Dietary intervention is a key strategy for preventing and managing chronic kidney disease (CKD). However, evidence on specific foods’ effects on CKD is limited. This study aims to clarify the impact of various foods on CKD risk. We used two-sample Mendelian randomisation to analyse the causal relationships between the intake of eighteen foods (e.g., cheese, processed meat, poultry, beef and non-oily fish) and CKD risk, as well as estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR)cr and eGFRcys levels. The inverse variance weighting method, weighted median method, MR-Egger regression, simple mode and weighted mode were employed. The sensitivity analysis included Cochran’s Q test and the Egger intercept test. According to the main method, the IVM results indicated that frequent alcohol intake was linked to higher CKD risk (P= 0·007, 0·048). Protective factors included cheese (OR = 0·71, (95 % CI: 0·53, 0·94), P= 0·017), tea (OR = 0·66, (95 % CI: 0·43, 1·00), P= 0·048) and dried fruit (OR = 0·78, (95 % CI: 0·63, 0·98), P= 0·033). Oily fish (β = 0·051, (95 % CI: 0·001, 0·102), P= 0·046) and dried fruit (β = 0·082, (95 % CI: 0·016, 0·149), P= 0·014) were associated with elevated eGFRcys. Salad/raw vegetables (β = 0·024, (95 % CI: 0·003, 0·045), P= 0·028) and dried fruit (β = 0·013, (95 % CI: 0·001, 0·031), P= 0·014) were linked to higher eGFRcr, while cereal intake (β = –0·021, (95 % CI: −0·033, −0·010), P < 0·001) was associated with lower eGFRcr. These findings provide insights for optimising dietary strategies for CKD patients.

Politicians appear to overestimate how conservative public opinion is in the U.S. and other Western democracies. Whether this “conservative bias” extends to voters remains unclear but has important implications for belief formation and behavior. I examine this in the context of abortion access after the Dobbs decision. Despite the salience of the topic, original survey data collected post-Dobbs reveal consistent underestimation of public support for abortion access. Individuals identifying as “pro-life” drive most of this underestimation, suggesting the presence of egocentric biases in which “pro-life” Americans overestimate the commonality of their views. Conservative biases among voters may contribute to a skewed information environment for politicians, potentially providing leverage for further restrictions on abortion access.

What factors explain Latino support for conspiracy theories? Contemporary scholarship offers valuable insights on how psychological, social, and political factors shape support for conspiracy theories. At the same time, scholarly understanding of the dynamics that foster conspiracy beliefs among racial and ethnic minorities is much more limited. Utilizing survey responses from more than 1,000 Latinos, we theorize explicitly about the factors that explain their support for conspiracies. Consistent with the scholarship highlighting in-group diversity among Latinos, we reveal significant differences among Latinos in their propensity to harbor conspiracy beliefs. Some of the factors that influence their support for conspiratorial statements align with the broader literature, other results appear unique to Latino Americans. Religiosity, lack of trust in institutions, and conservative political ideology are associated with higher levels of conspiracy beliefs among Latinos. We also find that Latinos from later generations, those who consume Spanish media, and who disagree that Latinos face discrimination and White privilege exists are more likely to believe in certain conspiracy theories.

INCUS (INvestigation of Convective UpdraftS) is a NASA Earth Science mission scheduled to launch in 2026. The goal of the mission is to study in detail how water vapor and droplets move inside tropical storms and thunderstorms and understand their effects on weather and climate models. To carry out this study, the mission will use three almost identical SmallSats, each equipped with a Raincube-heritage Ka-band radar. The deployable mesh reflector antenna is a new 1.6 m design provided by Tendeg, which is fed using a seven-horn feed assembly to generate overlapping secondary beams. This paper discusses the approach used to design and fabricate the feed assembly and presents the measured and calculated RF performance parameters.

Many people with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) believe that certain foods may influence disease activity. Elimination reintroduction diets and oral food challenges are dietary strategies used to identify foods that may exacerbate symptoms. This review summarises and appraises the literature on elimination diet interventions that include food reintroductions or oral food challenges in adults with RA. It describes study design, measures used to assess the effects of food exclusion and challenge, foods identified that may affect RA symptoms, and the measures used to assess the outcome of excluding those foods. A search of five databases, two thesis repositories and Open Grey was conducted to identify records published from inception to January 2025, using terms related to RA, elimination diets and food sensitivity. Eligible records were screened independently by two reviewers, and data extraction followed Joanna Briggs Institute guidelines. Data are presented using a narrative synthesis approach with descriptive data analysis. In total, forty-eight records met inclusion criteria comprising twenty intervention studies (sample sizes 4–94) and seventeen case studies, conducted across twelve countries (1949–2024). Interventions included single-food exclusions, few-food diets, low-allergen meal replacements and fasting protocols. Reintroduction methods varied from a single-food challenge to multiple reintroductions, with five studies using blinded challenges. Outcome measures included physician- or participant-observed symptom changes, clinical assessments and laboratory measures, though these were heterogeneous. Findings reveal a lack of standardised protocols, dated methodologies and limited contemporary research. Controlled studies are needed to establish evidence-based protocols, investigate mechanisms, and guide dietary strategies as adjuncts to RA pharmacological treatment.

We investigate how sexism and harassment affect political candidates’ preferences for political positions by deploying a conjoint experiment among political candidates in the 2021 Danish local elections. We find that, compared to men candidates, women candidates experience far more sexism and harassment, and assess their risk of victimization as being far higher. Correspondingly, the conjoint experiment reveals that women candidates state stronger preferences for equal working environments in politics than men, while holding similar preferences for formal working conditions like political positions, remuneration, and workload. Substantively, women’s willingness to lower their remuneration and increase their workload to avoid sexism in politics is more than double the size of men’s willingness. Our approach provides us with highly accurate descriptions of candidates’ preferences for political jobs, which are often assumed rather than measured directly. This lets us quantify the magnitude of an important working condition in politics with significant repercussions for women.

This contribution aims to relate an important topic of the Hegelian philosophy, that of second nature, to the gender question developed by Simone de Beauvoir. The core of the emancipation process described in The Second Sex lies in Beauvoir’s revolutionary idea of the artificial character of gender: the latter belongs to the culturally constructed sphere of social norms and not to mere fixed nature. In this assumption the French philosopher seems to recover the Hegelian theory of second nature: Hegel believes that through an individual and social Bildungsprozess, subjects liberate themselves from the immediate level of natural necessity and reach the free horizon of spiritual existence, in which they become self-conscious actors. Beauvoir accepts in her own existentialist view this extra-natural becoming and realizes that also gender participates in it: women are not by nature ‘immanent’ creatures that lack ‘transcendence’. Hegel, however, does not recognize the second nature of gender and falls into that same essentialism, denounced by Beauvoir, which relegates the woman to the biological plane, thus excluding her from the dialectic of second nature and self-consciousness. For this reason, Hegel’s understanding of freedom through second nature will initially be introduced, and then, employing this concept against Hegel himself, the path of emancipation from gender essentialism in Beauvoir’s account of biology and culture will be addressed. In the second part of the paper it will be shown how gender, in acting as a second nature, replays the same ambiguity of Hegel’s theory: are second nature and gender something that we individuals freely shape or are we victims of an externally imposed necessity just like in first nature? A dialectical solution will be presented in both thinkers, whose work aims to conciliate spirit and nature beyond any Cartesian dualism.

The extent to which legislators pursue their privately held preferences in office has important implications for representative democracy and is exceedingly difficult to measure. Many models of legislative decision-making tacitly assume that members are willing and able to carry out the wishes of their constituents so as to maximize their reelection prospects and, in so doing, relegate their personal preferences. This project explores this assumption by examining the role that members’ place of birth plays in shaping legislative behavior, apart from other politically relevant factors like partisanship. We find that birthplace exerts an independent influence on members’ voting behavior. Using a variety of geographic measures, we find that members who are born in close proximity to one another tend to exhibit similar patterns in roll call voting, even when accounting for partisanship, constituency attributes, and a variety of other determinants of voting. We also demonstrate in a secondary analysis that the agricultural composition of members’ birthplace influences their support for agricultural protection. Our findings suggest that members’ personal history shapes the representational relationship they have with their constituents.

Cartographic representations of Kashmir and Taiwan act as sites upon which Indian and Chinese state power is exercised to govern the logics of visibility and legibility for these two regions. Despite the differences in regime type, these major non-Western powers represent Kashmir and Taiwan respectively as internal and integral parts of their sovereign territorial form. In this article, we consider two cases that have not hitherto been studied together in International Relations (IR), putting forward ‘cartographic imaginaries’ as a framework to reveal systematic analytical dynamics in relation to representation, nationalism, and diaspora. Cartographic imaginaries are sites of productive power that evoke certain emotions and carry a set of ideas relating to territory that can be naturalised through repeated exposure. We present in-depth investigations providing a range of examples to trace Indian and Chinese states’ efforts, both domestic and international, involved in constructing and controlling cartographic imaginaries of Kashmir and Taiwan. Our analysis relates to significant current concerns in IR about critiques of imperial cartography, impact of rising powers on global order dynamics, and transnational governance of diaspora. Our framework thus demonstrates the connexions between affect, visuality, and state power and offers empirical insights into non-Western projections of imperialism on a global scale.

This article uses letters from BL, ms Lansdowne 99 to explore how a diverse group of individuals experiencing mental and emotional distress utilised religious ideas as a primary means of interpreting their experience and expressing themselves to those in authority in Elizabethan England. It shifts emphasis away from the causes and towards the construction and experience of distress. It argues that such letters shed important light on the character and progress of the English Reformation by the closing decades of the sixteenth century, as well as on the operation of the process of Reformation itself.

Using a recent result of Bowden, Hensel and Webb, we prove the existence of a homeomorphism with positive stable commutator length in the group of homeomorphisms of the Klein bottle which are isotopic to the identity.

Using a laboratory experiment, we investigate complexity in decision problems as a cause of failures in contingent reasoning. For this purpose, we introduce three dimensions of complexity to a decision problem: the number of contingencies, the dominance property of choices, and reducible states. Each decision problem is designed to reflect variations in complexity across the three dimensions. Experimental results show that the number of contingencies has the most significant effect on failures in contingent reasoning. The second dimension, the dominance property of choices, also has a statistically significant effect, though the effect size is smaller than in the existing literature. In contrast, the third complexity dimension has no impact; presenting the decision problem in a reduced or reducible form does not change subjects’ performance on contingent reasoning. Additionally, we examine the Power of Certainty and show its existence. This effect is particularly pronounced when the number of contingencies is large.

Considering the alarming energy demand for cooling and seeking sustainable cooling alternatives to over-reliance on air conditioning, our pre-registered study is the first attempt to apply social norm nudges on two cooling behaviors – lighter clothing and the use of personal cooling devices (PCDs). To examine and compare the effectiveness of a descriptive norm message, an injunctive norm signal from leadership, and the two norms combined, we conducted an online randomized controlled survey experiment among financial employees (n = 743) in Guangdong, China. We measured their behavioral intentions before and after the intervention, and their level of commitment to these behaviors as an alternative outcome. We found that while single-norm conditions did not lead to desirable increases in lighter clothing, the both-norm condition nudged participants toward selecting lighter work clothes and boosted commitment to lighter clothing. Outcomes related to the use of PCDs were not affected by any of the norm conditions. These mixed findings present a cautionary tale for designing social norm interventions in office spaces and highlight the boundaries of their effectiveness in energy-saving behaviors.

The concept of security, with its various dimensions, is fundamental to the field of ageing literature. However, feeling safe does not always equate to feeling at ease or being comfortable with people and places. Building on these premises, this article presents and analyses the factors involved in the perception of security and social safeness among women ageing in a top-down co-housing project and a nursing home in Italy. This country has one of Europe’s oldest populations, and the ageing population phenomenon is particularly notable in the Veneto region. In response to changing demographics, the search for alternative housing solutions and associated innovative paradigms of care and support has been gaining ground in recent years. Our study analysed data gathered from women who decided not to age in place. Fieldwork was carried out in one of the most densely populated provinces in the Veneto region during 2022 and 2023. The methodology was qualitative and consisted of in-depth interviews, a focus group and a workshop. Participants were 11 self-sufficient older women, aged 75 and over, living in these facilities. Among the elements that contribute to the perception of social safeness, the following stood out: material and structural factors, physical and emotional factors, relational factors and factors linked to independence and autonomy. Finally, the article stresses the need to study social safeness in greater depth, as it could become a new line of social science research capable of providing relevant information on the housing needs of older adults.