Here we present the resistance of two halophilic Archaea, Halorubrum (Hrr.) sp. AS12 and Haloarcula (Har.). sp. NS06, isolated from the brine in Lunenburg, Germany, to stress factors including desiccation, radiation and elevated perchlorate concentration. This is the first study to describe the stress resistance of halophilic Archaea isolated from the Lunenburg brine. While Hrr. sp. AS12 tolerates desiccation up to 45 days with a -log3 reduction in survival, Har. sp. NS06 displays a strong decline in viability and no detectable survival following 21 days. In contrast, Hrr. sp. AS12 was more sensitive towards X-Ray irradiation with a significant decline in viability (D10 228,2 ± 8,9 Gy) while Har. sp. NS06 showed a slight decline in survival following exposure to 1 kGy. The resistance of both strains against germicidal UV-C254nm radiation follows a similar pattern when compared to X-ray exposure with Hrr. sp. AS12 displaying more sensitivity to UV-C radiation (F10 111,6 ± 6,4 J/m2) compared to Har. sp. NS06 (F10 194,9 ± 13,7 J/m2). Exposure to He, Ar, and Fe heavy ions up to 500 Gy showed little effect on the survivability; however, the transport control of Hrr. sp. AS12 showed a strong decline (-log3 reduction) in survival. Both strains revealed increased growth in the presence of perchlorates (NaClO4 and MgClO4) with a clear preference to NaClO4 up to 5%. Our results provide a first insight into the stress resistance of these two isolates and will further develop our understanding of the parameters of life on Earth and potentially on other planets.

This study investigates the implementation of the “School for Sustainable Life” programme in primary schools in the Czech Republic through the lens of the action-oriented education for sustainable development framework. The research explores the programme’s impact on fostering student leadership and engagement in sustainability initiatives using qualitative methodologies, including three focus groups (N = 18) and interviews with teachers (N = 5). The findings reveal that while the programme significantly enhances students’ understanding and action towards sustainable development, challenges remain in achieving consistent engagement across different school contexts. The study contributes to the ESD discourse by highlighting the crucial role of students’ leadership in implementing sustainability education and providing insights for educators and policymakers.

Studying the diffuse Galactic synchrotron emission (hereafter, DGSE) at arc-minute angular scale is important to remove the foregrounds for the cosmological 21-cm observations. Statistical measurements of the large-scale DGSE can also be used to constrain the magnetic field and the cosmic ray electron density of our Galaxy’s interstellar medium. Here, we have used the Murchison Widefield Array drift scan observations at $154.2 \, \textrm{MHz}$ to measure the angular power spectrum $({\mathcal C}_{\ell})$ of the DGSE of a region of the sky from right ascension $349^{\circ}$ to $70.3^{\circ}$ at the fixed declination $-26.7^{\circ}$. In this RA range, we have chosen 24 pointing centers (PCs), for which we have removed all the bright point sources above $\sim430 \, \textrm{mJy}\,(3\sigma)$, and applied the Tapered Gridded Estimator on residual data to estimate the ${\mathcal C}_{\ell}$. We use the angular multipole range $65 \le \ell \le 650$ to fit the data with a model, ${\mathcal C}^M_{\ell}=A\times \left(\frac{1\,000}{\ell}\right)^{\beta}+C$, where we interpret the model as the combination of a power law $(\propto \ell^{-\beta})$ nature of the DGSE and a constant part due to the Poisson fluctuations of the residual point sources. We are able to fit the model ${\mathcal C}^M_{\ell}$ for six PCs centered at $\alpha=352.5^{\circ}, 353^{\circ}, 357^{\circ}, 4.5^{\circ}, 4^{\circ}$, and $1^{\circ}$. We run the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) ensemble sampler to get the best-fit values of the parameters $A, \beta$, and C for these PCs. We see that the values of A vary in the range 155–400 mK$^{2}$, whereas the $\beta$ varies in the range $0.9$–$1.7$. We find that the value of $\beta$ is consistent at $2-\sigma$ level with the earlier measurement of the DGSE at similar frequency and angular scales.

This paper investigates public attitudes towards education spending based on a survey experiment. It enquires whether a trade-off between education and other welfare domains, namely healthcare, unemployment benefits and pensions, diminishes support for higher public spending on education. Drawing on five Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (Italy, Spain, Greece, Mexico and Turkey), the paper demonstrates that education spending preferences are contingent on the nature of trade-offs and the priorities of the stakeholder groups. Testing the predictive power of age, income, ideology, labour market positioning and gender, our research finds robust support for public spending on education across all countries. Nonetheless, this support diminishes significantly when trade-offs that are linked to cuts in other welfare domains are introduced.

Designing optimal assistive wearable devices is a complex task, often addressed using human-in-the-loop optimization and biomechanical modeling approaches. However, as the number of design parameters increases, the growing complexity and dimensionality of the design space make identifying optimal solutions more challenging. Predictive simulation, which models movement without relying on experimental data, provides a powerful tool for anticipating the effects of assistive devices on the human body and guiding the design process. This study aims to introduce a design optimization platform that leverages predictive simulation of movement to identify the optimal parameters for assistive wearable devices. The proposed approach is specifically capable of dealing with the challenges posed by high-dimensional design spaces. The proposed framework employs a two-layered optimization approach, with the inner loop solving the predictive simulation of movement and the outer loop identifying the optimal design parameters of the device. It is utilized for designing a knee exoskeleton with a damper to assist level-ground and downhill gait, achieving a significant reduction in normalized knee load peak value by $ 37\% $ for level-ground and by $ 53\% $ for downhill walking, along with a decrease in the cost of transport. The results indicate that the optimal device applies damping torques to the knee joint during the Stance phase of both movement scenarios, with different optimal damping coefficients. The optimization framework also demonstrates its capability to reliably and efficiently identify the optimal solution. It offers valuable insight for the initial design of assistive wearable devices and supports designers in efficiently determining the optimal parameter set.

This study examined how immigrant status and socioeconomic status influence racial self-classification among U.S. Latinx adults aged eighteen and older across multiple nationalities. Using data from the 2010–2018 National Health Interview Survey, we analyzed a nationally representative sample of Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Central/South American adults (N = 41,133) who identified as White, Black, or Another race. Socioeconomic status was measured using a composite index of income-to-poverty ratio, education, employment status, and homeownership. Multinomial logistic regressions and average marginal effects revealed significant heterogeneity in examined predictors of racial identity. U.S.-born Latinx adults, particularly Puerto Ricans and Central/South Americans, had higher probability of identifying as Black compared to recent immigrants. Latinx adults with low and middle socioeconomic status backgrounds were more likely to identify as Black or Another race across most nationality groups. Findings highlight the complexity of Latinx racial identity, whereby Latinxs may experience racialization differently depending on indicators of acculturation and socioeconomic status. The inclusion of multidimensional measures of race, such as skin color and street race, in future research is needed to better understand Latinx racial identity formation. Findings inform interventions to address race-related stress and anti-Blackness, particularly among AfroLatinx populations, and provide considerations for improving race data collection practices, such as those impacted by recent federal policy changes to the U.S. Census.

While it is vital to agree to a set of global objectives and targets to reduce plastic pollution as part of the Global Plastic Treaty, past negotiations have been troubled by differences in regional and national priorities and needs. To take these different priorities and needs into account, this letter proposes the adoption of an interdisciplinary source-to-sea approach. A source-to-sea approach emphasizes the connected nature between land-based sources of marine plastic pollution along the life cycle of plastic products on the one hand, and air, soil, and water cycles that determine marine plastic flows and associated sustainability risks on the other hand. It takes into account how we know more about the way in which production, use and plastic waste contribute to the pollution of rivers and seas in one location (e.g. in Europe), than we do for rivers and seas in other places (e.g. Africa). There are also regional and national differences in how much awareness exist about plastic pollution and how it is governed and regulated. These differences translate in different priorities and needs in terms of how to most efficiently and effectively reduce plastic pollution. The letter argues that these differences should be embraced and that an interdisciplinary source-to-sea approach can help to develop tailor-made regional and national targets and measures that in turn contribute to achieving the global ambitions of the Global Plastic Treaty. A key role is foreseen for existing governance institutions, such as river basin commissions and regional seas conventions (coordinated by UNEP Regional seas Programme), while the Global Plastic Treaty can become a platform for sharing of approaches, lessons and strategies between regions and countries so that over time, plastic pollution will be reduced worldwide.

Although much has been written on legislative reciprocity, rarely have scholars had an opportunity to leverage a randomly assigned asset to assess whether and how legislators reciprocate when their colleagues assist them. Using the lottery that allows Canadian Members of Parliament (MPs) to propose bills or motions, we examine whether MPs’ priority numbers affect their proclivity to second motions made by other MPs, which would be expected if MPs sought to build support for their own proposals by supporting proposals by others. Although MPs almost always make a proposal if their priority number allows them to do so, we find a weak relationship between MPs’ priority numbers and their probability of seconding others’ proposals. Moreover, when we look at successive parliaments, we see only faint indications that those who, by chance, won the right to propose in the previous session (and who therefore were eligible to attract seconds) are more likely to second others’ proposals in the current session. Although subject to a fair amount of statistical uncertainty that will gradually dissipate as future parliaments are examined, this pattern of evidence currently suggests that correlated seconding behavior among legislators is more the product of homophily than reciprocity.

Does the presence of two or more transborder minorities alter the logic of nation-building and affect minority securitization? This article goes beyond the triadic nexus framework commonly applied to minorities caught between their home- and kin-states, proposing a complex lens for analyzing states with multiple ethnic minorities. Titular political elites dealing with multiple minorities assign them to contradictory frames to manage the challenging reality of ethnic demography and regional security. By framing one minority as a “model minority” — trustworthy and law-abiding — and another as a “fifth column” — threatening and disruptive – they accomplish two aims: (1) maintain the dominant status of the titular nation by discrediting minority claims for institutional changes, and (2) legitimize the differential treatment of minorities. Ethnic minorities’ responses to these frames vary from relative acquiescence to violent conflict. I explore why the initially excluded Poles have been recently accommodated in Lithuania, why the marginalized Uzbeks became targets of repression in the Kyrgyz Republic, and why the relatively accommodated Russian speakers, former colonizers, became framed as a security threat in Lithuania but not in the Kyrgyz Republic after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Understanding how strategic framing advances nation-building offers generalizable insights on (de)securitization of ethnicity.

Reparations for African Americans reflect both material concerns aimed at eliminating the Black–White racial wealth gap and symbolic political aspirations, including the end of structural racism. But do material or symbolic considerations drive policy evaluations across racial and partisan divides? What knowledge and experiences undergird processes through which individuals weigh the symbolic importance of a policy against its actual benefits? Leveraging a set of forty-one in-depth interviews with Black and White residents of Evanston, Illinois—the first municipality in the United States to approve a publicly-funded reparations-related ordinance—we highlight a mechanism through which individuals develop their opinions about reparations: political socialization. Black interviewees linked their understanding of reparations to robust financial compensation while White Democrats viewed their support for Evanston’s policy as symbolic of their longstanding, affective commitments to racial equality. Drawing from these observations, we present a framework highlighting policy attributes that frame how different constituencies respond to reparations-related policies. We test this framework using a conjoint experiment about reparations policies fielded in the 2022 Cooperative Election Study. We find Americans—especially White Republicans—possess less familiarity about reparations and remain strongly opposed to these policies, regardless of the form they take. While White Democrats are more familiar with reparations and more supportive of policies mirroring Evanston’s, Black Americans—those who are most familiar with reparations—support direct cash payments regardless of their political identification.

A dimer model is a quiver with faces embedded in a surface. We define and investigate notions of consistency for dimer models on general surfaces with boundary which restrict to well-studied consistency conditions in the disk and torus case. We define weak consistency in terms of the associated dimer algebra and show that it is equivalent to the absence of bad configurations on the strand diagram. In the disk and torus case, weakly consistent models are nondegenerate, meaning that every arrow is contained in a perfect matching; this is not true for general surfaces. Strong consistency is defined to require weak consistency as well as nondegeneracy. We prove that the completed as well as the noncompleted dimer algebra of a strongly consistent dimer model are bimodule internally 3-Calabi-Yau with respect to their boundary idempotents. As a consequence, the Gorenstein-projective module category of the completed boundary algebra of suitable dimer models categorifies the cluster algebra given by their underlying quiver. We provide additional consequences of weak and strong consistency, including that one may reduce a strongly consistent dimer model by removing digons and that consistency behaves well under taking dimer submodels.

Impaired glycaemic control is a major risk factor for developing type 2 diabetes (T2D), a worldwide health epidemic intrinsically linked to diet and obesity. Whey proteins (WP) are increasingly popular supplements that are a rich source of branched-chain amino acids (BCAA), essential for muscle protein synthesis and metabolic regulation. In humans, fasting plasma concentrations of BCAA are maintained around 350 µM but become chronically elevated by 10–25% in persons with T2D. Little is known about whether BCAA from WP impacts circulating BCAA concentrations and contributes to this phenomenon. This narrative review used a systematic search approach with relevant keywords to identify evidence from randomised controlled trials in normoglycaemic humans and those with insulin resistance or T2D, on the effects of WP intake on plasma BCAA and glycaemic control. This review is, to the authors’ knowledge, the first to specifically examine the effects of WP intake on plasma BCAA concentrations in relation to glycaemic control. Whilst the majority of acute studies identified (n = 6) reported that WP consumption between 10 and 50 g significantly elevates postprandial BCAA and insulin responses (as evidenced by peak concentration and/or area under the curve), evidence from chronic studies (n = 3) report inconsistent findings on the impact of 9–51 g of WP/d on fasting BCAA and glycaemic control (for example, fasting glucose and insulin, insulin clearance). Findings from this literature review highlight the need for further studies that investigate the relationship between WP consumption with BCAA and glycaemic control, and to determine underlying mechanisms of action.