The Northeast Greenland Ice Stream (NEGIS) is an elongated feature extending ∼600 km into the interior of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Here, we investigate detailed subglacial topography along the length of the NEGIS to ascertain the characteristics of the ice stream bed. We use topographic analysis (hypsometry, spatial roughness and valley morphometry) to describe and demarcate three geomorphologically distinct regions. The upstream region, near the NEGIS onset, exhibits low roughness and a lack of valleys, indicating the likely presence of subglacial sediments. Downstream, roughness abruptly increases, with two wide subglacial troughs present in the middle region. In the downstream region, the topography displays smaller alpine-like valleys. We propose that these differences are attributable to changing geological provinces, which are poorly constrained in this area. The topography also has a distinct impact on ice stream geometry, as ice flow is generally preferentially steered through a trough. Whilst the upstream regime appears to have little effect on the location of the ice stream onset and shear margins, its low friction enables fast flow that propagates longitudinally upstream from the troughs. On the basis of our data, we argue that the NEGIS is more strongly influenced by basal topography than has been previously suggested.

Research on the dissent–repression nexus assumes that repression of non-violent protesters undermines popular support for the regime. We challenge this assumption, arguing that coercion does not automatically generate legitimacy costs as bystanders’ pre-existing beliefs about targeted socio-political groups condition how repression is evaluated. While we expect bystanders to disapprove of and sanction repression of liked protester groups, we hypothesize that they will approve of and perhaps even credit the regime for repressing groups they do not sympathize with. We probe these hypotheses in a pre-registered survey experiment (with 3,569 Russian respondents), in which we pre-evaluate respondents’ beliefs about different socio-political groups in Russia and vary the participating group and the government’s response in a realistic protest vignette. The results corroborate our hypotheses and even show that the Russian president’s approval ratings are largely unaffected by regime coercion, indicating that autocrats have much more leeway in using repression than usually thought.

We review the state of the evidence for the existence and observational appearance of supermassive black hole binaries. Such objects are expected from standard hierarchical galaxy evolution to form after two galaxies, each containing a supermassive black hole, have merged, in the centre of the merger remnant. A complex interaction is predicted to take place with stars and gas in the host galaxy, leading to observable signatures in weakly as well as actively accreting phases. Direct observational evidence is available and shows examples of dual active galactic nuclei from kpc scales down to parsec scales. Signatures of possibly closer supermassive black hole binaries may be seen in jetted black holes. The interaction with stars and gas in a galaxy significantly affects the hardening of the binary and hence contributes to uncertainties of the expected gravitational wave signal. The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) should in the future detect actual mergers. Before the launch of LISA, pulsar timing arrays may have the best chance to detect a gravitational wave signal from supermassive black hole binaries. The first signs of the combined background of inspiralling objects might have been seen already.

The lowest mass at which the third dredge-up (TDU) occurs for thermally pulsing asymptotic giant branch (TP-AGB) stars remains a key uncertainty in detailed stellar models. S-type AGB stars are an important constraint on this uncertainty as they have C/O ratios between 0.5 and 1, meaning they have only experienced up to a few episodes of TDU. AGB stars are also long-period variable stars, pulsating in low order radial pulsation modes. In this paper, we estimate the initial masses of a large sample of intrinsic S-type AGB stars, by analysing their visual light curves, estimating their luminosities with Gaia DR3 parallax distances and finally comparing to a grid of detailed stellar models combined with linear pulsation models. We find that the initial mass distribution of intrinsic S-type stars peaks at 1.3–1.4 M$_{\odot}$ depending on model assumptions. There also appear to be stars with initial masses down to 1 solar mass, which is in conflict with current detailed stellar models. Additionally, we find that though the mass estimates for semiregular variable stars pulsating in higher order radial modes are precise, the Mira variables pulsating in the fundamental mode present challenges observationally from uncertain parallax distances, and theoretically from the onset of increased mass-loss and the necessity of non-linear pulsation models.

This quasi-experimental before-and-after intervention study evaluated an indication-based electronic prescribing alert in a 450-bed tertiary care hospital. Implementation reduced meropenem use by 41% without compromising patient safety, demonstrating the effectiveness of this targeted antimicrobial stewardship strategy.

The history of legal aid in South Asia has hitherto been restricted to appendages or short overviews in writings orientated towards its contemporary. This article offers the first archivally grounded study of the birth of the legal aid movement in early twentieth-century colonial India, focusing specifically on the Bombay Legal Aid Society. It pursues three major lines of inquiry. First, I consider the transnational intellectual networks between India and America upon which early Indian legal aid thinking developed. Second, I tackle the fraught politics of doing legal aid in interwar Bombay, a period marked by anticolonial nationalism and strong trade union organizing. Finally, the article examines why the BLAS succeeded in building strong working relationships with existing social welfare societies, state institutions, and like-minded legal professionals, but failed to garner considerable interest from the working classes it sought to serve. I argue that these struggles point to the hard limits of legal aid in the colony but also present a valuable window into the Bombay working classes’ legal consciousness. The article thus contributes to ongoing efforts at globalizing the history of legal aid and to the small but growing study of the legal profession in colonial South Asia.

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a deep economic crisis that prompted governments and central banks to implement extraordinary fiscal, monetary, and financial interventions. We examine public support for these interventions using a conjoint survey experiment conducted in Australia and the United Kingdom in early 2021. Our experiment innovates by investigating public preferences across two main categories of intervention: (1) wage subsidies designed to address employment and income risks and (2) financial stabilization measures aimed at supporting the balance sheets of households, businesses, and financial institutions. Results show that wagesubsidies received robust public support across diverse social, economic, and experiential cleavages. By contrast, financial and credit market interventions elicited mixed reactions, with strongest opposition toward those benefiting large firms and banks. We argue that the variation in support is primarily driven by an alignment of fairness considerations and policy design. In both countries, wage subsidies had key design features that made them more likely to be perceived as distributionally neutral, consistent with important fairness norms, and limiting the potential for free riding. They were available to all citizens experiencing verifiable employment disruption, delivered through employers, and appealed to welfare-chauvinistic views by excluding many recent immigrants and temporary residents. Moreover, the viral origin of the economic shock was widely perceived as exogenous and quasi-random, and the associated losses – particularly those related to employment and income more readily elicited greater empathy when borne by individuals than by firms. In contrast, financial-sector interventions, especially those aiding large corporations and banks, were less easily viewed as consistent with these fairness norms. These interventions were more prone to being perceived as favoring opportunistic or politically connected firms, echoing earlier public resentment of global financial crisis bailouts. Even some household-targeted financial interventions, such as debt relief and rent holidays, likely raised concerns among respondents about undeserved gains. Unlike some existing studies, our subgroup analysis finds little evidence that personal or local pandemic experiences significantly influenced attitudes toward economic interventions. Individuals who suffered direct health or economic impacts, or who lived in areas with high infection rates or strict lockdowns, were no more or less supportive of interventions. Instead, partisan orientation and perceptions of inequality were more predictive. Left-wing partisans and those who perceived rising or high inequality were especially supportive of wage subsidies and household-focused assistance. Traditional material cleavages – such as income, education, wealth, or asset ownership – had limited explanatory power. The underbanked population was an exception, showing more muted support for all interventions, likely due to perceived exclusion or limited personal benefit. We conclude that public evaluations of economic interventions during the pandemic were shaped less by self-interest or crisis exposure than by judgments about deservingness, fairness, and partisan attachments. Our findings emphasize the importance of policy design and political framing in sustaining public support for large-scale interventions during crises, and they have broader implications for the politics of economic policy in future global shocks.