This article discusses the role of affect in diasporic belonging, especially when a community is affected by conflict, tracing the ways it circulates in and through discourses and interactions across different generations. Drawing on a linguistic ethnographic project on Greek-Cypriot diaspora, and following recent calls for paying more attention to affect in sociolinguistic analyses, it analyses the communicative dynamics of diasporic affect. Understanding diasporic affect as the circulation and communication of affects/emotions between individuals within a diasporic space, which is—to an extent—regulated by community norms, we analyze the discursive and communicative mechanisms participants used to navigate emotional norms about collective memory, conflict, and diasporic identifications. At the same time, we show how these mechanisms are productive of subjectivities that could either reinforce, disrupt, or redefine these norms. In doing so, we discuss the political implications of diasporic affect and the rules governing its expression and enactment in discourses and communicative practices. (Affect, conflict, diaspora, emotions, interaction, belonging)*

Magnetic AB stars are known to produce periodic radio pulses by the electron cyclotron maser emission (ECME) mechanism. Only 19 such stars, known as ‘Main-sequence Radio Pulse emitters’ (MRPs), are currently known. The majority of MRPs have been discovered through targeted observation campaigns that involve carefully selecting a sample of stars that are likely to produce ECME and which can be detected by a given telescope within reasonable amount of time. These selection criteria inadvertently introduce bias in the resulting sample of MRPs, which affects subsequent investigation of the relation between ECME properties and stellar magnetospheric parameters. The alternative is to use all-sky surveys. Until now, MRP candidates obtained from surveys were identified based on their high circular polarisation ($\gtrsim 30\%$). In this paper, we introduce a complementary strategy, which does not require polarisation information. Using multi-epoch data from the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope, we identify four MRP candidates based on the variability in the total intensity light curves. Follow-up observations with the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) confirm three of them to be MRPs, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of our strategy. With the expanded sample, we find that ECME is affected by temperature and the magnetic field strength, consistent with past results. There is, however, a degeneracy regarding how the two parameters govern the ECME luminosity for magnetic A and late-B stars (effective temperature $\lesssim 16$ kK). The current sample is also inadequate to investigate the role of stellar rotation, which has been shown to play a key role in driving incoherent radio emission.

In 1 Timothy 2, the author claims that Eve alone was deceived, and not Adam, yet women can be saved through childbirth. In Or. 37, Gregory of Nazianzus construes Genesis 3 differently, insisting that both Eve and Adam were deceived and that both will be saved in the same manner. This article considers whether Gregory performs a subtly transgressive rewriting of 1 Timothy. To corroborate that Gregory is engaging 1 Timothy, rather than disregarding it, the article surveys early Christian reception of 1 Tim 2:14 through the lens of Elizabeth A. Clark’s categories of ascetic reading, and it explores how women function in Gregory’s corpus and how his own interpretive principles could render a transgressive rewriting intelligible. It concludes that Gregory may be transgressing 1 Timothy after the pattern of Jesus transgressing the Mosaic law on divorce, a spiritual transgression.

Our research focused on the Critically Endangered Chinese pangolin Manis pentadactyla in the Siang River basin of Arunachal Pradesh in north-east India, home to the Indigenous Adi People. We found evidence of a resident Chinese pangolin population in the study area after assessing pangolin presence from walking surveys and camera trapping at pangolin burrows. We assessed the effectiveness of positioning camera traps based on the local knowledge of the Adi People. Camera-trap capture rates (5.1%) were comparable to or higher than those reported in other studies across Africa and Asia, highlighting the value of incorporating local ecological knowledge in camera-trap surveys. Our findings underscore the complementary nature of Indigenous knowledge and scientific methods, especially for elusive species such as pangolins.

In the past two decades, China has emerged as Africa’s biggest bilateral trading partner, its top five foreign direct investors, a significant contributor for development finance, and a contractor for infrastructure finance (Oqubay and Lin 2019). The study of how African agents have negotiated with or (re)defined institutions or entities in this relationship and how agents negotiate or utilize existing power structures to maintain or redefine existing settings has witnessed a surge in the past 20 years. The increase in literature on “African agency” offers not only a deeper understanding of the different ways that African actors use their various spaces of engagement to their advantage; it also has allowed researchers to more effectively locate, unpack, and outline such agency (Chipaike and Bischoff 2018; Chipaike and Bischoff 2019; Chipaike and Knowledge 2018; Chiyemura 2020; Corkin 2013; Cheru and Obi 2010; Gadzala 2015; Kragelund and Carmody 2016; Mohan and Lampert 2012; Mann 2023; Odoom 2019; Otele 2016). However, much of this literature categorizes African agency into general categories, such as state, nonstate, elite, and local agency. Although general categories prove useful for an initial understanding, they are limited in explaining the different ways that agency is carried out by different African actors within the state apparatus or among nonstate actors, their modalities, and their impact. Various actors within these large categories of state and nonstate actors exercise agency differently with different motivations, and they use different repertoires of action.

The plaza is one of the most important elements of the built environment for bringing people together in the Pueblo World of the US Southwest. Yet, the myriad ways in which plazas were designed and used vary greatly through time. Although plazas have been significant components of Ancestral Pueblo site layouts for hundreds of years, nearly every research study has been based on the enclosed plazas of the Pueblo IV period. In this article, we evaluate variation in 861 plazas from the Pueblo World dating from AD 800 to 1550. Our analysis of settlement size, plaza area, and degrees of plaza accessibility demonstrates that the spacious plazas emblematic of the Pueblo IV period were built to accommodate more people than the resident population, suggesting the origins of the feast-day-type ceremonialism seen in contemporary Pueblo communities. Our analysis suggests that this is a relatively recent phenomenon, because plazas in earlier Chaco great house communities were built to be more exclusionary, and thus activities held within them were more restricted.

It is now generally accepted that human rights law applies at sea, yet uncertainty remains as to how it operates within the maritime domain. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea contains few references to the treatment of individuals and many of the central concepts of the law of the sea that are reflected in it—such as functional zones of maritime jurisdiction, flag State jurisdiction and the freedoms of the seas—present challenges to the effective application of human rights law. Moreover, human rights law was developed with a terrestrial focus, making its application at sea equally problematic. This article argues that before practical solutions can be proposed to address this conflict of regimes, it needs to be recognised that human rights law does not apply at sea in the same way that it applies on land: the practical realities of the maritime environment shape the scope and content of rights. It argues that there is a need to clarify what constitutes a genuine human rights issue in the maritime domain, distinguishing these from other forms of poor treatment or regulatory non-compliance. It examines how the law of the sea and human rights law might interact more effectively, considering both conceptual and contextual adjustments necessary for realistic and enforceable protection of human rights in the maritime domain.

The history of the laws of war is an increasingly popular research field of international law. Claire Vergerio’s book War, States, and International Order: Alberico Gentili and the Foundational Myth of the Laws of War is a good-read in this regard. It provides a critical analysis of how 19th-century international lawyers misread and reinterpreted the writings of the 16th-century Italian jurist Alberico Gentili to establish the modern sovereign state as the sole legitimate subject of the laws of war. In this review essay, I offer a critical reading of War, States and International Order, positioning its intervention in the context of broader scholarly debates.

A pervasive approach in scientific computing is to express the solution to a given problem as the limit of a sequence of vectors or other mathematical objects. In many situations these sequences are generated by slowly converging iterative procedures, and this led practitioners to seek faster alternatives to reach the limit. ‘Acceleration techniques’ comprise a broad array of methods specifically designed with this goal in mind. They started as a means of improving the convergence of general scalar sequences by various forms of ‘extrapolation to the limit’, i.e. by extrapolating the most recent iterates to the limit via linear combinations. Extrapolation methods of this type, the best-known of which is Aitken’s delta-squared process, require only the sequence of vectors as input.

However, limiting methods to use only the iterates is too restrictive. Accelerating sequences generated by fixed-point iterations by utilizing both the iterates and the fixed-point mapping itself has proved highly successful across various areas of physics. A notable example of these fixed-point accelerators (FP-accelerators) is a method developed by Donald Anderson in 1965 and now widely known as Anderson acceleration (AA). Furthermore, quasi-Newton and inexact Newton methods can also be placed in this category since they can be invoked to find limits of fixed-point iteration sequences by employing exactly the same ingredients as those of the FP-accelerators.

This paper presents an overview of these methods – with an emphasis on those, such as AA, that are geared toward accelerating fixed-point iterations. We will navigate through existing variants of accelerators, their implementations and their applications, to unravel the close connections between them. These connections were often not recognized by the originators of certain methods, who sometimes stumbled on slight variations of already established ideas. Furthermore, even though new accelerators were invented in different corners of science, the underlying principles behind them are strikingly similar or identical.

The plan of this article will approximately follow the historical trajectory of extrapolation and acceleration methods, beginning with a brief description of extrapolation ideas, followed by the special case of linear systems, the application to self-consistent field (SCF) iterations, and a detailed view of Anderson acceleration. The last part of the paper is concerned with more recent developments, including theoretical aspects, and a few thoughts on accelerating machine learning algorithms.

This work introduces GalProTE, a proof-of-concept Machine Learning model, leveraging Transformer Encoder architecture to efficiently determine the stellar age, metallicity, and dust attenuation of galaxies from optical spectra. Designed to address the challenges posed by the vast datasets produced by modern astronomical surveys, GalProTE offers a significant improvement in processing speed while maintaining accuracy. Using the E-MILES spectral library, we generate a dataset of 111936 diverse templates by expanding the original 636 simple stellar population models with varying extinction levels, combinations of multiple spectra, and noise modifications. This ensures robust training over the spectral range of 4750–7100 Å at a resolution of 2.5 Å. GalProTE architecture employs four parallel attention-based encoders with varying kernel sizes to capture diverse spectral features. The model demonstrates a mean squared error (MSE) of 0.27% with a standard deviation of 0.10% between the input spectra and the GalProTE-generated spectra for the synthetic test dataset. Performance evaluation against real data from two galaxies in the PHANGS-MUSE survey (NGC4254 and NGC5068) demonstrates its ability to extract physical parameters efficiently, with spectral fit residuals showing a mean of -0.02% and 0.28%, and standard deviations of 4.3% and 5.3%, respectively. To contextualize these results, we compare age, metallicity and dust attenuation maps generated by GalProTE with those of pPXF, a state-of-the-art spectral fitting tool. While pPXF achieves robust results, it requires approximately 11 sec per spectrum. In contrast, GalProTE processes a spectrum in less than 4 ms – a speedup factor exceeding 2750, while also consuming 68 times less power per spectrum. The comparison with pPXF maps from PHANGS-MUSE underscores GalProTE’s capacity to enhance traditional methods through machine learning, paving the way for faster, more energy-efficient, and more comprehensive analyses of galactic properties. This study demonstrates the potential of GalProTE as an efficient, scalable, and sustainable solution for processing large astronomical surveys.

Begonia larorum is a threatened plant species endemic to Alcatrazes Island, south-east Brazil, which had not been recorded since its discovery in the 1920s. Here we report its rediscovery after more than a century since the first and only collection. In February 2024, we found a single individual in the forest understorey and successfully propagated it ex situ. Later that year we located a population of 19 individuals in an open area of vegetation prone to fires and invasive grasses and we obtained the first colour photographs of the species. Given its restricted range and the threats to its survival, we recommend the species be assessed for inclusion on the global IUCN Red List in addition to maintaining its Critically Endangered status at national level on the Red List of Brazilian Flora. We also propose in situ and ex situ conservation actions.

Ethiopia aspired to become Africa’s “light manufacturing hub” and a “lower middle-income country” by 2025 (National Planning Commission 2016, 143, 169). Successive Ethiopian governments launched long-term plans and pursued industrial policies in line with a declared “developmental state” approach inspired by Japanese, South Korean, and Chinese models (Aberg and Becker 2020; Cheru and Oqubay 2019; Clapham 2018; Fourie 2015; Gebreeyesus 2013; Oqubay 2018). The intention was to build on the country’s comparative advantages of cheap land and labor to develop manufacturing with backward linkages to the domestic economy, focus on labor-intensive light manufacturing, build special economic zones (SEZs) to attract foreign direct investment (FDI), and promote exports for global markets to create jobs, enhance skills, expand the private sector, and kickstart wider industrialization.