This article explores the potential of large language models (LLMs), particularly through the use of contextualized word embeddings, to trace the evolution of scientific concepts. It thus aims to extend the potential of LLMs, currently transforming much of humanities research, to the specialized field of history and philosophy of science. Using the concept of the virtual particle – a fundamental idea in understanding elementary particle interactions – as a case study, we domain-adapted a pretrained Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers model on nearly a century of Physical Review publications. By employing semantic change detection techniques, we examined shifts in the meaning and usage of the term “virtual.” Our analysis reveals that the dominant meaning of “virtual” stabilized after the 1950s, aligning with the formalization of the virtual particle concept, while the polysemy of “virtual” continued to grow. Augmenting these findings with dependency parsing and qualitative analysis, we identify pivotal historical transitions in the term’s usage. In a broader methodological discussion, we address challenges such as the complex relationship between words and concepts, the influence of historical and linguistic biases in datasets, and the exclusion of mathematical formulas from text-based approaches.

This article examines how post-Soviet Azerbaijani literature redefined creative and narrative forms, challenging Soviet literary norms through experimentation and new modes of characterization. Following independence in 1991, Azerbaijani literature moved from the transitional, trauma-marked works of the 1990s to the pluralism and experimentation of the 2000s and, after 2020, toward a discourse of triumph. Writers such as Aziza Jafarzadeh, Huseyn Ibrahimov, Elchin Afandiyev, Anar, and Afag Masud employ non-linear structures, allegory, symbolism, and introspection to transform inherited Soviet forms into vehicles of cultural resistance. Drawing on postcolonial theory (Bakhtin, Bhabha, Spivak, and Annus) and close textual readings, this article situates Azerbaijani literature within broader Eurasian and postcolonial frameworks, demonstrating how creative characterization fosters new expressions of identity, memory, and cultural reimagining.

The Shast-Sheshi festival is held annually in the village of Siān, beginning on the sixty-sixth day after Nowruz. This timing matches the ancient Khordadgan festival, celebrated on the sixth day of the month of Khordad, dedicated to the Zoroastrian goddess Khordad. The central rite of Shast-Sheshi was immersion in the now-dry Shāh Chashme spring. Other rites include visits to nearby sacred sites linked to Khordad, the female guardian of water. The festival, drawing thousands from nearby settlements, lasts ten days and features a seasonal fair. Although centered at a Shia shrine complex, it remains a largely secular event. Jarquyeh uniquely preserves this ancient Iranian tradition and shows how forgotten myth can resurface in an unexpected place and time.

In 1770, the Rohilla chief Ḥāfiz̤ Raḥmat Ḵẖān wrote a text called Ḵẖulāṣat ul-Ansāb, focusing on the genealogical and ancestral history of the Rohilla Afghans. This article analyses the text as a glimpse into the emotions he went through—such as anxiety, uncertainty, confidence, determination, and strength—as the ruler of a small principality founded by a new political group in the competitive political milieu of eighteenth-century South Asia. It studies the textual expression of these emotions he experienced during a period that brought both challenges and opportunities for the Rohilla Afghans. It firstly shows how the text served as a means of creating unity among the Rohilla Afghans by elaborating an origin story, adapting them to new circumstances, and legitimising the emerging Rohilla state. Secondly, it discusses how Ḥāfiz̤ Raḥmat aimed to rectify the negative portrayals of the Afghans by Mughal chroniclers and enhance Afghan prestige in northern India by creating a haloed genealogy. Finally, it explains how the text claimed religious legitimacy for the Rohilla Afghans by linking them to the prophets, Muslim invaders of the past, and local religious figures. Overall, this textual analysis contributes to the historiography of eighteenth-century South Asia by studying the political anxieties associated with Rohilla Afghan state formation.

This article explores young children’s relations with soil, drawing on research that positioned soil as animate, lively and interconnected. The paper investigates how animist approaches offered a mode of encounter for children and their teachers, encouraging them to see themselves as part of a larger ecological community. The research began with a “soil biome immersion” experience where teachers engaged with soil through sensory and arts-based experiences. These initial encounters led to further exploration of child-soil relations through experiential learning and storytelling. Children, as active meaning-makers, co-constructed the inquiry through imaginative and sensory engagements. Findings suggest animism cultivates soil relations, challenging traditional notions of soil as inert and promoting a dynamic understanding of soil ecosystems. Through practices such as storying, drawing and listening, educators supported children’s animist perspectives, deepening their attunement to the more-than-human world. This article contributes to environmental education by demonstrating how animism can enrich children’s ecological awareness and their sense of connectedness to the world.

We gather evidence on a new local-global conjecture of Moretó and Rizo on values of irreducible characters of finite groups. For this we study subnormalisers and picky elements in finite groups of Lie type and determine them in many cases, for unipotent elements as well as for semisimple elements of prime power order. We also discuss subnormalisers of unipotent and semisimple elements in connected as well as in disconnected reductive linear algebraic groups.

This essay, by revisiting the capitalism and slavery debate, explores the material relations between the Industrial Revolution and the crisis of Black slavery in the British Empire from the perspectives of critical theory and global history. After suggesting that the debate has made capital invisible as a category of historical analysis, I argue that the Industrial Revolution unleashed a process of widening trade circuits around the Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific within which the abolition debate should be understood. These new global circuits of trade became a powerful material mediation between the crisis of slavery in the West Indies; the rise of slavery in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil; and the advancement of New Imperialism in the East.

We present a potential test of the origin of the $\gamma$-ray Galactic Centre Excess (GCE). We demonstrate how gravitational microlensing by stellar mass objects along the line of sight to the Galactic Bulge can distinguish between the possibility of extensive emission due to dark matter self-annihilation from more prosaic astrophysical sources, namely millisecond pulsars. Such an astrophysical origin would result in emission from a population of small, currently unresolved point-like sources – in contrast to the expected smoother emission resulting from dark matter annihilation. Given that the scale of gravitational microlensing, that is, the Einstein radius for stellar mass lenses, and hence, the degree of induced magnification, is sensitive to the size of the emitting region, such microlensing will induce time variability in the emission of astrophysical sources, whereas $\gamma$-ray emission from dark matter annihilation will effectively be immune to such influences. However, we find that detecting microlensing-induced variability requires significantly greater sensitivity than that of current or planned $\gamma$-ray detectors. For a small population of bright GCE sources, more than an order-of-magnitude increase in effective area over Fermi-LAT would be required, with events remaining extremely rare. For a large population of faint sources, events would occur multiple times a year, but would only be detectable with a four-order-of-magnitude improvement. Whilst microlensing might not be a definitive test of the origin of the GCE, in future observations, it may prove useful in determining the properties of any point-like source population.

It has been a long time since political scientists have taken measure of our political engagement in the United States. Drawing on data collected from political scientists in Summer 2024, this article assesses the extent and type of political engagement, finding three alliterative dimensions into which we tend to fall: partisans (who engage in partisan politics), public scholars (who share political science logic and findings), and pedagogues (who engage through teaching and event sponsorship). This effort may represent the first time we have tried to measure individual beliefs about how personal participation should intersect with professional responsibilities. Our dimensions of engagement tend not to differ substantially by demography, institution, or rank. However, we do have different beliefs about the propriety and the likely effects of different types of engagement with politics that give structure to our presence in the public sphere.

In 1924, the Italian ship Regia Nave Italia visited twenty-eight ports in thirteen Latin American states. Initially conceived as a commercial venture, it became a tool of Mussolini’s foreign policy led by Giovanni Giurati, a cabinet minister appointed as extraordinary ambassador. This article uncovers the colonial agenda of this voyage, arguing that a racialised vision of the Italian diaspora in Latin America shaped strategic alignments between the fascist government and Italian economic elites. It shows how ideas of race, migration, and Latinity configured discursive strategies designed to materialise fascism’s project of demographic imperialism through engagement with local authorities and their population policies. Within a longer genealogy of colonial practice, the Regia Nave Italia illustrates how Italy’s informal empire intersected with fascist ambitions across the Atlantic.