Branched broomrape was presumed to have been eradicated in California in the 1980s but has reemerged as a threat to the processing tomato industry. Although chemicals for suppressing branched broomrape have been used in the past few years as an emergency response, limited research has been conducted on cultural practices that could be incorporated into integrated pest management programs. Three laboratory-scale studies were conducted in 2024 and 2025 to evaluate the responses of branched broomrape seeds to nitrogen fertilization and flooding. The fertilizer study evaluated the effects of diammonium hydrogen phosphate, calcium nitrate tetrahydrate, potassium chloride, potassium nitrate, ammonium nitrate, ammonium sulfate, and urea on branched broomrape seed germination and radicle elongation at various concentrations (0, 1.56, 3.125, 6.25, 12.5, 25, and 50 mM) and at various seed germination stages (preconditioning, germination stimulation, and radicle elongation). The flooding studies evaluated the effects of flooding duration (3, 7, 14, 28, 42, and 56 d) and temperature (10 C and 28 C) on branched broomrape seed germination and the number of seed attachments to the tomato host plant. Results from the fertilizer study showed that fertilizers containing diammonium hydrogen phosphate, ammonium nitrate, and urea inhibited branched broomrape seed germination and radicle elongation, and this effect was observed only when fertilizers were applied during the germination stimulation stage. In the flooding studies, branched broomrape seed germination dropped to 20% after 14 d of flooding at 28 C. Flooding at both 10 C and 28 C reduced broomrape seed attachment to tomato plants by 50% within 7 d in the greenhouse study. These laboratory-scale data suggest that fertilization management and flooding have the potential to control branched broomrape infestation as cultural management strategies, but the results should be validated at the field scale in future experiments.

Flexible meta-regression is an important facet of biomedical research. These methods employ basis expansions to model the relationship between exposure and outcome. Examples include splines, fractional polynomial, and local regression models. The extent to which flexible meta-regression has been appropriately employed and reported in the past has not been studied. This study aims to provide an overview of flexible meta-regression for researchers as well as summarize the practical use and reporting of these methods in the epidemiological literature. A systematic literature search of EMBASE, MEDLINE, and the Cochrane Library identified systematic reviews published between 2011 and 2021 which employed flexible meta-regression methods. Data on study characteristics were extracted and validated by two independent researchers. Given the lack of guidance on reporting standards for flexible meta-regression, we proposed a novel 9-item checklist. This was used to assess reporting quality in included studies. A total of $N=346$ eligible studies were identified and $N=86$ were randomly sampled for full data extraction and analysis. The number of reviews using flexible regression methods increased over time. Spline models were the most frequently employed class of methods. There were no apparent trends in the use of the three methods over country of affiliation, number of authors, or clinical context. In over two thirds of reviews sampled, methods were found to have not been reported consistently. Further work is needed to improve the reporting of these methods to ensure research transparency and reproducibility.

In 2022, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals decided the case Oglala Sioux Tribe v. United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Like similar cases, the plaintiffs, the Oglala Sioux, challenged a US federal agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, over their granting of a permit to an industrial project, in this case a uranium mining project. The Oglala Sioux argued that the agency’s environmental impact statement (EIS) was incomplete and inadequate. The court rejected the Oglala Sioux’s arguments, decided that the EIS was sufficient, and ruled in favor of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Critically, even though the agency did not follow EIS procedures completely, the court applied several exemptions allowing the EIS to stand. As in other EIS cases in recent years, Oglala Sioux highlights the limitations of environmental law in the protection of US communities’ local environments and cultural heritage.

We study the uniform computational content of Ramsey’s theorem using both Weihrauch reducibility and a new variant of Weihrauch reducibility, where the functions in the reduction are required to be total. In the latter setting, we show that the strength of Ramsey’s theorem varies significantly depending on how one represents its solutions, for example, using characteristic functions or using enumerations. Some of our results extend beyond variants of Ramsey’s theorem. In particular, we show that $\mathsf {RT}^{2}_{2}$ where solutions are represented using characteristic functions is not totally Weihrauch reducible to any computational problem whose solutions are represented using enumerations. Next, we study the computational problems $\mathsf {RT}^{n}_{\infty }$ which take as input a colouring of n-tuples which has some infinite homogeneous set and asks for any such set. The problem $\mathsf {RT}^{1}_{\infty }$ is fairly well-studied, as it is Weihrauch equivalent to the cluster point problem on $\mathbb {N}$. Our main result shows that $\mathsf {RT}^{1}_{\infty }$ is not Weihrauch reducible to $\mathsf {RT}^{2}_{\mathbb {N}}$, strengthening a result of Soldà and Valenti. We also show that the jump of $\mathsf {RT}^{1}_{\infty }$ is Weihrauch equivalent to $\mathsf {SRT}^{2}_{\infty }$.

The unique statutory provision that is section 423 of the Insolvency Act 1986,1 offering redress to creditors that have been, or potentially will be, prejudiced by fraudulent transactions entered into by the debtor, has recently been the subject of interpretation by the Supreme Court in El-Husseiny v Invest Bank.2 This asset recovery provision is not strictly confined to insolvency situations.3 The core issue before the Supreme Court was whether the term ‘transaction’ in section 423 applied to a situation where a debtor procures a company which he owns to transfer a valuable asset for no consideration or at an undervalue which diminishes or eliminates the value of his shares in the company, or whether the provision required the debtor to personally own and transfer the asset in question.4 This was a preliminary matter that was found against the debtor in the Court of Appeal which enabled the substantive trial to proceed. While the substantive trial decided that other elements in section 423 were not met, the Supreme Court acknowledged that the parties did not seek to stop it from rendering its judgment, and that in any case the issue was of sufficient importance for it to proceed.5

This paper reports the results of an Australian qualitative study investigating the return of raw genomic data to research study participants. Increasing numbers of participants request access to their raw genomic data, although the legal position in relation to whether data should be returned lacks clarity, particularly in Australia. Interviews were conducted with stakeholders involved in two research studies where participants have undergone whole genome sequencing: ZERO Childhood Cancer, and the Australian Pancreatic Cancer Genome Initiative. Four major themes were identified: whether raw genomic data should be returned; reasons for seeking access; risks in returning data; and processes for return. Our findings indicate that health professionals, scientists, bioinformaticians, patients and patient advocates overwhelmingly support the return of raw data upon request, with ethical imperatives providing a strong basis for this support. Many stakeholders went on to stress the importance of adequate support for participants to ensure risks associated with the return of raw genomic data are minimized, including the provision of explanation and, where necessary, counselling and clinical advice. Our findings provide a basis for arguing that adequate resourcing must be built into research projects from the outset, given expected increases in participant demand for genomic data.

This case note examines the landmark judgement in Case C-115/24 (DrSmile), the CJEU’s first ruling specifically addressing cross-border telemedicine. The dispute centred on a hybrid orthodontic model where physical dental acts in Austria were coupled with remote monitoring and treatment planning from Germany. The Court’s decision creates a significant “digital scalpel,” legally slicing the medical act into discrete components. By interpreting Article 3(d) of Directive 2011/24/EU strictly, the Court ruled that only services provided exclusively at a distance qualify as telemedicine. This triggers a legal fiction that anchors regulatory oversight in the provider’s country-of-origin, favouring market integration. However, any physical component remains tethered to the destination state’s regulations. While providing much-needed judicial scaffolding, the author argues that this formalist division creates a clinical-legal gap. By severing indivisible therapeutic processes, the ruling risks creating liability vacuums and professional fragmentation.

Parties in all European countries at least partially rely on private donations to finance their activities, but gender gaps in donations remain underexplored. Investigating gaps in donation frequencies and amounts, as well as which parties are likely to receive donations from women, is crucial, as parties represent the interests of donors more than the interests of non-donors, opening an avenue of potential underrepresentation of women’s interests. This study addresses this gap, leveraging data from party finance reports from Italy, the UK, and Finland over time to investigate gender gaps in donation amounts, frequencies, and recipient parties. The results highlight that while gender gaps in donation frequency exist, these differences in how often women and men donate to parties do not directly translate into how much money they donate. Rather, there is large variation in donation amounts over time and across countries. Particularly in Finland, a highly gender-equal country, differences in donation amounts are marginal. Finally, the expectation that green and left parties are most likely to receive donations from women does not hold across all cases – while in all three countries green parties are most likely to receive donations from women, right-wing parties are not the least likely to receive donations from women in Finland and Italy.

Virtue epistemologists have analyzed individual intellectual virtues such as intellectual humility and perseverance, but intellectual generosity remains relatively under-explored. This may be because intellectual generosity seems simpler and less impactful than other virtues, but in this paper, I argue it is more complex and significant than it might first appear. More precisely, I use case studies from mathematics to show that sharing intellectual goods, the core activity of intellectual generosity, is often complicated and challenging, especially when sharing with large groups. Further, I show that intellectual generosity can have important and long-lasting beneficial consequences for entire research areas, both in terms of generating new discoveries and improving the intellectual climate. Additionally, I suggest a practical way for agents to cultivate intellectual generosity and show that there is a connection between intellectual generosity and intellectual courage in the context of mathematics.

Childhood adversity impairs well-being, yet psychological resilience may buffer its impact. Using resting-state fMRI in 94 rural Chinese children (ages 10–14), we examined whether psychological resilience protects brain network connectivity from adversity and its relevance to psychological well-being. Psychological resilience significantly moderated the impact of abuse, but not neglect, on limbic connectivity. Low-resilience children exposed to abuse showed heightened limbic-somatomotor and limbic-ventral attention connectivity, which predicted greater somatization and depression at baseline and more severe levels of anxiety six months later. These associations were absent in high-resilience children. Our findings reveal that psychological resilience specifically shields against the neurotoxic effects of abuse by modulating networks involved in emotion regulation, salience, and sensorimotor processing. Targeted interventions should consider adversity dimensions and psychological resilience capacity to mitigate long-term mental health risks.

We report the discovery of a new long-period radio transient, ASKAP J142431.2–612611, with a 36 min period, identified in the Australian SKA Pathfinder Evolutionary Map of the Universe survey. We detected pulsed emission from ASKAP J142431.2–612611 over a period of eight days during follow-up observations with the Australia Telescope Compact Array, after which the source appears to have switched off. No optical or near-infrared counterpart is detected in archival surveys or in targeted Gemini South FLAMINGOS-2 observations. During its active state, the source exhibits a stable pulse profile with fractional polarisation consistent with 100%, evolving from elliptically to linearly polarised and tracing a well-defined great-circle trajectory on the Poincaré sphere. We show that this behaviour is consistent with fully linearly polarised intrinsic emission modified by propagation through a linearly polarised birefringent medium. This discovery expands the known population of long-period transients and highlights the intermittent nature of their activity. We discuss the implications for proposed models of long-period transients and outline future observations needed to constrain the origin of their intermittency and polarisation properties.

Since the mid-twentieth century, foreign-physician migration to the United States has challenged mainstream medicine. Facing simultaneous demands to address physician shortages and concerns about the quality of foreign-trained doctors, regulators struggled to create effective systems for evaluating international credentials. This essay traces three pivotal episodes reflecting the evolution of this regulatory landscape: the postwar incorporation of Jewish émigré doctors, the rise of Asian physician migration following the Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and the contemporary role of global regulatory entities. Over the past sixty years, as physician migration from the global South has increased, the regulatory apparatuses to facilitate this mobility have grown in scale, size and number. The multiplication of these supranational bureaucracies and institutions is not a value-neutral endeavour. It reflects racialized assumptions coded through ‘competence’ discourses, geopolitical investments and a bias toward global North educational models, and raises broader questions about global health care equity. Despite these overlapping and sometimes redundant global-governance structures, however, foreign-physician integration continues to raise questions about trust, equivalency and the variability of human capital.