The Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) was the most significant policy breakthrough to expand health insurance coverage in the USA in 45 years. Culminating a decade-long effort by Republicans to repeal and undermine the ACA, the Trump administration launched a panoply of executive initiatives to sabotage the law. Benefitting from Democratic control of both the House and Senate during its first 2 years, the Biden administration through legislative and executive initiatives made substantial headway in reversing Trump's sabotage and further reinvigorating the ACA. The 2022 elections witnessed a shift in the partisan milieu. Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives; Democrats scored modest gains in state elections. Emphasising two pivotal features of American governance – federalism and the outsized role of the courts – this essay examines the implications of this new partisan context for Biden's efforts to bolster ACA durability prior to the 2024 presidential election.

Healthcare personnel with severe acute respiratory coronavirus virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection were interviewed to describe activities and practices in and outside the workplace. Among 2,625 healthcare personnel, workplace-related factors that may increase infection risk were more common among nursing-home personnel than hospital personnel, whereas selected factors outside the workplace were more common among hospital personnel.

Acute change in mental status (ACMS), defined by the Confusion Assessment Method, is used to identify infections in nursing home residents. A medical record review revealed that none of 15,276 residents had an ACMS documented. Using the revised McGeer criteria with a possible ACMS definition, we identified 296 residents and 21 additional infections. The use of a possible ACMS definition should be considered for retrospective nursing home infection surveillance.

Properties of radiatively cooled supersonic plasma jets formed by ablation of thin Alfoils driven by 1.4 MA, 250 ns current pulse are presented. The jets are highly collimatedwith half-opening angles of ~2°. Measurements of the flow velocity (~60km/s) and plasma temperature (~15 eV) in the jet with Thomson scattering diagnosticgive internal Mach number of M ~ 3, suggesting additional collimation of the jet bytoroidal magnetic fields.

The formation of supersonic, radiatively cooled plasma jets with applications tolaboratory astrophysics has been an active area of research on the MAGPIE generator. Oneof the ways of producing astrophysically-relevant jets in the laboratory is by using theablation of plasma from a radial foil Z-pinch. In this configuration a ~1.4 MA, 250ns current pulse is introduced into an aluminium disk with a thickness of 15μm. The ablated plasma from the foil converges on the axis, producing asteady and collimated jet with a typical axial velocity of ~100 km/s. The setupallows for the addition of argon above the foil for jet-ambient interaction studies. Theinteraction is characterised by the formation of several shock features, which arepresented and discussed from experimental data and numerical simulations.

The seismology and physics of localized structures beneath the surface of the Sun takes on a special significance with the completion in 2006 of a solar cycle of observations by the ground-based Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG) and by the instruments on board the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). Of course, the spatially unresolved Birmingham Solar Oscillation Network (BiSON) has been observing for even longer. At the same time, the testing of models of stellar structure moves into high gear with the extension of deep probes from the Sun to other solar-like stars and other multi-mode pulsators, with ever-improving observations made from the ground, the success of the MOST satellite, and the recently launched CoRoT satellite. Here we report the current state of the two closely related and rapidly developing fields of helio- and asteroseimology.

Electromigration-induced failure of near-bamboo interconnects depends strongly on the number and lengths of both polygranular clusters and bamboo segments in a line. We have used numerical techniques to calculate the stress profile as a function of position and time for near-bamboo lines with a variety of microstructures. Our results show that coupling of stress profiles between nearby clusters can affect the time to reach a pre-defined critical, or failure, stress. The degree of coupling depends both on the spacing between clusters and the ratio of the diffusivities between polygranular and single crystal regions. Electromigration failure is therefore sensitive to the distribution and lengths of bamboo segments, and the likelihood of long polygranular clusters coinciding with adjacent short bamboo segments.