Ice sheet mass loss is typically provided for grounded ice, because changes in floating ice are more difficult to measure and contribute minimally to sea level rise. However, gross freshwater mass flow rate across ice sheet boundaries, including floating ice, is a better metric of ice sheet health. Here, we present total mass flows across ice sheet boundaries for both the Greenlandic and Antarctic ice sheets and their peripheral glaciers from 2010 through 2019. In addition to total mass flow, we provide constituent terms and gross rather than net values, including components that combine to provide surface mass balance. Ice mass loss in Greenland is 330 $\pm$50 Gt yr-1 which is $\sim$30% larger than the 255 $\pm$40 Gt yr-1 grounded ice mass loss estimates that neglect floating ice changes. Ice mass loss in Antarctica is 450 $\pm$270 Gt yr-1 which is $\sim$2.4x the 190 $\pm$115 Gt yr-1 grounded ice mass loss estimates. Freshwater mass flow rate from Greenland is $\sim$1065 $\pm$120 Gt yr-1 or $\sim$3x mass loss ($\sim$4x grounded mass loss), and from Antarctica is $\sim$3110 $\pm$1515 Gt yr-1, or $\sim$7x mass loss ($\sim$16x grounded mass loss).

Large language models (LLMs) excel at understanding natural language but struggle with explicit commonsense reasoning. A recent trend of research suggests that the combination of LLM with robust symbolic reasoning systems can overcome this problem on story-based question answering (Q&A) tasks. In this setting, existing approaches typically depend on human expertise to manually craft the symbolic component. We argue, however, that this component can also be automatically learned from examples. In this work, we introduce LLM2LAS, a hybrid system that effectively combines the natural language understanding capabilities of LLMs, the rule induction power of the learning from answer sets (LAS) system ILASP, and the formal reasoning strengths of answer set programming (ASP). LLMs are used to extract semantic structures from text, which ILASP then transforms into interpretable logic rules. These rules allow an ASP solver to perform precise and consistent reasoning, enabling correct answers to previously unseen questions. Empirical results outline the strengths and weaknesses of our automatic approach for learning and reasoning in a story-based Q&A benchmark.

This study explores the visual aesthetics of organizational space by contrasting coworking spaces with traditional open-plan offices. Drawing on signaling theory and symbolic interactionism, we examine how ambience communicates symbolic meaning. Employing an archaeological approach to retrieve large-scale online photo data from Coworker and Pinterest, we then apply AI-driven deep learning visual contrast analysis to reveal clear aesthetic distinctions in organizational space. Coworking spaces evoke a homely, dining-room-like ambiance, with artwork, plants, warmer color palettes, and a more homely and hospitable ambience. Traditional open-plan offices, by contrast, tend toward cooler colors and industrial design elements. Findings suggest that coworking spaces visually signal greater affective and sensory value, promoting belonging, creativity, and warmth. The study contributes to organizational space theory by theorizing how visual aesthetics act as symbolic cues that shape workplace experiences and by introducing a methodological framework that integrates AI-based analysis with interpretive meaning-making.

The recent proliferation of quantitative models for assessing anatomical character evolution all assume that character change happens continuously through time. However, the punctuated equilibrium model posits that character change should be coincide with cladogenetic events, and thus should be tied to origination rates. Rates of cladogenesis are important to quantitative phylogenetics, but typically only for establishing prior probabilities in the tree model component of phylogenetic analyses. Here, we modify existing character-likelihood models to use the local cladogenesis rates from Bayesian analyses to generate amounts of character change over time dependent on origination rates, as expected under the punctuated equilibrium model. In the case of strophomenoid brachiopods from the Ordovician, Bayesian analyses strongly favor punctuated models over continuous-time models, with elevated rates of cladogenesis early in the clade’s history inducing frequencies of change despite constant rates of change per speciation event. This corroborates prior work proposing that the early burst in strophomenoid disparity simply reflects elevated speciation rates, which in turn has implications for seemingly unrelated macroevolutionary theory about whether early bursts reflect shifts in intrinsic constraints or empty ecospace. Future development of punctuated character evolution models should account for the full durations of species, which will provide a test of continuous change rates. Ultimately, continuous change versus punctuated change should become part of phylogenetic paleobiology in the same way that we currently test other models of character evolution.

The use of the veto by Security Council members has played a central role in the international community’s failure to prevent atrocity situations. As a result, proposals have been put forward to restrain the use of the veto and are commonly referred to as the ‘responsibility not to veto’ (RNTV). So far, existing research has focused on the history of the RNTV and the strengths and weaknesses of specific proposals. However, this article is interested in a different question: does the RNTV constitute an emerging norm that is progressively leading to behavioural change from veto users and other members of the international community? Drawing on norm research and an extensive discourse analysis of over 5,500 statements made during Security Council and General Assembly debates between 1990 and 2023, this article argues that it does. To do so, it clarifies what an emerging norm is, the impact it can have, and how to trace it. Through this analysis, this article not only contributes to our understanding of the RNTV and broader debates on the Security Council but also promotes a stronger understanding of ongoing change in international relations by emphasising the impact emerging norms can have and ways to trace them.

We evaluated the impact of a web-based quiz on prescribing guideline-concordant antibiotic duration for pediatric acute otitis media. Adjusted for baseline prescribing, participants increased mean guideline-concordant prescribing by 9.6% compared to nonparticipants; those who took an enhanced quiz increased 17.1%. QuizTime may be a low-effort intervention to increase stewardship education.

Critiques of religion in Arab political life have long been framed as a project of the left. Since the uprisings of 2011, however, the most forceful critics of theology’s presence in politics have been conservatives. This article reconstructs the intellectual history of the Arab right through the work of philosopher Mohammed Jaber al-Ansari. Revisiting the intellectual and historical context of the 1990s, it advances a new genealogy of conservative Arab political thought, one that saw in all transcendental and religious identifications not only the dangers of revolution but also a forfeiture of politics itself. In decoupling conservatism from Islam, the article advances an understanding of conservatism as both contingent and structural, or permanent in its formal presence but not necessarily in content, to suggest that histories of conservatism not only provide resources for a better understanding of the present, but also can complement the task that radical and ecumenical accounts of the Arab past have long pursued in disputing the religious or cultural nature of conservatism. In that sense, intellectual history of secular conservatism is important not because it is more or less dominant than theologically inflected varieties of it today, but because of how it might help free the historian from the need to restrict her endeavour to the correction of essentialist misrepresentation and to write histories where contingency is assumed rather than histories whose burden it has been to prove it.

Globalization’s emphasis on the knowledge economy gradually shifted universities’ objectives away from fostering social cohesion towards developing market skills. What kind of citizenship has emerged from this process? Using a staggered difference-in-differences design, I study the political economy legacy of the largest ever market-oriented transformation in higher education – the Bologna Process – for European millennials. I find evidence for a ‘neoliberal hypothesis’: the reform substantially increased the perceived importance of achieving status and wealth. By contrast, I find no evidence for a ‘humanist hypothesis’: The reform did not change the perceived importance of global equality and environmental issues. Ironically, the Bologna Process heightened the perceived importance of status and wealth without delivering long-run gains in income and employment. My findings dispute that universities indoctrinate students into left-wing politics, and suggest that market-friendly institutional change constructs the ‘student customer’.

The purpose of this paper is to expose and investigate natural phase-space formulations of two longstanding problems in the restriction theory of the Fourier transform. These problems, often referred to as the Stein and Mizohata–Takeuchi conjectures, assert that Fourier extension operators associated with rather general (codimension 1) submanifolds of Euclidean space may be effectively controlled by the classical X-ray transform via weighted $L^2$ inequalities. Our phase-space formulations, which have their origins in recent work of Dendrinos, Mustata and Vitturi expose close connections with a conjecture of Flandrin from time-frequency analysis, and rest on the identification of an explicit ‘geometric’ Wigner transform associated with an arbitrary (smooth strictly convex) submanifold S of $\mathbb {R}^n$. Our main results are certain natural ‘Sobolev variants’ of the Stein and Mizohata–Takeuchi conjectures and involve estimating the Sobolev norms of such Wigner transforms by geometric forms of classical bilinear fractional integrals. Our broad geometric framework allows us to explore the role of the curvature of the submanifold in these problems, and in particular we obtain bounds that are independent of any lower bound on the curvature; a feature that is uncommon in the wider restriction theory of the Fourier transform. Finally, we provide a further illustration of the effectiveness of our analysis by establishing a form of Flandrin’s conjecture in the plane with an $\varepsilon $-loss. While our perspective comes primarily from Euclidean harmonic analysis, the procedure used for constructing phase-space representations of extension operators is well-known in optics.

Drawing on primary and secondary data, the article illustrates that whilst the health system in Australian certainly dissipates the social determinants of health and lessens health inequality, there remain significant inequalities in life expectancy, health access, utilisation and outcomes. The key argument is that class, gender, racial and spatial inequalities are mirrored in the health system. With respect to class, the weakening of bulk billing, where the full cost of the medical consultation is borne by the government, means that a proportion of low-income individuals defer visiting their GP. The problem is far more acute with respect to specialist, dental and mental health consultations where the out-of-pocket costs are greater. Again it is far more likely to result in low-income people deferring or avoiding necessary consultations. ‘Medical misogyny’ - the argument that the medical concerns of women are taken less seriously than those of men, is shown to be a major issue. The Indigenous - non-Indigenous health divide is acute; the life expectancy of Indigenous Australians is eight years less than non-Indigenous Australians. Spatial inequality is also significant; the health outcomes of people in rural and remote areas are shown to be poorer than those of people in the metropolitan areas.

Hybrid prototyping (HP) – the combination of mixed prototyping media within a single product design – has shown potential to substantially reduce process cost and fabrication time. However, previous work has not considered how HP processes and fabrication should be aligned with designer intent or activity needs, how these may change the realised savings or good practice guidance for successful implementation. This work proposes three approaches for HP with Lego and additive manufacturing, targeted towards enabling mixed fidelity for prototype flexibility, parallelisation for rapid fabrication and component reuse to minimise material waste. It then establishes good practice guidance and proposes a HP method that accounts for practical and process constraints, then implemented through an automated hybridisation tool. Approaches are compared through a simulation study and a case study to establish relative benefit. Results show potential time and material savings of 56% and 76%, respectively, depending on the approach chosen, demonstrating the substantial and practical scope for savings that HP provides.

Quick and accurate forecasts of incidence and mortality trends for the near future are particularly useful for the immediate allocation of available public health resources, as well as for understanding the long-term course of the pandemic. The surveillance data used for predictions, however, may come with some reporting delays. Consequently, auxiliary data sources that are available immediately can provide valuable additional information for recent time periods for which surveillance data have not yet become fully available. In this work, a set of Google search queries by individual users related to COVID-19 incidence and mortality is collected and analyzed. The information from these queries aims to improve quick forecasts. Initially, the identified search query keywords were ranked according to their predictive abilities with reported incidence and mortality. After that, the ARIMA, Prophet, and XGBoost models were fitted to generate forecasts using only the available reported incidence and mortality (baseline model) or together with combinations of searched keywords identified based on their predictive abilities (predictors model). In summary, the inclusion of top-ranked keywords as predictors significantly enhanced prediction accuracy for the majority of scenarios in the range from 50% to 90% across all considered models and is recommended for future use. The inclusion of low-ranked keywords did not provide such an improvement. In general, the ranking of predictors and the corresponding forecast improvements were more pronounced for incidence, while the results were less pronounced for mortality.

Growing environmental concerns and the rise of pesticide resistance have prompted a critical need to develop alternatives to synthetic chemical insecticides. In this context, mineral-based products offer a promising solution for integrated pest management. This study examines the potential of a granite dust product as a control agent for two-spotted spider mites, Tetranychus urticae Koch (Acariformes: Tetranychidae), on grapevines, Vitis spp. (Vitaceae). Using two-choice repellency, repulsiveness, and no-choice bioassays involving substrate, foliar, and combined applications, the dust was found to effectively deter mites from moving from control leaves to treated leaves in repulsiveness tests; however, in repellency tests, some but not all mites moved from treated leaves to control leaves. Significantly higher mite mortality was observed across all dust treatments in both bioassays than in control treatments, suggesting that contact exposure to the dust and potentially the accumulation of silica in cell walls in plants treated with rock dust as a substrate amendment could render the cell walls resistant to piercing by spider mite mouthparts. The findings improve the understanding of this product’s potential for pest management.

This article provides novel insights into Russia’s strategic use of migrants, using the Federal Security Service (FSB)-enabled migration flows towards Norway and Finland in 2015/16 as a case study. Through the use of semi-structured interviews and an empirical study, we identify several potential Russian goals tied to its use of migration, including restoring bilateral relations to the levels before Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, influencing the European Union’s (EU’s) decisions on sanctions and cooperation, warning Finland against seeking NATO membership, testing the effectiveness of a new tool, collecting intelligence, and weakening Western influence per Russia’s broader information confrontation towards the West. These objectives served the broader regional and grand strategic goals of maximising Russia’s influence and minimising the EU’s and NATO’s sway in the region. Our findings challenge earlier interpretations that downplayed Russia’s role, arguing instead that the operation established coercive potential rather than immediate concessions. We contribute to the literature on the strategic use of migration and authoritarian states’ innovative use of unconventional methods.