Using a Bayesian Global VAR model as a methodological tool, we analyze how heightened geopolitical risk shocks propagate across advanced economies and quantify the economic effects of these events. The global VAR impulse response functions in response to the skyrocketing Russian geopolitical risk after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine revealed a contraction of GDP and an increase in inflation. Eastern European and Baltic countries are particularly affected by the Russian geopolitical risk shock. We also document a strong component of the Russian geopolitical risk shock that is not driven by fossil fuel prices.

The rapid spread of herbicide resistance in weeds, driven by gene flow through multiple pathways, poses an increasing challenge for agricultural systems. This review summarizes the extent and distance of pollen- and seed-mediated gene flow (PMGF and SMGF, respectively) in selected self-pollinated weeds and the environmental factors that influence PMGF. A comprehensive literature review was focused on assessing PMGF patterns, dispersal mechanisms, and influencing factors across self-pollinated weed species. Statistical analyses were conducted to evaluate correlations between PMGF and environmental variables, including temperature, precipitation, humidity, and elevation. Self-pollinated weeds in the Asteraceae family show the highest PMGF (average 10.63%), with common groundsel showing 24% at 0.5 m from the pollen source. Solanaceae and Chenopodiaceae are plant families with the second and third highest PMGF (average 10.00% and 1.58%, respectively). Within Solanaceae, eastern black nightshade exhibited the maximum PMGF (17%), whereas in Chenopodiaceae, magenta spreen showed the highest gene flow, reaching 3% at 15 m from the pollen source. In contrast, the lowest mean PMGF was observed in Poaceae and Brassicaceae (average 1.87% and 0.33%, respectively). Furthermore, among environmental variables, only temperature showed a significant correlation (P < 0.05). Due to the limited number of studies, this correlation should be viewed cautiously, as it likely reflects general patterns rather than a causal link to PMGF. Bold-seeded grasses such as oat may disperse seeds at low frequency (14-18%), however, light-seeded species such as horseweed can disperse as high as 99% of their seeds. Understanding gene flow in self-pollinated weeds with high fecundity is vital to limiting herbicide resistance spread in such species.

This article assesses the impact of the discovery of bacteriophages, which emerged from an investigation into a 1915 outbreak of bacillary dysentery in France, on influenza virus research. Specifically, it details the way in which the phages became a vehicle for importing certain assay techniques into the study of influenza and other viruses that cause infectious diseases in humans and other animals, thereby enabling the scaling up of vaccine production for these diseases. Very soon after his 1917 report of the discovery of bacteriophages, Felix d’Herelle developed an assay technique based on their ability to form countable plaques on solid media when incubated along with the dysentery bacteria. This basic technique was further refined by Macfarlane Burnet in the late 1920s. Still later, in the wake of a 1935 influenza outbreak in Australia, Burnet applied the principles of serial dilution and plaque counting, honed during his work on the phages, to develop a technique for cultivating influenza viruses in fertilised eggs and assaying them by counting the pocks induced on the chick embryo membranes. The ability to grow and assay these viruses proved crucial in developing the first successful vaccines against influenza. In the 1950s, bacteriophage assay techniques were once more carried over to the assaying of viruses on cultured cells by Renato Dulbecco and Marguerite Vogt. The importance of quantification in science, as well as the ability to apply the results of investigations in one area of biology to another, relatively unrelated field, is also discussed.

The potential of coastal regimes for supporting permanent human settlement is tempered by the vulnerability of fixed infrastructure to changes in sea levels. First-millennium AD civic-ceremonial centers on the northern Gulf coast of Florida involved the construction of permanent infrastructure in support of regional gatherings that challenged sustainable settlement in the context of regressive sea. Although rising sea was the more common challenge over millennia of coastal dwelling, marine regression from periods of cooling climate slowly diminished near-shore habitat for fish and shellfish and eventually stranded settlements from tidal water. The challenge was especially acute for a community that built a tidal fish trap for summer solstice feasts, whose utility depended on the reliability of tides to flood the trap. High-resolution lidar data from the Richards Island fish trap enable accurate modeling of the effectiveness of the trap under current and lowered sea levels. The use-life history of the Richards Island fish trap illustrates the limits to intensification of coastal economies inherent to nonportable infrastructure whose utility is tide dependent—in particular, when demands on production are out of sync with optimal tidal conditions.

Comorbid substance use and mental health disorders are highly prevalent and increase the risk of various adverse outcomes. Yet, treatment for comorbid substance use and mental health disorders is scattered and varies considerably between countries and regions. Quality standards are principles and sets of rules that can serve as a statement of expected requirements. They can be developed by (inter)national bodies and contribute to identification of shared ethical principles, harmonisation of care and implementation of evidence-based interventions. While in recent decades there has been an increase in the availability of quality standards in healthcare, and despite some national and regional efforts, international quality standards for the treatment of comorbid substance use and mental health disorders are lacking. Consensus over the development of such standards by international organisations could contribute to improved care for patients with comorbid substance use and mental health disorders globally.

In the early 2000s, mainstream US wellness culture started to develop something of an obsession with the distant past. These “paleofantasies” (Zuk 2013), such as barefoot running and the Paleo diet, are not based in scientific evidence about prehistoric human behavior or accurate understandings of evolutionary theory. Why, then, do so many people (especially men) find them compelling? In this paper, I argue that the “stone age” chronotope is implicitly masculine and in fact tends to exclude women altogether. Women are largely absent from imaginings of prehistory, whether those imaginings are car insurance commercials, diet and exercise programs, or even anthropological texts. Looking at various popular discourses about the stone age chronotope, I consider how women are effectively rendered invisible, leaving behind what is perceived as a distilled masculine essence. I suggest that the proliferation of paleofantasy in the past two decades has been part of a broader cultural backlash against feminist progress.

Economic hardship is known to shape children’s self-regulation, yet little is understood about how fluctuations in hardship unfold over time and whether different patterns of unpredictability carry unique developmental consequences. Using a socioeconomically diverse sample, we tracked families’ subjective economic hardship across 15–36 monthly assessments and applied an environmental statistics framework to quantify four indices of unpredictability: changepoints in mean, changepoints in variance, coefficient of variation, and noise. PCA identified two distinct forms of economic unpredictability: one marked by frequent, unpredictable hardship, and another by infrequent but abrupt hardship. Economic unpredictability was disproportionately experienced by racially minoritized and lower-income families in our sample, reinforcing structural inequities in economic resources. Relations between these indices and caregiver-reported measures of family routines and day-to-day unpredictability were weak, suggesting wide heterogeneity in the ways families adapt to economic unpredictability. Leveraging propensity score methods, we isolated the effects of unpredictability from hardship severity, finding that both were associated with greater self-regulation challenges in early childhood, with the strongest effects for hardship severity. These findings underscore the importance of capturing economic hardship as a dynamic and multidimensional experience, with implications for policy efforts aimed at promoting stability in families’ access to resources over time.

The marked length spectrum (MLS) of a closed negatively curved manifold $(M, g)$ is known to determine the metric g under various circumstances. We show that, in these cases, (approximate) values of the MLS on a sufficiently large finite set approximately determine the metric. Our approach is to recover the hypotheses of our main theorems in Butt [Quantative marked length spectrum rigidity. Preprint, 2022], namely, multiplicative closeness of the MLS functions on the entire set of closed geodesics of M. We use mainly dynamical tools and arguments, but take great care to show that the constants involved depend only on concrete geometric information about the given Riemannian metrics, such as the dimension, diameter and sectional curvature bounds.

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic represented a time of mixed messaging around the relevance of various respiratory virus transmission pathways, with debate extending from the regional health authorities to individual subject matter experts around the world. Globally, the non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) for dealing with the pandemic virus were, fortunately, based on the potential risk posed by each of the transmission pathways (direct droplet transmission, transmission by aerosolized virus, and indirect transmission via surfaces/hands or re-aerosolization of infectious virus from contaminated environmental surfaces). These NPIs were very effective in limiting transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory viruses. We believe that there are numerous interdependencies between the various virus transmission pathways, indicating the need for a more holistic consideration of the importance of all transmission pathways and the corresponding need for targeted NPIs during virus outbreaks and pandemics.

In January 2023, the South Carolina Science Writing Initiative for Trainees (SC-SWIFT), an internship in the College of Graduate Studies at the Medical University of South Carolina, began offering tiered digital badges in science communications. The badges’ purpose was to encourage graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to engage in extracurricular science writing opportunities available through SC-SWIFT and to document acquired communications skills for employers. The badges have been well received, with 18 interns earning the beginner badge in the first two years of the program. In March 2025, SC-SWIFT queried 25 interns who had earned a beginner badge or completed half the requirements for doing so in 2023–2024 to gauge how important they considered the badges to their engagement in science communications and how valuable they would be in a job search. All 14 respondents found the badges important in engaging them in science communications, and 86% either strongly agreed or agreed that digital badges would be an asset when job searching. Eleven of 12 respondents (92%) thought that their confidence in telling their own research story had increased. These initial results suggest that digital badges could be useful tools for documenting science communications skills acquired during extracurricular, experiential learning.

National digital ID apps are increasingly gaining popularity globally. As how we transact in the world is increasingly mediated by the digital, questions need to be asked about how these apps support the inclusion of disabled people. In particular, international instruments, such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, spotlight the need for inclusive information and communication technologies. In this paper, we adopt a critical disability studies lens to analyse the workings of state-designed digital IDs—Singpass app—and what they can tell us about existing ways of designing for digital inclusion. We situate the case of the Singpass app within the rise of global digital transactions and the political-technical infrastructures that shape their accessibility. We analyse the ways Singpass centres disability, the problems it may still entail, and the possible implications for inclusion. At the same time, we uncover the lessons Singpass’s development holds for questions of global digital inclusion.

As digital welfare systems expand in local governments worldwide, understanding their implications is crucial for safeguarding public values like transparency, legitimacy, accountability, and privacy. A lack of political debate on data-driven technologies risks eroding democratic legitimacy by obscuring decision-making and impeding accountability mechanisms. In the Netherlands, political discussions on digital welfare within local governments are surprisingly limited, despite evidence of negative impacts on both frontline professionals and citizens. This study examines what mechanisms explain if and how data-driven technologies in the domain of work and income are politically discussed within the municipal government of a large city in the Netherlands, and its consequences. Using a sequential mixed methods design, combining automated text-analysis software ConText (1.2.0) and text-analysis software Atlas.ti (9), we analyzed documents and video recordings of municipal council and committee meetings from 2016 to 2023. Our results show these discussions are rare in the municipal council, occurring primarily either in reaction to scandals, or in reaction to criticism. Two key discursive factors used to justify limited political discussion are: (1) claims of lacking time and knowledge among council members and aldermen, and (2) distancing responsibility and diffusing accountability. This leads to a ‘content chopping’ mechanism, where issues are chopped into small content pieces, for example technical, ethical, and political aspects, and spreading them into separate documents and discussion arenas. This fragmentation can obscure overall coherence and diffuse critical concerns, potentially leading to harmful effects like dehumanization and stereotyping.

A multi-modal embodied robot framework was developed and evaluated to support English as a Second Language (ESL) learning in preschoolers through physical interaction and adaptive engagement. The system integrates a 4-DOF OpenManipulator-X robot with a tablet-based educational application, forming a unified instructional platform that delivers synchronized auditory, visual, and kinesthetic stimuli. Designed to improve lexical retention and motivation in early learners, the framework enables task-based interaction through pick-and-place vocabulary reinforcement, collaborative drawing, and tablet-mediated language tasks, coupled with a real-time emotion recognition module to adjust instructional cues.

An experimental design within the subject was used with 21 Korean preschool children (ages 4–8), comparing robot-assisted language learning (RALL) with traditional teacher-led language learning (TLLL) in matched tasks involving vocabulary learning, math reasoning, color categorization, and spelling recall. Each session was conducted under controlled classroom conditions and analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative metrics, including engagement frequency, task precision, and structured post-session surveys.

The results demonstrate significantly higher participation and task completion rates in the RALL condition, with vocabulary acquisition outcomes comparable to TLLL (p > 0.05). Children exhibited increased motivation and sustained interaction when guided by the robot and the application, suggesting that embodied adaptive systems can effectively support early second language learning. The study contributes validated design principles for integrating physical embodiment, affective responsiveness, and multi-modal instructional delivery in educational robotics. Implications are discussed for the scalable deployment of robot-assisted systems in preschool contexts, emphasizing child-centered interaction and developmental appropriateness within RALL environments.

In Japan in the 1920s, several financial crises and government policy led to bank mergers and the consolidation and expansion of branch networks. Using unique historical bank branch-level lending and deposit data, we show that branch banking integrated peripheral markets with the rest of the country, with large urban banks – those headquartered in Tokyo and Osaka – using deposit supply shocks in peripheral areas to fund lending in their core markets. While these findings support contemporary concerns about branch banking draining funds from peripheral markets, we argue that the export of liquidity by urban banks likely represented an efficient reallocation of credit, driven primarily by competition in funding markets. Faced with high-yielding lending opportunities in central prefectures, urban banks bid up deposit rates in peripheral areas, raising local banks’ funding costs. Local banks responded by lowering intermediation margins and reducing lending to traditional industries, which suggests that they shifted their lending to less risky and more efficient customers. We speculate that this competitive reallocation of capital across regions and sectors allowed banks to maintain a functional specialization in different customer segments, which may explain the continued coexistence of small relationship lenders and large integrated arm’s-length lenders in local banking markets.

The distribution and abundance of insect pests are influenced by landscape structure and composition, particularly through modifications to biocontrol services and the proportion of suitable habitats within the landscape. In addition, pest populations are affected by agricultural practices at different landscape scales, ranging from field-by-field to area-wide. Our study focuses on one of the world’s most invasive and polyphagous pests of fruits and vegetables: the Oriental fruit fly, Bactrocera dorsalis (Hendel, 1912) (Diptera: Tephritidae). We analysed how farmer practices, landscape composition, and mango varieties were related to B. dorsalis infestation in an insular tropical agroecosystem with disparate farming systems, where crop plots are of modest size and interconnected with various habitat types. Fruit infestations were regularly recorded during 18 months in different plots on all mango varieties of the study area. Agricultural practices were determined through semi-structured interviews and categorised according to the farm structure and practices related to B. dorsalis management. Landscape composition was determined from high-resolution satellite imagery and local surveys, and the area of landscape cover was calculated within a 500 m buffer around each sampled orchard plot. We demonstrate that both landscape and local factors influence the infestation indexes of B. dorsalis in mango orchards. At a landscape scale, B. dorsalis was favoured by habitat diversity, which probably provided complementary larval food resources and enabled populations to maintain throughout the year. On a local scale, individual farmers’ practices had a significant influence on infestation indexes. The proportion of infested fruits was lower in plots managed by farmers who practised sanitation.