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.

Numerous phenomena prompt inquiries into their origins, spanning from the cosmos and life, to species, civilizations, and pandemics. Answering these questions entails offering origin explanations. Here, I explore the distinctive characteristics of origin explanations that distinguish them from other types of explanations. I explicate the concept of an origin phenomenon and suggest conceptualizing an origin explanation as a specific form of causal explanation—one that reveals a bottleneck in the causal network leading to an origin phenomenon. The resulting framework highlights the specificity of origin explanations across disciplines, pinpointing distinctive topological features within the causal structure of the world.

Aerial lidar (light detection and ranging) has been hailed as a revolutionary technology in archaeological survey because it can map vast areas with high-precision and seemingly peer beneath forest cover. This excitement has led to a proliferation of lidar scans, including calls to map the entire land surface of earth. Highlighting how the growth of aerial lidar is tied to fast capitalism, this article seeks to temporarily pause the global rush for data collection/extraction by focusing on the ethical dilemmas of remotely scanning Indigenous homelands and heritage. Although lidar specialists must obtain federal permissions for their work, few engage with people directly in the path of their scans or descendant stakeholders. This oversight perpetuates colonial oppression by objectifying Indigenous descendants. To address Indigenous objectification, I argue that aerial lidar mapping should be preceded by a concerted, culturally sensitive effort to obtain informed consent from local and descendant groups. With the Mensabak Archaeological Project as a case study, I demonstrate how aerial lidar can become part of a collaborative, humanizing praxis.

MRI-guided focused ultrasound (MRgFUS) thalamotomy has expanded the surgical treatment envelope for patients with essential tremor who fail on first-line pharmacological therapies. Understanding differences in access to MRgFUS thalamotomy, a procedure publicly funded in Ontario, is a first step to ensuring equitable opportunity for treatment across the province. In this brief communication, we explore the frequency of referrals directed to our tremor program between 2018 and 2023. We highlight differences in referral rates by jurisdiction and medical specialty, and explore associations with socio-economic factors. Our findings inform public policy and identify geographical areas for targeted outreach to enhance equitable access.

Research on multilingualism often assumes homogeneity within monolingual and multilingual groups, overlooking diversity in language environments, such as differences in language exposure and combinations. This study examines three such diversity indicators – language entropy, context entropy and linguistic distance – and their relationship to vocabulary in 4- to 5-year-old mono- and multilingual children (N = 257). Results reveal significantly greater vocabulary in monolinguals than multilinguals when comparing one language, but multilinguals outperform monolinguals on conceptual vocabulary. Vocabulary size in multilinguals showed a quadratic relationship with language and context entropy, initially increasing but declining at higher entropy levels. Additionally, children with greater linguistic distances generally had larger dominant vocabularies. However, within the group with high linguistic distance, further increased distance was linked to smaller dominant vocabularies. These findings suggest that the applied diversity indicators capture meaningful variation in language environments, offering valuable insights about diversity in environments on vocabulary outcomes in multilingual children.

This study investigated whether differences in executive control exist between bilinguals and monolinguals who share a dual-language context. We compared functional monolingual and bilingual groups’ cognitive performance and the correlation between self-reported and objective linguistic variables and cognitive outcomes. Group comparisons revealed no significant differences between functional monolinguals and bilinguals on inhibition, task switching and updating of information. However, distinct correlational patterns were observed within groups. In functional monolinguals, participants with lower bilingualism scores showed better task-specific inhibition (Color–Word part of the Stroop task) and a better ability to monitor for conflicts (Digits Forward task). In contrast, bilinguals with higher degrees of bilingualism showed better overall inhibition outcomes (Stroop effect). Findings are discussed in terms of the importance of adopting more comprehensive methodological approaches to study bilingualism as a heterogeneous phenomenon, considering the diversity within each group and the cultural and linguistic context in which the bilingual experience takes place.

The United States has long been a global power deeply entangled in regions like Europe and the Middle East, where its foreign policy has been anchored in clear ontological scripts – defender of democracy, bulwark against terrorism, guarantor of order. In contrast, the Arctic has historically lacked this symbolic and strategic integration into US identity. Despite its formal status as an Arctic state since the 1867 purchase of Alaska, the region has remained ontologically peripheral to US strategic imagination. This paper explores the implications of that absence. Through discourse and content analyses of Arctic strategy documents and congressional hearings from 1867 to 2024, I identify four distinct eras of US Arctic engagement and examine how the region’s underdefined identity position has generated scattered and inconsistent policy. The paper argues that this form of ontological ambiguity has given rise to growing anxiety, particularly status anxiety, amid rising Arctic investments by Russia and China. Rather than paralyzing decision-making, however, this anxiety has begun to function as a catalyst, prompting renewed attention to the Arctic’s strategic, environmental, and symbolic relevance.

Regulatory sandboxes for Artificial Intelligence (AI) are designed to address challenges of rapid technological change. AI innovations create an acute need for learning about what regulation is suitable for enabling innovation while dealing with technological risks. This article argues that regulatory sandboxes should be analyzed primarily as mechanisms for enhancing policymakers’ understanding of technologies such as AI, rather than solely as spaces for experimentation that promote innovation. It discusses the role of regulatory sandboxes in facilitating policy learning that can complement the long-term learning processes of the traditional policy cycle. Six case studies serve to illustrate sandbox elements for enabling collaborative experiential learning in contexts in which the absence of AI regulation makes accelerated policy learning particularly valuable. Looking at the design and governance of regulatory sandboxes from Brazil, Colombia, Mauritius, Mexico, Rwanda, and Thailand, learning elements related to the technology and consequences for closing legal lags emerge as critical components.

The establishment of artificial intelligence regulatory sandboxes (AIRSs) poses both policy and technical challenges, especially in how to reconcile support for innovation with regulatory oversight. AIRSs are based on dynamic regulatory feedback mechanisms that allow for a deeper examination of legal norms with a view to their future evolution. These structures facilitate engagement between regulators and innovators, enabling business learning and regulatory adaptation. However, their proliferation across the European Union under the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) may raise issues of coordination between competent authorities, cross-border regulatory alignment and consistency with overlapping (sectoral) rules. In view of these potential complexities, this paper makes two distinct recommendations. First, AIRSs would benefit from cross-border cooperation – efforts should therefore be made to pursue the establishment of joint AIRSs among different Member States in order to reduce regulatory fragmentation, lower the risk of forum shopping, and optimise administrative resources. Second, integrating AI and cybersecurity compliance within the same sandbox environment would be beneficial in terms of providing clearer and more structured compliance pathways. A well-designed regulatory sandbox regime would make regulation more effective, encourage responsible AI development and secure Europe’s leadership in digital regulation.

Archaeology comprises both systematic and pragmatic attitudes and processes concerned with the collection and maintenance of data. Thus, it needs to obtain formally defined data while also grappling with the fuzzy and uncertain nature of archaeological encounters, especially in fieldwork environments. This produces an epistemic tension, as archaeologists struggle to reconcile their desire to produce concrete outcomes based on objective facts and their intuitive understanding that data are in fact products of situated decisions and actions. Through observations of archaeological practices, interviews with archaeologists at work, and analysis of the documents they produced while recording objects of archaeological concern, this article describes how archaeologists cope with this tension and integrate it into their work experiences.

This paper seeks to understand the different conceptual representations of R. Murray Schafer’s ideas in scholarly literature and their relevance within framework of transversal competences as a perspective of education in the 21st century. A systematic review of the literature was carried out using the PRISMA guidelines as a reference. Five multidisciplinary databases were searched between 2000 and 2024 in English, Spanish and Portuguese. The 29 scientific papers included in the review present perspectives from four continents, diverse areas of knowledge and different educational focuses and levels. The results show the relevance of three concepts: listening as a disposition, creative music education as a procedure and soundscape as an interdisciplinary resource. These concepts are approached from the artistic-musical and transdisciplinary fields, and represented from different perspectives: inclusive, aesthetic, social and economic. It is concluded that M. Schafer’s ideas are characterised by their topicality due to the transversal approach they promote, where creativity, social and environmental commitment, and the participation of all in musical learning are coherent with the challenges of musical education and training to which we aspire.

The “public turn” in the humanities constellates a moment of critique, identifying literature’s dis-embedded and elite orientations, mostly institutionalized by academics and the reigning world systems. The reified literary space and its ultimate syllabification have completely dematerialized literature, even de-radicalizing postcolonial studies, Black studies, and Dalit studies into dis-embedded academic practices. The questions I pose inquire whether the postcolonial literary enterprise mostly relies on elite “europhonic” expressions of the aesthetic, while ignoring a vast corpus of vernacular and local texts that narrate the struggles and visions of the actual publics and the counterpublics (Fraser 1992 and Warner 2005). The heterodox and subaltern dimensions of the publics—the counterpublics—also expose the conformist and majoritarian character of the publics. This project, therefore, argues for the restoration of the publics in literature while at the same time problematizing the ideological and hegemonic kernel of the category of the publics itself. As the idea of the counterpublics signifies a greater materiality of dissent within the category of the publics, this paper empirically examines the vernacular Sahajiya literature of Bengal (fifteenth to nineteenth centuries), which involves the voices of the Bengali counterpublics, including the subaltern Bauls and the Fakirs who embodied the Sufi-Sahajiya or Sufi-Vaisnab heterodox traditions of vernacular cosmopolitanism.

International migrant workers (IMWs) may face insecure work and housing, limited access to healthcare and increased risk of psychological problems. Two scalable, evidence-based interventions to support individuals experiencing psychological distress are Doing What Matters in Times of Stress (DWM) and Problem Management Plus (PM+). This study aimed to explore IMWs’ problems, daily functioning and help-seeking behaviour, to inform cultural adaptation of the DWM/PM+ stepped-care intervention in the Netherlands. Following the Design, Implementation, Monitoring, and Evaluation (DIME) model, we conducted various qualitative interviews and a focus group discussion with IMWs (n = 30) and professionals (n = 18). Data were analysed thematically, and findings informed adaptations. Participants described problems related to work, housing, administration, finances, healthcare access and the COVID-19 pandemic. Daily routines focused on practical needs. Help-seeking was hindered by stigma, fear of job loss, low trust and reliance on informal or cross-border healthcare. Based on these results, the intervention was adapted to the needs of Polish IMWs in the Netherlands, regarding content and examples, which were tailored to their context; the intervention was offered remotely and collaboration with employers was avoided. These findings highlight the structural vulnerabilities of IMWs and demonstrate how qualitative insights can guide the cultural adaptation of a psychological intervention.

We give a presentation of the torus-equivariant (small) quantum K-ring of flag manifolds of type C as an explicit quotient of a Laurent polynomial ring; our presentation can be thought of as a quantization of the classical Borel presentation of the ordinary K-ring of flag manifolds. Also, we give an explicit Laurent polynomial representative for each special Schubert class in our Borel-type presentation of the quantum K-ring.

Magmatic textures and whole-rock major element analyses of metaluminous to mildly peralkaline alkali feldspar syenite and granite in the late Palaeozoic Oslo Rift in S.E. Norway, suggest that most of these rocks formed from a mixture of liquids and cumulus minerals, mainly alkali feldspar, and, in some cases, ternary anorthoclase. A likely scenario is that the syenitic to granitic plutons were emplaced as slurries of crystal-laden melts, which continued to accumulate feldspar ± quartz once emplaced at their final level. Interstitial and miarolitic mineral assemblages with arfvedsonite, aegirine, astrophyllite, elpidite and other alkali-rich minerals formed from trapped, highly evolved residual melts. Energy-constrained modelling of the magmatic evolution shows that a mildly alkaline, mafic parental magma, appropriate for basalts and intermediate magmatic rocks in the Oslo Rift, can differentiate to peralkaline, syenitic residual compositions close to silica saturation by fractional crystallization only in a narrow pressure interval (4.5 to 5.0 kbar), at fO2 between ca. QFM-1 and QFM + 1, with low initial water content. When emplaced into the shallow crust, such melts will deposit alkali feldspar cumulates with the composition and mineralogy of mildly peralkaline syenite. Peralkaline granitic residual liquids can be formed by further fractionation of residual melts in this system at lower pressure (2–3 kbar) and will eventually deposit alkali feldspar – quartz cumulates. The residual melts are too strongly peralkaline to account for observed plutonic rock compositions, but they are close to a suite of accompanying peralkaline trachytic to rhyolitic dykes. Similar accumulation processes may be important for syenitic rocks enriched in alkali feldspar and depleted in nominally incompatible trace elements worldwide.

African swine fever (ASF) is a highly contagious animal disease caused by African swine fever virus (ASFV). It is listed by the World Organization for Animal Health (WOAH) as an animal disease subject to statutory reporting. ASFV, a large, enveloped double-stranded DNA virus with high genomic complexity, exhibits a case fatality rate of up to 100%, posing a significant threat to the global pig industry and food safety. To date, the absence of a safe commercial ASFV vaccine primarily stems from challenges in identifying immunogenic viral antigens, insufficient characterization of ASFV pathogenesis, and limited understanding of the virus’s immune evasion mechanisms. Here, we review the pathogenic characteristics (morphological structure, clinical symptoms, and epidemiological characteristics), molecular biological characteristics, and infection mechanism of ASFV, as well as the immune response mechanism, vaccine research, and the latest information on ASFV in other areas. This review will be in favour of understanding the current state of knowledge of ASF and developing effective vaccines to control this disease.

The ENHANCE non-inferiority trial that took place in a deprived setting in Pakistan demonstrated that a technology-assisted digital adaptation of the Technology Assisted Thinking Healthy Programme (THP-TAP) was no different than the face-to-face THP in improving symptoms of perinatal depression. The present study examines the mechanisms through which THP-TAP improved symptoms of perinatal depression (or not) compared to the face-to-face THP.

We applied a counterfactual-based approach to mediation – particularly interventional effects – to decompose the total effect of the THP-TAP intervention on symptoms of perinatal depression into the following pre-specified indirect effects: number of sessions attended; behavioural activation; perceived social support; problem-solving and cognitive-restructuring skills; and peer empathy. Mediators were assessed at 3 months post-partum, and depressive symptoms were measured at 6 months using the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9).

Perceived social support in THP-TAP arm mediated an improvement in symptoms of perinatal depression compared to the standard face-to-face THP group (adjusted mean difference in PHQ-9 scores attributable to perceived social support in the technology-assisted digital adaptation of the THP group compared to the World Health Organisation THP group: −0.072, bias-corrected 95% confidence interval: −0.170, −0.018). There was no difference to support the indirect effects for all other mediators.

Even in the absence of treatment superiority, our findings suggest that levels of perceived social support were an important feature of the THP-TAP intervention, which resulted in improved symptoms of perinatal depression. From a practical perspective, these findings highlight the importance of social connectedness as a mechanism of change, demonstrating that peer-delivered digital psychosocial interventions can successfully cultivate this relational component.