Every year agriculture uses 2 million tonnes of plastic mulch in the form of polyethylene (i.e., “PE mulch”) to grow the world’s food. Plastic mulch is a key tool for growers to suppress weeds, improve crop microclimates, increase yields, mitigate erosion, and potentially enhance crop quality. However, plastic mulch use comes at a major environmental cost due to poor end-of-life outcomes. Hydromulch (also known as “hydramulch” or “hydro-mulch”) is an alternative, sprayable, soil-biodegradable mulch technology made from biobased feedstocks that can be formulated to be acceptable in certified organic agriculture in the United States and Canada. Paper-based hydromulches are generally made from some combination of recycled cellulose fiber, water, tackifier or other binding agents, and sometimes filler derived from various agricultural residues or waste products. The objective of this review is to provide a historical overview of hydromulch, highlight key findings from previous hydromulch research, and provide recommendations to advance the use of hydromulch as a biobased, soil-biodegradable alternative to plastic mulches in specialty crop agriculture. Feedstock and application costs are still major barriers for commercialization and may be mitigated by further research, including the creation of hydromulch formulations that utilize agricultural residues without compromising the physical properties of the mulch layer. Overall, this literature review indicates that hydromulch is a promising technology, but also one in need of further research to be viable across a broad spectrum of cropping systems and environments.

Public rituals of buffalo sacrifice have a prominent place in the political history of eastern India. They were productive activities in agrarian livelihoods, stages for intercommunal politics, unifying spectacles for regional kings, and justifications for colonial military interventions. While their historical scale is much reduced today, in parts of southern Odisha, they remain important political events. Drawing on historical research and long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Odisha’s Kandhamal Hills, this article examines how public rituals of sacrifice form a site of commensuration: a space where interlocal relations of mutuality and difference are temporarily made visible, and where value is defined in the presence of diverse audiences. By focusing on one specific ritual event, I show how these “sacrificial publics” are structured around the tensions of sovereignty (togetherness and transgression) and have long been spaces where different kinds of sovereign power have become legible. Historicizing an enduring sacrificial politics at India’s upland margins, I outline a distinctly anthropological concept of sovereignty—one that reflects the ways human relationships are made commensurable in lasting political formations, sustained through interlocal and intercommunal patterns of recognition.

This article establishes forests as sentient pedagogical communities through four autoethnographic vignettes drawn from parent-child forest school encounters. Rather than presenting forest as co-teacher as a conceptual claim, this work animates these ideas through lived stories in which acorns, fungi, winds and fire participate in teaching alongside children, parents and educators. Grounded in Indigenous epistemologies that recognise land as first teacher, posthumanist notions of intra-action and ecofeminist ethics of care, this study develops Situated Forest Inquiry as a methodology of relational accountability between human and more-than-human worlds. The findings illustrate how forest pedagogies can redefine care, enact species interdependence, nurture multispecies kinship and deepen engagement with Indigenous knowledge, offering educators clear examples of how environmental education might be practiced differently.

The effects of negative triangularity (NT) on boundary plasma turbulence in double-null (DN) configurations are investigated using global, nonlinear, three-dimensional, flux-driven two-fluid simulations. Negative triangularity plasmas exhibit suppressed interchange-driven instabilities, resulting in enhanced confinement and lower fluctuation levels compared with positive triangularity (PT) plasmas. This reduction in interchange instability is associated with the weakening of curvature effects in the unfavourable region, caused by the stretching of magnetic field lines at the outer midplane. The magnetic disconnection between the turbulent low-field side and the quiescent high-field side results in most of the heat flux reaching the DN outer targets. In NT plasmas, the power load on the outer target is reduced, while it increases on the inner target, indicating a reduced in–out power asymmetry compared with PT plasmas. Furthermore, the analysis of power load asymmetry between the upper and lower targets shows that the absolute magnitude of up–down power asymmetry is mitigated in NT plasmas, mainly due to the reduced total power crossing the separatrix. The reduction of interchange instabilities in NT plasmas also affects the blob dynamics. A three-dimensional blob analysis reveals that NT plasmas feature smaller blob sizes and slower propagation velocities. Finally, an analytical scaling law for blob size and velocity that includes plasma shaping effects is derived based on the two-region model and is found to qualitatively capture the trends observed in nonlinear simulations.

Sea-level projections are highly anticipated outcomes of climate model simulations, relevant for coastal management worldwide. Ideally, any model simulation needs to be validated against observations, but this is impossible for the most recent sets of future climate model simulations, which start near to the present day (2020). Here, we compare satellite observations of regional sea-level change against projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report for total sea-level change and its individual components over their overlapping period, from 2007–2022. We first test and compare three different methods to reduce the internal variability in the observations, which hampers the comparison with models, in particular for shorter time periods. While all three methods reduce the internal variability, we find the low-frequency component analysis (LFCA) removes most of the internal variability. We find that the regional projections are in good agreement with the LFCA-filtered observations, for 96% of ocean area within the 90% confidence interval. For the total sea level and sterodynamic component, the projections both under- and overestimate the observations, depending on the region. For mass-driven sea-level change, the regional projections tend to overestimate the observations. Our analysis gives confidence in sea-level projections for the instrumental era.

The degradation of isoprene – a prevalent volatile organic compound (VOC) – in soil has primarily been attributed as a microbial process, but chemical degradation may also play a role. Separating simultaneous abiotic and biotic degradation pathways under representative conditions has been a technical challenge, leaving the fate of surface and subsurface isoprene inputs from the atmosphere, litter roots, and microbes to the soil uncertain. Here, we investigated the real-time dynamics of belowground isoprene degradation by introducing isoprene into the subsurface through an artificial root and tracking its fate along with primary gas-phase oxidation products via in situ soil gas probes and online high-resolution proton transfer reaction time-of-flight mass spectrometry. Isoprene additions generated oxidation products from known NO- and •OH-initiated pathways, revealing chemical degradation as an active loss pathway for isoprene in soil. Over time, isoprene concentrations plummeted relative to an inert tracer despite continuous and repeated isoprene addition, revealing a lasting up-regulation of microbial isoprene degradation that ultimately outcompeted the chemical sink. We verified the presence of putative bacterial isoprene-degrading genes in the soil by quantitative PCR of isoA and identified microbial groups that increased in abundance in response to isoprene availability using 16S amplicon sequencing. Overall, our results show for the first time the relevance of chemical degradation pathways to isoprene in soil and the capacity and dynamics of the soil microbiome to respond using community memory to increased isoprene availability. Soil is a dynamic oxidative and adaptive environment beneath our feet that may play additional roles in the biosphere–atmosphere exchange of isoprene, and by extension other VOCs, beyond what was previously expected.

This study examines when and how second language (L2) learners begin to exhibit sensitivity to key factors influencing the choice between the English double object and prepositional object constructions. While previous research has shown that such choices in native speakers are influenced by such factors as animacy, pronominality and verb bias, little is known about the developmental timing of these effects in L2 production. Using 5,785 dative constructions from a large-scale learner corpus, we analyzed how these variables interact with learners’ proficiency levels across 23 verbs. We found that learners showed systematic sensitivity to all of these factors, including statistical verb bias derived from a native speaker corpus (Corpus of Contemporary American English), at much earlier stages than previously suggested. These results suggest that learners may possess a cognitive bias that maps preexisting conceptual structures onto linguistic constructions, reflecting more than mere statistical learning.

It has already been three years since millions of Ukrainians found refuge in other countries. In our longitudinal research, we examine in what way the main news websites in Poland and Czechia portray Ukrainian refugees and through that how they contribute to their social construction as a group deserving or undeserving of societal and public policy support. Data were collected from platform X, focusing on the accounts of the five most popular news websites in each country. In 2022, we expanded CARIN to CARIN+A, highlighting assistance as a booster (Zogata-Kusz, Öbrink Hobzová, and Cekiera, 2023). Now, examining the period between February 24, 2023, and July 31, 2024, we formulate a hypothesis of dimension content modification, i.e. the meaning of deservingness dimensions change over time for the same target group. Both countries exhibited similar themes and narratives. This was most visible in the attitude and reciprocity, although identity was also important. While at the beginning of the invasion the question of deservingness tied to who they are, later how they behave became crucial. Additionally, we observed normalisation of the situation, without compassion fatigue. Longitudinal media analysis is rare but crucial for countering xenophobia and nationalism.

This study examines overlooked or underexplored fragments from Rufus of Ephesus’ On Melancholy, as cited in Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. Zakariyyāʾ al-Rāzī’s seminal medical work, The Comprehensive Book (Kitāb al-Ḥāwī fī al-Ṭibb). Through an analysis of Arabic texts and Latin translations, we present two previously unexamined fragments and one of doubtful authenticity which reference Rufus’ understanding of melancholy. Preserved across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts, these fragments illuminate the transmission of ancient Graeco-Roman medical knowledge into the Islamic Golden Age and Renaissance Europe. Arabic texts are compared with corresponding Latin editions to verify their authenticity and trace their historical transmission.

The Askey–Wilson algebras illustrate the bispectral property of orthogonal polynomials in the Askey scheme. The universal Askey–Wilson algebra $\triangle _q$ is a central extension of the Askey–Wilson algebras associated with the most general orthogonal polynomials in the Askey scheme. The Verma $\triangle _q$-modules are a family of infinite-dimensional $\triangle _q$-modules with marginal weights. Under the condition that q is not a root of unity, it was shown that every finite-dimensional irreducible $\triangle _q$-module has a marginal weight and is isomorphic to a quotient of a Verma $\triangle _q$-module. Assume that q is a root of unity. We prove that every finite-dimensional irreducible $\triangle _q$-module with a marginal weight is isomorphic to a quotient of a Verma $\triangle _q$-module. More precisely, two natural families of finite-dimensional quotients of Verma $\triangle _q$-modules contain all finite-dimensional irreducible $\triangle _q$-modules with marginal weights up to isomorphism. Furthermore, we classify the finite-dimensional irreducible $\triangle _q$-modules with marginal weights up to isomorphism.

Opiate smuggling has found increasing scholarly attention. Legal distribution however remains largely a blind spot. Against this background, I follow in this article some of the traces it has left in Switzerland. I ask not only how it was regulated, but also where the drugs came from and how and by whom they were sold. In the first section, I examine the trade in the opium-based panacea theriac in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At that time, pharmacists were increasingly successful in claiming the exclusive right to sell remedies. When powerful industrial opiates gradually replaced the early modern artisanal goods in the nineteenth century, it was they who benefited most. As I argue in the second section, this line of business came under pressure when the use of opiates increasingly faced criticism in the last third of the century. However, as I show in the third section, legal provisions were only reluctantly enforced and followed. A fundamental shift only occurred in the 1960s when, in the context of the cold war, the Americanisation of international crime control and the “war on drugs” led to a repressive turn in law enforcement.

This article examines field experiences across archaeological sectors and demographics through the results of a survey aimed at understanding how the culture of toughness is manifest in archaeological fieldwork through the prevalence of discrimination and pressure to accept inappropriate behaviors and to push oneself physically, mentally, and emotionally. We selected these particular behaviors as they demonstrate ways in which archaeologists perceive expectations and how individuals prove they can endure, that they are tough enough. Our survey data demonstrate that women, noncisgendered, and entry-level archaeologists are the most vulnerable to negative experiences, that the pressure to push beyond one’s limits is universal, and that discrimination and harassment are factors increasingly considered by women as they decide whether to continue in the profession. We argue that many of these rules and social conditions are created and maintained inconspicuously through performative informality which is linked to the discipline’s culture of toughness. Through analysis of our quantitative survey results, we discuss how archaeology’s work culture shapes experiences in the industry and examine avenues for reform to promote equity in archaeology.

Taiwanese politics is often characterized as being dominated by two camps: the “blue” camp, which supports the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), and the “green” camp, which supports the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). However, a substantial portion of the electorate identifies as independent, representing one of the largest but least studied groups in Taiwan’s political landscape. This study examines how independent voters differed from partisan voters in their responses to one of the most defining political moments in recent years, the legislative reform, and the subsequent Bluebird movement, one of the largest social protests in Taiwan since 2014. Drawing on two waves of original survey data, we find that independents were more likely to adopt the KMT’s framing of the protests and related legislative reforms. However, independent voters had greater support than blue camp supporters for democratic practices, despite their alignment over the Bluebird movement. These findings advance understanding of Taiwan’s electoral blocs, the dynamics of movement–party relations and the contours of democratic support among its citizens.

The present three-wave longitudinal study tested two transdiagnostic mediators – anger and racism-related vigilance – of the link between racism and internalizing and externalizing problems. At Wave 1, the sample included 344 Mexican-origin adolescents (Mage = 13.5 years; 51.7% male, 45.9% female; 2.3% non-binary) residing in the Midwestern United States. Data across the three waves were collected from April 2021 through October 2024. The study examined how both direct and vicarious racism were related to internalizing and externalizing problems over time. Results from latent growth curve mediation analyses indicated that outward anger expression was a significant mediator; both direct and vicarious racism at Wave 1 were significantly associated with higher levels of anger at Wave 2, which in turn, were associated with higher levels of internalizing and externalizing problems at Wave 3. Racism-related vigilance was a significant mediator of the association between vicarious racism and internalizing problems only, according to results from post hoc sensitivity analyses. Implications for future theory, research, and clinical practice are discussed to help mitigate the effects of racism in new migration contexts for this vulnerable population.