The scope of unconscious processing has long been, and still remains, a hotly debated issue. This is driven in part by the current diversity of methods to manipulate and measure perceptual consciousness. Here, we provide ten recommendations and nine outstanding issues about designing experimental paradigms, analyzing data, and reporting the results of studies on unconscious processing. These were formed through dialogue among a group of researchers representing a range of theoretical backgrounds. We acknowledge that some of these recommendations naturally do not align with some existing approaches and are likely to change following theoretical and methodological development. Nevertheless, we hold that at this stage of the field they are instrumental in evoking a much-needed discussion about the norms of studying unconscious processes and helping researchers make more informed decisions when designing experiments. In the long run, we aim for this paper and future discussions around the outstanding issues to lead to a more convergent corpus of knowledge about the extent – and limits – of unconscious processing.

Exotic stereotypes have long been a feature of reporting on Japan and this year has been no exception. In October this year, the British Observer newspaper carried a long article on why young Japanese people have stopped having sex. The story was read millions of times and triggered criticism and rebuttals from, among others, Bloomberg columnist William Pesek, who said in as much as the sex drought existed, it was driven by economic, not cultural factors.

This past summer, I was delighted to discover a new “ethnic detective” character named Masuo “Mas” Arai, an elderly Japanese American gardener whose credentials include a green thumb and a nose for sniffing out criminals. The creation of Los Angeles-based journalist and author Naomi Hirahara, Arai made his literary debut in 2004 in “Summer of the BIG BACHI.” A year later he was assisting the NYPD in “Gasa-Gasa Girl.” This year, he's back cruising the L.A. freeways in his battered pickup truck in “Snakeskin Shamisen,” where a traditional Okinawan musical instrument left at the scene of the crime led him to the killer.

On January 27, at a gathering of Liberal Democratic Party supporters in Matsue City, Minister of Health, Labour and Welfare Yanagisawa Hakuo made his now-famous remark that “women are child-bearing machines,” and immediate plunged himself into water considerably hotter than any of the local onsen.

We measured brain activity using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigm and conducted a whole-brain analysis while healthy adult Democrats and Republicans made non-hypothetical food choices. While the food purchase decisions were not significantly different, we found that brain activation during decision-making differs according to the participant’s party affiliation. Models of partisanship based on left insula, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, precuneus, superior frontal gyrus, or premotor/supplementary motor area activations achieve better than expected accuracy. Understanding the differential function of neural systems that lead to indistinguishable choices may provide leverage in explaining the broader mechanisms of partisanship.

This article surveys the highlights of Japanese political assassination from 1909 to 2022 through the commemoration of the victims and photographs of the major sites in Tokyo.

In 1936, after the Berlin Olympics concluded, Tokyo won the right to host the 1940 Olympics. The sequence of events that led to the 1940 games' forfeiture can be said to have begun on July 7, 1937, when Japanese and Chinese troops clashed at the Marco Polo Bridge southwest of Beijing. The IOC's initial reaction was to transfer the 1940 games to Helsinki; but with Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939, the ‘missing Olympics’ were cancelled for good.

The very name of Bihar, a district in the eastern part of India, evokes images of anarchy, banditry, and disarray. Already traversed by distinct cultural zones - Bhojpuri, Mithila, Magadha, and the tribal zone of Jharkhand - Bihari society is characterized by bloody clan conflict over territorial rights. The doggedness with which the region's protagonists form militias is a perpetual source of front-page news. Pitted against the Brahmans and Bhumihar Rajputs, the large landowners, are the herding and soldier castes such as the livestock-herding Yadavas, the farming Kurmis, and the former saltpeter miners, the Noniyas, whose economic, social, and political growth has given them real power. And although Magadha's rich Buddhist past attracts pilgrims and tourists, and Mithila's beautiful painted murals and villages draw art connoisseurs, Bihar ranks as one of the least safe regions of India. The rate of banditry and other crime reaches surprising levels.

Archaeological narratives have traditionally associated the rise of social and political ‘complexity’ with the emergence of agricultural societies. However, this framework neglects the innovations of the hunter-gatherer populations occupying the Siberian taiga 8000 years ago, including the construction of some of the oldest-known fortified sites in the world. Here, the authors present results from the fortified site of Amnya in western Siberia, reporting new radiocarbon dates as the basis for a re-evaluation of the chronology and settlement organisation. Assessed within the context of the changing social and environmental landscape of the taiga, Amnya and similar fortified sites can be understood as one facet of a broader adaptive strategy.

This article examines Leonard Freed's 1980 Police Work, a photobook that documents the activities of the New York City Police Department from 1973 to 1979. It contextualizes the photobook within this liminal decade after the fullness of the civil rights movement and before the rise of austerity politics. The photobook, I argue, produces a visual repertoire of policing that resolves the crisis of legitimacy faced by the NYPD during this decade, remaking the meaning of the police in the public imaginary from an agent of state warfare into an institution of state welfare. Far from simply creating photographs of policing as community care, Police Work engages in a process by which police violence is visually recoded as police benevolence. The visual politics of the family are central to this process by which we are made not to see police brutality, even when it is placed vividly on display. Ultimately, I show how, even as the camera moves between public and private, Police Work produces an ideology of separate spheres in which the expansion of policing can find its rationalization. Ultimately, this article reveals Police Work as a site through which to examine the intimate, yet often disavowed, entanglements between the domestic and the carceral.

Characterizing exact energy density distributions for laser-accelerated ion bunches in a medium is challenging due to very high beam intensities and the electro-magnetic pulse emitted in the laser–plasma interaction. Ion-bunch energy acoustic tracing allows for reconstructing the spatial energy density from the ionoacoustic wave generated upon impact in water. We have extended this approach to tracing ionoacoustic modulations of broad energy distributions by introducing thin foils in the water reservoir to shape the acoustic waves at distinct points along the depth–dose curve. Here, we present first simulation studies of this new detector and reconstruction approach, which provides an online read-out of the deposited energy with depth within the centimeter range behind the ion source of state-of-the-art laser–plasma-based accelerators.

The acoustic pulse emitted from the Bragg peak of a laser-accelerated proton bunch focused into water has recently enabled the reconstruction of the bunch energy distribution. By adding three ultrasonic transducers and implementing a fast data analysis of the filtered raw signals, I-BEAT (Ion-Bunch Energy Acoustic Tracing) 3D now provides the mean bunch energy and absolute lateral bunch position in real-time and for individual bunches. Relative changes in energy spread and lateral bunch size can also be monitored. Our experiments at DRACO with proton bunch energies between 10 and 30 MeV reveal sub-MeV and sub-mm resolution. In addition to this 3D bunch information, the signal strength correlates also with the absolute bunch particle number.

The Centre for Advanced Laser Applications in Garching, Germany, is home to the ATLAS-3000 multi-petawatt laser, dedicated to research on laser particle acceleration and its applications. A control system based on Tango Controls is implemented for both the laser and four experimental areas. The device server approach features high modularity, which, in addition to the hardware control, enables a quick extension of the system and allows for automated data acquisition of the laser parameters and experimental data for each laser shot. In this paper we present an overview of our implementation of the control system, as well as our advances in terms of experimental operation, online supervision and data processing. We also give an outlook on advanced experimental supervision and online data evaluation – where the data can be processed in a pipeline – which is being developed on the basis of this infrastructure.