This article engages health humanities scholarship that approaches biomedical knowledge as cultural and pedagogical, and that treats patient experience, clinician reports, medical images, and other quotidian patient and/or health-provider texts as interpretive sites. This work fleshes out the intelligibility of patient voices as constitutive of a cartography of presence. Drawing on queer theory and the onco-humanities, I argue that clinical cancer settings operate through choreographies that both organize bodies and feature tactical refusals. Autobiographical experience rendered as pathography—often dismissed as anecdotal—is approached here as research evidence and as animating practices of resistance within regimes of biomedical authority. Methodologically, the article juxtaposes close readings of two sets of artifacts: (1) Tactic, the first widely broadcast cancer-focused educational television series (produced by the American Cancer Society and NBC) and (2) a hauntological archive summoned from my 2025 to 2026 Stage IV lung cancer documents; a constellation of clinical and autobiographical traces—fieldnotes, clinical care-provider reports, and medical images. Read together, these materials reveal how cancer—reimagined as an “epidemic of signification”—has long functioned as a pedagogical project aimed at managing uncertainty, disciplining affect, and sustaining optimism as a mode of governance. By placing a contemporary patient-curated archive in dialogue with mid-century public cancer pedagogy, the article traces queer pedagogical practices that rewrite the normative from cancer’s margins. It advances the concept of tactical choreographies to name how cancer patients inhabit, reroute, and on occasion, refuse the pedagogical demands of medicine under conditions of institutional invisibility, necropolitical abjection, and state violence.

How is an off-the-books exchange governed under strong formal regulation? This article answers this question through a mechanism-based reanalysis of 216 interviews conducted in Amsterdam and Rotterdam in 1997–1999, focusing on 46 traceable cases of undeclared or informally compensated activity. Treating the corpus as a historical welfare-state baseline, not evidence of current prevalence, this article shows that informal exchange was governed at the transaction level through three linked mechanisms. Moral norms distinguished necessity-based side activities from abusive undeclared work; trust relations filtered access to low-visibility opportunities; and community-based enforcement stabilised repeated exchange through reputation, reciprocity, monitoring, and selective exclusion. These mechanisms mattered where formal work was blocked, weakly rewarding, administratively risky, or incompatible with care obligations. This article contributes to institutional economics by specifying how informal institutions shape the legitimacy, accessibility, durability, scale, and visibility of exchange under strong formal regulation.

In the early postcolonial period, Eastern Nigerian women increasingly entered the sex industry because of poverty, the Civil War, and limited employment opportunities. Drawing on archival records, oral histories, and newspapers, I examine local and transnational sex work among Eastern Nigerian women, highlighting their strategic decisions—from migrating to lucrative urban centers to developing social skills to attract clients. By framing sex work as labor rather than moral decadence, I challenge dominant moralistic discourses, positioning sex workers as economic agents who accumulated wealth and invested in businesses and property.

The COVID-19 pandemic unfolded alongside an unprecedented ‘infodemic’ that reshaped public engagement with science, health, and authority. This study examines how online infodemics translated into collective resistance and influenced population health through political mobilisation. Using structural equation models across six European countries, I conceptualise resistance as a latent construct – captured by residential mobility and protests opposing vaccines, lockdowns, and public health measures linked to populist radical right (PRR) movements – acting as a behavioural bridge between digital information environments and epidemic outcomes. The findings reveal a robust infodemic–resistance–epidemic pathway: greater exposure to infodemic content consistently predicts stronger opposition to non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and vaccination. This effect is strongest in Germany and Italy, where PRR networks amplified narratives of ‘elite overreach’ and ‘freedom under threat’, transforming online discontent into organised mobilisation. In other countries, resistance appears weaker and more pandemic-specific. By integrating informational, political, and epidemiological processes, the analysis shows how epidemics can evolve into politicised collective behaviour that undermines compliance and sustains transmission. The results highlight populist mobilisation as a key amplifier of epidemic risk and suggest that effective responses must rebuild trust, depoliticise health communication, and address structural sources of grievance.

The Gas Dynamic Trap (GDT) facility at the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics continues experimental studies in support of the Gas-Dynamic Multiple-Mirror Trap (GDMT) project – a prospective neutron source and thermonuclear reactor concept based on open-ended magnetic confinement. During the 2024–2025 upgrade campaign, key engineering systems and diagnostic suites were substantially modernised to address critical physics and technology challenges for the GDMT development. Three key research and development directions were pursued. First, a conductive wall stabilisation system was designed to suppress magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) instabilities at high plasma beta. Second, a new second-harmonic X-mode electron cyclotron resonance heating (ECRH) system operating at 54.5 GHz with 0.8 MW power was commissioned. Preliminary experiments demonstrated increased electron temperature compared with non-ECRH heated plasmas. Third, proof-of-principle experiments on bulk plasma fuelling using a Marshall gun injector were successfully performed, supporting further development towards a high-repetition-rate injector. These results provide essential experimental validation and technological groundwork for the GDMT project, demonstrating progress towards high-beta plasma operation, efficient heating schemes and particle balance control in open magnetic traps.

Most studies on modern state formation assume that enhanced state capacity and institutionalization increase clarity and predictability. We argue that this view fails to consider ambiguity politics—a form of governance in which formal and informal institutions are inconsistent, unclear, or ill-defined, thereby creating space for multiple interpretations, practices, and procedures. Combining inductive insights from research in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and deductive engagement with different strands of literature, we developed a typology that distinguishes mechanisms of ambiguity politics according to the level at which the ambiguation takes place (elite/administrative) and the intentionality of it (strategic/accidental). Although ambiguity politics is particularly visible in conflict and postconflict settings, we show that it is not inevitably a temporary stage toward greater order and predictability but rather a persistent feature of governance in various contexts.

This study investigates the nuanced challenges of fine-grained word sense disambiguation (WSD) tasks with regular polysemy detection (RPD) of the named entity, focusing on evaluating the trade-offs between encoder and decoder-based model performance and computational efficiency. The datasets, including Chinese Wordnet 2.0 (CWN) as sense inventory, the Social Media Corpus (PTT) for user-generated content, and the Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus (ASBC) for formal linguistic data, were chosen to provide a diverse and representative framework for evaluating both common nouns and proper nouns with regular polysemy in Taiwan Mandarin. This analysis evaluated ten encoder- and decoder-based models, assessing their performance on two tasks. The encoder-based models demonstrate comparable accuracy to the decoder-based models on WSD tasks (77.5% vs. 78.5%), and similarly strong performance in RPD tasks (84.2% vs. 83.8%). On a large-scale all-words WSD task, the encoder model not only outperformed the decoder model but also generated substantially lower carbon emissions – an eight-fold reduction. These differences underscore the trade-offs between model architecture and task-specific performance, highlighting the necessity for balancing performance and energy efficiency in the design and application of language models, advocating for sustainable and eco-friendly practices in natural language processing development.

Speakers of pitch-accent languages, such as Japanese, are often overly sensitive to pitch cues, which may affect second language (L2) suprasegmental learning. The present study examined whether sensitivity to non-pitch cues (i.e., second formant, duration and amplitude rise time) is associated with more accurate perception of L2 English word stress following phonetic training. A total of 115 Japanese English-as-a-foreign-language learners were assessed on pitch and non-pitch dimensions of auditory processing and assigned to experimental or control groups. The experimental groups received perceptual phonetic training on English word stress, cued not only by pitch, but also by non-pitch information (duration, intensity and vowel quality). Results showed that brief training significantly enhanced prosodic perception of trained words. Importantly, auditory processing exhibited dimension-specific effects: more precise processing of non-pitch cues was associated with superior perception and greater training gains, whereas pitch sensitivity was unrelated to learning outcomes.

BIOARC (Bioregional Mineralisation with Agricultural Resources for Construction) explores how agricultural residues and regional microbial resources can be combined to create low-impact construction materials rooted in local ecological contexts. Working across four European bioregions, the project investigates wheat in Poland, sunflower in France, hops in Germany, and rice in Italy as feedstocks for the development of construction boards, insulation materials, acoustic panels and partition wall systems.

The project combines agricultural by-products with biomineralisation processes, in which microorganisms induce the formation of calcium carbonate minerals that act as natural binders within plant-based composites. Alongside biomass resources, BIOARC has isolated mineralising bacterial strains from limestone-rich and calcium-rich environments within each participating region, establishing a bioregional approach in which both material feedstocks and microbial agents originate from the same local context.

The demonstration presents a biomineralised construction prototypes alongside the agricultural residues, bacterial cultures and microscopy imagery that underpin its development. Together, these artefacts communicate the transformation from regional agricultural by-products and environmental microbial communities into construction-oriented materials. By linking agriculture, biotechnology and construction, BIOARC demonstrates how place-based material systems can support circular value chains, reduce reliance on conventional mineral-intensive products, and contribute to more resilient and regenerative approaches to the built environment.

The Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) framework recognizes that preconception exposures influence offspring health, yet paternal nutrition has received little attention compared to maternal diet. To better understand this emerging area, we undertook a systematic evidence mapping exercise in accordance with the PRISMA 2020 guidelines to develop an evidence gap map (EGM). Seventy-five studies examining paternal preconception diet and offspring health outcomes were identified, including sixty animal experiments and fifteen human observational studies. Animal studies consistently showed that paternal high-fat or low-protein diets impaired offspring metabolism, and that targeted dietary interventions such as omega-3 fatty acids or methyl donors, mitigated these effects. Human studies were fewer, narrower in scope, and largely focused on famine exposure or single food group intakes, with no randomized trials and only half of the studies accounting for maternal diet. Offspring outcomes were limited to birthweight and adiposity, with little investigation of cardiometabolic, neurodevelopmental, mental health, or other chronic disease–related outcomes. The current evidence therefore suggests that paternal diet may influence offspring health, but highlights major methodological and conceptual gaps in human research. By mapping the scope and limitations of the existing evidence, this study provides a roadmap for future Paternal Origins of Health and Disease research, and underscores the need to develop paternal-inclusive preconception nutrition strategies and public health interventions to improve intergenerational health.

The importance of the third sector has been recognized by academia and policymakers. However, little is known about the geography of third sector associations. This issue is of central importance as the third sector is increasingly expected to play a role in solving local societal challenges. Here, the geography of the third sector is investigated at the municipal level in Finland using quantitative data and statistical analyses. The results show that socio-economically less advantageous and rural regions host the most third sector associations per capita. This creates a conundrum. On the one hand, there are abundant numbers of third sector associations in rural regions that could step in to address local societal challenges. On the other hand, rural regions are among the most poorly locally resourced, casting doubt on the future of their operations.