Progress in reducing global malaria incidence has slowed in recent years, demonstrating the need for new vector control tools to complement existing interventions in reaching global malaria control targets. Spatial repellents (SRs) can reduce pathogen transmission by altering the behaviors of Anopheles spp. mosquito vectors. A recent cluster-randomized control trial in western Kenya found that SRs reduced first-time infections by 33.4% in a highly-endemic setting with substantial insecticide resistance and high coverage of insecticide treated nets. We modeled the likely impact of the SR intervention in this setting under different deployment strategies, with the goal of identifying the best overall and per-product strategies. Continuous monthly SR deployment with 100% coverage caused the greatest (45.1%) reduction in infections versus no SR, although some seasonal approaches averted more infections per SR product. Six months of SR use starting in October caused a 36.4% reduction in infections and eight months starting in September reduced infections by 44.7%. This study identified optimum and efficient SR use strategies and highlights the importance of SR protection during periods of low and increasing transmission. When resources are limited, the coverage, deployment strategy, and timing of SR deployment all play a key role in maximizing product impact.

In 2022, Giorgia Meloni (Fratelli d’Italia-FdI) and Marine Le Pen (Rassemblement National-RN) achieved historically significant electoral results, cementing their position as female leaders of the populist radical right. This paper examines how these figures perform and frame gender-related issues, which is still an understudied topic. Through a qualitative discourse analysis of their TikTok and Twitter content, we argue that Meloni and Le Pen exemplify strongwomen, which we innovatively construct as an extension of the notion of strongmen, through the incorporation of hegemonic femininity, and stereotypical feminine elements. Indeed, Meloni and Le Pen balance stereotypical femininity—advocating for women’s rights and exhibiting a nurturing attitude—with the strongmen traits of toughness and assertiveness, displayed towards the promotion of the family and natality, restrictive reproductive rights, and racial and gender hierarchies typical of hegemonic femininity. Notably, Meloni and Le Pen, while being classified as strongwomen, show varying degrees of hostility towards abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, and differing levels of conflation of gender with nativism.

In this article we argue that relational work between the state and civil society is crucial for social change, focusing on the relational work between activist bureaucrats and citizen representatives in the development of Bogotá’s gender and care policies. While existing literature shows that social movement embeddedness within the state helps explain why some governments achieve more egalitarian outcomes, this structural concept lacks micro-level foundations. Highlighting the role of relational work fills this gap. Drawing on three years of ethnographic research—including 54 semi-structured interviews and over 300 hours of observation—we show that the intense relational practices of citizen representatives and activist bureaucrats (materialized in open and effective participation, joint and coordinated advocacy, and translation of bureaucratic jargon to common language) was crucial to advance feminist agendas. This study contributes to an understanding of how everyday relational practices between state actors and citizens can generate policy change.

A global shift towards decentralisation includes the spread of territorial autonomy for separatist minorities and Indigenous sovereignty movements. These trends and accompanying scholarship have evolved in isolation, to their mutual detriment. This paper has two goals. First, it identifies Indigenous autonomy as one form of territorial autonomy and one manifestation of Indigenous sovereignty. Indigenous autonomy resembles mainstream autonomy, but has distinct origins, powers, leadership, and scale. Second, while existing research focuses on Latin America and the Arctic, this paper looks to Asia. I identify four sets of cases: Existing autonomous regions not always seen as Indigenous, Indigenous subregions nested within autonomous regions, special subnational units rarely seen as autonomous or Indigenous, and recognised Indigenous peoples lacking territorial government. A clearer sense of Indigenous autonomy has the potential to deliver renewed, albeit partial sovereignty to Asia’s tribal peoples.

We study a random graph model with preferential edge attachment and detachment through the embedding into a generalized Yule model. We show that the in-degree distribution of a vertex chosen uniformly at random follows a power law in the supercritical regime but has an exponential decay in the subcritical. We provide the corresponding asymptotics. In the critical regime we observe an intermediate decay. The regimes are clearly defined in terms of parameter ranges.

Second language (L2) processing places substantial demands on working memory (WM). Because WM training programs are time-consuming and effortful, the present study examined whether transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), a region associated with WM, can facilitate L2 comprehension. Intermediate L2 learners of Spanish were randomly assigned to an active or sham group. Both groups completed pre- and posttests of listening and reading comprehension; between tests, the treatment group received two 20-minute sessions of 2.0 mA anodal tDCS over the left DLPFC, whereas the sham group received only brief stimulation. Results showed no improvement in reading comprehension, but the treatment group exhibited significant gains in listening comprehension from pre- to posttest and relative to the sham group. These findings suggest that anodal tDCS over the left DLPFC facilitates L2 listening comprehension under the present experimental conditions, offering a potential neuromodulatory aid for adult learners.

Building on Nozick’s (2001) work, I provided a novel invariantist account of scientific objectivity: the Counterfactual Independence Account (Reutlinger 2024). Despite its virtues, this account needs to be articulated in a more nuanced manner – regarding its scope, content, and consequences. My goal in this paper is to develop such a more articulated and improved version of the Counterfactual Independence Account in two steps. First, I will discuss two instructive dissonances between Nozick’s version of invariantism and the Counterfactual Independence Account – dissonances concerning what concept of objectivity is addressed and how the key notion of invariance is characterized. Second, I will develop an argument for the claim that (epistemic) objectivity plays a productive role in scientific inference or, more precisely, that objective evidence is, in a sense to be specified, more evidence.

Many people around the globe, including in Europe, have been recently affected by various global crises. In the last 20 years, Europe has experienced the financial crisis, the refugee crisis, COVID-19, increasing extreme weather events associated with climate change, and the breakout of a new war between Russia and Ukraine. This exacerbation of crises has brought increasing scholarly attention to the ‘politics of crises.’ Scholars in political science have examined the politics of crises across a range of domains, such as energy (e.g. Aklin and Urpelainen, 2013; Hancock and Allison, 2020; Bayer et al., 2025), finance (e.g. Mosley and Singer, 2009; Walter, 2013; Pepinsky, 2014; Copelovitch and Singer, 2020), pandemics (e.g. Worsnop, 2017; Youde, 2018), and migration (e.g. Rudolph, 2003; Hopkins, 2010).

The permanent closure of large marine areas is often regarded as an effective strategy for conserving marine biodiversity. However, implementing large permanent closures can be difficult in many small-scale fisheries systems, where communities depend heavily on marine resources for their livelihoods and food security, and where issues of equity and access must be carefully considered. Around the world, many coastal communities instead rely on temporary closures – areas that open and close over time – to balance ecological recovery with ongoing use. Despite their prevalence and potential, these dynamic approaches remain conceptually underdeveloped compared to permanent marine-protected areas. This article calls for a reevaluation of marine management’s prevailing focus on space by bringing time to the forefront of analysis. We introduce a framework that distinguishes two key temporal dimensions – duration and cyclicity – to clarify how different temporal designs shape ecological, social and governance outcomes. Within this framework, cyclicity captures how closures and openings alternate over time, including the relative balance between periods of access and closure (i.e., the access ratio). Drawing on diverse examples where temporary management is implemented, this framework lays the groundwork for developing more formal theory and comparative evidence about how temporal strategies can align ecological recovery with livelihood dynamics in resource-dependent systems.

This study focuses on a multidimensional evaluation of China’s artificial intelligence (AI) governance policies by employing the Policy Modeling Consistency (PMC) index model to systematically analyze the performance and coherence of these policies in terms of goal setting, technological attributes, risk governance, and socio-cultural institutional embedding. The study conceptualizes AI as a novel form of cultural and social technology rather than merely an intelligent agent. This perspective highlights AI’s role in reorganizing and restructuring information flow, cultural expression, and institutional operations. By constructing a PMC evaluation framework that integrates technological, risk, and socio-cultural dimensions, this research reveals both strengths and weaknesses in the current policy system, particularly significant gaps in embedding socio-cultural institutions. Combining theoretical and empirical analyses, the PMC model offers an effective framework for understanding the institutional dynamics of AI governance in China. The findings enrich theoretical perspectives on AI governance and provide empirical support for policy formulation.

SHAME and GUILT refer to compositional emotional experiences, some aspects of which are shared across linguacultures, while others are shaped by socialisation. This study combines questionnaire and corpus data to explore how people talk about and possibly experience SHAME and GUILT in English and Japanese contexts. First, keyword analysis is used to identify English and Japanese expressions frequently used in SHAME- and GUILT-inducing situations. These keywords are treated as potential markers of SHAME and GUILT. The focus then shifts to emotion co-occurrence. Assuming that emotions rarely occur in isolation, I examine patterns of lexical co-occurrence in two general corpora of Japanese and English, using some of the previously identified keywords as nodes. The findings suggest that FEAR and SADNESS have a dominant role in the emotional landscapes of SHAME and GUILT in both languages. In the English data, we find references to ANGER and DISGUST, while in the Japanese data, GUILT is more strongly associated with the semantic sphere of ‘responsibility’. Methodologically, the study exemplifies an innovative approach to operationalising emotion through terms that emerge from the data itself and is more generally relevant to scholars interested in questions that revolve around (relative) ineffability and linguacultural variation.

Developing food-waste-based hydroponic fertilizers (FWBHF) addresses growing urban sprawl and the growing adoption of urban horticulture, improving nutrient cycling and sustainability in our food production systems. This study profiles plant-available nutrients across a range of food products, divided into three main groups (protein-rich, carbohydrate-rich, and fiber-rich) after exposure to anaerobic and aerobic fermentation and vermicompost techniques. Leachates were analyzed for inorganic nutrients and heavy metals to compare with a conventional synthetic hydroponic fertilizer. Key findings identified deficiencies in nitrogen and calcium across all treatments. Nutrient availability in the protein-rich group (beef and chicken) was consistent across both aerobic and anaerobic treatments, with the exception of aerobic fermentation producing a significantly higher level of phosphorus and potassium compared to the control. This was contradicted by the high variation between treatments in the carbohydrate-rich group (pasta and bread), which often produced contradicting nutrient outcomes in the same treatment group, this was attributed to differences in wheat varieties and value-added processes affecting the inorganic nutrient availability in this group. The vermicompost leachate, vermiliquer, contained statistically similar levels of potassium, phosphorus, magnesium, and zinc when compared to the control, but was significantly deficient in nitrogen, calcium, and sulfur. Despite this, it was identified as a potential ‘all-in-one’ solution, being low in heavy metals, elemental toxicity, and odorless when compared to fermentation treatments. These results aim to assist future developments in FWBHF by profiling inorganic nutrient availability across food groups when exposed to vermicomposting and aerobic/anaerobic fermentation techniques.

Museums often speak with a single, confident voice, but this authority was built by many hands. In this article, I show how natural history museums in India and China relied on wide networks of collectors, hunters, taxidermists, and local intermediaries to build and sustain their collections, even though credit and curatorial power were far from being equally shared. In British India, museum collecting grew alongside the infrastructure of East India Company rule. In China, early museums developed in urban, treaty-port settings, where Chinese assistants to foreign missionaries collected, prepared, and exhibited specimens. I call this dynamic asymmetric co-curation—the making of museum knowledge through shared and often cross-cultural labor, while the authority to classify, display, publish, and claim that knowledge remained unevenly held. By tracing this process across India and China, the article offers asymmetric co-curation as a way to understand how museums transform unequal labor into public authority.

We examined whether diet quality is associated with executive function (EF) in middle-aged women with a family history of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and whether this is moderated by a genetic AD risk factor, APOE-ε4 allele carriage. Data from 102 low-physically active women (AgeMean = 56.9 ± 5.8 years) were analyzed cross-sectionally. Diet quality was quantified via the Healthy Eating Index-2020 (HEI-2020). Overall EF and sub-domains (working memory [WM], exogenous inhibitory control [ICex], endogenous inhibitory control [ICen], and cognitive flexibility) were measured using neurocognitive assessments. APOE-ε4 carriage was determined from saliva. Moderated regression models tested HEI-2020*APOE-ε4 interactions; significant (p < .05) and near-significant (p < .10) interactions were followed by simple slope analyses. Main effects of HEI-2020 predicted overall EF (p = .033) and WM (p = .003). Interaction effects of HEI-2020*APOE-ε4 for EF and WM (p’s = .056–.038) were such that diet quality was positively associated with overall EF (p = .003) and WM (p = .005) in noncarriers only. Main effects of select HEI-2020 sub-scores were observed for overall EF and sub-domains (p’s = .001–.047). Interaction effects of total vegetables*APOE-ε4 on overall EF and ICex, saturated fatty acids*APOE-ε4 on overall EF and WM, and added sugars*APOE-ε4 on ICen (p’s = .007–.074) were such that sub-scores were positively associated with cognition in noncarriers only (p’s < .05). Diet quality and select sub-scores were positively associated with EF in middle-aged women without APOE-ε4 only. Future work should explore if APOE-ε4 carriers require a threshold of diet quality to yield cognitive benefits.

Extraterritorial jurisdiction inherently tests the boundary between sovereign governance and international cooperation. It hovers between unilateralism and cosmopolitan conceptions of obligation. Evan Criddle has argued that extraterritorial laws violate the right to self-determination if those laws subject a people to “uninvited foreign rule.”1 In turn, however, the right to self-determination permits extraterritorial lawmaking in service of shared legal norms. This is because “there is no conflict between the right to self-determination and the extraterritorial extension of national laws based on universally accepted norms, such as those enshrined in international human rights law.”2 Criddle also accepts that active nationality jurisdiction is less likely to offend self-determination.3 Assuming Criddle is correct, criminal laws with extraterritorial scope that address climate change are likely to fall into the category of “laws based on universally accepted norms.” This is particularly so given the existential risks posed to all life on Earth by a warming planet, and the now widely recognized human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. Climate change also creates national security risks, and the right of a nation state to defend its national security is not incompatible with self-determination. While there is no fixed definition of national security under international law, and domestic definitions vary according to context, the essence of national security is the right and obligation of a nation state to defend its existence, its citizens, and its values. Even narrow conceptions of national security now accommodate climate change due to the breadth and depth of its existential consequences.

This article challenges the widespread framing of minority rights and democracy as opposing principles within the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). It argues that both share a common foundation in political equality and autonomy, and that their protection is historically, theoretically and practically intertwined. It argues that the ECtHR”s practice should recognize this connection more clearly and more openly, rather than treating democracy as a rationale for deference that undermines minority rights. Drawing on comparative constitutional law, particularly representation-reinforcement theory, it argues that the ECtHR might adjust and rethink some of its concepts to that purpose, in particular its procedural approach and the concept of vulnerability, and it might experiment with communication to better safeguard structurally disadvantaged groups while at the same time strengthening and respecting democratic processes. By situating minority protection within a broader democratic project, the paper proposes ways for the ECtHR to strengthen legitimacy, counter democratic backsliding and resist far-right efforts to weaponize ‘democracy’ against politically vulnerable groups.

A multi-technique approach has been proposed to characterize weathering phases and their relationships with the primary rhyolitic paragenesis at Piloni di Torniella (Tuscany, Italy) hydrothermal kaolin mine. Analyses were carried out on geological samples and on material extracted from the mine for assessment of the ceramic application of the raw material. A multi-technique protocol was applied, involving both bulk techniques (e.g. X-ray powder diffraction) and microanalytical techniques (e.g. petrographic analysis, scanning electron microscopy with energy-dispersive spectrometry and micro-Raman spectroscopy), including imaging applications. Some secondary phases, such as alunite, halloysite and α-cristobalite, were identified and characterized. Highlighting the presence of such phases is important for the mine license holder and traders, who should manage the specific properties of the final commercial mine products for ceramic applications. Furthermore, a better understanding of the alteration mechanism of biotite at the study site was achieved; in fact, where the alteration process is complete, both kaolinite and halloysite have been identified as intergrown phases in biotite pseudomorphs. This suggests the presence of a lower-temperature fluid (<100°C) percolating in some areas of the mine, probably representing a different alteration stage than that which led to the kaolinization.