Weed management is a major challenge in pearl millet production. Limited herbicide options available for use with pearl millet further complicates weed control. To fill this knowledge gap, field experiments were conducted during the 2023 and 2024 growing seasons in Hays, Kansas, to investigate eight preemergence herbicides (labeled for use in sorghum production) for crop safety and weed control when applied to three pearl millet hybrids. Averaged across two growing seasons, S-metolachlor applied preemergence alone or in combination with atrazine, mesotrione, or atrazine + mesotrione resulted in >95% injury to all three pearl millet hybrids at 28 d after application (DAA). Visible injury with acetochlor + atrazine applied preemergence ranged from 50% to 96% among hybrids at 28 DAA. Atrazine or mesotrione applied alone or in combination were safe (<5% injury) on all hybrids. All tested preemergence herbicides provided effective (≥90%) control of Palmer amaranth at 28 DAA, except S-metolachlor, which provided 86% control. The greatest green foxtail control (≥99%) was achieved with mesotrione and acetochlor in combination with atrazine applied preemergence. All three hybrids recorded the highest grain yields (4,370 to 5,870 kg ha−1) with atrazine and mesotrione applied separately, and when they were combined. These results suggested that atrazine, mesotrione, or a mixture of atrazine + mesotrione applied preemergence may be safely used for Palmer amaranth and green foxtail control with newly developed pearl millet hybrids.

This article examines the problem of racialized vulnerability to systemic violence by engaging with the works of Judith Butler and discussing police brutality. Butler has been criticized for presupposing vulnerability as an ontological condition inherent in embodied life and obscuring the distinctive characteristics of racialized vulnerability. Wrestling with these criticisms, the article reads this presupposition as a “contingent foundation,” and it turns to Butler’s longstanding engagements with phenomenology to foreground the norms and frames that inform the ways in which vulnerability is always perceived, interpreted, and adjudicated. Expanding on Butler’s analysis of the 1992 Rodney King trial with the help of Frantz Fanon’s concept of “sociogeny” and working with the trial archives, jurors’ statements, media coverage, and King’s memoir, it outlines a critical phenomenology inquiring into the sociohistorical constitution of racial schemas that turn Black bodies into phobic objects and disproportionately expose them to violence carried out with impunity.

We co-designed a bee sequence with a specialist primary science teacher at an Australian government school. Year 6 students learned about European honeybees and Australian native bees, including through Cli-Fi. In this paper, we explore the pedagogical power of providing students with opportunities to create Cli-Fi about bee futures in the Anthropocene. We present and thematically analyse examples of students’ bee Cli-Fi to argue that they generated these narratives to express how we ought to value bees and how we ought to conduct ourselves towards bees to realise more desirable futures. We propose that these students were futuring as normative myths. Students generated dystopian views of bee futures in adopting a human perspective, but also present were glimmers of hope for a more positive outlook that embraced more-than-human perspectives. We adopt a pragmatist semiotic approach to propose that these young people’s bee Cli-Fi constituted normative claims about the future of bees, as they outlined the aesthetics (how and what we ought to value) and ethics (how and in what way we ought to act) of humans caring for bees in an epoch of polycrisis. We suggest that Cli-Fi ought to be an integral part of climate change education in empowering students to assert their agency.

Soil health refers to the ongoing ability of soil as a living ecosystem to maintain environmental quality, support crop productivity, and ensure human health. Evaluating and enhancing soil health is crucial for ensuring more productive and resilient agricultural systems. The aim of this work is to assess soil health using both on-farm and computational methods. The study was carried out on a slope with textural variation at Ponta Grossa–Paraná State, Brazil. The slope was divided into three segments based on altitude and clay content: upper, middle, and lower positions. In each segment, twenty points were sampled, resulting in a total of sixty points along the slope. Soil health was analysed at these points by visual evaluation of soil structure (VESS), and samples were also collected to use the Soil Management Assessment Framework (SMAF) approach in the 0–0.10 m and 0.10–0.20 m soil layers. The indicators used in this approach were soil organic carbon, macroaggregates, bulk density, water-filled pore space, pH, phosphorus, and potassium. The data were analysed using analysis of variance, mean comparison with Tukey’s test (p < 0.05). In addition, principal component analysis was performed on the soil health index (SHI) and its components (chemical, physical, and biological) with clay content and VESS scores. The study discovered that the upper position had the highest clay content, lower visual scores (2.44), and a higher SHI (up to 0.80) compared to the middle (3.7 and 0.78) and lower positions (2.9 and 0.73). This study highlights the significant influence of soil texture, particularly clay content, on soil structural quality and health as assessed by VESS and SMAF. Higher clay content improved soil aggregation and health, while lower clay content in the middle and lower slope positions resulted in poorer structure. VESS proved to be an effective field-based tool for rapid assessment of soil health, complementing the more detailed SMAF framework. The integration of both methods is essential for the development of adaptive and sustainable soil management strategies.

The Mental Health Gap Action Programme Intervention Guide (mhGAP-IG) was developed by the World Health Organization as a key tool for delivering evidence-based mental healthcare in non-specialized settings. The mhGAP-IG requires contextualization and adaptation to ensure local relevance. However, evidence on adapting the Child and Adolescent Mental Disorders (CMH) module of the mhGAP-IG is limited. This study contextualized and adapted the 2016 mhGAP-IG CMH module through two workshops with local mental health experts and stakeholders, preceded by six in-depth interviews exploring the child and adolescent mental health contexts in Nairobi and Kilifi. Data were analysed in NVivo-Lumivero© software. Interviews with mental health stakeholders revealed significant challenges in both counties, including a shortage of mental health specialists, frequent medication stockouts, stigma and inadequate resources. Key adaptations to the module included using locally acceptable terms (e.g., replacing ‘failure to thrive’ with ‘suboptimal growth’); expanding training to five days; adding the mhGAP-IG Essential Care and Practice module to address culturally sensitive communication in mental healthcare provision; streamlining referral pathways; and incorporating aspects of self-harm/suicide and substance use linked to the CMH module content. Contextualizing the CMH module is crucial for effective implementation, but sustaining impact will require addressing systemic barriers beyond capacity-building.

The thesis that testimony is the sole foundational source of justification for moral belief will strike many as ridiculous and a non-starter for theorizing about the justification of moral beliefs. Call this thesis testimonial foundationalism. This paper argues that testimonial foundationalism deserves to be taken seriously as a live option in moral epistemology. First, I argue that if we think non-moral testimony can propositionally justify belief, then we should think that moral testimony doing the same is no more problematic. Second, I show that there are good prima facie reasons to hold testimony as the unique source of propositional justification for moral belief: Testimonial foundationalism requires fewer metaphysical commitments, gives the best explanation of our practices in moral education, and there are no special reasons stemming from skeptical challenges pushing us to reject the thesis. Finally, I tackle the “obvious objection,” which argues that in order to successfully testify to a moral fact, the testifier must first know that moral fact, but it is impossible for the first testifier to have moral knowledge by the lights of testimonial foundationalism. I conclude with an upshot of the paper, which is that it reveals there to be two independent projects in moral epistemology: providing a theory of justification for moral belief, and providing a theory of the reliability of our moral beliefs.

Magnetic geometry has a significant effect on the level of turbulent transport in fusion plasmas. Here, we model and analyse this dependence using multiple machine learning methods and a dataset of ${\gt}200\,000$ nonlinear gyrokinetic simulations of ion-temperature-gradient turbulence in diverse non-axisymmetric geometries. The dataset is generated using a large collection of both optimised and randomly generated stellarator equilibria. At fixed gradients and other input parameters, the turbulent heat flux varies between geometries by several orders of magnitude. Trends are apparent among the configurations with particularly high or particularly low heat flux. Regression and classification techniques from machine learning are then applied to extract patterns in the dataset. Due to a symmetry of the gyrokinetic equation, the heat flux and regressions thereof should be invariant to translations of the raw features in the parallel coordinate, similar to translation invariance in computer vision applications. Multiple regression models including convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and decision trees can achieve reasonable predictive power for the heat flux in held-out test configurations, with highest accuracy for the CNNs. Using Spearman correlation, sequential feature selection and Shapley values to measure feature importance, it is consistently found that the most important geometric lever on the heat flux is the flux surface compression in regions of bad curvature. The second most important geometric feature relates to the magnitude of geodesic curvature. These two features align remarkably with surrogates that have been proposed based on theory, while the methods here allow a natural extension to more features for increased accuracy. The dataset, released with this publication, may also be used to test other proposed surrogates, and we find that many previously published proxies do correlate well with both the heat flux and stability boundary.