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| > 20°) 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 , which is in agreement with other results within the literature. Previous constraints on DMMW,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.

This paper examines the history-making of the first two Raffles Professors of History at the University of Malaya, C.N. Parkinson and K.G. Tregonning, to demonstrate the impact Malaya’s decolonisation had on the historiographical practices of the university’s History Department. It argues that both historians, animated by Malaya’s decolonisation, attempted to re-frame Malayan history – through adopting a ‘world-historical’ and ‘autonomous history’ framework respectively – to meet what they perceived were the needs of a post-independence multiracial Malaya. Although both historians claimed to be producing histories for an independent Malaya, and while their frameworks were indeed methodologically innovative, both historians ultimately produced histories that continued to frame Malayan history using western frameworks. They were thus partially decolonised historians writing partially decolonised histories for a partially decolonised Malaya.

Working closely with a detailed 1582 register of the free Afro-Peruvian population of Cusco, Peru, this article explores how the strategic representations of individual registrants reflect the intersectional impact of unfree labor practices and increasing racial marginalization in the early colonial Andes. The growing population of free Afro-Peruvian men and women navigated practices and policies that promoted racial inequalities and coerced labor based on race, class, and gender. The 1582 registry reflects municipal attempts to subject Cusco’s free Afro-Peruvians to ordinances that acknowledged the relative independence of skilled workers (oficiales), while requiring others to reside and serve in the homes of Spanish masters (amos). Analyzing entries for the nearly 150 people registered reveals ways that intersectional status and identity affected the experience of registration and the strategies for providing personal information to the Spanish notary. The declarations and omissions contained in the document highlight personal choices that people made to preserve their independence and that of their families. The social and economic independence displayed by many oficiales contrasts with the silence of individuals who lived and worked in the households of wealthy and powerful Spaniards, navigating unequal and enmeshed relationships. The range of individual experiences and statuses evident in the 1582 registry helps explain why the restrictive goal of the proceeding failed in the following years, as well as why a free Afro-Peruvian community did not flourish in Cusco during the later colonial period.

This paper presents a reliability-constrained Bayesian optimization framework for structural design under uncertainty, addressing challenges in stochastic optimization where the objectives and constraints are defined implicitly by potentially expensive numerical models. Our approach explicitly accounts for parameter uncertainty using results from Bayesian quadrature for uncertainty propagation in Gaussian process surrogate models. The method accommodates arbitrary probability distributions and employs gradient-based optimization for acquisition function maximization, strategically selecting sample points to minimize numerical model evaluations. We demonstrate our algorithm’s superior performance over random search and conventional Bayesian optimization through both an analytical test function and a prestressed tie-beam design case study, showing its practical applicability to structural optimization problems.

Notating electroacoustic music can be challenging due to the uniqueness of the instruments employed. Electronic instruments can include generative components that can manipulate sound at different time levels, in which parameter variations can correlate non-linearly to changes in the instrument’s timbre. The way compositions for electronic instruments are notated depends on their interfaces and the parameter controls available to performers, which determine the state of their sound-generating system. In this article, we propose a notation system for generative synthesis based on a projection from its parameter space to a timbre space, allowing to organise synthesiser states based on their timbral characteristics. To investigate this approach, we introduce the Meta-Benjolin, a state-based notation system for chaotic sound synthesis employing a three-dimensional, navigable timbre space and a composition timeline. The Meta-Benjolin was developed as a control structure for the Benjolin, a chaotic synthesiser. Framing chaotic synthesis as a specific instance of generative synthesis, we discuss the advantages and drawbacks of the state- and timbre-based representation we designed based on the thematic analysis of an interview study with 19 musicians, who composed a piece using the Meta-Benjolin notational interface.

Bilinguals vary in their daily-life language use and switching behaviours, which are also frequently studied in relation to other processes (e.g., executive control). Measuring daily-life language use and switching often relies on self-reported questionnaires, but little is known about the validity of these questionnaires. Here, we present two studies examining test–retest reliability and validity of language-use questionnaires (relative to Ecological Momentary Assessment, Study 1) and language-switching questionnaires and tasks (relative to recorded daily-life conversations, small-scale Study 2). Test–retest reliability and validity of the LSBQ (Anderson et al., 2018) were high and moderate, respectively, suggesting this questionnaire can capture daily-life language use well. Although only examined with a small sample size, Study 2 suggested relatively low validity of most language-switching questionnaires, with short language-production tasks potentially offering a more valid assessment. Together, these studies suggest that tools are available to reliably capture language use and switching with (a certain degree of) validity.

This study examines intergroup bias among members of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland—a high-status ethnolinguistic minority group. Drawing on social identity theory and intergroup threat theory, the study explores ingroup favoritism and identifies key predictors of individual-level bias. Using survey data from 1,096 Swedish-speaking Finns, the study uses trait-based evaluations of both ingroup and outgroup members. Results show that intergroup bias is prevalent, particularly in the form of ingroup favoritism for positive traits. Analyses reveal that strong ethnolinguistic identity and perceived intergroup threat significantly predict higher levels of bias, while language identity, Finnish language proficiency, and intergroup contact show no consistent relationships. These findings suggest that even in socially stable and egalitarian contexts, perceived threats to group identity can sustain intergroup bias.

New parties have emerged across European democracies, forcing established parties to develop strategies to campaign against them. But how do supporters want their established parties to respond to these new parties? Using survey experiments in 14 European countries, we examine how party supporters react to responses their preferred parties might take to the rise of a hypothetical new party. Our results primarily highlight that voters care about substantive representation. They endorse accommodative responses towards a new party offering a policy they agree with. Thus, the extent to which party responses bind supporters to established parties is highly contingent on the distribution of policy positions among their supporters. Often, established parties must walk a precarious tightrope, balancing the need for unity with some degree of tolerance for dissent. Hence, our results explain why parties accommodate the position of new parties, despite recent evidence that doing so can be electorally detrimental.