While many phonological variables can be captured by single acoustic correlates, others must be described along several dimensions. This paper examines multiple properties of creaky voice to facilitate an understanding of phonatory variation. We evaluate the ideology that creak is most prevalent among young women using replicable, automated methods on a large, socially diverse sample. We take three approaches to quantifying creak: binary classification, measures of glottal constriction, and periodicity. Results indicate that creak originates in phrase-final position and spreads to earlier positions characterized by high glottal constriction, regardless of gender. Gender differences arise phrase-finally, where young men (like women) are less periodic but show decreased glottal constriction (in contrast to women). Overall, even though young women creak the most, young men and older women produce comparable degrees of glottal constriction. Each approach is differently informative, and analyses that rely on just one could yield partial understandings.

Agrivoltaics offers a strategy to expand renewable energy production while preserving agricultural land use through lease agreements between solar utilities and landowners. It can also provide farmers with additional income. Despite these advantages, adoption remains limited. This study examines farmers’ willingness to lease and estimates how additional information on this strategy affects farmers’ willingness to lease land for agrivoltaics. Using survey data from 177 farmers, we find that while 25% are willing to lease their land, 25% are indifferent. We find that additional information significantly increases the likelihood of farmers expressing willingness to lease by 4.1 percentage points.

Chronic Q fever can present as culture-negative aortic endograft infection with osteomyelitis. Plasma microbial cell-free DNA sequencing unexpectedly detected Coxiella burnetii before serology, prompting exposure reassessment and targeted therapy. Later operative cultures grew Eikenella corrodens, underscoring the need to pair molecular results with serology and source-control microbiology.

Care ethicists often critique the history of Western philosophy for its tendency, at least within certain movements, to conceive of human nature in terms of independence. They argue that this has led some to disregard dependence’s role in human life, which in turn has led them to sideline care as basic to morality. In this paper, I complicate this narrative by examining the thought of the eighteenth-century philosopher Christian August Crusius. Like care ethicists, Crusius constructs his moral philosophy upon a model of human nature that places dependence at the center, arguing that moral obligations follow from dependence upon God. Following an examination of dependence in both theories, I discuss various points of overlap and distinction between them and identify ways in which both care ethicists and Crusius scholars stand to benefit from engaging with one another. In view of this analysis, I conclude that Crusius helps to bridge the gap between care ethics and the history of philosophy and should therefore be understood as a strong ally of care ethics with respect to their shared commitment to the dependence model of human nature and their efforts to construct a moral theory rooted therein.

The genre of Islamic juristic opinions (fatāwā or nawāzil) provides a fascinating window into how Muslim jurists—both medieval and modern—have applied theoretical sharī‘a guidelines to actual problems facing their communities. Because Muslim practitioners have historically sought fatāwā (sing. fatwā) on matters ranging from the legal to the ethical to the ritual, these juristic opinions allow us to trace not only the concerns of believers in different Muslim societies over time, but also the moral imagination of the jurists as they grappled with those concerns. In this article, I present a close reading of a fatwā by the late modern Moroccan jurist al-Mahdī b. Muḥammad al-Wazzānī (1849–19231) on the moral value of polygamy versus monogamy. I show how his legal opinion can be fruitfully read in the context of larger debates across the Middle East and Muslim societies over marriage law and ethics. I suggest that al-Wazzānī’s fatwā represents a traditionalist reaction to the wave of modernist-feminist religious reform that was sweeping through the region at the turn of and into the twentieth century, and that sought to discredit the traditional Islamic practice of polygamy in favor of monogamy.

While the textual corpus of Ebla is well-known for its assortment of incantations in Sumerian and one or more Semitic languages, the evidence put forth to identify the language of discrete spells from Ebla has not been subject to reexamination for many years. Due to the esoteric content of incantations as well as their specialized vocabulary and unconventional orthography, it is often difficult to recognize the language of a given composition or discern its subject matter. This contribution reevaluates the Semitic classification of the tenth incantation on TM 75.G.2459 (ARET 5, 19), reanalyzes its language as syllabic Sumerian, and explores its content in light of other early Mesopotamian incantations.

The year 2024 marked a turning point for EU delict law, as the EU adopted a new Product Liability Directive to replace its 1985 predecessor. The new Directive, however, does more than modernise product liability law. It also reflects a deeper shift in how the EU uses private law as a tool of governance. While doctrinal commentary has largely treated the Directive as a remedial private-law instrument, this article argues that it also pursues regulatory functions. In that sense, it reflects the increasingly blurring boundary between private and public law, a development already noted in European legal scholarship. This article contributes to that debate in three ways. First, it shows how that regulatory dimension is expressed through the Directive’s objectives, namely the internal market, innovation, the circular economy and private enforcement. Second, it argues that those objectives are not relevant in every dispute, but only where particular provisions giving effect to them are applied. Third, it proposes a three-step test for determining when regulatory objectives are relevant in a given dispute and examines the consequences that follow: where this is so, those provisions should be interpreted differently from classic private-law provisions, through a forward-looking reading that advances those regulatory aims.

The “affirmative consent model” for sexual acts requires that participants give explicit, unambiguous, informed, and enthusiastic consent. This model is a valuable harm reduction practice but, as a pre-requisite for erotic action, it is sometimes over-applied. As a result, people can feel unduly constrained and forgo valuable activities. I introduce a case study, the Pagan fertility festival of Beltane, which customarily includes a representation of sexual congress, such as dancing, gyrating, or thrusting. I argue that to permissibly perform these erotic ritual acts, the protagonists—in this case, the May Queen and Oak King—do not need explicit affirmative consent from everyone gathered in the magic circle or temple. Indeed employing the widespread operative model of affirmative consent can be disadvantageous because it would require participants to know the ritual’s details beforehand. In making this case, I highlight the costs of predictability, choreography, and prior communication in erotic rituals. And I argue that, owing to distinctive features of community-orientated and religious erotics, theorists shouldn’t simply extend interpersonal sexual ethics to explain these contexts. Instead, to countenance Paganism as an important social form, theorists must look to the ethics of institutions. Like churches and educational establishments, erotic ritual is social infrastructure.

Healthcare sustainability is a multidisciplinary field that seeks to mitigate healthcare’s environmental consequences. Antimicrobial stewardship and healthcare sustainability both aim to reduce wasteful resource use while maximizing patient safety. However, a strong partnership between antimicrobial stewardship and healthcare sustainability has yet to develop. To facilitate environmentally sustainable decision-making in antimicrobial prescribing, we developed a web-based calculator (EcoRxChoice (www.ecorxchoice.com)) where users can enter different antimicrobial regimens and compare how much plastic waste each regimen creates. This work was supported in part by the Society of Infectious Diseases Pharmacists (SIDP), reflecting SIDP’s commitment to strengthening sustainability as a practical extension of antimicrobial stewardship and empowering infectious disease pharmacists to make measurable environmental impact through evidence-based care.

Do field experimental interventions produce durable changes in gender representation? We examine the persistence of experimental treatment effects in Karpowitz, Monson, and Preece (2017), where a single letter from Republican Party leaders significantly increased women’s election to state delegate positions. Two years later, differences between treatment and control conditions evaporated. Treated precincts largely retained earlier experimental gains, but the treatment effect size was smaller because of increases in the control condition. We examine four possible explanations for this pattern. First, we find considerable evidence of an incumbency effect among women in one treatment condition. Second, increases in women’s representation in the control condition appear to be related in part to larger turnout during the 2016 election cycle. Finally, we find little evidence of lasting attitude changes about women’s representation and few traces of post-experimental spillover.

Since the publication of the original Vancouver Obsessional Compulsive Inventory (VOCI), a large body of evidence demonstrating the prevalence and importance of newer symptom domains in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) (e.g. mental contamination, reassurance seeking, and symmetry, ordering, and arranging) has emerged. Although the VOCI has excellent psychometric properties, these developments point to the need for a revision. The present study aimed to revise the VOCI to provide a brief and up-to-date measure to assess OCD symptomatology. The development of the VOCI-2 is discussed, along with information about its reliability, validity and factor structure. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted on data obtained from 1108 non-clinical participants who completed the VOCI, the Vancouver Obsessional Compulsive Inventory – Mental Contamination Scale (VOCI-MC), the Symmetry Ordering and Arranging Questionnaire (SOAQ), and the Covert and Overt Reassurance Seeking Inventory (CORSI) to arrive at an updated measure, and clinical samples (primary diagnosis of OCD, n=59; anxious controls, n=42; depressed controls, n=18) completed the VOCI-2 to assess known-groups validity. The VOCI-2 consists of six distinctive factors reflecting symptom categories: Symmetry, Ordering and Arranging; Reassurance Seeking; Checking; Mental Contamination; Obsessions; and Contact Contamination. The updated questionnaire is characterized by strong reliability and validity, face valid items and subscales, is easy to administer and reflects a current understanding of the heterogeneous presentations of OCD. Future directions include additional validation in larger clinical samples and in other (e.g. treatment) contexts.

Mycelium composites are intended to replace plastics in different applications as lightweight, sustainable alternatives. One major limitation is the exchange of oxygen and heat in the core of the material. Bio-welding allows the stacking of thinner layers that are then connected by fungal mycelium. We screened six different fungi for their growth rate, binding strength and gap-bridging capability before fabricating bio-welded composites from beech sawdust with two of the fungi, using two different particle sizes and growth durations. The influence of these parameters, as well as the number of layers and their orientation in the material, on internal bond strength and thermal conductivity was assessed. We found that the maximum gap-bridging distance of a fungus is less essential than the strength of the mycelium connection. Most importantly, the surface roughness of the layers must be minimized to ensure that the bio-welded interface is stronger than the individual layers.

This article argues that the regulation of rents in eighteenth-century Turin played a central role in shaping the city’s social fabric. Focusing on the first half of the century, it examines the process of rent formation culminating in a 1749 edict that condemned excessive increases and introduced new procedures for regulation. By analysing both the causes of rising rents and the criteria used to define fair rents, the article shows how rent-setting operated as a site of clash and negotiation among the competing interests of institutions, landlords and tenants. The procedures and solutions adopted reveal a system of values through which access to the city was defined. In this sense, the rental market emerges not merely as an economic mechanism but as a key arena in which the production, appropriation and transformation of urban space were negotiated and redefined.

Mycelium-based composites are part of an emerging group of biofabricated materials with potential for sustainable construction and interior applications. Their properties depend on fungal species, substrate composition, incubation conditions, and post-processing strategies, yet the relative influence and controllability of these parameters remain fragmented across the literature. This review systematically analyses 46 peer-reviewed studies to evaluate how externally controllable fabrication parameters affect mechanical, thermal, acoustic, and hygroscopic performance. The biofabrication workflow is structured into pre-processing, incubation, and post-processing stages, with particular emphasis on incubation as an underexplored design domain. While species and substrate strongly determine baseline performance, environmental and physical parameters applied during growth, such as moisture, temperature, aeration, and mechanical confinement, suggest potential opportunities for dynamic property tuning. By proposing incubation as an emerging opportunity for material programming, this review outlines pathways toward digitally controlled, functionally graded mycelium composites, contributing a structured framework for integrating biological growth into biodesign workflows.

Contrary to the notion of collective self-rule, in modern democratic states the set of individuals that make the rules and the set of individuals to whom rules apply cannot be one and the same. Recognizing this “non-identity thesis” has important implications for democratic theory. Among them is the need to recognize that any democratic system will involve rule over others and that democratic procedures will not be sufficient for political legitimacy.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, best known for “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Herland, brings a colloquial Machiavellian deception to women’s political education in her sorely neglected novel, Benigna Machiavelli. Serialized in her magazine, The Forerunner, which itself is one of Gilman’s attempts to generate social change, Benigna Machiavelli gives us the character, Benigna MacAvelly, triply marginalized—female, a child, from a poor family—who becomes a hidden leader. Benigna, following in the footsteps of Ben Franklin and Machiavelli, and advocating associations as a means to preserve liberty, seeks to cultivate women as social, political, and economic actors. Because the man-made world has malformed women, limiting reason’s effectiveness as a means to pursue social change, Benigna turns to deception. This paper examines Benigna’s—and Gilman’s—uses of deception and imagination, respectively, as tools to create a new world, to generate a democratic polity.

In September 1833, eleven students aged between fourteen and twenty-one were imprisoned and brought before judge Manuel Joaquín Valdivieso in Santiago de Chile. They were accused of leading a rebellion that had rocked the country’s foremost educational institution, the Instituto Nacional, earlier that month. When asked who had initiated the revolt or invited them to join, the students refused to name names, insisting instead that theirs had been “a complot of all.” Their statement echoed similar assertions made by protesters across the Spanish Atlantic, from Castilian peasants to Andean Natives. Tracing the confrontation between the Instituto students and Judge Valdivieso, this article examines how appeals to collective agency and unanimous action disrupted the attribution of penal responsibility. I argue that such strategies served not only to deflect blame but to assert the legitimacy of revolts and other dissident political acts. The article explores how students confronted the judge’s interpretation of their movement, from their motivations to the dynamics of the insurrection. To justify their revolt, it shows, the Instituto students had to mobilize their knowledge of the law—not to claim its protection, but to undermine its capacity to render their actions intelligible.

Within nationality studies, the 19th-century philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) is typically presented as the founding father of liberal-nationalism because of his warning that liberal democratic institutions need to be embedded within the framework of a mononational state. However, the leading Mill scholar in the field, Georgios Varouxakis, has long challenged this designation. Indeed, in the absence of any attempt by other scholars to refute his claim that Mill should be interpreted as a cosmopolitan patriot instead, he has raised the question of whether the conventional view is little more than a disciplinary dogma. This article defends the conventional view through two key moves. First, to counter Varouxakis’ principal objections, we show that Mill’s account of the emergence of nationalities, as a historically progressive phenomenon grounded in an expansion of human sympathies, implies that his concerns about nationalistic indifference or hostility to foreigners do not translate into objections to nationality as such. Second, to counter Varouxakis’ presentation of the cosmopolitan patriot interpretation as a viable alternative to the liberal-nationalist one, we argue that Mill’s ethical and political cosmopolitanism is insufficient to support a liberal-postnationalist interpretation and is instead best understood as an integral component of his liberal nationalism.