In this paper, we develop canonical bundle formulas for fibrations of relative dimension one in characteristic $p>0$. For such a fibration from a log pair $f\colon (X, \Delta ) \to S$, if f is separable, we can obtain a formula similar to the one due to Witaszek [36]; if f is inseparable, we treat the case when S is of maximal Albanese dimension. As an application, we prove that for a klt pair $(X,\Delta )$ with $-(K_X+\Delta )$ nef, if the Albanese morphism $a_X\colon X \to A$ is of relative dimension one, then X is a fiber space over A.

The Bennettitales, a group of extinct gymnosperms, had outstanding species diversity throughout the Mesozoic and were abundant during the Jurassic. They were key components of terrestrial ecosystems, thriving in diverse climates and environmental conditions. However, a deeper understanding of the ecological strategies exhibited by this extinct lineage across time and space within a well-characterized geological context is still lacking for the region. Here, we examine bennettitalean assemblages from the Middle Jurassic Otlaltepec Formation (Otlaltepec Basin) and compare them with floras from two other rift basins (Tlaxiaco and Ayuquila) in low latitudes. Based on morphological features, we propose the new species Zamites ambigua, and identify the following additional taxa: Zamites lucerensis, Zamites oaxacensis, Zamites tribulosus, cf. Zamites diquiyui, Zamites sp. 1, Zamites sp. 2, Bennettitcarpus sp. 1, Bennettitcarpus sp. 2, and cf. Weltrichia xochitetlii, along with two types of gymnosperm foliage of uncertain affinities.

Our findings on bennettitalean diversity in the Otlaltepec Formation reveal the presence of foliage across all three basins in both time and space, indicating a generalist element among these rift environments. In contrast, other foliage and reproductive structures exhibit two distinct distributional patterns: some are confined to a single basin over time, while others appear only during specific intervals in each basin’s history. Our findings highlight that some Bennettitales exhibited ecological resilience, maintaining their morphology and distribution despite the shifting environmental conditions caused by tectonic activity. This suggests that certain generalist taxa persisted across varying moisture regimes and depositional settings, while others displayed more localized or temporally restricted distributions.

Carbonaceous chondrites contain various organic compounds, including amino acids (AAs), which may have contributed to the emergence of life on Earth. However, their origin remains debated. Previous studies have shown that amino acid precursors (AAPs) can form in ice mantles of interstellar dust particles within molecular clouds. These AAs and AAPs could have been incorporated into small celestial bodies during the formation of the solar system. It has been suggested that interstellar AAs and AAPs underwent aqueous alteration due to heat and radiation from the decay of radioactive nuclides such as 26Al. To test this hypothesis, we combined experiments simulating interstellar chemical reactions with those mimicking conditions inside meteorite parent bodies. We subjected AAs and interstellar AAP analogs to gamma irradiation in mixtures of formaldehyde (HCHO), methanol (CH3OH), ammonia (NH3) and water (H2O). The resulting products were analyzed by cation-exchange high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and gas chromatography-quadrupole mass spectrometry (GC/MS). Our results demonstrated that interstellar AAP analogs were more resistant to gamma irradiation than free AAs. Among the free AAs, glycine exhibited the highest stability, while AAs lacking α-hydrogens were more stable than their isomeric counterparts with α-hydrogens. Additionally, gamma irradiation not only degraded AAs but also generated new ones. The yield and diversity of newly formed AAs depended on the specific AAPs or AAs present in the system. Notably, systems containing interstellar AAP analogs produced a greater variety and higher quantity of AAs than those containing free AAs or none at all. These findings suggest that interstellar organic matter, including AAPs, delivered to asteroids could have contributed to the formation of the diverse organic compounds observed in asteroids and meteorites.

Drought is a critical issue for global agriculture making the development of drought-resilient crop varieties crucial. Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench is a highly drought tolerant cereal crop with the potential to serve as a model for identifying drought-tolerant genes. Investigating drought-induced gene expression changes in S. bicolor can inform breeding strategies aimed at enhancing resilience in other crops in the Poaceae family. Our aim was to identify the genes and networks that are differentially expressed in drought stressed sorghum across multiple tissue types, not just leaves. Previously, we reported differences in phenotype in terms of biomass, photosynthetic traits and the concentration of specialized metabolites (dhurrin and phenolics) between well-watered and water-limited plants. Here, differential gene expression analysis was conducted for drought-stressed S. bicolor variety BTx623 using edgeR. Gene ontology enrichment analysis and Weighted Gene Correlation Network Analysis (WGCNA) were conducted to identify the over-represented functions of the differentially expressed genes and to identify clusters of genes that behave together as a response to drought, respectively. Gene expression changes were largely confined to the root (56 genes were found to be differentially expressed), with little differential expression in the leaves or sheaths and no significant differences in expression of key dhurrin pathway genes. Together, these results indicate that drought tolerance in the cultivated sorghum reference genotype BTx623 is associated primarily with root-specific transcriptional responses and provide a tissue-resolved baseline for future comparative analyses across sorghum genotypes and wild relatives differing in drought sensitivity and HCN potential.

Transfemoral prosthesis users demonstrate a higher fall rate due to tripping than able-bodied controls in previous laboratory studies. In particular, early swing demonstrates the greatest disparity, where able-bodied controls typically utilize an elevating strategy to cross the obstacle in the same stride that the perturbation occurs, rather than the lowering strategy, where swing is ended prematurely and the obstacle is crossed in the following stride. However, due to the passive nature of most commercial knee prostheses, the elevating strategy is largely inaccessible to prosthesis users, potentially contributing to the increased fall rate in early swing. To investigate the effects of reintroducing the elevating strategy to transfemoral prosthesis users, a bimodal stumble recovery controller was developed for a powered knee prosthesis that utilized the elevating and lowering recovery strategies, selected based on the post-impact kinematics of the prosthesis. The Bimodal controller was compared to a unimodal controller that only used the lowering strategy. Three transfemoral prosthesis users underwent a series of treadmill-based obstacle perturbations with each controller following an acclimation period. All participants successfully used the elevating response in the early swing phase. On average, the elevating response reduced the disturbance to participants’ trunk kinematics and the reliance on harness support. While the Bimodal controller sometimes resulted in a recovery strategy mismatch for two participants, the mismatch still resulted in outcome metrics comparable to the unimodal controller. Overall, results suggest that the inclusion of the elevating and lowering strategies may improve stumble recovery outcomes for some transfemoral prosthesis users.

Research on the non-linguistic cognitive consequences of bilingualism remains inconclusive, with ongoing debate over which characteristics of bilinguals drive potential effects and which cognitive abilities may be involved. The impact of bilingualism and trilingualism on attentional performance was studied using a computerized Attentional Network Test. It was administered to 97 adults, assuming progressive improvement with increasing language experience. Reaction times and errors were examined across global and specific attentional network measures (alerting, orienting and executive control). Results indicated that the locus of improvement between bilinguals and trilinguals relative to monolinguals emerged primarily in global reaction times and errors, with no specific effects in any attentional network. Although differences between bilinguals and trilinguals showed only a non-significant trend, regression analyses revealed a significant logarithmic relationship whereby speaking more languages predicted faster global reaction times. The observed processing-speed improvement is discussed in relation to ongoing hypotheses proposing an adaptive response in multilinguals.

The brazilwood tree Paubrasilia echinata is endemic to the Atlantic Forest of Brazil and is categorized as Endangered on the IUCN Red List as a result of habitat loss and overexploitation. Phylogenomic analysis has identified five groups based on genotype, including the arruda-RJ lineage endemic to the state of Rio de Janeiro. We propose a prioritization classification protocol for Atlantic Forest fragments and evaluate the effectiveness of conservation for this species in Rio de Janeiro. We collated a total of 164 occurrence records of P. echinata from fieldwork during 2004–2024 and from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. We classified forest fragments containing the species as high, medium or low priority for conservation. The arruda-RJ lineage persists in 43 forest fragments in the coastal region, 30 of which are documented for the first time here. Most forest fragments are small and have an uneven population structure. Urbanization is the primary threat to the survival of this lineage. We documented protected areas in 33 fragments, and identified conservation opportunities. The greatest number of forest fragments is in the northern region where there are the most protected areas and the brazilwood populations hold the greatest local genetic diversity. We propose targeted conservation actions for P. echinata arruda-RJ in eight forest fragments identified as high priority and with the greatest potential for conservation of the lineage. We identified 25 fragments as medium priority and 10 fragments as low priority. Our approach is applicable to other lineages of P. echinata and is aligned with Global Biodiversity Framework targets.

Poor public service provision creates an electoral vulnerability for incumbent politicians. Under what conditions can bureaucrats exploit this to avoid reforms they dislike? We develop a model of electoral politics in which a politician must decide whether to enact a reform of uncertain value, and a voter evaluates the incumbent’s reform based on post-reform government service quality, which anti-reform bureaucrats can undermine. Bureaucratic resistance for political leverage is most likely to occur when voters are torn between the reform and the status quo. Resistance lowers the informational value of government service for voters and can lead to policy distortions and accountability loss. When reform is moderately popular, resistance leads to policy inefficiency by preventing beneficial reforms due to electoral risks and inducing ineffective reforms by offering bureaucrats as scapegoats. Our model identifies a distinct mechanism of bureaucratic power and its implications for policy and accountability.

In many areas in linguistic study it is difficult to decide where the study of language ends and the study of other aspects of human cognition begins. In this article, we discuss a particularly striking case of this, the use of the signing space (loci) for marking linguistic relations. The use of loci in the nominal and verbal domains has received a wide range of analyses, from those considering loci to be abstract linguistic mechanisms such as semantic indices and syntactic agreement to those considering them to be making use of nonlinguistic mechanisms such as spatial cognition. We defend the view that the use of loci is both fundamentally linguistic (they are modifiers) and fundamentally spatial (they express an association with space), providing possible descriptive content in both the verbal and the nominal domain. This analysis allows for a uniform account of loci use in the two linguistic domains and accounts for an important, yet less noticed, property of loci, which is that their distribution is pragmatically conditioned for the purpose of disambiguation.

Elected governments across the globe increasingly limit fundamental rights, arguably to manage societal divisions or counter serious harms, such as extremism and political violence. Yet which speech restrictions and group bans qualify as illiberal restrictions adopted by intrusive states, and which constitute safeguards in liberal societies endangered by extremism, remain open questions. This uncertainty hinders normative and empirical assessments of whether the changes in democratic legal architectures that we have observed in the United States, Europe, and Latin America signal democratic erosion or resilience. Integrating research from comparative politics, political theory, and law, we distinguish between a defensive and an illiberal logic of rights restructuring and, relatedly, propose conceptual tools to specify whether actual legal provisions limiting rights meet or violate liberal democratic minimum standards. To examine theoretically expected trends in rights restructuring, we employ these tools to analyze changes in the regulation of association, assembly, and expression in 12 European countries over a 23-year period. Worryingly, provisions falling outside the boundaries of self-defense—indicating an illiberal logic of rights restructuring—have grown. This substantiates concerns about democratic erosion, reinforced by a growing number of elected governments pushing, if not overstepping, legal limits to implement their political agendas.

This article argues that the India League’s 1942–47 anticolonial campaign for a Constituent Assembly for India played a constitutive role in Indian independence. It examines the Constituent Assembly not as an institution that followed the decision to offer India independence but as an anticolonial idea that helped produce it. A necessary part of this was the dissolution of the ‘minority veto’ placed on Indian constitutional progress, mainly by the Conservative Party. It traces the transmission of the Constituent Assembly idea through the India League’s transnational networks until it became a Congress demand in India and a Labour Party initiative in Britain, leading to the Cripps Mission and the policy of the 1945 Labour government. In doing so this article challenges the historiography of geopolitical decolonization by finding Indian independence to be the product of an anticolonial campaign that operated through solidarity and elective affinities with the global left. This was contested by both the Conservative Party and the Muslim League, and the article also examines how Muslim League opposition to being ‘minoritized’ within the Constituent Assembly contributed to the Partition of India.

Energy-efficient biomass cookstoves and small solar systems play an important role in the transition to clean energy. Despite their affordability and scalability, uptake remains low among households in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper examines whether household-level behavioural factors help explain this under-adoption. Drawing on data from real-purchase offers in rural Rwanda and Senegal, we analyse how willingness to pay for the technologies varies with risk aversion, innovation resistance, time preferences and beliefs. These traits explain part of the variation in purchase decisions, though effects are generally moderate. The findings improve our understanding of consumer behaviour with regard to innovative consumer goods at the base of the pyramid and inform policy and market strategies of suppliers entering these markets. We conclude by recommending that behavioural approaches be applied conservatively and only in conjunction with efforts to improve affordability and access.

This is a commentary on von Bogdandy’s article ‘On the Meaning and Promise of European Society’. It attempts to outline what an account of European society might look like if it were formulated from a more straightforward Hegelian perspective.

Failure extropy, introduced by Nair and Sathar Nair [(2020). On dynamic failure extropy. J. Indian Soc. Probab. Stat. 21: 287–-313], provides a complementary perspective to entropy for quantifying uncertainty in lifetime distributions. However, it becomes mathematically invalid for distributions with unbounded support. To overcome this limitation, Tahmasebi and Toomaj [(2022). On negative cumulative extropy with applications. Commun. Stat. Theory Methods 51(15): 5025-–5047] proposed the concept of negative cumulative extropy (NCEx), offering a bounded and interpretable alternative. In this paper, we extend the notion of NCEx to the bivariate dynamic setting, where uncertainty is assessed for systems whose components have failed at specified times. The proposed formulation effectively captures the uncertainty associated with past lifetimes under dependence, which the existing NCEx cannot address. The measure is further generalized to a vector-valued form, and its fundamental properties are established, including monotonicity, invariance, bounds expressed in terms of the expected inactivity time, and key characterizations. A new stochastic ordering based on the proposed measure is also established. To facilitate practical implementation, a nonparametric estimator is developed and its performance evaluated through extensive Monte Carlo simulations. The practical relevance of the proposed measure is demonstrated using a real dataset, and its superiority over existing entropy-based approaches is shown on an additional dataset.

Lyndwood’s Provinciale (c. 1433) contains the ecclesiastical legislation, and a gloss on it, of the Province of Canterbury. The York Provinciale (c. 1518), issued by Wolsey, Archbishop of York, contains the legislation of that province, but with no gloss. The Canterbury Provinciale is well known, and dominates in the works of ecclesiastical lawyers and in the church courts after the Reformation. The York Provinciale is little known, and much neglected after the Reformation by the ecclesiastical lawyers, and today by historians of canon law. The two Provinciales have never been compared. What follows remedies this neglect and compares these two legal entities, in terms of ten matters, namely, their: authors; sources; purposes; internal structure; authority (the Canterbury Provinciale was never ratified legislatively, the York one was, arguably as a legatine constitution and so superior in status to Canterbury’s); geographical applicability (including York’s adoption of Canterbury’s provincial law in 1462 subject to its consistency with York law); position in historic debates; editions; use by the post-Reformation ecclesiastical lawyers; and use by modern scholars. It is time, therefore, for Canterbury’s laws to share the limelight with the York Provinciale.

Courts that wish to avoid the effect of a binding precedent sometimes do so by reinterpreting the precedent so that its application depends on underlying facts of the case that were not invoked by the precedent court in the formulation of their reasons for decision. This article considers the implications of this practice, which I call “restrictive reinterpretation,” for the popular reason model of precedential constraint. The practice of restrictively reinterpreting precedent exposes the reason model to criticism on two opposing fronts. On one hand, it threatens the distinction between distinguishing and rule-modification that underlies the reason model. On the other hand, it provides a basis for challenging the view that courts’ formulations of their reasons for judgment have constraining effect. The article presents these challenges within an extended formal framework, before offering a qualified defense of the reason model.