This paper presents the development of a modulable and active Thomson parabola ion spectrometer designed to measure the energy spectra of multi-MeV ion species generated in laser–plasma interactions. The spectrometer features a flexible and reconfigurable design, with modular components tailored for easy adaptation to various experimental setups and rapid deployment. GEANT4-based optical simulations were employed to investigate several active detection schemes using scintillators, allowing us to evaluate their feasibility and to identify limitations, such as with direct scintillation readouts or scintillating fiber bundles. These simulations informed the design choices and highlighted the need for continued optimization. Although experimental validation under real conditions remains to be performed, this work lays the foundation for high-repetition-rate, active ion detection compatible with current and upcoming high-intensity laser facilities.

Addiction was considered ‘alien to Socialism’. At least, that was the narrative upheld by the socialist East German state, which thus followed the traditional argumentation of socialist and social democratic movements since the turn of the century. While the state clung to this ideological claim, the consumption and abuse of beer, spirits, and benzodiazepines continued to increase. However, there was never a central strategy for the treatment and prevention of addiction in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The hesitation and ignorance of the state authorities created a vacuum that was filled by local initiatives and expert discussions aimed at improving the situation of people with addictions. In this article, I analyse the introduction of new treatment methods in a psychiatric hospital in the GDR and show that doctors, psychologists, patients, and local officials had certain freedoms to test new approaches, many of which originated in the West. Even though they had to adapt concepts such as the ‘therapeutic communities’ of British reformer Maxwell Jones to the specific socialist and East German context to avoid restrictions by state authorities, the Berlin Wall did not prevent the transfer of knowledge. This article, therefore, paints a nuanced picture of the therapeutic methods used to treat people with addiction in the GDR. From condemning individuals as outcasts of socialist society for socially deviant drinking behaviour and relying exclusively on aversion therapy and moral accusations, there was a shift towards a mixture of treatments that became increasingly specialised and individualised, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, comparable to Western standards.

Focusing on intellectual property rights (IPRs) and their role in global access to vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic, this article argues that key aspects of the current institutional system align towards delivering individualistic state/regional/rightsholders priorities in the use of IPRs over pandemic health technologies. This played a key role in the vaccine nationalism and global vaccine inequity that emerged during the pandemic. It critically analyzes the IPR provisions within the World Health Organisation’s Pandemic Agreement and negotiation process. It argues that nationalistic/individualistic approaches toward the use of IPRs over health technologies also permeate such contexts. The final text of the Agreement leaves considerable discretion to states around IPRs, and much will depend on how it is implemented in practice. For effective future pandemic preparedness around how IPRs are used over health technologies, this article argues that a deeper bottom-up institutional change is needed — one which offers nuanced strategies to balance the potential incentivization role of IPRs with the implications certain uses of IPRs can have on access to downstream health technologies. A key element of this change is embedding a greater recognition of the range of resources provided by entities (e.g. funders, biobanks, and universities) necessary in the successful development of health technologies, including in pandemic contexts. Such entities should leverage these resources, including by attaching contractual conditions to access these, which mandate avenues for downstream access to pandemic health technologies. In the longer term such approaches could be part of a broader institutional change, which prioritises global collective health needs in pandemics.

The appointment of federal examiners under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a novel administrative authority that Congress granted to the Justice Department to enforce voter registration of black southerners, was largely limited to jurisdictions in which the department had already pursued federal litigation under the previous Civil Rights Acts. Out of procedural concerns, the attorneys of the Department's Civil Rights Division became increasingly path-dependent in their enforcement activities as they concentrated bureaucratic resources in three of the volatile southern states. They left the remainder of the south that experienced comparable incidents of authoritarian repression and violence with little to no federal intervention. These findings are presented with geospatial illustrations to reveal the limitations in the territorial reach of federal law enforcement. I argue that the circumspection was caused by the department's continued reliance on litigation as a benchmark for establishing the existence of racial discrimination. Both the signed complaints from the local black citizens and the President's political deference to the southern Democrats in Congress had little influence on the department's decisions for appointing examiners.

Some victims of sexual violence fight back, seriously harming their abusers as a way of taking power or exacting retribution. Although violence always raises moral questions, there is nevertheless something impressive about those whose actions succeed in posing a formidable challenge to their oppression. The aim of this paper is to offer two ways of thinking about the ethical value of such non-ideal acts of resistance. First, violent resistance may allow victims to maintain ground projects that are being undermined by their abusers. Second, violent resistance may display what I call the virtue of audacious integrity—a willingness to take moral risks, that is, to act in ways that may arouse severe moral censure, in order to uphold one’s values. Both explanations illustrate that victims of sexual abuse may choose to engage in violent resistance for a variety of ethical reasons, including but not limited to paradigmatic moral considerations.

Cocoa production is highly variable and shows low yields globally, but the drivers of this variation are poorly understood. Climate has been proposed as one of the main drivers, but within-tree competition for resources and disease may also influence the number of cocoa pods produced. In addition, the relative importance of climate and within-tree competition for resources remains unknown. We evaluated the effects of climate, within-tree competition, and disease on cocoa pod dynamics in Ghana and assessed the relative importance of climate and within-tree competition. We monitored cocoa pod dynamics during three years for 1472 trees at 96 farms across Ghana. Counts of pods of different sizes were carried out every six weeks. Climate effects were evaluated based on monthly precipitation and temperature, including lag effects. Effects of within-tree resource competition on pod production were tested by assessing the effect of the number of larger-sized pods on a cocoa tree on the number of pods in smaller size classes using generalised linear mixed-effects models accounting for zero inflation. We consistently found that climate was a stronger driver of pod production than within-tree competition. Across size classes, the climatic conditions experienced at the time of fruit set had the strongest effect on the number of pods. For most pod size classes, both higher temperature and, unexpectedly, higher precipitation negatively influenced pod number. A larger number of large and mature pods negatively affected the number of cherelles (smallest pods), indicating within-tree competition among pods. This suggests that cocoa trees prioritise sustaining pods in larger sizes over producing new ones, for instance, through mechanisms like cherelle wilt. Our results suggest that higher precipitation increased the incidence of fungal diseases and indirectly reduced the number of pods produced. Thus, a combination of lagged climate effects and within-tree competition and disease drives the dynamics and development of pods on cocoa trees. Our results show that lagged climate effects should be considered for adaptation measures to climatic conditions (and climate change) and for determining the best timing for disease management interventions. These results help in understanding cocoa production dynamics and are important for yield and disease modelling.

Partisanship and feelings about racial groups are increasingly linked among whites in the United States. Does this pattern extend to other Americans? To answer this question, we begin by examining trends in what has been termed “affective differentiation”—a measure of racial affect that is, in our case, the difference in ratings between one’s own group and white Americans—and partisanship to demonstrate first that affective differentiation has increased. Further, this measure of racial affect has a growing relationship with partisanship among Black and Latine Americans such that Democratic identification is associated with higher levels of affective differentiation. Next, using panel data from the two most recent presidential elections we find that the direction of influence flows from partisanship to affective differentiation. Higher levels of attachment to the Democratic Party are associated with greater affective differentiation in which respondents rate their own group more favorably than whites. In recent elections, there has been a stark polarization among political parties regarding the utilization of explicit racial rhetoric. Members of the electorate have taken notice, leading partisans to update their racial attitudes.

We deliberated a case report of seven cases to investigate whether inhibitors of tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-) could reduce pregnancy dangers caused by antiphospholipid syndrome (APS). Patient 1 was diagnosed with NC-OAPS and Hashimoto, Patient 3 was with SN-APS and Hashimoto, Patient 2, 3, 4 were with SN-APS, Patient 5 and 6 were with OAPS, and Patient 7 was with OAPS and PCOS. Patient 4 took the longest period to report the disappearance of symptoms (7 days), followed by patients 1 and 5, and lastly, 2, 3, 6 and 7; after treatment, TNF-α decreased to varying degrees in 7 patients, among which Patient 1, 3, 6, 7 reached the ideal level (< 8.1) and Patient 5 reached the highest level (123.04); Patient 6 and 7 were ongoing pregnancies. The fetuses were born to the desired gestational age except the fetus from Patient 1. A total of 5 patients underwent cesarean delivery. The average height of the newborns was 48.20 cm and the average weight was 2.50 kg. The Apgar scores ranged between 8 and 10. The ongoing pregnancies as a limitation of the dataset. Collectively, we found that TNF-α Inhibitors could prolong gestational period.

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the fastest-growing neurological condition in the world, affecting 11·8 million people worldwide in 2021. Due to the globally expanding and ageing population, as well as growing industrialisation, this number is likely to increase. Given the absence of disease-modifying pharmacological therapies, this review aimed to examine the effect of dietary interventions on PD progression, motor symptoms, non-motor symptoms, specifically those affecting the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, and severity. To do so, this review synthesised the current evidence from randomised controlled trials (RCTs) on dietary patterns, individual foods and beverages, and nutritional supplements including nutrients, bioactive compounds, and biotics.

Results from the included RCTs failed to demonstrate conclusive evidence for the use of a dietary intervention as a therapy for improving PD progression, symptoms and severity. However, this is likely a reflection of the current scarcity of RCTs in the literature, rather than an outright demonstration of the ineffectiveness of such dietary approaches. In contrast, several trials have demonstrated a beneficial effect of biotic supplementation in managing GI symptoms, particularly constipation syndrome, which may be a promising avenue for improving GI-related issues that affect up to 80 % of PD patients. In conclusion, further RCTs are required to decipher the role that diet may play in mitigating PD progression and severity and improving overall patient care by reducing both motor and non-motor symptoms.

Based on four years of fieldwork, including 339 interviews across 21 cities, this paper provides the first-ever ethnographic account of the political economy behind the transition from traditional taxis to Didi-style ride-hailing in China. This paper makes two contributions to the literature. First, it investigates how the seemingly disadvantaged stakeholders of an old economy resisted the progress of the platform economy and why the different levels of the Chinese government, which are not subject to Western democratic accountability regimes, respond to the resistance. Second, it demonstrates the sophisticated and various approaches the Chinese government has taken in balancing the interests of the old taxi industry and the interests of the new economy. The Chinese government’s holistic approach in seeking a balance across different industries and achieving multiple goals at the same time differs from our conventional way of considering regulating online ride-hailing as an issue of compensation between the government and taxi license holders or an issue of legalization between the government and platforms such as Didi or Uber.

Often, accounts of epistemic injustice either conflate epistemic harming with epistemic wronging or assume epistemic injustice is grounded in instances of epistemic harm. Recently, Dunne and Kotsonis (2024) have argued that neither conflation nor grounding make sense; the two are separate phenomena and have attempted to show how the two relate to one another. I argue this approach is mistaken: rather than just distinguish epistemic harming and wronging, instead we should question the very existence of epistemic harm. First, I discuss the relationship between epistemic harm and epistemic wrong and briefly summarize the ways in which they come apart. While I argue that Dunne and Kotsonis’ arguments are unsuccessful, I offer a new argument to the same effect, showing that current accounts of epistemic harm are underinclusive with respect to epistemic wronging. Second, I show that, generally, wronging does not require harming. Finally, I give us reason to believe that indeed, epistemic harm doesn’t exist: I argue that the notion of intrinsically epistemic harm is suspect, and does not fit within extant theorization on harm more generally and that we, therefore, ought to abandon it entirely: like the general case, epistemic wrong can exist without epistemic harm. To modify a slogan proposed by Bradley, we should do away with epistemic harm.

We give combinatorially controlled series solutions to Dyson–Schwinger equations with multiple insertion places using tubings of rooted trees and investigate the algebraic relation between such solutions and the renormalization group equation.

As India and Pakistan emerged as two new nation-states after 1947, questions around nationality and citizenship animated official and public discourses. While there were constitutional and legal pronouncements to clarify these matters, this article suggests that particular documents governing mobility became central to how such issues were framed and understood. In particular, this article focuses on the Indian passport and similar documents of mobility control, such as the domicile certificate, permits, and so on, to examine how they worked singly and in conjunction to frame the documentary life of belonging. The article also focuses on particular mobile groups, Muslim minorities and women married to non-Indians, to understand how these documents became central to their claims of citizenship and belonging.

Human interactions in the online world comprise a combination of positive and negative exchanges. These diverse interactions can be captured using signed network representations, where edges take positive or negative weights to indicate the sentiment of the interaction between individuals. Signed networks offer valuable insights into online political polarization by capturing antagonistic interactions and ideological divides on social media platforms. This study analyzes polarization on Menéame, a Spanish social media platform that facilitates engagement with news stories through comments and voting. Using a dual-method approach—Signed Hamiltonian Eigenvector Embedding for Proximity for signed networks and Correspondence Analysis for unsigned networks—we investigate how including negative ties enhances the understanding of structural polarization levels across different conversation topics on the platform. While the unsigned Menéame network effectively delineates ideological communities, only by incorporating negative ties can we identify ideologically extreme users who engage in antagonistic behaviors: without them, the most extreme users remain indistinguishable from their less confrontational ideological peers.

Understanding how law is articulated by computer means becomes crucial amid the widespread use of algorithmic decision-making systems (ADMs) in public policies. Based on a case study of the profiling algorithm deployed in labour market policies in Poland, this article contributes to the debate on computer representation of law. Using unique data concerning ADMs and their development, we address the following questions: How is the law articulated through algorithms? Who produces, and how, what kinds of discrepancies between the law and ADMs? Our analysis revealed discrepancies that were indicative of political decision-making that go far beyond adaptations of law to the requirements of ADMs. Furthermore, contrary to what the literature suggests, these discrepancies were a product of backstage decision-making by traditional policy-makers – executive and public administration – rather than system-level bureaucrats. Thus, we argue for the need to incorporate the political dimension more systematically into the analysis of computer articulation of law.