Major shifts underway in US vaccine policies reflect widespread misinformation, notably including unproven claims of harms from vaccines. Vaccination misconceptions also include an array of falsities about the scope and extent of governmental powers and protections. Exposing these “legal myths” clarifies existing foundations of vaccine laws and policies, providing guidance on appropriate responses to quell vaccine hesitancy.

This response addresses critical engagements with The Epistemology of Disaster and Social Change, defending and expanding its core argument: that disasters generate epistemic opportunities capable of reshaping societies, for better or worse. Drawing from feminist and standpoint epistemologies, the authors develop a heuristic of the epistemic watershed to map how positionality, rupture, and solidarity produce or inhibit liberatory change. They confront critiques of epistemic uptake, emphasizing the ethical costs of appropriating marginalized knowledge while asserting its centrality to just disaster response. Case studies from the Altadena wildfires and post-Maria Puerto Rico illustrate how queer and Black feminist practices of survival, refusal, and community-building challenge dominant imaginaries and enable democratic transformation. Acknowledging the real harms of epistemic extraction and backlash, the authors argue for coalitional knowledge practices as essential in moments of crisis. Ultimately, they insist that disaster must be reimagined not as a neutral rupture but as a battleground for justice-oriented futures.

During World War II, German occupation obstructed foreign tourism to Amsterdam. The local tourist association VVV did not, however, cease its promotional activities. On the contrary; as a public–private association largely financed by the Amsterdam municipality and the local Chamber of Commerce, the VVV functioned as an institutional nexus between the German-controlled municipal authorities, local entrepreneurs in the city’s tourist industry, tourists and local citizens. This article argues that the VVV played a significant role in promoting the return to ‘normalcy’ and an acceptance of aspects of a new normal in the Dutch capital. In a wide variety of initiatives, it encouraged domestic tourists and local inhabitants – largely ignoring the gradual exclusion of Jews – to continue a public life of amusement, cultural enrichment and identification with local and national heritage.

Turnbull-Dugarte and López Ortega (2024) argue that increasing exposure to sexually conservative ethnic out-groups causes instrumental support for LGBT+ rights among those predisposed to disfavor the ethnic out-group. The article presents results from two related experiments, one conducted in the UK and a follow up in Spain, where respondents were randomly assigned to read vignettes about anti-LGBT+ protests, and the identity of the protesters was varied. I outline a series of concerns with the article, primarily related to ad hoc empirical choices. The authors use weights (of undisclosed origin) that follow a peculiar bimodal distribution in the second study but use no weights in the first, and inconsistently use robust standard errors throughout. These choices create a pattern of statistically significant results consistent with their theory, a pattern that disappears when either choice is varied. Additional analyses show that, rather than supporting their theory, the second experiment contradicts it.

Previously, consideration of purebred cat welfare has focused heavily on links between specific breeds and their predispositions to disease, extreme morphology, and behavioural traits. While these are certainly important to consider, negative messaging about purebred cats is often poorly evidenced and can be alienating to owners and breeders, with consequent limited or even negative welfare gain. Negative focus on individual breeds also risks overlooking the wider picture, where propagation of genetic traits that impinge upon welfare should be avoided across all cats (Felis catus). An account of purebred cat welfare must also consider husbandry and breeding practices, new experimental breeds and motivations behind changing acquisition trends. This review used a framework based on the five welfare needs from UK legislation, bolstered by published feline quality of life assessment tools, to review the literature on purebred cats. This aimed to re-orient the discussion on purebred cat welfare away from excessive focus on individual breed statements and instead explore broader, generalisable evidence-based welfare considerations. The review concludes that purebred cat welfare in the UK falls short of ideal in numerous ways. These include more obvious conformational concerns, such as osteochondrodysplasia in Scottish Folds and the increasingly flattened faces of brachycephalic cats. Several areas where strong evidence is lacking were also identified, including current breeding conditions, impact of morphological changes on social behaviour, and the breeding and keeping of hybrid cats. More evidence on the motivations behind owning cats with specific morphology is also required to better target interventions to improve the lives of cats.

The Drittwirkung determined the discussion on the impact of fundamental rights on private relations, significantly influencing the dogmatics of fundamental rights and the paradigm of their application in Germany. The current state of development of the Drittwirkung is a result of a dialogue over the course of several decades in German academia between the Federal Constitutional Court and legal scholars, who point out the dogmatic deficiencies of this concept. The development of the problem of the phenomenon in question in the jurisprudence of the FCC progressed along two lines. Firstly, it consisted of the dogmatization of the Drittwirkung, as this is how the process of the clarification of the conditions for the radiating impact of fundamental rights can be described in its subsequent rulings. Secondly, the efforts of the FCC were aimed at searching for solutions alternative to Drittwirkung, which could justify the horizontal application of fundamental rights norms. The article reconstructs the dogmatization process of Drittwirkung with reference to the key rulings in the development of this concept. It presents a possible account of the relationship between Drittwirkung and Schutzpflichten. Finally, it argues in favour of a reorientation of the doctrine of the Drittwirkung, framing the horizontal application of fundamental rights as an interpretation in accordance with the constitution.

We examined how language affects moral judgments in a non-WEIRD population. Tanzanian participants (N = 103) evaluated utilitarian agents in moral dilemmas, either in native Chagga or foreign Swahili. Agents were rated significantly more moral and braver when evaluated in a foreign language. Bravery predicted morality more strongly in the foreign language than in the native language. Indirect sacrifices were judged more moral than direct ones, but equally brave. These findings extend the moral foreign language effect to informally acquired languages and highlight methodological implications for cross-cultural research.

We describe the main insights from the papers included in this special issue, Challenges for the Development of Latin America in the Anthropocene: Current Research in Environmental Economics. The contributions are organized around three themes: the economic and welfare impacts of temperature variability, the role of institutions and user rights in shaping environmental governance and the effectiveness of regulatory instruments for managing ambient and atmospheric pollution. Together, these papers show that environmental outcomes in Latin America are deeply shaped by institutional capacity, governance quality and social inequality. By combining rigorous empirical analysis with attention to local contexts, they demonstrate how environmental economics can inform policy responses to the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution.

The Ordovician Puna retroarc foreland basin in northwestern Argentina accommodated the c. 3500 m thick Puna Turbidite Complex, consisting of the Lower and Upper Turbidite systems. The turbidites accumulated in the Middle Ordovician over 15 Myr. 744 new detrital zircon U-Pb ages obtained from seven medium and fine-sand turbidite layers of the Puna Turbidite Complex reflect a South American provenance from the Terra Amazonica and the early Terra Australis orogens between 2000 Ma and 440 Ma. The most abundant detrital zircon age group consists of Ordovician ages representing the Famatinian orogenic cycle (520–410 Ma), followed by those of the preceding Olmos-Pampean orogenic cycle (650–520 Ma), the Neoproterozoic rifting phase connected to Rodinia dispersal (1000–650 Ma) and the Sunsás orogenic cycle (1200–1000 Ma). The age distributions of fine and medium sand turbidite layers are statistically almost identical and do not display significant effects of sorting. Subchondritic ϵHf(t) values of Ordovician zircon emphasise crustal recycling and reworking as the most significant processes during the Famatinian Orogenic cycle. Hf(TDM2) indicates that crustal material mostly formed as juvenile crust in Mesoproterozoic time, during the Rȏndonia-San Ignacio and Sunsás orogenic cycles. Detrital zircon δ18O data obtained from syndepositional Ordovician zircon are elevated and range between 6.5 and 8.8 ‰. Combined with similar data from the literature on intrusive and orthometamorphic rocks of the Famatinian magmatic arc, these data indicate that crustal recycling and reworking of supracrustal rocks played a major role in the evolution of the Famatinian arc in the southern central Andes.

Between December 2018 and August 2019, political activities in Sudan resulted in the overthrow of the incumbent regime. Despite efforts by the security apparatus to retain control, continued mobilization of Sudanese working peoples ensured civilian participation in the transitional government. How did the organization of Sudanese working peoples lead to the overthrow of the regime and challenge the state? Drawing on the work of Global African thinkers, and analyzing organizational documents, systematically collected media reports on the uprising (2018–2019), and insights from ethnographic fieldwork in Khartoum (2022), I argue that the nonhierarchical coordination of autonomous, self-organized groups - such as the Neighborhood Resistance Committees and Tea Sellers Association - representing different sections of the working poeples was central to the movement’s success. These findings enrich our understanding of the Sudanese revolutionary process by showing how coordinated self-organization served as an asset for political change.

In many African countries, limited population data pose a challenge for tax administrations struggling with informal economies. This study examines Uganda’s integration of national ID data into tax registration through “Instant TIN,” an interface linking the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) with the National Identification and Registration Agency (NIRA) and the Uganda Registration Service Bureau (URSB). This reform aims to streamline taxpayer registration and improve data quality. Using a mixed-methods approach—combining interviews with government officials and administrative data analysis—we identify three key findings. First, Instant TIN registrants differ significantly from those using the conventional process. They are more likely to be individuals, female, younger, and previously informal, highlighting the reform’s role in bringing in marginalised taxpayers. Second, Instant TIN improves data quality. It reduces TIN duplications for individuals and enhances contact accuracy, decreasing invalid or missing email addresses by eight percentage points and invalid phone numbers by six. However, it worsens sector data quality, increasing missing or incorrect sector information by 12 percentage points. Third, while Instant TIN reduces duplication, manual data entry, and administrative burdens, challenges remain. Infrequent updates in external datasets and a lack of validation within the interface increase administrative costs and complicate taxpayer engagement. Additionally, mandatory in-person updates and invalid contact details add to compliance burdens. Overall, Uganda’s experience highlights both the potential and limitations of integrating national ID data for tax administration, offering insights for other countries considering similar reforms.

How can we make global sensitivity analysis accessible and viable for engineering practice? In this translation article, we present a methodology to enable sensitivity analysis for structural and geotechnical engineering for built environment design and assessment workflows. Our technique wraps computational mechanics and geomechanics finite element (FE) simulations and combines high-performance computing on public cloud with surrogate modeling using machine learning. A key question we address is: “Is there a noticeable loss in fidelity of results from the sensitivity analysis when substituting a simulation model with a surrogate model?” We answer this question for both linear and nonlinear FE simulations.

We investigate the synchronization of speech and co-speech actions (i.e., manual game moves) in a dyadic game interaction across different levels of information structure and mutual visibility. We analyze cross-modal synchronization as the temporal distance between co-speech actions and corresponding (1) pitch accent peaks and (2) word onsets. For (1), we find no effect of mutual visibility on cross-modal synchronization. However, pitch accent peaks and co-speech actions are more tightly aligned when game moves are prosodically prominent due to information structural needs. This result is in line with a view of a tightly coupled processing of modalities, where prominence-lending modifications in the prosodic structure attract corresponding manual actions to be realized in a way similar to ‘beat’ gestures. For (2), we do find an effect of mutual visibility, under which co-speech actions are produced earlier and more tightly aligned with word onsets. This result is in line with a view in which co-speech actions act as communicative affordances, which may help an early disambiguation of a message, similar to ‘representational’ co-speech gestures.

Mars, one of the most Earth-like celestial bodies in the Solar System, is a key focus in the search for extraterrestrial life. However, pure liquid water – essential for life as we know it – is unstable on its surface today due to low pressure and frigid conditions. Concentrated salt solutions (brines) may form through the deliquescence of hygroscopic salts like chlorates and perchlorates detected on Mars, offering a potential water source for hypothetical halotolerant organisms due to the brines’ lower freezing point and reduced vapour pressure. This study simulates brine formation on Mars using a methodical setup. Martian global regolith simulant MGS-1 was either supplemented with hygroscopic salts such as sodium chloride (NaCl), sodium chlorate (NaClO3), sodium perchlorate (NaClO4) or used without the addition of salts as a control. Samples were inoculated with the halotolerant yeast Debaryomyces hansenii, chosen for its high (per)chlorate tolerance. Desiccated samples were transferred to an environment with constant relative humidity (98%), allowing the salts to absorb water from the atmosphere through deliquescence. The study examined the survival of D. hansenii after desiccation and its ability to grow using water absorbed through deliquescence. The results revealed that D. hansenii survived the desiccation in samples containing NaClO3, NaCl or no additional salt and grew in the control samples as well as in the deliquescent-driven NaClO3 and NaCl brines. No survival was observed in samples containing NaClO4 after the desiccation step. These findings suggest that Mars could potentially harbour life in specific niches where deliquescent brines form, specifically in NaCl or NaClO3 rich areas. NaClO4, at least for the yeast tested in this study, is too toxic to support survival or growth in deliquescene-driven habitats.