys such as the ASKAP POSSUM survey. All of our data products are publicly available on the CSIRO Data Access Portal (DAP) and the CSIRO ASKAP Science Data Archive (CASDA).

Throughout the precolonial era, monumentality in the midcontinent was expressed through a variety of earthen constructions from circular mounds to animal effigies to geometric shapes to depictions of spiritual beings. Here, we describe an example of megalithic monumentality located at the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin, USA. This archaeological feature uses a mix of the natural geology alongside anthropogenic efforts to depict the Menominee legend of a battle between the Thunderbird and Serpent. The encountering and documentation of this megalith were the result of ongoing collaborative efforts that brought together archaeological techniques with Menominee knowledge sets. We describe the megalith and draw on the only other known megalithic effigy from Wisconsin, a serpent effigy, located in ancestral Menominee territory and documented more than a century ago. Together, these two megalithic features illustrate currently unrecognized monumental construction efforts in the midcontinent and highlight the value and importance of collaborative approaches to documenting and preserving archaeological heritage.

I develop in this paper some epistemological themes inspired by the writings of Mohandas K. Gandhi. Gandhi famously thought the method of nonviolence he’d pioneered—satyagraha, as he called it—a powerful means of effecting change in the political domain, but he also thought it a way of life, applicable in the warp and woof of everyday, interpersonal interactions. I will investigate here what it might look like to practice the way of Gandhian nonviolence in one’s everyday epistemic interactions. There will be connections between this sort of epistemic practice and some main themes in contemporary work on intellectual humility.