As a star ages, more and more of the hydrogen in its core becomes consumed by fusion into helium. Once this core hydrogen is used up, how does the star react and adjust? Stars at this post-main-sequence stage of life actually start to expand, eventually becoming much brighter giant or supergiant stars, shining with a luminosity that can be thousands or even tens of thousands that of their core-H-burning main sequence. We discuss how such stars reach their stellar end points as planetary nebulae or white dwarfs.

Mental illness stigma has long been an issue of both sociological and practical importance. Until recently, cross-national, comparative research on the prejudice and discrimination attached to mental illness has been primarily focused on Western, Global North and developed countries, failing to examine stigma in Eastern, Global South and developing nations. This has both left gaps in our theoretical knowledge and hindered our ability to reduce stigma globally. With recent calls to action from major stakeholders, including the Lancet Commission and the World Health Organization, more attention is being paid to mental illness, stigma, and their detrimental effects for those who experience it and societies that harbor it. Nonetheless, common myths about global stigma persist within and outside scholarly and medical communities about stigma cross-nationally. In this chapter, we leverage existing comparative research and data to describe some of what we know about the global profile of stigma through four cross-national myths about mental illness stigma. The four myths we debunk include the following: (1) stigma is lower in low- and middle-income countries; (2) cultural context doesn’t matter for individual experiences of stigma; (3) cultural context doesn’t matter for whether individuals seek mental health care; and (4) increasing contact with individuals with mental illness will continue to reduce stigma. For each myth, we trace its origin before using current, cross-national data to show how these widely held beliefs are inaccurate. Then, to push the sociological contributions of stigma further, we review two novel ideas at opposite ends of the research continuum – ethnographic investigation and complex systems models – that both suggest how the cultural elements of stigma can be rethought. Theory that leans toward ethnographic investigation includes the “What Matters Most” (WMM) model. This framework highlights the importance of stigma as a culturally and situationally embedded phenomenon. In other words, the WMM framework emphasizes the importance of local social worlds, and how there is a need to understand the specific cultural features that define the meaning of stigma in different communities. On the other end of the methodological spectrum, the Framework Integrating Normative Influences on Stigma (FINIS) model provides a complex systems model that leans toward survey and archival data. This model brings together insights from social structural and social psychological understandings of stigma to acknowledge how geography, history, politics, and economies shape the social construction of stigma. By detailing both of these frameworks, we provide contemporary maps for cross-national understandings of the potential paradox between the universality of stigma and its specific manifestations across the globe.

To understand ways we might infer stellar distances, we first consider how we intuitively estimate distance in our everyday world, through apparent angular size, and/or using our stereoscopic vision. We explain a practical, quite direct way to infer distances to relatively nearby stars, namely through the method of trigonometric parallax. This leads to the definition of the astronomical unit and parsec, and the concept of solid angles on the sky, measured in steradians or square degrees.

What are the key physical properties we can aspire to know about a star? In this chapter we consider the properties of stars, identifying first what we can directly observe about a given star: position on the sky, apparent brightness, color/spectrum. When these observations are combined with a clear understanding of some basic physical principles, we can infer many of the key physical properties of stars. We also make a brief aside to discuss ways to get our heads around the enormous distances and timescales we encounter in astrophysics.

Verna Keith and Diane Brown present a conceptual model for understanding the way in which the interrelationships among race, gender, and socioeconomic status (SES) influence mental well-being for Black American women. Mental well-being is affected by social, cultural, and psychological factors as well as by physical health and health behavior; in turn these factors are influenced by one’s social status (i.e., race, gender, SES). Black American women are subject to racism, sexism, and for some, heterosexism, which diminish their educational attainment, personal and household incomes, occupational status, wealth accumulation, and opportunities for socioeconomic advancement. Consequently, Black American women have fewer resources than their White counterparts and are far more limited in their capacity to cope with crises and adversities. Stressors such as poverty and economic hardship also challenge the adaptive abilities of many Black women. They are less likely to be married and, if married, more likely to be employed than White married women. Parenthood often is another source of stress as many Black women are single parents. A key argument made by Keith and Brown is that there is a strong connection between mental and physical health. Black women have poorer physical health with higher rates of diabetes, hypertension, HIV infection, and lupus, which lead to higher mortality rates than White women. Additionally, Black women are less likely to use health care, which may be due to a lack of access, among other factors. However, the extended social networks of Black women may provide important sources of social support. What other types of support would help Black women cope with the many sources of stress in their lives, and would immigrant and LGBT women need additional supportive resources?

When speaking, speakers break down the continuous stream of sounds into smaller units – so-called intonation phrases. Within these intonation phrases, we find a rhythmic pattern of unstressed and stressed syllables, similar to the word stress that we already saw in individual words. This chapter investigates which principles speakers follow when rhythmically grouping the speech flow. Like word stress, the rhythmic structure of utterances does not distinguish meaning in English, or it only does so in a very limited way. However, it does serve important linguistic functions. Additionally, speakers pronounce intonation phrases with specific melodic patterns. Intonation will be dealt with in detail in the subsequent chapter. Rhythm and intonation constitute the suprasegmental level. Even though the suprasegmental level plays a secondary role in the language system of English, rhythm and intonation serve several crucial functions in communicative situations.

In this chapter, we are going to ask one of the most important questions that phonology is concerned with: when are two phonetically different sounds considered variations of the same sound within the system of a language and when are they two distinct speech sounds? Instead of speech sounds, we are going to introduce the terms ‘phonemes’ and ‘allophones’ and use these from hereon. We will learn how phonemes and allophones differ in their function, their occurrence within language (called ‘distribution‘) as well as their phonetic properties. Finally, we can now understand the different interests that the two sister-sciences phonetics and phonology pursue.

Properties of speech sounds can be measured. Speech recognition systems, such as Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant, make use of the fact that each class of sounds has its own characteristics. In this chapter, we are going to look at the most basic acoustic characteristics of speech, starting with loudness and pitch. Moreover, you will learn how you can make easy measurements with a free software that many phoneticians also use.

In this chapter, you will discover that sound-changing processes are also at work in connected speech that impact the phoneme sequence. Like allophonic variation, many of these will occur in faster speech and not in careful pronunciation, and they are also speaker-dependent. Over time, though, they may alter the pronunciation of a word, so that many of today’s pronunciations are the result of such phonological processes that occurred in the past, and current frequently occurring phonological processes will lead to the standard pronunciation of tomorrow.

In this chapter, we will look at the writing system, why the Latin alphabet used by English and many other languages is not ideal, as it does not provide letters for all sounds, and what tools phoneticians have at their disposal to accurately write down the pronunciation of words. This textbook takes a hands-on approach. Therefore, in this chapter, you will also be introduced to a free software used by many phoneticians. With this, you can listen to stretches of speech and annotate them. In a later chapter, you will also learn how to perform simple measurements with it. Finally, just like there is standard English grammar and vocabulary, there are also two main pronunciation standards for English, which will be introduced here.

This chapter introduces diphthongs as well as other English vowels that only occur in specific positions. Unlike for monophthongs, where the tongue remains in a steady position, for diphthongs the tongue performs a gliding movement during articulation. Diphthongs are an integral part of the English vowel system. Sometimes diphthongs are indicated in the spelling by a digraph, such as in they. At other times, however, they are represented by a single vowel letter, as in gave. Two classes of vowels deserve special attention, as they only occur in specific positions. Pre-rhotic vowels only occur when in spelling the vowel is followed by ‹r›. Weak vowels, on the other hand, only appear in unstressed syllables, so in syllables that are not accentuated. Finally, the chapter looks at letter-to-sound correspondences. These are more intricate, as the thirteen vowel qualities found in English can only be written with the five vowel letters of the Latin alphabet. However, they are also more regular than might be assumed.