In this paper, we study the existence and stability of solitary wave solutions for the generalized Benjamin equation in both the $L^2$-critical and $L^2$-supercritical cases by applying the variational methods and the non-homogeneous Gagliardo–Nirenberg inequality. Our main results generalize and complement the existing results in the literature.

Common envelope (CE) evolution is largely governed by the drag torque applied on the in-spiralling stellar components by the envelope. Previous work has shown that idealized models of the torque based on a single body moving in rectilinear motion through an unperturbed atmosphere can be highly inaccurate. Progress requires new models for the torque that account for binarity. Towards this end, we perform a new 3D global hydrodynamic CE simulation with the mass of the companion point particle set equal to the mass of the asymptotic giant branch star core particle to maximize symmetry and facilitate interpretation. First, we find that a region around the particles of a scale comparable to their separation contributes essentially all of the torque. Second, the density pattern of the torque-dominating gas and, to an extent, this gas itself, is roughly in corotation with the binary. Third, approximating the spatial distribution of the torquing gas as a uniform-density prolate spheroid whose major axis resides in the orbital plane and lags the line joining the binary components by a constant phase angle reproduces the torque evolution remarkably well, analogous to studies of binary supermassive black holes. Fourth, we compare the torque measured in the simulation with the predictions of a model that assumes two weak point-mass perturbers undergoing circular motion in a uniform background without gas self-gravity and find remarkable agreement with our results if the background density is taken to be equal to a fixed fraction ($\approx0.44$) of the density at the spheroid surface. Overall, this work makes progress towards developing simple time-dependent models of the CE phase, for example by informing the development of drag force prescriptions for 1D spherically symmetric CE simulations, which could be used to explore the parameter space of luminous red novae or in binary population synthesis studies.

Preparing and filing taxes has become an increasingly digital task. Older adults need to file taxes to qualify for benefits, but little is known about how older adults in Canada manage tax preparation, nor about how they get help. We investigated delegation mechanisms provided by the Canada Revenue Agency, documenting workflows needed to set up delegation and identifying privacy and security risks. We conducted a semi-structured interview study (n = 19) with older adults, formal tax volunteers, and informal tax helpers to understand the challenges and experiences in tax delegation. Our results show that the CRA’s delegation mechanisms are lightweight and enable older adults to delegate tasks to others with minimal privacy and security risks. However, we found these lightweight mechanisms were not known about or used by the older adults who delegated to informal tax helpers, nor were they known about or used by any of the informal tax helpers we interviewed.

This cross-sectional study investigated how care home size influences COVID-19 transmission dynamics, focusing on outbreaks in England during the second wave of COVID-19 (Wave 2; December 2020 to March 2021) and the Omicron wave (December 2021 to February 2022). Using data from the UK Health Security Agency and the Care Quality Commission, positive SARS-CoV-2 test results were matched to care home registration and occupancy data, examining outbreak trajectories in homes of varying sizes and resident age groups. The study included over 90,000 positive cases across the two waves. Small care homes (SCHs, with 10 or fewer beds), predominantly housing younger adults, showed significantly higher early positivity rates: 42% of residents were positive at outbreak detection, rising to 61% by day 7. In contrast, larger homes had early positivity rates of only 3–6%. These findings suggest that SCHs, often designed for communal living, facilitate rapid within-home transmission similar to household settings. The study concludes that outbreak control strategies in SCHs should differ from those in larger care homes, emphasizing proportionate, individualized approaches that consider resident vulnerability and minimize disruption to social support systems. These results have broader implications for managing future infectious disease outbreaks and support the development of tailored guidance based on care home size and resident demographics.

This article aims to help clinicians better assess and manage patients who show ‘problematic detachment’: interpersonal distancing that is resulting in functional impairment or distress. It considers both the possible relevant social contextual factors and the wide range of possible underlying psychopathologies that can result in problematic detachment, including mental illnesses, neurodevelopmental disorders and personality pathology. After giving a practical framework for diagnostic formulation, it summarises key aspects of best practice when working with such individuals. The article covers four key questions that the clinician must address. Is problematic detachment present? If so, what specific challenges underlie and maintain it in this person? Based on that, what diagnostic formulation makes sense for this individual? Finally, using this understanding, how can they best treat this individual?

This theoretical paper responds to concerns surrounding the fracturing and opaqueness of the term “sustainability” and the related metaphysical crisis that underpins an existential polycrisis. Drawing on Nietzsche’s work on order and disorder (1873, 1901), Latour’s (2013) philosophical anthropology of modernity and Rosa’s (2019) theory of resonance, the author proposes a way of considering sustainability pluralistically, as a crucial mode of existence amongst others. Revisiting the dualism of subject/object, the author proposes a more implicated, associative way of viewing how humans and non-humans relate, introducing the term sobject: interpolated, entangled being(s). As this mode of existence is explicated, the paper articulates how this could be useful in an educational sense. What is proposed is a way to “zone in” to sustainability with students; a mode through which we can learn to see our connections to and within the world, through which we can actively renew the many-pronged path of Earthly existence. Authentic transformation of dysfunctional existence on Earth, this paper argues, will not arise from harmony or consensus but from engaging the generative dissonances through which we might move beyond perpetual reconsideration of “sustainability” towards the active reconfiguration of how we live, learn and co-create a more inhabitable world.

In this paper, I draw on feminist resources to argue that Christian analytic philosophers of religion have good reason not only to focus more thoroughly on the topic of love in their treatments of the divine nature but also to give it a substantial and transformative role in the divine nature. The way forward, I propose, involves three moves: (1) designate a place for love in the divine nature, (2) attend to feminist insights on love when doing so, and (3) consider how these interventions transform our understanding of God overall. I then begin this work. Starting with the first task, I consider two ways we might conceptualize love within the divine nature. On the first (which I call ‘the mutually conditioning approach’), love is assigned equal shaping power and, on the second (which I call ‘the orienting trait approach’), love is given enlarged shaping power in the divine nature. In comparing the two, I conclude that both have the good outcome of resulting in a transformed view of God. However, though the second option is more radical and metaphysically complex, we have good reason to prefer it to the first both from philosophical reflection on love’s nature and for its coherence with the Christian tradition. After clarifying how my argument relates to divine simplicity, I begin working towards accomplishing the second and third tasks by considering how the orienting trait approach applies to the topic of divine violence.

This paper examines the understudied role of reading and oral performance in Maya “scribal” imagery from the Late Classic period (a.d. 600–900). Although many studies consider the ways in which Maya artists represented the production of text and image, few systematically examine how textual reception was rendered in Maya art. With this in mind, the present essay considers one specific motif that recurs on painted drinking vessels: the image of a seated figure in front of a codex book. A systematic review of this imagery reveals the limits of conceptualizing these figures as “scribes,” a term which implicitly privileges the acts of painting and writing (tz’ihb). The majority of the figures who appear with books do not hold writing implements. Instead, they make a variety of gestures to texts that likely encode distinct forms of oral performance. Writers and readers can also be tied to separate deities and regalia, which suggests that this division is an emic distinction with implications for the hierarchy of Maya courts. The emphasis on speech and textual interpretation in scribal imagery demonstrates the value of embracing a more flexible, orality-based notion of aesthetics in studies of Maya imagery and non-Western material culture more broadly.

This article proves two no-go results against the conventionality of geometry. I then argue that any remaining conventionality arises from scientific incompleteness. I illustrate by introducing a new kind of conventionality arising in the presence of higher spatial dimensions, where the incompleteness is resolved by introducing new physical theories like Kaluza–Klein theory. Thus, conventional choices of this kind may guide scientific discovery, but if successful, they would dissolve the original conventional freedom.

This article examines the lives of three politicians from Austria’s crownland of Bukovina—Aurel Onciul, Nikolai Wassilko, and Benno Straucher—who pursued distinct national ambitions and built successful political careers as advocates of democratization and nationalization under imperial rule. It aims to highlight the multiple transitions these individuals experienced, including shifts from conservative to democratic mass politics, struggles for national rights, and the passage from imperial to national orders. After 1918, Onciul became a representative of a nationality with its own nation-state, while Wassilko and Straucher became spokespersons for embattled minorities. All three struggled to adapt to the new national order, and the forces of nationalization they once championed ultimately turned against them. The article argues that the nationalist politics that had brought these politicians success under imperial rule were later criticized by their co-nationals as treasonous and opportunistic, illustrating the complex and often paradoxical outcomes of nationalization processes in Central Europe.

This article examines how the absence of physical branches and embodied oversight in fintech reconfigures financial life in Nigeria. Based on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in Jimeta, it shows that the absence of physical infrastructures and the dominance of virtual ones is not merely technical but an active condition that reshapes moral obligation, trust, and accountability in borrowing. Branchless fintech enables users, mostly Muslims, to rationalise interest-bearing loans as private acts beyond communal or religious scrutiny – a process conceptualised as financial secularisation. Yet the same absence generates mistrust as users perceive fintech as intangible and unreliable. The article also shows how the impersonal nature of fintech borrowing encourages default, which fintech companies counter through coercive digital enforcement. These dynamics reveal a dialectic of absence and presence: physical absence weakens moral accountability while hyper-visible digital oversight reinstates coercion. The article contributes to debates on credit-debt relations and infrastructure by showing how digital finance transforms moral economies in the global south and reshapes financial subjectivities.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to address real-world design problems, especially during the design ideation phase. Although LLMs hold substantial promise for concept generation, the understanding of how they can effectively assist designers in enhancing the diversity of design concepts is still limited. In this study, we set up different strategies for prompting multiple professional personas to the LLM for design concept generation, including (1) multiple prompts for concept generation in parallel, each with a professional persona, (2) a single prompt for concept generation with multiple professional personas, and (3) a sequence of prompts for concept generation and update, each with a professional persona. We formulate and test several hypotheses on the effectiveness of different strategies. All hypotheses are tested by constructing professional knowledge bases, selecting design problems and personas, and designing the prompts. The results suggest that LLMs can facilitate the design ideation process and provide more diverse design concepts when they are given multiple prompts in parallel, each with a professional persona, or given a sequence of prompts with multiple professional personas to generate and update design concepts gradually.

What is it to treat people with respect when commenting upon their appearance? What duties does widespread vulnerability to body anxiety impose on us concerning the remarks we make about people’s looks? I provide partial answers to these questions by engaging with three proposals. First, the account of aesthetic exploration developed by Sherri Irvin. Second, the principle of the unmodified body defended by Clare Chambers. Third, the ideal of body reflexivity advocated by Kate Manne. I argue that none of the moral duties these accounts point towards can be justified straightforwardly as a requirement of treating people with equal respect, but the idea that it is disrespectful to treat a person’s appearance as inadequate can be defended when hierarchies of attractiveness translate into differences in perceived moral status. Furthermore, qualified versions of each can be justified by the protection they provide when body shaming is liable to cause debilitating anxiety.

Bien qu’il soit tentant de s’attarder surtout sur les événements marquant la suite des élections américaines tant les deux derniers mois de l’année ont modifié le paradigme en ce qui concerne le droit du commerce international, cette chronique tentera de décrire et d’analyser l’année 2024 dans sa globalité. On pourrait ainsi diviser l’année en deux: l’avant et l’après 5 novembre 2024.

This comment interrogates the methods and conclusions of Working with AI, a recent report conducted under the auspices of Microsoft, which identified historians as the profession with the second-highest ‘AI applicability’. It finds that the authors’ conclusions are based on an erroneous simplification and misrepresentation of a historian’s typical professional tasks, which have been publicly amplified by extensive media coverage. This comment then offers a wider provocation about the report’s conception of a professional historian, and whether it is related to the public application of ‘historian’ to a number of different practitioners with varied training and qualifications. In particular, it seeks to highlight a paradox which the report exposes: that we cannot defend the specialist training and expertise of professional historians against the encroachment of AI without also separating the academic skills and qualifications of historians from those engaged in more popular forms of historical writing and communication. The comment questions how we might grapple with this paradox without reverting to academic elitism.

We study Langevin-type algorithms for sampling from Gibbs distributions such that the potentials are dissipative and their weak gradients have finite moduli of continuity not necessarily convergent to zero. Our main result is a non-asymptotic upper bound on the 2-Wasserstein distance between a Gibbs distribution and the law of general Langevin-type algorithms based on a Liptser–Shiryaev-type condition for change of measures and Poincaré inequalities. We apply this bound to show that the Langevin Monte Carlo algorithm can approximate Gibbs distributions with arbitrary accuracy if the potentials are dissipative and their gradients are uniformly continuous. We also propose Langevin-type algorithms with spherical smoothing for distributions whose potentials are not convex or continuously differentiable and show their polynomial complexities.

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act introduces AI regulatory sandboxes and testing in real-world conditions as experimentation tools to support innovation in AI development. While regulatory sandboxes have been widely adopted across various sectors, their precise function and scope under the AI Act remain complex and multifaceted. This paper examines the legal framework governing AI regulatory sandboxes, analysing the degree of regulatory flexibility they provide and how they interact with other experimentation tools established by the AI Act. In particular, the study assesses whether these instruments enable AI systems to be tested under reduced regulatory constraints or whether they primarily serve as forums for regulatory dialogue. It then explores the differences between AI regulatory sandboxes and the testing in real-world conditions mechanism, highlighting how sandboxes focus on legal guidance, while testing in real-world conditions aims to remove legal barriers and facilitate market entry. The analysis also identifies key interpretative challenges, including the interplay between Article 57 (AI regulatory sandboxes) and Article 60 (testing in real-world conditions), the compliance requirements for each mechanism, and the role of regulatory authorities. The paper concludes that further clarification from the European Commission is necessary to address inconsistencies in the AI Act’s provisions, ensuring effective implementation of AI regulatory sandboxes and testing in real-world conditions.