A Rank Forum was convened to discuss the evidence around food insecurity (FIS), its impact on health, and interventions which could make a difference both at individual and societal level, with a focus on the UK. This paper summarises the proceedings and recommendations. Speakers highlighted the growing issue of FIS due to current economic and social pressures. It was clear that the health implications of FIS varied geographically since food insecure women in higher income regions tend to be living with overweight or obesity, in contrast to those living in low-to-middle income countries. This paradox could be due to stress and/or metabolic or behavioural responses to an unpredictable food supply. The gut microbiota may play a role given the negative effects of low fibre diets on bacterial diversity, species balance and chronic disease risk. Solutions to FIS involve individual behavioural change, targeted services and societal/policy change. Obesity-related services are currently difficult to access. Whilst poverty is the root cause of FIS, it cannot be solved simply by making healthy food cheaper due to various ingrained beliefs, attitudes and behaviours in target groups. Person-centred models, such as Capability-Opportunity-Motivation Behavioural Change Techniques and Elicit-Provide-Elicit communication techniques are recommended. Societal change or improved resilience through psychological support may be more equitable ways to address FIS and can combine fiscal or food environment policies to shift purchasing towards healthier foods. However, policy implementation can be slow to enact due to the need for strong evidence, consultation and political will. Eradicating FIS must involve co-creation of interventions and policies to ensure that all stakeholders reach a consensus on solutions.

Flumioxazin and S-metolachlor are widely used in conventional sweetpotato production in North Carolina and other states; however, some growers have recently expressed concerns about potential effects of these herbicides on sweetpotato yield and quality. Previous research indicates that activated charcoal has the potential to reduce herbicide injury. Field studies were conducted in 2021 and 2022 to determine whether flumioxazin applied preplant and S-metolachlor applied before and after transplanting negatively affect sweetpotato yield and quality when activated charcoal is applied with transplant water. The studies evaluated five herbicide treatments and two activated charcoal treatments. Herbicide treatments included two flumioxazin rates, one S-metolachlor rate applied immediately before and immediately after transplanting, and no herbicide. Charcoal treatments consisted of activated charcoal applied at 9 kg ha−1, and no charcoal. No visual injury from herbicides or charcoal was observed. Likewise, no effect of herbicide or charcoal treatment on no. 1, marketable (sum of no. 1 and jumbo grades), or total yield (sum of canner, no. 1, and jumbo grades) was observed. Additionally, shape analysis conducted on calculated length-to-width ratio (LWR) for no. 1 sweetpotato roots found no effect from flumioxazin at either rate on sweetpotato root shape. However, both S-metolachlor treatments resulted in lower LWR of no. 1 sweetpotato roots in 2021. Results are consistent with prior research and indicate that flumioxazin and S-metolachlor are safe for continued use on sweetpotato at registered rates.

In this commentary, we set out the specifics of how Glowacki's game theoretical framework for the evolution of peace could be incorporated within broader cultural evolutionary approaches. We outline a formal proposal for prisoner's dilemma games investigating raid-based conflict. We also centre an ethnographic lens to understand the norms surrounding war and peace in intergroup interactions in small-scale communities.

We start this special issue with two perspectives. First, that the sociological study of crime and law often intersects with the study of inequality, power, the state, and life chances. Second, that the study of crime and law are deeply interconnected—institutionally, politically, and culturally. Legal institutions build on normative ideas, organizations, careers, and power to govern, to criminalize, and to punish (and, conversely, to ignore or absolve), and everyday understandings of crime are deeply tied to cultural understandings of legality, perceptions of justice and injustice, and hopes for everyday life. Law and crime are thus dynamically tied to social aspirations, fears, and divisions, and are political and social contests over what unites and what divides societies.

Precision Medicine is an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle. Autoimmune diseases are those in which the body’s natural defense system loses discriminating power between its own cells and foreign cells, causing the body to mistakenly attack healthy tissues. These conditions are very heterogeneous in their presentation and therefore difficult to diagnose and treat. Achieving precision medicine in autoimmune diseases has been challenging due to the complex etiologies of these conditions, involving an interplay between genetic, epigenetic, and environmental factors. However, recent technological and computational advances in molecular profiling have helped identify patient subtypes and molecular pathways which can be used to improve diagnostics and therapeutics. This review discusses the current understanding of the disease mechanisms, heterogeneity, and pathogenic autoantigens in autoimmune diseases gained from genomic and transcriptomic studies and highlights how these findings can be applied to better understand disease heterogeneity in the context of disease diagnostics and therapeutics.

Estimates suggest as much as 17% of the US workforce may be neuroatypical, a term used to describe individuals whose neurological functioning is at the tail ends of the distribution of naturally occurring variation. Although the neuroatypical population has a history of under- and unemployment, their inclusion in the modern workplace (i.e., promotion of neurodiversity within organizations) is gaining recognition by scholars and organizations as an important dimension of organizational diversity. Despite this burgeoning interest in examining neuroatypicality in the context of organizational diversity, surprisingly little research has been conducted that bridges these two research areas. The literature that does exist is scattered across several different academic disciplines, largely outside of industrial-organizational psychology, and rarely examines the employment of neuroatypical workers explicitly from a diversity perspective. In this article we argue that as the nature of work evolves and jobs continue to become more specialized, neurodiversity will become an increasingly relevant dimension of organizational diversity and is likely to play a key role both in terms of individual employees’ well-being and performance outcomes, as well as organizational success.

The United Nations (UN) established an umbrella of organizations to manage distinct clusters of humanitarian aid. The World Health Organization (WHO) oversees the health cluster, giving it responsibility for global, national, and local medical responses to natural disasters. However, this centralized structure insufficiently engages local players, impeding robust local implementation. The Gorkha earthquake struck Nepal on April 25, 2015, becoming Nepal’s most severe natural disaster since the 1934 Nepal-Bihar earthquake. In coordinated response, 2 organizations, Empower Nepali Girls and International Neurosurgical Children’s Association, used a hybrid approach integrating continuous communication with local recipients. Each organization mobilized its principal resource strengths—material medical supplies or human capital—thereby efficiently deploying resources to maximize the impact of the medical response. In addition to efficient resource use, this approach facilitates dynamic medical responses from highly mobile organizations. Importantly, in addition to future earthquakes in Nepal, this medical response strategy is easily scalable to other natural disaster contexts and other medical relief organizations. Preemptively identifying partner organizations with complementary strengths, continuous engagement with recipient populations, and creating disaster- and region-specific response teams may represent viable variations of the WHO cluster model with greater efficacy in local implementation of treatment in acute disaster scenarios.

Field studies were conducted to assess the efficacy of physical weed management of Palmer amaranth management in cucumber, peanut, and sweetpotato. Treatments were arranged in a 3 × 4 factorial in which the first factor included a treatment method of electrical, mechanical, or hand-roguing Palmer amaranth control and the second factor consisted of treatments applied when Palmer amaranth was approximately 0.3, 0.6, 0.9, or 1.2 m above the crop canopy. Four wk after treatment (WAT), the electrical applications controlled Palmer amaranth at least 27 percentage points more than the mechanical applications when applied at the 0.3- and 0.6-m timings. At the 0.9- and 1.2-m application timings 4 WAT, electrical and mechanical applications controlled Palmer amaranth by at most 87%. Though hand removal generally resulted in the greatest peanut pod count and total sweetpotato yield, mechanical and electrical control resulted in similar yield to the hand-rogued plots, depending on the treatment timing. With additional research to provide insight into the optimal applications, there is potential for electrical control and mechanical control to be used as alternatives to hand removal. Additional studies were conducted to determine the effects of electrical treatments on Palmer amaranth seed production and viability. Treatments consisted of electricity applied to Palmer amaranth at first visible inflorescence, 2 wk after first visible inflorescence (WAI) or 4 WAI. Treatments at varying reproductive maturities did not reduce the seed production immediately after treatment. However, after treatment, plants primarily died and ceased maturation, reducing seed production assessed at 4 WAI by 93% and 70% when treated at 0 and 2 WAI, respectively. Treatments did not have a negative effect on germination or seedling length.

Obesity is a major burden on the health system in England and the rest of the UK. Obesity prevalence is high in adults and children and most of the UK population are consuming more energy than required, and not meeting other dietary recommendations, including those for saturated fat, free sugars, fibre, oily fish and fruit and vegetables. Over the past 5 years, a number of cross-government policies, both promoting voluntary action and legislative, have been put in place to tackle diet-related health and obesity. The food environment is complex with many influencing factors, some of which act through individual automatic choices. Other factors such as accessibility, advertising, promotion and nudging drive increased food and drink purchases. With continual changes in the food environment favouring fast-food outlets and meal delivery companies alongside the adverse impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on diets and physical activity levels, further governmental action is likely needed to deliver sustained improvements to diet and health.

Sleep hygiene recommendations discourage eating before bedtime; however, the impact of mealtime on sleep has been inconsistent. We examined gender-stratified associations between eating or drinking <1, <2 and <3 h before bedtime, sleep duration and wake after sleep onset (WASO >30 min). This study utilised 2003–2018 data from the American Time Use Survey, a nationally representative sample of USA residents aged ≥15 years. Participants recorded weekday/weekend activities during a 24-h period. Age-specific sleep duration and WASO were estimated categorically and continuously. Eating or drinking were identified from all activities recorded <1, <2 and <3 h before bedtime. Mean ± se sleep duration was 8·0 ± 0·006 h, and 6% of participants ate or drank <1 h prior to weekdays bedtime. Overall, eating or drinking <1 h prior to bedtime was associated with longer weekdays sleep duration. Women and men who ate or drank <1 h before bedtime, v. those who did not, had 35 min (95% CI (30,39)) and 25 min (95 % CI (21,29)) longer sleep duration, respectively, as well as increased odds of WASO; women (OR=2·03, 95% CI (1·66,2·49)) and men (OR=2·64, 95% CI (2·08,3·36)). As the interval of eating or drinking prior to bedtime expanded, odds of short and long sleep durations and WASO decreased. This population-based data linked eating or drinking <1 h before bedtime to longer sleep duration, but increased WASO. Eating or drinking further from bedtime lowers the odds of short and long sleep duration and WASO. Causal pathways are difficult to discern, though inefficient sleep after late-night eating could increase WASO and trigger compensatory increases in sleep duration.

Laboratory and greenhouse studies were conducted to evaluate the effects of chemical treatments applied to Palmer amaranth seeds or gynoecious plants that retain seeds to determine seed germination and quality. Treatments applied to physiologically mature Palmer amaranth seed included acifluorfen, dicamba, ethephon, flumioxazin, fomesafen, halosulfuron, linuron, metribuzin, oryzalin, pendimethalin, pyroxasulfone, S-metolachlor, saflufenacil, trifluralin, and 2,4-D plus crop oil concentrate applied at 1× and 2× the suggested use rates from the manufacturer. Germination was reduced by 20% when 2,4-D was used, 15% when dicamba was used, and 13% when halosulfuron and pyroxasulfone were used. Use of dicamba, ethephon, halosulfuron, oryzalin, trifluralin, and 2,4-D resulted in decreased seedling length by an average of at least 50%. Due to the observed effect of dicamba, ethephon, halosulfuron, oryzalin, trifluralin, and 2,4-D, these treatments were applied to gynoecious Palmer amaranth inflorescence at the 2× registered application rates to evaluate their effects on progeny seed. Dicamba use resulted in a 24% decrease in seed germination, whereas all other treatment results were similar to those of the control. Crush tests showed that seed viability was greater than 95%, thus dicamba did not have a strong effect on seed viability. No treatments applied to Palmer amaranth inflorescence affected average seedling length; therefore, chemical treatments did not affect the quality of seeds that germinated.