We present a dataset of 1,119 radiocarbon dates and their contexts for Oaxaca, Mexico, a best effort to include all published dates, plus hundreds of unpublished samples. We illustrate its potential and limitations with five examples: (1) dated stratigraphy in stream cutbanks show how aggradation, downcutting, and stability responded to global climate and human activities; (2) 14C samples from Late/Terminal Formative contexts allow interregional comparisons of temple and palace construction, use, and abandonment; (3) new 14C dates provide better understanding of events during the Late Classic/Epiclassic, a problematic time in the ceramic chronology; (4) individual Classic/Postclassic residential contexts had long durations—several hundred years; and (5) model constraints from other data permit refinement at times of calibration curve deviation, as during AD 1400–1600. We recommend further chronological refinement with best-practice standards, new samples, existing collections, and statistical modeling.

Transcatheter pulmonary valve replacement (TPVR) is often employed for patients who are poor surgical candidates. We present a case of posterior sternal protrusion into a surgically placed right ventricle to pulmonary artery conduit, making the patient a poor candidate for surgical replacement and leading to significant operator distress during ultimately successful TPVR.

Actuaries must model mortality to understand, manage and price risk. Continuous-time methods offer considerable practical benefits to actuaries analysing portfolio mortality experience. This paper discusses six categories of advantage: (i) reflecting the reality of data produced by everyday business practices, (ii) modelling rapid changes in risk, (iii) modelling time- and duration-varying risk, (iv) competing risks, (v) data-quality checking and (vi) management information. Specific examples are given where continuous-time models are more useful in practice than discrete-time models.

We reprise some common statistical models for actuarial mortality analysis using grouped counts. We then discuss the benefits of building mortality models from the most elementary items. This has two facets. First, models are better based on the mortality of individuals, rather than groups. Second, models are better defined in continuous time, rather than over fixed intervals like a year. We show how Poisson-like likelihoods at the “macro” level are built up by product integration of sequences of infinitesimal Bernoulli trials at the “micro” level. Observed data is represented through a stochastic mortality hazard rate, and counting processes provide the natural notation for left-truncated and right-censored actuarial data, individual or age-grouped. Together these explain the “pseudo-Poisson” behaviour of survival model likelihoods.

Current liver-stage Plasmodium falciparum models are complex, expensive and largely inaccessible, hindering research progress. Here, we show that a 3D liver spheroid model grown from immortalized HepG2/C3A cells supports the complete intrahepatocytic lifecycle of P. falciparum. Our results demonstrate sporozoite infection, development of exoerythrocytic forms and breakthrough infection into erythrocytes. The 3D-grown spheroid hepatocytes are structurally and functionally polarized, displaying enhanced albumin and urea production and increased expression of key metabolic enzymes, mimicking in vivo conditions – relative to 2D cultures. This accessible, reproducible model lowers barriers to malaria research, promoting advancements in fundamental biology and translational research.

We present an analysis of the hard X-ray emission from the central region of Abell 3667 using deep NuSTAR observations. While previous studies on the nature of the hard X-ray excess have been controversial, our analysis of the central region suggests that the excess is primarily thermal, best described by a two-temperature (2T) model, with the high-temperature component likely arising from merger-induced heating. This interpretation contrasts with some earlier suggestions of non-thermal emission due to inverse Compton scattering of relativistic electrons. Additionally, we set a lower limit on the magnetic field strength of $\sim 0.2 \, \unicode{x03BC}$G in the central region, consistent with values found in other dynamically active clusters and compatible with those inferred from equipartition and Faraday rotation measurements. Since our study is focused on the central region of the cluster, further high-resolution observations of the outer regions will be critical to fully disentangle the thermal and non-thermal contributions to the X-ray.

Recent changes to US research funding are having far-reaching consequences that imperil the integrity of science and the provision of care to vulnerable populations. Resisting these changes, the BJPsych Portfolio reaffirms its commitment to publishing mental science and advancing psychiatric knowledge that improves the mental health of one and all.

The First Large Absorption Survey in H i (FLASH) is a large-area radio survey for neutral hydrogen in and around galaxies in the intermediate redshift range $0.4\lt z\lt1.0$, using the 21-cm H i absorption line as a probe of cold neutral gas. The survey uses the ASKAP radio telescope and will cover 24,000 deg$^2$ of sky over the next five years. FLASH breaks new ground in two ways – it is the first large H i absorption survey to be carried out without any optical preselection of targets, and we use an automated Bayesian line-finding tool to search through large datasets and assign a statistical significance to potential line detections. Two Pilot Surveys, covering around 3000 deg$^2$ of sky, were carried out in 2019-22 to test and verify the strategy for the full FLASH survey. The processed data products from these Pilot Surveys (spectral-line cubes, continuum images, and catalogues) are public and available online. In this paper, we describe the FLASH spectral-line and continuum data products and discuss the quality of the H i spectra and the completeness of our automated line search. Finally, we present a set of 30 new H i absorption lines that were robustly detected in the Pilot Surveys, almost doubling the number of known H i absorption systems at $0.4\lt z\lt1$. The detected lines span a wide range in H i optical depth, including three lines with a peak optical depth $\tau\gt1$, and appear to be a mixture of intervening and associated systems. Interestingly, around two-thirds of the lines found in this untargeted sample are detected against sources with a peaked-spectrum radio continuum, which are only a minor (5–20%) fraction of the overall radio-source population. The detection rate for H i absorption lines in the Pilot Surveys (0.3 to 0.5 lines per 40 deg$^2$ ASKAP field) is a factor of two below the expected value. One possible reason for this is the presence of a range of spectral-line artefacts in the Pilot Survey data that have now been mitigated and are not expected to recur in the full FLASH survey. A future paper in this series will discuss the host galaxies of the H i absorption systems identified here.

Around 1000 years ago, Madagascar experienced the collapse of populations of large vertebrates that ultimately resulted in many species going extinct. The factors that led to this collapse appear to have differed regionally, but in some ways, key processes were similar across the island. This review evaluates four hypotheses that have been proposed to explain the loss of large vertebrates on Madagascar: Overkill, aridification, synergy, and subsistence shift. We explore regional differences in the paths to extinction and the significance of a prolonged extinction window across the island. The data suggest that people who arrived early and depended on hunting, fishing, and foraging had little effect on Madagascar’s large endemic vertebrates. Megafaunal decline was triggered initially by aridification in the driest bioclimatic zone, and by the arrival of farmers and herders in the wetter bioclimatic zones. Ultimately, it was the expansion of agropastoralism across both wet and dry regions that drove large endemic vertebrates to extinction everywhere.

Stephen Roach, chief economist for Morgan Stanley, might also be introduced as their chief iconoclast and contrarian. In these latter roles he regularly challenges the optimistic consensus on the basis of facts and analyses that tend to be ignored as the herd embraces a new trend. For example, while numerous analysts confidently hold that asset-based (rather than income-based) consumption can continue to power the US economy, Roach has been raising doubts about this for years. As America's housing bubble slides and leaves a swathe of consumers stuck with exorbitant mortgage payments, their “propensity to consume” is falling and Roach is looking prescient (again). The American housing bubble is only beginning to slide, but this may be one reason that growth in consumption has recently slipped to 1.5% after recording a robust 4% for the past decade.

[The international press has focused attention on the Abe Shinzo administration's high profile China and Korea diplomacy. Little noticed has been the fact that the Japanese economy is slipping back into trouble. One strong signal is found in Japanese press reports from October 21 that the Abe Shinzo people basically kicked Hitotsubashi University Emeritus Professor Ishi Hiromitsu off the Government Tax Commission and replaced him with a supply-side true believer. Ishi's term was up, but according to the Nikkei he wanted re-appointment. Not in the cards, especially after Ishi put out a very public and explosive call for equity and tax increases last year. The new chief of the Commission is to be Osaka University's Honma Masaaki, who's keen on cutting the corporate tax and following the new Abe regime's line of low taxes despite Japan's stratospheric debt, skimpy social investment and mounting needs for elder care.

[Stephen Roach is among the most acute analysts of the risks inherent in the chronic US balance of payments deficit and low savings rates. Here he steps up his warning of the dangers of a meltdown of the global economy by a close examination of the vulnerability of the US and Chinese economies to a slowdown in US consumption related to oil and other factors. Japan nowhere figures in his simple story of forces driving the global economy, the implications for Japan and Asia are no less stark than those for China and the US. Japan Focus.]

After nearly five fat years, the global economy is headed for trouble. This will come as a surprise to policy makers and investors, alike -most of whom were counting on boom times to continue.

At work is yet another post-bubble adjustment in the world's largest economy - this time, the bursting of America's massive property bubble. The subprime fiasco is the tip of a much larger iceberg - an asset-dependent American consumer who has gone on the biggest spending binge in the modern history of the global economy. Seven years ago, the bursting of the dot-com bubble triggered a collapse in business capital spending that took the US and global economy into a mild recession. This time, post-bubble adjustments seem likely to hit US consumption, which at 72% of GDP, is more than five times the share the capital spending sector was seven years ago. This is a much bigger problem - one that could have grave consequences for the US and the rest of the world.

[Stephen Roach, chief economist of Morgan Stanley, has written extensively on the “global labor arbitrage” and its increasing impact on politics and economics across the developed and developing worlds. The arbitrage is the result of two increasingly salient facts. First, a rapidly growing supply of skilled service-sector and technological workers is available, at low cost, in the emerging economies, most notably in China and India. And second, the internet and other information technologies are constantly reducing the transaction costs of employing these workers for firms headquartered in Europe and North America. The consequent spread of outsourcing in the service and technological innovation sectors of the developed economies is a hitherto unforeseen and destabilizing new feature of globalization.

Until March of 2007, Stephen Roach was the chief economist for Morgan Stanley and the analyst to read on the Morgan Stanley Global Economic Forum page. But his repeated warnings of a bubble economy about to burst went unappreciated by his paymasters and - rumor has it - many Morgan Stanley investors. Yet even as they moved Roach to the Morgan Stanley Asia desk, far away from his forum, the housing bubble he warned of was already showing strong evidence of impending collapse. Late last summer, of course, the subprime market in the financial sector slipped suddenly into meltdown mode, leaving not only homeowners in the lurch, but striking deep into the profits of the likes of Citibank. Now it seems that not only the US economy but others, too, are sliding into something truly ominous. So inside the year since Roach was silenced, we have moved from bubble-era euphoria to the growing possibilities of a major recession, and some believe even a 1930s style collapse. So Roach is clearly someone worth listening to, in this instance comparing the US with Japan's 1990s implosion.

At a time when the possibilities of a new and more contentious U.S.-China relationship is under discussion by the Trump administration, this article cautions that economic codependency should caution against aggressive moves that could jeopardize core American economic and financial interests and increase tensions in the Pacific. In assessing the deep two-way relationship, the article notes that China as well as the United States has powerful resources to bring to bear on their relationship including curbing US exports to China and ceasing to prop up the US deficit economy through the massive purchase of US treasury bonds.

In the midst of an ever-escalating tariff war, I do not share the view that Sino-American tensions are all about trade imbalances. The real battle is a strategic clash over innovation and technology — the Holy Grail of any nation's prosperity.