The commentary raises important points like patients' actual availability of out- or in-patient services in the wake of pandemics and nationwide lockdowns. The focus is also drawn to missed opportunities to include data from hotlines and online services, a possible increase in death by suicides or changes in the factors that could add up to or protect a person from suicide.

The ASACUSA (atomic spectroscopy and collisions using slow antiprotons) Cusp experiment requires the production of dense positron plasmas with a high repetition rate to produce a beam of antihydrogen. In this work, details of the positron production apparatus used for the first observation of the antihydrogen beam, and subsequent measurements, are described in detail. This apparatus replaced the previous compact trap design resulting in an improvement in the positron accumulation rate by a factor of $52\pm 3$.

Methods for reducing the radius, temperature and space charge of a non-neutral plasma are usually reported for conditions which approximate an ideal Penning Malmberg trap. Here, we show that (i) similar methods are still effective under surprisingly adverse circumstances: we perform strong drive regime (SDR) compression and SDREVC in a strong magnetic mirror field using only 3 out of 4 rotating wall petals. In addition, we demonstrate (ii) an alternative to SDREVC, using e-kick instead of evaporative cooling (EVC) and (iii) an upper limit for how much plasma can be cooled to $T<20\ \mathrm {K}$ using EVC. This limit depends on the space charge, not on the number of particles or the plasma density.

The Community Research Advisory Council (C-RAC) of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Clinical and Translational Research was established in 2009 to provide community-engaged research consultation services. In 2016–2017, C-RAC members and researchers were surveyed on their consultation experiences. Survey results and a 2019 stakeholder meeting proceeding helped redesign the consultation services. Transitioning to virtual consultations during COVID-19, the redesigning involved increasing visibility, providing consultation materials in advance, expanding member training, and effective communications. An increase in consultations from 28 (2009–2017) to 114 (2020–2022) was observed. Implementing stakeholder-researcher inputs is critical to holistic and sustained community-engaged research.

Community-Research Advisory Councils (C-RAC) provide a unique mechanism for building sustainable community-academic partnership, fostering bidirectional understanding of complex research issues, disseminating timely research findings, and thereby improving public trust in science. Created in 2009, the Johns Hopkins C-RAC has a mission to achieve diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) of stakeholders across the entire research continuum. It has nurtured over a decade of partnership among community and academic stakeholders toward addressing health disparity, health equity, structural racism, and discrimination. Evidence of successful strategies to ensure DEI in partnership and lessons learned are illustrated in this special communication.

We investigate how men and women fare in the managerial labor market in the plausibly exogenous circumstance of their firms being acquired when most target-firm managers (about 90%) are displaced. These career disruptions result in a larger drop in rank and compensation for female managers, despite similar job search attributes. Gender differences are mitigated when hiring firms have more women in upper-echelon positions. Rich managerial experience and external board service also reduce gender-related differences. Overall, results point to a (implicit) “gender penalty” in terms of managerial job mobility, but also indicate contexts in which penalty is alleviated, and even reversed.

We find that male participants in Harvard Business School’s New Venture Competition who were randomly exposed to more venture capital (VC) investors on their panel were substantially more likely to start a VC-backed startup post-graduation, indicating that access to investors impacts fundraising independent of the quality of ideas. However, female participants experience no benefit from exposure to male or female venture capitalists (VCs), which appears related to a reduced propensity to reach out to VCs to whom they were exposed. Our results therefore also demonstrate gender-based differences in the degree to which increased exposure to investors can address networking frictions in venture capital.

Effectiveness of corona virus disease-19 (COVID-19) vaccines used in India is unexplored and need to be substantiated. The present case-control study was planned to elicit the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines in preventing infection and disease severity in the general population of Bihar, India. This case-control study was conducted among people aged ≥45 years during April to June 2021. The cases were the COVID-19 patients admitted or visited All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Patna, Bihar, India, and were contacted directly. The controls were the individuals tested negative for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS CoV-2) at the Virology laboratory, AIIMS-Patna and contacted telephonically for collection of relevant information. The vaccine effectiveness (VE) was calculated by using the formula (VE = 1 – odds ratio). The adjusted VE for partial and full vaccination were estimated to be 52.0% (95% confidence interval (CI) 39.0–63.0%) and 83.0% (95% CI 73.0–89.0%) respectively for preventing SARS CoV-2 infection. The sub-group analyses of the cases have shown that the length of hospital stays (LOS) (partially vaccinated: 9 days vs. unvaccinated: 12 days; P = 0.028) and the severity of the disease (fully vaccinated: 30.3% vs. partially vaccinated: 51.3% and unvaccinated: 54.1%; P = 0.035) were significantly low among vaccinated compared to unvaccinated individuals. To conclude, four out of every five fully vaccinated individuals are estimated to be protected from contracting SARS CoV-2 infection. Vaccination lowered LOS and chances of development of severe disease.

The study aims to estimate and compare the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) seroprevalence, the fraction of asymptomatic or subclinical infections in the population, determine the demographic risk factors and analyse the antibody development at different time points among adults in Bhubaneswar city, India. This was a serial three-round cross-sectional, community-based study where participants were selected from the residents of Bhubaneswar city using multi-stage random sampling. Blood samples were collected during household visits along with demographic and clinical data from every participant. Total anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibody present in serum was assessed using the electro-chemiluminescence immunoassay platform. Temporal comparisons of the community seroprevalence were performed against the detected number of cumulative cases, active cases, recoveries and deaths. A total of 3693 participants were enrolled in this study with a cumulative non-response rate of 18.33% in all the three rounds. The gender-weighted seroprevalence for the city in the first round was 1.55% (95% confidence interval (CI) 0.84–2.58), second round was 5.27% (95% CI 4.13–6.59) and in the third round was 49.04% (95% CI 46.39–51.68). In the first round, the seroprevalence was found to be highest in the elderly population, whereas the seroprevalence for the second and third phases was highest in the age group of 30–39 years. Seroprevalence showed an increasing trend over the three time periods, with the highest seropositivity rates among individuals sampled between 16 and 18 September 2020. By the third round, 93.93% of those who had previously been tested positive by real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction had seroconversion and 46.57% of those who had been tested negative also showed seroconversion. Infection to case ratio during first round was 27.05, for second round and third round it was 5.62 and 17.91, respectively.

We are interested in understanding how socially desirable traits like sympathy, reciprocity, and fairness can survive in environments that include aggressive and exploitative agents. Social scientists have long theorized about ingrained motivational factors as explanations for departures from self-seeking behaviors by human subjects. Some of these factors, namely reciprocity, have also been studied extensively in the context of agent systems as tools for promoting cooperation and improving social welfare in stable societies. In this paper, we evaluate how other factors like sympathy and parity can be used by agents to seek out cooperation possibilities while avoiding exploitation traps in more dynamic societies. We evaluate the relative effectiveness of agents influenced by different social considerations when they can change who they interact with in their environment using both an experimental framework and a predictive analysis. Such rewiring of social networks not only allows possibly vulnerable agents to avoid exploitation but also allows them to form gainful coalitions to leverage mutually beneficial cooperation, thereby significantly increasing social welfare.

A growing number of studies have tested the association between intimate partner violence (IPV) and the unintendedness of pregnancy or birth, and most have suggested that unintendedness of pregnancy is a cause of IPV. However, about nine in every ten women face violence after delivering their first baby. This study examined the effects of the intendedness of births on physical IPV using data from the National Family Health Survey (2015–16). The multivariate logistic regression model analysis found that, compared with women with no unwanted births (2.9%), physical IPV was higher among those women who had unwanted births (6.9%, p<0.001), followed by those who had mistimed births (4.4 %, p<0.001), even after adjusting for several women’s individual and socioeconomic characteristics. Thus, the reduction of women with mistimed and unwanted births could reduce physical IPV in India. The study highlights the unfinished agenda of family planning in the country and argues for the need to integrate family planning and Reproductive, Maternal and Child Health Care (RMNCH) services to yield multi-sectoral outcomes, including the elimination of IPV.

Insurance companies often follow highly correlated investment strategies. As major investors in corporate bonds, their investment commonalities subject investors to fire sale risk when regulatory restrictions prompt widespread divestment of a bond following a rating downgrade. Reflective of fire sale risk, the clustering of insurance companies in a bond has significant explanatory power for yield spreads, controlling for liquidity, credit risk, and other factors. The effect of insurer clustering on bond yield spreads is more evident for bonds held to a greater extent by capital-constrained insurance companies, those with ratings closer to National Association of Insurance Commissioners risk categories with larger capital requirements, and during the financial crisis.

Overconfident CEOs/senior executives tend to have excessively positive views of their own skills and their company’s future performance. We hypothesize that overconfident managers are more likely to engage in reckless or intentional actions/disclosures that give rise to securities class actions (SCAs). Empirical evidence is supportive: Overconfident CEOs/senior executives increase SCA likelihood, though litigation risk is ameliorated through improved governance, such as following the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002. Post-SCA, companies are less likely to hire an overconfident CEO. Following an SCA, overconfident CEOs appear to moderate behavior and to reduce their litigation risk.

Solid-state batteries are considered the holy grail of next-generation battery technology, meeting the ever-increasing demand for energy storage that is affordable and safe, with high energy density and long cycle life. Materials and interfaces play a critical role for their eventual success and mass commercialization. This issue of MRS Bulletin focuses on the current state of the art of solid-state electrolytes and device architectures and provides a perspective into the various materials and interfacial challenges that limit its performance and stability.