Symmetrically self-similar graphs are an important type of fractal graph. Their Green’s functions satisfy order one iterative functional equations. We show that when the branching number of a generating cell is two, either the graph is a star consisting of finitely many one-sided lines meeting at an origin vertex, in which case the Green’s function is algebraic, or the Green’s function is differentially transcendental over $\mathbb {C}(z)$. The proof strategy relies on a result in a recent preprint of Di Vizio, Fernandes, and Mishna. The result adds evidence to a conjecture of Krön and Teufl about the spectra of the difference Laplacian of this family of graphs.

Recent developments in spatial audio and immersive technologies have expanded creative possibilities for composers and sound artists. This article presents a novel prototype of a spherical microphone with an ellipsoid casing and ten motorised condenser capsules, each capable of real-time adjustment of orientation and polar pattern. Unlike fixed-pattern or conventional ambisonic arrays, this design enables dynamic control over spatial coverage and directivity, offering new opportunities for multichannel recording, live performance and interactive sound art. While software-based spatialisation offers some flexibility, physical reconfiguration of capsules provides superior responsiveness and avoids latency, phase artefacts or resolution loss. This is especially critical in performance contexts where immediate acoustic adaptation is required. The system allows direct manipulation of capsule parameters during rehearsal or installation, effectively transforming the microphone into a performative instrument. The article compares the prototype with existing commercial ambisonic microphones, highlighting its distinctive advantages in workflow and compositional strategy. Use-case scenarios demonstrate how real-time control over spatial parameters enhances both technical precision and artistic expressiveness. The article concludes with a discussion of future directions, including collaborative testing with practitioners and integration into creative environments where spatial transparency, fidelity and interactivity are essential.

Under the Generalised Riemann Hypothesis (GRH), any element in the multiplicative group of a number field K that is globally primitive (i.e., not a perfect power in $K^*$) is a primitive root modulo a set of primes of K of positive density.

For elliptic curves $E/K$ that are known to have infinitely many primes ${\mathfrak{p}}$ of cyclic reduction, possibly under GRH, a globally primitive point $P\in E(K)$ may fail to generate any of the point groups $E(k_{\mathfrak{p}})$. We describe this phenomenon in terms of an associated Galois representation $\rho_{E/K, P}\,:\,G_K\to\mathrm{GL}_3({\widehat {{\mathbf{Z}}}})$, and use it to construct non-trivial examples of global points on elliptic curves that are locally imprimitive.

This paper uses karlup bidi (pathway home) as a metaphor to show and explain the cultural landscape of a significant central Perth locality: Kaart Gennunginyup Bo, or Karrgatup, or Kaarta Koomba, also known as King’s Park. Drawing on oral histories, cultural narratives and contemporary reflections, the study uses Noongar understandings of Country, family, time and relationship to challenge and decolonise Western paradigms of land use and identity. The intent is to narrate Noongar Boodja (Country) as it was, remains and always will be – as Noongar heartland. Central to this paper is the trilogy of boodja, moort, kaartdijin (Country, family, knowledge), a framework for relating with Noongar boodja in caring, animate, thriving and responsive ways.

Scientific and technological revolutions, including the isolation of alkaloids and the invention of machines, allowed the mass production and long-distance distribution of drugs from the early nineteenth century onwards. At the same time, drugs were found to keep industrial work processes going, by cutting hunger and fatigue and other conditions associated with the industrial lifestyle, including chronic pains, coughs, asthma, and depression. The seven chapters of the issue show the neglected relationship between drugs and the industrial situation, by combining different spatial scales: by zooming in on factories and other enclosed spaces, such as slave ships, colonial hospitals, laboratories, as well as the suburbs and garden plots that made up the everyday lives of drug-using working classes; and by zooming out to transnational business connections, resource-providing agricultural areas, and licit and illicit trade routes across national borders and continents.

Courts and judicial institutions are often overlooked in armed conflict research. Before the rebel group is formed and initiates armed confrontation, states and their allies – directly and indirectly – mobilize the court to prosecute selected individuals to deter political opposition and establish state legitimacy. This article argues that the state can directly prosecute potential political challengers through criminal cases, deterring aspiring political leaders from organizing a rebellion at the local level. Similarly, the state can indirectly use its local collaborators to prosecute potential civilian supporters in court by filing civil cases, intensifying local discontent, and exacerbating underlying grievances against the state and its local collaborators. The state’s direct and indirect involvement in generating legitimacy affects the subnational risk of conflict onset differently. Analyses of original data for all 75 district-level courts in Nepal between 1991 and 2006 and the onset of the Maoist conflict show robust support for the arguments.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) probe the electron column density along the line of sight and hence can be used to probe foreground structures. One such structure is the Galactic halo. In this work, we use a total of 98 high Galactic latitude ($|b| \gt 20^\circ$) FRBs detected by ASKAP, Parkes, DSA, and FAST with 32 associated redshifts to constrain the dispersion measure (DM) contribution from the Galactic halo. We simultaneously fit unknown FRB population parameters, which show correlations with the Galactic halo but are not completely degenerate. We primarily use an isotropic model for the halo, but find no evidence favouring a particular halo model. We find DM$_\mathrm{MW,halo}$ = $68^{+27}_{-24}$ pc cm$^{-3}$, which is in agreement with other results within the literature. Previous constraints on DM$_\mathrm{MW,halo}$ with FRBs have used a few, low-DM FRBs. However, this is highly subject to fluctuations between different lines of sight, and hence using a larger number of sightlines as we do is more likely to be representative of the true average contribution. Nevertheless, we show that individual FRBs can still skew the data significantly and hence will be important in the future for more precise results.

The regulation of groundwater remains underdeveloped globally and often lags behind the domestic governance of surface water. As a result, groundwater is often subject to unfettered extraction, uses, and contamination. A clear understanding of ownership is central to the success of domestic regulations. However, the types of ownership regime in place in nations around the world are poorly documented in the academic literature. This study addresses that gap through a comparative analysis of domestic groundwater ownership regimes across ten jurisdictions in nine countries spanning five continents. It identifies three dominant models of groundwater ownership: private ownership, public ownership, and non-ownership with public oversight. It then examines how these ownership doctrines impact key dimensions of groundwater governance, including the nature and transferability of the ownership right, the level of government at which regulation takes place, implications for rights of use, and interactions with customary and Indigenous rights. Doing so offers unique insight into how nations with different legal traditions, governance structures, and customary practices address the ownership of groundwater resources. It also suggests that different ownership (and non-ownership) models can have distinct implications for other aspects of groundwater governance.

This musing explores the neoliberalization of addiction recovery and its implications for queer subjects, their affects and attachments. The author examines the ways in which neoliberal ideology usurps the critical potential of trauma-informed theory and practice in the context of addiction recovery, and offers a queer reading of the affects of addiction experienced as a negotiation of this tension. How do queer experiences both challenge and reflect the neoliberal ethos informing contemporary frameworks for addiction recovery? Through a media analysis of the Netflix mini-series, Feel Good, which depicts an experience of queer addiction and codependency, the author illustrates how a representation of queer affect is mediated by neoliberal formulations of subjectivity and pathology. A theoretical framework combining critical addiction studies and feminist affect studies is employed to examine the challenges and possibilities for queer subjects whose experiences at the intersection of systemic oppression and addictive attachment have the potential to subvert the neoliberalization of addiction recovery.

Rare Earth Elements (REEs) are essential for green energy technologies and defense systems, yet global supply chains remain concentrated in China. This has intensified geopolitical competition for alternative sources, positioning the Arctic as a strategic frontier, as retreating ice exposes mineral deposits. A comprehensive discourse analysis of strategic documents, scholarly literature, and media sources from 2010 to 2025 reveals a dramatic shift from geological characterization and economic speculation to urgent securitization and strategic alliance formation. Academic research has evolved from establishing natural baselines to governance and social conflict analysis. Media coverage of REE in the Arctic peaked in 2025, with rising emphasis on governance, sovereignty, geopolitics, and Greenland’s strategic position. Critical gaps persist in addressing Indigenous rights, holistic impact assessments, and Arctic-specific innovation. Sustainable Arctic REE development requires integrated frameworks that balance geopolitical imperatives with environmental protection and Indigenous self-determination, preventing the region from becoming a sacrifice zone for global decarbonization.

This study investigates experimental luthiery and sound art practices in Latin America through the lenses of postcolonial theory and acoustemology. Within this framework, the musical instrument is conceptualised as a sound-producing object and an active site of cultural representation, historical memory and resistance. These practices, diverging from conventional luthiery traditions, embrace collective, conceptual and material-based modes of production, establishing alternative knowledge systems through sound. Drawing on the works of artists, such as Walter Smetak, Marco Antônio Guimarães, Joaquín Orellana, Wilson Sukorski and Tania Candiani, this study explores how sound mediates relationships with space, the body, memory and technology. Conceptual instrument design is thereby positioned as an aesthetic-political tool developed in parallel with transformations in auditory regimes and responding to epistemic inequalities. This study also focuses on modes of production shaped by technological exclusion, gender and postcolonial identity formation. Experimental luthiery in Latin America is presented as a field of artistic expression and a multilayered epistemic site for the generation of alternative knowledge systems, political subjectivities and spatial justice strategies.

Ready-to-use therapeutic foods (RUTFs) are widely used to treat severe acute malnutrition (SAM) by improving key anthropometric outcomes; however, optimisation of RUTF formulations remains important to support sustained recovery. Rice bran, a novel nutrient-dense, prebiotic food ingredient, can support healthy growth. This two-arm, double-blinded, randomised controlled trial, compared the effectiveness of a locally produced RUTF with rice bran to the same RUTF without rice bran for the treatment of uncomplicated acute malnutrition in Jember, Indonesia. 200 children aged 6–59 months with SAM (WHZ < −3.0 and/or mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC) < 115 mm or having bilateral pitting oedema +/++) or approaching SAM (WHZ < −2.5) were enrolled in the study. Primary outcomes were weight, MUAC, and anthropometric z-scores. Linear mixed models were applied across all ages, and split by age groups (6–23 months and 24–59 months) at weeks 0, 4, 8, 12, and 16 for intention-to-treat (ITT) and per protocol analysis (PP). Children in two age groups were expected to respond differently to treatment based on their microbiome maturity. At week 4, the PP analysis revealed RUTF+rice bran treatment had significantly greater weight gain velocity (p = 0.02; p = 0.008) and MUAC velocity (p = 0.004, p = 0.03) when compared to RUTF at all ages and in the 24–59 months age group, respectively. There were no significant differences between treatment groups at time points in the other anthropometric outcomes. This investigation shows promising impact of stabilised rice bran as a prebiotic and nutrient-dense ingredient for inclusion into RUTFs that can improve child growth outcomes.

This article will use the records of the Slave Compensation Commission to examine how women experienced and negotiated property- and slave-ownership in nineteenth-century Britain. Demonstrating that women played a crucial role in facilitating the transmission of wealth rooted in enslavement into metropolitan society, it will show how they utilized, manipulated—and were restricted by—the financial mechanisms and legal frameworks that underpinned the British economy. Women’s engagement with the compensation process illustrates both the economic opportunities open to middle- and upper-class women in the early nineteenth century and the ways that female property ownership was mediated and constrained. But we cannot elide the nature of this particular form of “property.” These women were significant players in a system dependent on the violent exploitation of other human beings. The article shows the different ways that British women claimed enslaved people as property: how they used racialized violence to negotiate and wield power in a patriarchal society and to claim, establish, and reinforce their own potentially precarious positions. In doing so, it demonstrates the importance of interrogating the complex nexus of power relations—gendered, racialized, and classed—that shaped how female property- and wealth-holders thought, acted, and behaved in nineteenth-century Britain.

Allocapnia pygmaea Burmeister (Plecoptera: Capniidae) is a winter-active stonefly in North America. Despite the adult’s winter emergence, little is documented about the insect’s cold tolerance and cryoprotective biochemistry. To better understand the cold tolerance of this winter-active stonefly, we collected adult A. pygmaea in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada, during March or April in both 2023 and 2024. Following different cold exposures, we measured the lower limits of activity (–9.3 °C) and the temperature at which internal freezing occurs (–11.9 °C), and we confirmed that A. pygmaea could survive subzero temperatures unless they froze. In control (field-collected) and cold-shocked stoneflies, we assayed the following putative cryoprotectants: proline, glycerol, myo-inositol, trehalose, and glucose. We detected little effect of cold shock on most cryoprotectants, except for the polyols glycerol and myo-inositol, which decreased in concentration following cold shock. These findings improve our current understanding of Capniid cold tolerance, confirm that A. pygmaea uses a freeze-avoidant strategy, and lay a foundation for future studies on how these insects may use cryoprotectants for winter activity.