Recent US policy changes, including abortion bans and reductions to social safety nets, have intensified structural pressures on reproductive decision-making. Research has examined interpersonal and clinical forms of reproductive coercion, but legal and policy forces remain undertheorized. This commentary introduces and defines sociolegal reproductive coercion as occurring when individuals feel pressured or constrained in their reproductive choices due to legal and policy landscapes that are reinforced and reified by social and cultural forces. These pressures operate collectively to make certain options, such as long-acting reversible contraception, feel obligatory even when undesired, by amplifying risks associated with pregnancy, abortion, and parenting. Sociolegal coercion interacts with clinical practice, shaping provider counseling and narrowing perceived options, and disproportionately affects marginalized communities already subject to systemic inequities. We situate this construct within existing scholarship on constrained choice and social control, propose a conceptual framework, and outline implications for research, clinical care, and policy. Recognizing sociolegal reproductive coercion is critical for understanding how health policy and sociocultural dynamics jointly constrain autonomy and for informing reforms that advance reproductive justice in a post-Roe landscape.

Not-reached (dropout) and omitted (intermittent missingness) behaviors are often inevitable in timed computerized tests. These missingness behaviors may be related to the subject’s latent traits, the difficulty of the item, or even the unobserved item response itself. In order to better understand the underlying test-taking behaviors, a Bayesian hierarchical framework is adopted to jointly model the item response, the item response time, the not-reached, and the omitted behaviors. For missing data, a sequential multinomial model is developed for the not-reached behavior, and a conditional model is proposed for the omitted behavior conditioning on the not-reached behavior. A decomposed logarithm of the pseudo marginal likelihood (LPML) is then developed to assess the fit of the missing data models. It can be further used to quantify the importance of modeling item response and response time jointly versus individually in identifying the missing data mechanism. The empirical performance of the proposed models and the model assessment criterion are examined through extensive simulations. The proposed methodology is further applied to analyze the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 Test.

During Czechoslovakia’s first decade, the state promoted public health reform and sponsored research surveys on healthcare and social welfare resources. Czechoslovak government leaders and healthcare professionals embraced a rhetoric of American progressivism and de-Austrianization to portray their country as forward-looking, democratic, and rational. Through the work of President Tomáš G. Masaryk’s daughter, Alice G. Masaryková, Czechoslovakia developed partnerships with American organizations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Young Women’s Christian Association, which provided funding, training, and personnel. A major undertaking of the early 1920s was the Social Survey of Greater Prague, a massive study based on American sociology methods, which helped determine state priorities in health and welfare. Yet, this strategy of partnering with American professionals and organizations obscured key continuities with the Habsburg era. Despite the influence of American health professionals in Czechoslovakia, the new state’s public health system developed within a centralized bureaucratic and legal structure inherited from Austria. As the capital of a centralized state, Prague replaced and even exceeded Vienna’s former role as the arbiter of health and welfare policies and practices.

Literature about the discovery of the leprosy bacterium Mycobacterium leprae usually mentions the Hansen-Neisser controversy. It is an established narrative that Neisser tried to present himself as the discoverer of the leprosy bacterium. However, Neisser’s first publication on Mycobacterium leprae refers explicitly to Hansen’s original discovery. How did the notion of Neisser trying to claim Hansen’s discovery emerge? A thorough source-critical examination of Hansen’s and Neisser’s scientific and popular publications between 1874 and 1897 as well as of the literature dealing with the so-called controversy brought interesting new results. The notion that Neisser tried to steal Hansen’s discovery is based on a misreading of Neisser’s publications by Hansen’s biographer. But Neisser tried indeed to bypass Hansen in trying to prove that Mycobacterium leprae was the contagion causing leprosy. The competition between the two scientists resulted in a personal enmity. This study shows how the history of modern science is prone to myths and underlines the importance of source criticism when dealing with established narratives.

Indonesia has ranked as the world’s most generous nation for seven consecutive years, yet the processes through which personal values shape humanitarian intention giving remain insufficiently understood. Drawing on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), Norm Activation and Value–Belief–Norm (NAM/VBN) frameworks, warm-glow, and signaling/trust theories, this study examined donation intentions in Aceh—the nation’s most charitable province—using a moderated value–resources model that integrated socioeconomic position, altruistic, social, and emotional values and organizational reputation, with religiosity as a moderating factor. Data from 400 adult respondents were analyzed via Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), revealing that altruistic, social, and emotional values, together with organizational reputation, significantly influenced humanitarian giving, whereas socioeconomic status showed no effect. Religiosity amplified these relationships, acting as a moral compass that transformed personal values into durable commitments to donate. These findings indicate that, in Aceh, moral and religious principles rather than material wealth primarily drive sustained philanthropic behavior. Based on these results, humanitarian organizations can improve fundraising effectiveness by segmenting donors according to religiosity and value orientation, using faith-consistent messaging, and providing transparent, real-time reporting of fund utilization. By uniting individual, organizational, and religious dimensions in a theory-informed framework, the study advances understanding of value-based humanitarian engagement in Muslim-majority contexts. The results, therefore, offer operational guidance for Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), policymakers, and faith-based institutions seeking to strengthen donor trust, engagement, and long-term participation.

On August 7, 1942, Allied forces began their first offensive action against Japan on the island of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. Over the next few years, thousands of Solomon Islanders assisted Allied soldiers as construction workers, local scouts, and messengers. Based on oral histories and soldiers’ memoirs, this article argues that these islander war workers not only played a crucial role in the ultimate Allied success in the Pacific war but were also part of a longer history of foreigners in the service of the U.S. empire. In fact, recruiting and managing non-combat workers of color became an important source of U.S. military and imperial power during World War II. Despite pervasive racism and demeaning work conditions, Solomon Islanders managed to create new opportunities both for themselves and for their home societies.

This study addresses the challenges of performing narratological analysis on low-resource languages, with a focus on Old Church Slavonic. Understanding the roles, interactions, and networks of persons is central to narrative analysis, yet such investigation is hindered by the scarcity of experts and the limited availability of annotated resources. We explore both established natural language processing (NLP) methods and large language models (LLMs) for analyzing pre-modern Slavic Lives of Saints, including several Slavic versions, the Greek original, and an English translation. Pre-modern Slavic texts pose particular difficulties due to rich morphology, orthographic variation, and limited standardization, which complicate the application of both traditional NLP tools and off-the-shelf LLMs. Through experiments using annotated and non-annotated ground truth data, we demonstrate that while conventional NLP methods often reach their limits on such low-resource, highly variable texts, LLMs provide complementary capabilities that can support narratological insights, especially in tracking persons and their interactions, albeit with important caveats regarding accuracy and coverage.

Several U.S. states expanded vote-by-mail in 2020, while other states made no changes. This uneven expansion occurred in a highly racialized policy context. We explore how the United States’ history of race-based disenfranchisement, racialized elite rhetoric, and the uneven policy expansion interact to shape voting methods and trust in government across racial groups. Using data from three national surveys and coarsened exact matching, we compare the behavior of voters across adopting and non-adopting states. We find that adopting no-excuse absentee voting and universal vote-by-mail in 2020 is associated with increased mail voting across racial groups, despite Black Americans’ historically rooted mistrust in new forms of voting. We also find that expanding mail voting was associated with increases in government trust in some cases. While prior work finds modest short-term increases in turnout, vote-by-mail may also affect perceptions of government, which can help close racial turnout gaps in the long term.

To explore the perceptions of, and barriers to, grey literature searching among medical researchers and journal editors. A cross-sectional survey of authors of systematic reviews and the editors of the journals in which the reviews were published. Systematic reviews indexed in MEDLINE, spanning a 4-week period in 2019. We excluded protocols. We asked whether the reviewers were performing a grey literature search. If they were, we asked about their approach to the grey literature search and relevant guidance. If they were not, we asked about their rationale for this. We elucidated understandings of grey literature from all reviewers. The survey to journal editors asked about their perceptions towards grey literature. A consecutive sample of 1,229 systematic reviews was included. A total of 155 authors responded, and a total of 46 journal editors responded. The majority (57%) of reviewers reported performing a grey literature search. However, there was no consensus on types of grey literature items or sources among the reviewers. The most frequent barrier to grey literature searches was concern about the quality/detail of the grey literature items. Editors expressed negative perceptions towards grey literature, rooted in suspicion of its quality. While many reviewers reported performing a grey literature search, there was a diverse understanding of the term grey literature. Concerns about the quality of grey literature exist among reviewers and editors alike. There is a marked discrepancy between the best-practice guidelines and the gatekeepers of journals.

We present recent results on high-power guiding and laser wakefield acceleration in the ELectron Beam Accelerator (ELBA) beamline at ELI Beamlines, using the L3-HAPLS laser system (13 J, 30 fs, 0.2 Hz). By employing self-waveguiding in a 20 cm plasma channel in helium, we achieved stable acceleration of electron beams to energies of approximately 5 GeV. A novel all-reflective optical setup, including an off-axis reflective axicon, enabled efficient acceleration at 0.2 Hz and guiding at repetition rates up to 3.3 Hz. This compact single laser, single-compressor implementation of plasma channels for electron acceleration stabilizes electron pointing and enhances energy gain without requiring modifications to the laser system, paving the way for broader adoption of the technology across user facilities.

Extreme environments are places where sustaining life is considered challenging by human standards due to harmful environmental conditions. In the last decades, these kinds of environments have awakened the interest of planetary scientists due to their similar conditions to extraplanetary bodies. Most of the research done in extreme environments has been conducted in the North American and Eurasian regions, while in Latin America only the most outstanding places have been explored, even though the region hosts numerous and varied extreme environments. The primary aim of this review is to present an extensive catalogue of around 300 extreme environments in Latin America. We classify them into deserts and semi-arid environments, geothermal and hydrothermal environments, glaciers and high mountain environments and hypersaline environments. Our review found that a great number of those environments remain unexplored or partially studied; however, many of those environments show multi-extreme features, becoming suitable to conduct astrobiology experiments such as biosignatures detection or planetary analogue missions. This review brings to current and future researchers a summary of the environmental properties of each place and their respective locations, to promote astrobiology and planetary science research in Latin America.

Taiwan’s partisan politics have long centered on Cross-Strait relations with Mainland China, yet over the past decade, cultural and moral issues—such as same-sex marriage, the death penalty, and surrogacy—have introduced new axes of division and intensified polarization. This article traces how civic groups and party actors during the same-sex marriage campaign and the Sunflower Movement framed and mobilized moral debates, and it uses two decades of Taiwan Social Change Survey data to show the rise of issue partisanship around civil rights and family values in the mid-2010s. These cultural cleavages persisted through 2020 without displacing Cross-Strait relations as the dominant divide. Taiwan’s case illustrates how cultural polarization can develop within a geopolitically constrained democracy and East Asian context, contributing to comparative debates on culture wars and partisan polarization.

Used farm machinery values play a critical role in farm management and in assessing the financial health of the agricultural sector. However, the heterogeneity of machines, particularly regarding embedded technology and usage, complicates efforts to isolate the factors that influence prices. This study leverages a detailed dataset from Tractor Zoom to estimate the effects of machine characteristics and market conditions on auction prices of used 300 to 450 horsepower tractors. We find a nonlinear relationship between machine usage and price: tractors with fewer than 500 hours of use lose approximately $118 per additional hour, while tractors with more than 10,000 hours show only a weakly significant decline of about $2 per hour. We also document pronounced seasonal patterns, with lower prices during the Midwest crop-growing season. These findings provide new evidence on machinery valuation and offer updated insights to inform farmers’ machinery replacement decisions.

Mental health conditions represent a major global burden. However, minimally adequate treatment coverage for common mental disorders remains critically low. Task-sharing solutions using non-specialist providers are promising, but successful implementation requires understanding local culture and context. This study explored facilitators and barriers to implementing non-specialist mental health interventions in Senegal. We conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with 53 stakeholders, including social protection program facilitators, beneficiaries and community members. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Four primary themes were constructed: (1) implementation barriers, (2) facilitating factors, (3) health-seeking beliefs and practices and (4) community recommendations. Key barriers include strong preferences for family-based problem-solving, stigma and financial constraints. Facilitators included recognition of the therapeutic benefit of interpersonal dialogue, empathetic values towards helping those with mental health conditions and community enthusiasm for mental health interventions. Culturally adapted interventions need to navigate cultural norms and leverage existing community strengths in interpersonal support. The coexistence of stigma and empathy, alongside both resistance and openness to non-specialist services, highlights a dynamic tension that not only challenges implementation but also presents an opportunity for change. These findings contribute essential formative evidence for designing effective, sustainable non-specialist mental health interventions in Senegal and the sub-Saharan African region.

The European electricity power grid is transitioning toward renewable energy sources, characterized by an increasing share of offshoreand onshore wind and solar power. However, the weather dependency of these energy sources poses a challenge to grid stability, with so-called Dunkelflaute events—periods of low wind and solar power generation—being of particular concern due to their potential to cause electricity supply shortages. In this study, we investigate the impact of these events on the German electricity production in the years and decades to come. For this purpose, we adapt a recently developed generative deep learning framework to downscale climate simulations from the CMIP6 ensemble. We first compare their statistics to the historical record taken from ERA5 data. Next, we use these downscaled simulations to assess plausible future occurrences of Dunkelflaute events in Germany under the optimistic low (SSP2–4.5) and high (SSP5–8.5) emission scenarios. Our analysis indicates that both the frequency and duration of Dunkelflaute events in Germany in the ensemble mean are projected to remain largely unchanged compared to the historical period. This suggests that, under the considered climate scenarios, the associated risk is expected to remain stable throughout the century.

Depression commonly coexists with cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) in older adults, worsening functional outcomes, medication adherence and survival. In Nigeria, nationally representative data on depression among older adults with CVD are scarce. This study aimed to determine the prevalence of depression, identify key factors associated with depression and examine psychosocial and clinical correlates among older Nigerians receiving CVD care. A hospital-based cross-sectional study was conducted (March 2024–July 2025) across 12 tertiary hospitals representing Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones. A total of 918 adults aged ≥60 years with confirmed CVD were recruited using multistage sampling. Depression and functional status were assessed using a culturally adapted Depression Assessment Questionnaire incorporating the GDS-15 and Lawton IADL Scale. Data were analyzed using chi-square tests and multivariate logistic regression. Depressive symptoms were prevalent in 89.7% of participants. Independent factors associated with depression included age ≥ 70 years (AOR = 2.55), Christian affiliation (AOR = 4.65), alcohol use (AOR = 2.98), CVD duration ≥5 years (AOR = 5.68), comorbidities (AOR = 2.49) and medication dependence (AOR = 9.10). Living with family was protective. Sex, education, residence, smoking and functional status were not significant factors associated with depression. Depression is highly prevalent among older Nigerians with CVD. Integrating routine depression screening and psychosocial support into cardiovascular care is urgently needed.

Large-scale assessment data typically include numerous variables, often affected by missing values. Motivated by the challenges arising in this framework, we extend the knockoffs method for selecting predictors to settings with missing values. Our proposal relies on a preliminary phase of multiple imputation (MI) of missing values. Each imputed dataset is then processed using a suitable knockoff filter. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method through simulation studies, showing satisfactory results consistent with a recently advocated cutting-edge method. We apply the method to large-scale assessment data collected by INVALSI on test scores of Italian students in grade 5, including many background variables. This case study is challenging, as most predictors have unordered categories, a setting not considered by traditional knockoff methods. In addition, some of the key predictors are affected by missing values. Our proposal to implement the knockoffs method within an MI framework is feasible, flexible, and effective.

Long-term trophectoderm (TE) cell culture provides a powerful model to investigate placenta-specific factors to better understand mechanisms relevant to pregnancy establishment and placental development. However, current TE culture systems rely on costly commercial media and extracellular matrix (ECM) components, which limit their scalability and accessibility. This study evaluated cost-effective alternatives to established conditions by testing modified DMEM/F-12 and a biphasic TE culture system as substitutes for commercial Advanced DMEM/F-12 and for continuous TE culture, and by assessing 0.1% gelatine as an ECM alternative to collagen IV. Trophectoderm outgrowths cultured on collagen IV or gelatine did not differ in attachment timing (P = 0.78) or in expression of placental and differentiation markers PLAC8 (P = 0.78), GATA2 (P = 0.18), and PAG10 (P = 0.39). Similarly, blastocysts cultured in commercial Advanced DMEM/F-12 or base DMEM/F-12 exhibited no differences in attachment day (P = 0.98), TE growth area from days 10–20 (P > 0.05), or expression of PLAC8 (P = 0.35) and PAG10 (P = 0.08), although PAG7 differed between treatments (P < 0.05). Embryos cultured in continuous TE attached later (P = 0.01) than those cultured in TE media, but no differences were observed in TE growth area or expression of PLAC8, PAG7, or PAG10 (P > 0.05). Collectively, these results indicate that affordable media formulations and gelatine-coated cultureware support TE attachment, proliferation, and differentiation. This cost-effective culture framework enables broader application of TE models and supports extended studies of trophoblast function, placental signalling, and early conceptus development.