Human intervention studies are gaining traction and recognition in the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) field. Since DOHaD intervention studies will most frequently use complex public health interventions, collaborations across science and social science disciplines are critical for obtaining and interpreting DOHaD evidence in ways that matter for policy recommendation. This chapter explores the application of biosocial collaboration in a DOHaD intervention trial, namely Bukhali, the Healthy Life Trajectories Initiative (HeLTI) South Africa randomised controlled trial. Bukhali evaluates a complex intervention initiated prior to conception, through pregnancy, and into early childhood, with the primary aim of addressing childhood obesity. As part of the first trials assessing the potential of preconception interventions to shape intergenerational health, the trial is significant to DOHaD science. Bukhali has adopted a pragmatic approach, allowing for ongoing adaptation to new knowledge as it arises and testing not only the primary hypothesis but also undertaking process evaluation analyses. This requires a multidisciplinary process that serves as a case study of how biosocial collaboration can enhance DOHaD-inspired intervention research.

This chapter follows individual voter flows using panel data for Social Democrats in Germany (1984–2018), the United Kingdom (1991–2018), and Switzerland (1999–2018). To the best of our knowledge, this chapter provides the first long-running study of individual voting transitions among social democratic voters. We aim at a better understanding of contemporary electoral choices of initial social democratic voters and of the individual-level characteristics that predict either staying with or leaving Social Democrats. We find that Social Democrats manage to keep some of their core but a lot of support gets demobilized or moves on to a various electoral competitors, especially to more progressive options (Greens, LibDem, Green Liberal Party). In all three countries under consideration, Social Democrats struggle to attract new voters. This tendency is slightly less pronounced in Switzerland, which we think is at least partly due to the particularly progressive programmatic offer of the Swiss SP. By contrast, the German SPD loses to everyone and gains almost nothing. We also find evidence for an aging core group of social democratic voters, highlighting a certain risk of going extinct: The key factor correlated with “leaving” is the generational cohort Social Democrats belong to. By contrast, often theorized and emphasized factors such as occupation, income, or unemployment show much smaller correlations with former Social Democrats' decision to leave the party behind.

The principle of relativity requires that no interaction can propagate instantly. Gravitational waves (GW) must exist, propagating with the same speed as light. The specific characters of GW are predicted by Einstein’s general relativity (GR). After decades of efforts to develop detectors, on 11 February 2016, the LIGO and Virgo Collaboration published the discovery of a GW.

The elements of GR relevant for GW production, propagation and detection. How the GR field, which is the dimensionless metric tensor, differs from the other fundamental fields, which have physical dimensions. The instruments and the discovery. After the first observation, dozens of gravitational signals have been detected, the vast majority from merging black holes and one, on 17 August 2017, from the merger of neutron stars. In this case, electromagnetic signals are expected, and have been detected, providing unique information to astrophysics and to fundamental physics as well. The measurement of the speed of the GW and the establishment of a bound on the mass of the graviton.

Many contemporary scholars have described the gendered dimensions of DOHaD research and their consequences, particularly for women and mothers. In this chapter, we further these discussions by highlighting the need for a critical gendered analysis of DOHaD. This approach requires attending to both gender and racism as relations of power that are mutually constituted and shape the practices and unequal impacts of DOHaD. Examining DOHaD through a feminist and critical race lens, we provide an overview of feminist science studies of gender and DOHaD, introduce the intersections of biopolitics, medicalisation, and the politics of reproduction, and discuss the impacts of DOHaD studies that provide little attention to racism. Our analysis draws attention to how gender and racism unequally survey and manage the living conditions and behaviours of certain bodies, highlights the disparate impacts of DOHaD research, and reflects the need for what we call critical gender analyses of DOHaD and other postgenomic sciences. We conclude by considering the effects of DOHaD research on Black, Brown, and Indigenous people and the need for ongoing attention to the impacts of gender and racism in DOHaD science today.

The 2021 State of the World’s Children Report (UNICEF 2021) makes it clear that mental health is a human right and a global good. Research in a variety of fields, including DOHaD, suggests that infancy is a critical period in both brain formation and the formation of positive relational networks that are the grounds for development and adult well-being. Strong evidence that mental health is adversely affected by poor socio-economic conditions suggests the need for carefully directing resources towards structural conditions. At the same time, positive attachment relations within caregiver–child dyads can offset some environmental insults and futures of ill health. The field of infant mental health (IMH) pays attention to the formation of these relationships in the earliest periods of life. This chapter describes efforts to localise universalist models of infant well-being in South Africa, a low-resource setting. These include a new masters’ level training programme and diagnostic tools that can help to sensitise health practitioners to infant well-being. The discussion offers one route to reframing Euro-American models for local contexts while retaining the insights that strong relational capacities can generate resilience in difficult contexts. Its emphasis on historical context, local meaning, and social environment is instructive for DOHaD scholarship.

Most concepts serve temporary and partial purposes in an activity system. We might call them action-level concepts. But there are also concepts that become durable orientation bases for the entire activity, or even for coalitions of multiple activity systems. We might call those activity-level concepts. Cultural-historical activity theory offers a set of foundational ideas for the study and practical fostering of concept formation in the wild, particularly in the current phase of the fourth generation of activity theory. The emerging fourth generation of activity theory zooms on heterogenous activity coalitions aimed at resolving wicked societal problems, or runaway objects, and creating sustainable and equitable alternatives to capitalism. The foundational ideas may be condensed in two principles, namely the principle of double stimulation and the principle of ascending from the abstract to the concrete. The principle of double stimulation incorporates volition and agency as integral aspects into our understanding of concept formation in the wild. The principle of ascending from the abstract to the concrete leads to the distinction between empirical and theoretical concepts, to the idea of a germ cell as the starting point and core of a theoretical concept, and to the theory of expansive learning.

Bioethnography, the combination of ethnographic observation and biochemical sampling, is a synthetic method for understanding environmental and bodily interactions. DOHaD researchers can use bioethnographically derived data to examine the complex processes that shape health and disease. Using examples from a longitudinal birth cohort study in Mexico City, the authors describe how bioethnography, which begins with an open-ended observational stage, can counteract some of the limitations of DOHaD research, which can be reductionist and universalising. DOHaD researchers often focus on the behaviour of individuals, especially mothers, instead of on the political-economic processes and environments that contribute to poor health and inequality. In addition, DOHaD researchers, who often reside in high-resource environments, tend to universalise their own experience rather than identify relevant research questions for people living in different circumstances. To combat reductionist and universalising tendencies, bioethnography allows researchers to develop inductively derived hypotheses and then test these in specific contexts. Validating and testing theories derived from bioethnographic methods in the same population where they were observed can fill critical gaps in DOHaD research that seeks to understand the complex relationship between environments and disease over the lifecourse.

Why do voters accede to or abandon social democratic parties in the most recent decades? This chapter analyzes the reasons that motivate voters go choose among parties. Are spatial considerations coming into play, that is, do voters move to parties that are more consistent with their preferences than those they abandon? This chapter tests this argument with European Election Study data from 1999 to 2019 focusing on those respondents who report a different party preference at the time of a survey compared to their past vote recall (“vote switchers”). The data reveal a robust relationship between switching direction and voter preferences, bearing out rational spatial theories of voting. For Social Democrats’ strategy considerations, however, this brings to light an inconvenient fact: Voters abandon their parties for very different reasons heading to a plurality of alternatives. Consequently, no unified party strategy can stop the vote hemorrhage on all fronts of competition.

The term ‘intergenerational trauma’ describes how trauma experienced in one generation can reverberate in the lives of descendants. The concept has been variously defined in relation to other disciplines and has overlaps with cognate concepts, including historical trauma, transgenerational trauma, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In this chapter, we provide a conceptual overview of intergenerational trauma in the interdisciplinary field of DOHaD research. Intergenerational trauma is of interest to many disciplines and frameworks in part because it lends itself to ’biosocial’ understandings of violence and discriminatory social contexts as physiologically embodied. Yet, intergenerational trauma also presents challenges for scientific study due to the difficulties inherent in stabilising it as a scientific object. Given the growing public interest in intergenerational trauma and its routinised clinical uptake for the care of marginalised communities, this chapter also considers a range of important questions related to policy translation, biopolitics, and social justice.

Momentum is building for epidemiological research undertaken with, for, and by Indigenous peoples. This work often follows a strength-based approach, emphasising the inherent assets and resilience of Indigenous communities and the role of culture as the foundation of our individual, social, ecological, and spiritual health and well-being. This chapter provides an overview of current discourses around centring Indigenous ontologies (ways of being), epistemologies (ways of knowing), and axiologies (ways of doing), also known as Indigenous ‘lifeworlds’, in epidemiology with a particular focus on Indigenous Australian (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) perspectives. Mayi Kuwayu: The National Study of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Wellbeing is used as a key example illustrating how epidemiological research may be led, owned, and governed by Indigenous peoples to produce rigorous and meaningful data that reflect Indigenous lifeworlds, known as ‘good data’. Applying an Indigenous lens to epidemiological research generates valuable lessons for the development of the DOHaD lifecourse framework and future studies that seek to address holistic determinants of intergenerational health and well-being.

Pundits have attributed the frequency of party leadership churns as a factor in the decline of the German Social Democrats. But have leadership changes and their frequency contributed to the German SPD’s and other social democratic parties’ declines across parliamentary systems? More generally, when and why do political parties change their leaders, and what are the electoral consequences of these changes? Using original party leadership data from ten parliamentary democracies across three decades, we show that while factors that affect leader durations in office vary across countries/regions, there are no unique factors influencing social democratic leaders’ tenure. In addition, while leadership changes and the frequency of leadership changes have some minor impact on polling results, they do not influence election results, and once again, their effects do not vary across party families. Our results have important implications for the party organizations and electoral outcomes literatures and call into question the recent argument about the increasing presidentialization of politics in parliamentary systems.

Oscillations between members of flavoured, electrically neutral meson pairs and the CP violation are phenomena strictly connected with the mixing. However, CP is more general, having been observed also in the decay of charged mesons.

CP violation was first observed in the neutral K system. We see the states of definite strangeness, those of definite CP and those with definite mass and lifetime. The oscillation between the former states, the mathematical expressions and the experimental evidence.

The oscillations and CP violation in the B0 system, and the beautiful experimental results obtained at dedicated high-luminosity electron–positron colliders, the ‘beauty factories’. Beauty physics at the dedicated experiment LHCb at LHC, in particular for the B0, that is not accessible to beauty factories. Examples of CP violation in B0. The recent discovery of CP violation in the charm sector.

How the many different measurements can be put together to test the SM with the unitary triangle.

Communicating research findings is a storytelling practice. The stories we tell as researchers are important to how the publics understand research findings and how research circulates in society. This is especially true for fields that have important social, political, or policy implications, such as the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD). In this chapter, we introduce the term ‘narrative choreographies’ to describe how researchers, clinicians, science journalists, and other actors embed DOHaD knowledge claims as part of larger scientific, social, and political narratives. Using examples from our own research, we show how DOHaD narratives can inadvertently pathologise and stigmatise marginalised people, such as low-income mothers and obese mothers. In order to combat this potentiality, we advocate for deliberately choreographing DOHaD narratives to address structural inequality and advocate for social justice and health equity. At the end of the chapter, we offer concrete recommendations for DOHaD researchers who are interested in reflecting on and workshopping their own narrative choreographies to better support the healthy development of parents, children, and communities.