We identify strong cross-border property rights as a driver for the globalization of innovation. Using 67 million patents from over 100 patent offices, we construct novel measures of the three stages of innovation diffusion: adoption, sourcing, and collaboration. Exploiting staggered bilateral investment treaties (BITs) as shocks to cross-border property rights, we show that signatory countries increase technology adoption and sourcing from each other; they also increase R&D collaborations. The results are particularly strong for countries with weak domestic institutions and technologies with high imitation risks. Increases in R&D-related foreign investments explain most of the results.

As the catalytic centre of the oxygen-evolving complex in photosystem II and a co-factor of glycosyltransferases and many other proteins, manganese (Mn) is essential for plants and a limiting factor for crop production. However, an excessive Mn availability is toxic to plants. Therefore, mechanisms need to be in place to maintain Mn homeostasis under fluctuating Mn availability. This review summarises our current understanding of the mechanisms that move Mn from the soil to its cellular targets and maintain Mn homeostasis. We zoom in from the whole-plant perspective to the intracellular allocation of the metal by transport proteins of different families acting in concert. In particular, organellar Mn supply by members of the recently identified bivalent cation transporter family and the post-translational regulation of Mn transporters by calcium-regulated phosphorylation have been a focus of current research. Finally, the emergent diversity of Mn handling beyond the Arabidopsis model will be addressed.

The Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA) provides a foundation in global health law to support legal preparedness across nations. This column examines the legal authorities necessary to meet the objectives of the GHSA Legal Preparedness Action Package and advance national law reforms to prevent, detect, and respond to public health emergencies.

Global crises constitute challenges for social policy. While social policy is predominantly a national concern, international organisations (IOs) contribute frames of reference for state decisions. In this article, we explore whether the COVID-19 pandemic led to changes in IOs’ social policy ideas and recommendations in health care, labour market, and social protection policies due to how IOs perceived the crisis’ specific nature, severity, and global scope. We focus on four IOs regarded as key actors in global social policy, namely the ILO, OECD, WHO, and the World Bank. Theoretically, we employ a framework of ideational policy change combining different levels (recommendations – including parameters and instruments – and paradigmatic ideas) with different types of change (layering, conversion, dismantlement, and displacement). We find that IOs have not fundamentally reimagined their pre-pandemic stances during the pandemic. The IOs’ perceptions of the crisis do not undermine IOs’ ideas and recommendations but highlight their appropriateness.

What is climate history? How can it serve as a lens through which to view other historical questions? This roundtable identifies key themes in Gilded Age and Progressive Era climate history, and demonstrates that this era was pivotal for both scientific and cultural perceptions of climate. It also shows how climate history can illuminate other subjects, including histories of science, medicine, health, and race. Further, it considers present-day implications. This roundtable began as a session sponsored by the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era at the 2024 Organization of American Historians annual meeting in New Orleans. What follows is a conversation based on that panel, a selected bibliography of scholarly sources, and a collection of primary sources for teaching climate history.

Laboratory experiments are an important methodology in economics, especially in the field of behavioral economics. However, it is still debated to what extent results from laboratory experiments are informative about behavior in field settings. One highly important question about the external validity of experiments is whether the same individuals act in experiments as they would in the field. This paper presents evidence on how individuals behave in donation experiments and how the same individuals behave in a naturally occurring decision situation on charitable giving. While we find evidence that pro-social behavior is more accentuated in the lab, the data show that pro-social behavior in experiments is correlated with behavior in the field.

The field of global health law has evolved over the past decade to describe new legal and policy instruments that apply to a changing set of public health threats, non-state actors, and regulatory norms that structure the global response to public health challenges. This special issue—bringing together the O’Neill Institute for National & Global Health Law and the Global Health Law Consortium—examines the expansive evolution of the field of global health law and its continuing development to face new health threats.

The field of global health law encompasses both “hard” law treaties and “soft” law policies that shape global health norms. Transitioning from “international health law” to “global health law and policy,” global health policymakers have increasingly looked to soft law instruments to address public health needs in a rapidly globalizing world – within the World Health Organization and across global health governance. Yet, as policymakers have expanded the landscape of soft law policy instruments to advance global health across state and non-state actors, the COVID-19 response revealed the limitations of this soft law approach to global health threats, with states now seeking hard law reforms to strengthen global health governance. As hard and soft law can provide complementary approaches to preventing disease and promoting health, future research must conceptualize how these normative frameworks interact in advancing global health.

This article elaborates the notion of hybrid repression, understanding by this modalities of dissidence suppression that involve state and non-state actors interacting in various ways, from fully autonomous to close cooperation. It does so by proposing a framework to scrutinize repressive configurations on the basis of three analytical dimensions – the perpetrator of repression, the tactics used and the threats perpetrators respond to – and using this framework to perform a systematic qualitative analysis of 160 in-depth interviews with human rights activists in four different countries (Colombia, Egypt, Mexico and Kenya). On this basis, the article analytically distinguishes and empirically elaborates four different patterns of hybrid repression, namely: state rogue, corporate, communitarian and non-state armed repression. Our argument challenges the state-centric approach to political repression that still dominates much of the literature on contentious politics and comparative regime analysis, and it invites further research on how hybrid forms of repression manifest and operate in different types of social and political contexts, and in relation to different areas of activism.

In this article, we examine the relationship between the World Health Organization International Health Regulations (IHR) and human rights and its implications for IHR reform, considering the evolution of human rights in the 2005 IHR, the role of human rights in IHR reforms and the implications of these reforms in key domains including equity and solidarity, medical countermeasures, core capacities, travel restrictions, vaccine certificates, social measures, accountability, and financing.

The 2024 U.S. election will shape the future of global health policy, with crucial implications for continuing U.S. leadership in global health. The United States has long played a critical role in global health governance, through multilateral institutions under the United Nations (UN) and bilateral assistance to advance U.S. priorities. However, political shifts have challenged U.S. engagement in global health, with the politicization of global health policy threatening global governance under the World Health Organization (WHO) and dividing global health support across political parties. This political polarization in global health proved catastrophic in the COVID-19 pandemic response and influential in the 2020 Presidential Elections. With the United States again seeking to advance global health policy, the 2024 Elections present a clear contrast in global health visions across U.S. political parties – with sweeping impacts on global governance, health funding, sexual and reproductive health, corporate regulations, tax equity, humanitarian challenges, and climate change. The future of U.S. leadership in global health hangs in the balance of this election, raising an imperative for candidates to highlight their global health positions and for voters to consider the global health implications.

Following from sweeping law reforms across the global health landscape, there is a need to prepare the next generation to advance global health law to ensure justice for a healthier world. Educational programs across disciplines have increasingly incorporated the field of global health law, with new courses examining the law and policy frameworks that apply to the new set of public health threats, non-state actors, and regulatory instruments that structure global health. Such interdisciplinary training must be expanded throughout the world to prepare future practitioners to strengthen global health law — ensuring a foundation for global health in legal studies and law and global health studies. Meeting this imperative for global health law teaching — establishing academic courses and textbooks on global legal responses to shared health threats — will be necessary to support students to address the global health challenges of the future.

We can hardly know for certain how strongly a scholarly discipline like history is able to affect politics and society, popular views and morals. Whatever its impact, it's influence also varies from epoch to epoch. During a few decades of the nineteenth century, historians were overwhelmed by so many questions and by such high expectations that there existed a large public space for them that they merely had to occupy. At other times, they have had to conquer this space first if they wanted to gain continued attention.

To be sure, a differentiation has to be introduced: any society has particular interests, e.g., in parts of its more recent past or in events that society sees as having something like a “mythical quality” about then, events that represent a major divide, that are deeply imprinted on that society's memory, that have attained a special role through tradition. There is, of course, always a space commanding wider public attention for these aspects. However, they are no more than small specks on the large canvas of history.

In this article, we study the complexity of weighted team definability for logics with team semantics. This problem is a natural analog of one of the most studied problems in parameterized complexity, the notion of weighted Fagin-definability, which is formulated in terms of satisfaction of first-order formulas with free relation variables. We focus on the parameterized complexity of weighted team definability for a fixed formula $\varphi$ of central team-based logics. Given a first-order structure $\mathcal{A}$ and the parameter value $k\in \mathbb N$ as input, the question is to determine whether $\mathcal{A},T\models \varphi$ for some team T of size k. We show several results on the complexity of this problem for dependence, independence, and inclusion logic formulas. Moreover, we also relate the complexity of weighted team definability to the complexity classes in the well-known W-hierarchy as well as paraNP.

Desorption processes of low-molecular-weight compounds from the surface of smectites into the gas phase determine a number of processes, e.g. those involved in drug delivery and the release of herbicides. The desorption has not been investigated thoroughly and is not well understood. The present study was undertaken in order to understand better the factors influencing these desorption mechanisms. Starting with a very pure standard (Na+-rich) montmorillonite (Kunipia-F), which was exchanged against cations with different hydration properties (Ca2+, Li+, phenyltrimethylammonium, hexyltrimethyl-ammonium), the experiments explored the rate of desorption of volatiles with different chemical functionalities (water, ethanol, ethyl acetate, and toluene). The desorption was monitored by thermogravimetry and differential scanning calorimetry under isothermal conditions, and by ramping the temperature at a constant rate. The experiments were compared with numerical calculations based on finite-element methods and with analytical models. These data point to a two-step mechanism where the desorption follows the curve of the equilibrium desorption isotherms of those molecules on the montmorillonite. The bulk-like volatiles (i.e. volatiles with release kinetics close to that of the bulk liquids) were desorbed in a first step. With a decrease in the degree of coverage of the volatile on the montmorillonite, the desorption was increasingly dominated by the strength of interaction between the volatile and the interlayer cations of the montmorillonite.