Inclusive global theories of child development require local researchers who spearhead research within their own communities. This means creating pathways for researchers from underrepresented contexts to lead projects, define priorities, and collaborate as equal partners, rather than merely act as data collectors. This capacity-building holds the promise of generating more accurate and equitable developmental science research.

Intercropping cereals and legumes may enhance system productivity by simultaneously producing grain for human consumption and crop residues for livestock feed. This study evaluated the effects of maize (Zea mays) intercropped with cowpea (Vigna unguiculata) or mucuna (Mucuna pruriens) on soil moisture dynamics, grain and forage yields, and household food and feed self-sufficiency under varying rainfall conditions. The experiment was conducted on five farms in Mutoko District, Zimbabwe, during the 2021/22 and 2022/23 growing seasons using a Randomized Complete Block Design with five treatments: sole maize, sole cowpea, sole mucuna, maize–cowpea intercropping, and maize–mucuna intercropping. Soil moisture was measured biweekly to 1.8 m depth. Each season, experimental sites were classified according to seasonal rainfall as dry (<450 mm), average (450–600 mm), or wet seasons (>600 mm).Intercropping performance was influenced by rainfall. Sole mucuna utilized more soil moisture than other cropping systems. In dry and average seasons, sole maize yielded 1,812 kg ha−1 of grain, 103% more than maize intercrops, and met annual household maize requirements. In wet seasons, maize–cowpea intercropping produced higher maize grain yields (3,273 kg ha−1) than sole maize (2,372 kg ha−1), with a land equivalent ratio of 2.18. Mid-season dry spells reduced grain yields across treatments but had limited effects on stover production. During wet seasons, mucuna-based systems generated the highest forage and crude protein yields, sufficient to feed five cattle during the dry season. These findings highlight that maize–legume intercropping can enhance food and feed production during relatively wet seasons

The COVID-19 pandemic overwhelmed New York City’s healthcare infrastructure, prompting rapid adaptations to expand critical care capacity. Montefiore Medical Center’s Hutchinson Metro Center (the Hutch), a standalone ambulatory surgical center (ASC), was converted into an ICU within 5 days to address the surge in COVID-19 cases. This was done by repurposing 16 operating rooms and 60 post-anesthesia care unit beds into 14 ICU and 60 floor beds. A 5-step framework guided the conversion process, including: (1) feasibility of conversion, (2) critical structural logistics, (3) essential supplies and technology, (4) Clinical criteria, and (5) staffing. Key challenges were oxygen supply limitations, staffing shortages, and logistical hurdles such as medication and equipment procurement. This report highlights the potential of ASCs as adaptable overflow facilities during public health crises and provides a blueprint for future pandemic preparedness.

I present a new set of new rules for Crystal Chemistry that greatly increases our understanding of the factors affecting the stereochemistry of mineral and inorganic crystal structures.

The electric field in a crystal is a vector field; bond strengths from cations to anions are positive and bond strengths from anions to cations are negative. The incident bond strengths at all ion sites must equal the formal charges at those sites. Bond strengths along non-degenerate paths between symmetrically equivalent ions in the structure must sum to zero. This leads to rule 1: the a priori bond-strength rule: “A priori bond-strengths may be calculated for all bonds in a structure by constructing a bond-strength table that includes all bond-strengths as unknown variables. The corresponding charge-conservation matrix can be solved for all the unknown bond-strengths”. The resultant bond strengths depend only on the formal charges of the constituent ions and the bond topology of the structure. However, they correlate strongly with bond lengths.

Ion radii derived from experimental bond lengths do not represent the radii of ions in crystals as we cannot objectively divide bond lengths into the radii of the constituent ions. This leads to rule 2, the ion-radius rule: “Ratios of ion radii have no physical meaning whereas sums of ion radii can be used in crystal chemistry (e.g. correlating site occupancies with observed mean bond lengths).”

The characteristic Lewis acidity of a cation is defined as its characteristic bond strength, which is equal to its charge/characteristic-coordination-number. The characteristic Lewis basicity of an anion is defined as the characteristic strength of the bonds formed by the anion. This leads to rule 3, the bond-strength-matching rule: “Stable structures will form where the Lewis acidity of the cation closely matches the Lewis basicity of the anion.” Cation and anion coordination numbers adjust to optimize matching of Lewis acidities and Lewis basicities.

This discussion note reviews responses of the linguistics profession to the grave issues of language endangerment identified a quarter of a century ago in the journal Language by Krauss, Hale, England, Craig, and others (Hale et al. 1992). Two and a half decades of worldwide research not only have given us a much more accurate picture of the number, phylogeny, and typological variety of the world's languages, but they have also seen the development of a wide range of new approaches, conceptual and technological, to the problem of documenting them. We review these approaches and the manifold discoveries they have unearthed about the enormous variety of linguistic structures. The reach of our knowledge has increased by about 15% of the world's languages, especially in terms of digitally archived material, with about 500 languages now reasonably documented thanks to such major programs as DoBeS, ELDP, and DEL. But linguists are still falling behind in the race to document the planet's rapidly dwindling linguistic diversity, with around 35–42% of the world's languages still substantially undocumented, and in certain countries (such as the US) the call by Krauss (1992) for a significant professional realignment toward language documentation has only been heeded in a few institutions. Apart from the need for an intensified documentarist push in the face of accelerating language loss, we argue that existing language documentation efforts need to do much more to focus on crosslinguistically comparable data sets, sociolinguistic context, semantics, and interpretation of text material, and on methods for bridging the ‘transcription bottleneck’, which is creating a huge gap between the amount we can record and the amount in our transcribed corpora.