The Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) has surveyed the sky at multiple frequencies as part of the Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey (RACS). The first two RACS observing epochs, at 887.5 (RACS-low) and 1 367.5 (RACS-mid) MHz, have been released (McConnell, et al. 2020, PASA, 37, e048; Duchesne, et al. 2023, PASA, 40, e034). A catalogue of radio sources from RACS-low has also been released, covering the sky south of declination $+30^{\circ}$ (Hale, et al., 2021, PASA, 38, e058). With this paper, we describe and release the first set of catalogues from RACS-mid, covering the sky below declination $+49^{\circ}$. The catalogues are created in a similar manner to the RACS-low catalogue, and we discuss this process and highlight additional changes. The general purpose primary catalogue covering 36 200 deg$^2$ features a variable angular resolution to maximise sensitivity and sky coverage across the catalogued area, with a median angular resolution of $11.2^{\prime\prime} \times 9.3^{\prime\prime}$. The primary catalogue comprises 3 105 668 radio sources, including those in the Galactic Plane (2 861 923 excluding Galactic latitudes of $|b|<5^{\circ}$), and we estimate the catalogue to be 95% complete for sources above 2 mJy. With the primary catalogue, we also provide two auxiliary catalogues. The first is a fixed-resolution, 25-arcsec catalogue approximately matching the sky coverage of the RACS-low catalogue. This 25-arcsec catalogue is constructed identically to the primary catalogue, except images are convolved to a less-sensitive 25-arcsec angular resolution. The second auxiliary catalogue is designed for time-domain science and is the concatenation of source lists from the original RACS-mid images with no additional convolution, mosaicking, or de-duplication of source entries to avoid losing time-variable signals. All three RACS-mid catalogues, and all RACS data products, are available through the CSIRO ASKAP Science Data Archive (https://research.csiro.au/casda/).

The Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope has carried out a survey of the entire Southern Sky at 887.5 MHz. The wide area, high angular resolution, and broad bandwidth provided by the low-band Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey (RACS-low) allow the production of a next-generation rotation measure (RM) grid across the entire Southern Sky. Here we introduce this project as Spectral and Polarisation in Cutouts of Extragalactic sources from RACS (SPICE-RACS). In our first data release, we image 30 RACS-low fields in Stokes I, Q, U at 25$^{\prime\prime}$ angular resolution, across 744–1032 MHz with 1 MHz spectral resolution. Using a bespoke, highly parallelised, software pipeline we are able to rapidly process wide-area spectro-polarimetric ASKAP observations. Notably, we use ‘postage stamp’ cutouts to assess the polarisation properties of 105912 radio components detected in total intensity. We find that our Stokes Q and U images have an rms noise of $\sim$80 $\unicode{x03BC}$Jy PSF$^{-1}$, and our correction for instrumental polarisation leakage allows us to characterise components with $\gtrsim$1% polarisation fraction over most of the field of view. We produce a broadband polarised radio component catalogue that contains 5818 RM measurements over an area of $\sim$1300 deg$^{2}$ with an average error in RM of $1.6^{+1.1}_{-1.0}$ rad m$^{-2}$, and an average linear polarisation fraction $3.4^{+3.0}_{-1.6}$ %. We determine this subset of components using the conditions that the polarised signal-to-noise ratio is $>$8, the polarisation fraction is above our estimated polarised leakage, and the Stokes I spectrum has a reliable model. Our catalogue provides an areal density of $4\pm2$ RMs deg$^{-2}$; an increase of $\sim$4 times over the previous state-of-the-art (Taylor, Stil, Sunstrum 2009, ApJ, 702, 1230). Meaning that, having used just 3% of the RACS-low sky area, we have produced the 3rd largest RM catalogue to date. This catalogue has broad applications for studying astrophysical magnetic fields; notably revealing remarkable structure in the Galactic RM sky. We will explore this Galactic structure in a follow-up paper. We will also apply the techniques described here to produce an all-Southern-sky RM catalogue from RACS observations. Finally, we make our catalogue, spectra, images, and processing pipeline publicly available.

In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked serious concern within qualitative research communities and raised fundamental questions about the meaning, value, costs, and intellectual relevance of transparency for qualitative inquiry. In this Perspectives Reflection, we crystallize the central findings of a three-year deliberative process—the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations (QTD)—involving hundreds of political scientists in a broad discussion of these issues. Following an overview of the process and the key insights that emerged, we present summaries of the QTD Working Groups’ final reports. Drawing on a series of public, online conversations that unfolded at www.qualtd.net, the reports unpack transparency’s promise, practicalities, risks, and limitations in relation to different qualitative methodologies, forms of evidence, and research contexts. Taken as a whole, these reports—the full versions of which can be found in the Supplementary Materials—offer practical guidance to scholars designing and implementing qualitative research, and to editors, reviewers, and funders seeking to develop criteria of evaluation that are appropriate—as understood by relevant research communities—to the forms of inquiry being assessed. We dedicate this Reflection to the memory of our coauthor and QTD working group leader Kendra Koivu.1

Conventional wisdom holds that landed elites oppose democratization. Whether they fear rising wages, labor mobility or land redistribution, landowners have historically repressed agricultural workers and sustained autocracy. What might change landowning elites’ preferences for dictatorship and reduce their opposition to democracy? Change requires reducing landowners’ need to maintain political control over labor. This transition occurs when mechanization reduces the demand for agricultural workers, eliminating the need for labor-repressive policies. We explain how the adoption of labor-saving technology in agriculture alters landowners’ political preferences for different regimes, so that the more mechanized the agricultural sector, the more likely is democracy to emerge and survive. Our theoretical argument offers a parsimonious revision to Moore’s thesis that applies to the global transformation of agriculture since his Social Origins first appeared, and results from our cross-national statistical analyses strongly suggest that a positive relationship between agricultural mechanization and democracy does in fact exist.

Covalent functionalisation of collagen has been shown to be a promising strategyto adjust the mechanical properties of highly swollen collagen hydrogels. At thesame time, secondary interactions between for example, amino acidic terminationsor introduced functional groups also play an important role and are oftenchallenging to predict and control. To explore this challenge, 4-vinylbenzylchloride (4VBC) and methacrylic anhydride (MA) were reacted with type Icollagen, and the swelling and rheological properties of resultingphoto-activated hydrogel systems investigated. 4VBC-based hydrogels showedsignificantly increased swelling ratio, in light of the lower degree of collagenfunctionalisation, with respect to methacrylated collagen networks, whilstrheological storage moduli were found to be comparable between the two systems.To explore the role of benzyl groups in the mechanical properties of the4VBC-based collagen system, model chemical force microscopy (CFM) was carriedout in aqueous environment with an aromatised probe against an aromatisedgold-coated glass slide. A marked increase in adhesion force(F: 0.11±0.01 nN) was measured between aromatisedsamples, compared to the adhesion force observed between the non-modified probeand a glass substrate (F: 2.64±1.82 nN). These resultssuggest the formation of additional and reversible π-πstacking interactions in aromatic 4VBC-based networks and explain the remarkablerheological properties of this system in comparison to MA-based hydrogels.

Variation in human cognitive ability is of consequence to a large number of health and social outcomes and is substantially heritable. Genetic linkage, genome-wide association, and copy number variant studies have investigated the contribution of genetic variation to individual differences in normal cognitive ability, but little research has considered the role of rare genetic variants. Exome sequencing studies have already met with success in discovering novel trait-gene associations for other complex traits. Here, we use exome sequencing to investigate the effects of rare variants on general cognitive ability. Unrelated Scottish individuals were selected for high scores on a general component of intelligence (g). The frequency of rare genetic variants (in n = 146) was compared with those from Scottish controls (total n = 486) who scored in the lower to middle range of the g distribution or on a proxy measure of g. Biological pathway analysis highlighted enrichment of the mitochondrial inner membrane component and apical part of cell gene ontology terms. Global burden analysis showed a greater total number of rare variants carried by high g cases versus controls, which is inconsistent with a mutation load hypothesis whereby mutations negatively affect g. The general finding of greater non-synonymous (vs. synonymous) variant effects is in line with evolutionary hypotheses for g. Given that this first sequencing study of high g was small, promising results were found, suggesting that the study of rare variants in larger samples would be worthwhile.

The ultrastructure, histochemistry and X-ray microanalysis of the metal-containing blood cells in three species of oyster, Ostrea edulis, Ostrea angasi and Crassostrea gigas are described. Granular cells containing both copper (up to 400 mM) and zinc (up to 1 M) are present in all three species. In addition,Ostrea edulis has two other granular amoebocyte types which specifically accumulate either copper (400 mM) or zinc (12 M). In all types of amoebocyte, the metals are stored in membrane-limited vesicles. The ultrastructure and histochemical staining characteristics of the vesicular contents vary according to metal composition. Zinc-containing granules appear basophilic after sulphide treatment and display homogeneous electron density; copper/zinc-containing granules are less dense and show varying degrees of crystallinity; copper-containing granules appear crystalline (however, any acidophilic or basophilic reaction is masked by the dark brown precipitate of copper sulphide).

The nature of the dispersion of a clay platelet in a resin composite will play an important role in the process of enhancement of the physical properties of that material. This paper describes studies of ultrasonically and mechanically mixed dispersion of various clays in methyl methacrylate (MMA) and reports the effects of organic surface modification on the rheology, suppression of settlement of filled systems, cure characteristics and final mechanical properties.

A description of the behaviour of the second-order moments of concentration for a variety of source types is derived within the context of the classical phenomenology of isotropic turbulence. The sources considered include instantaneous area, line and point sources and can also be interpreted as relating to plumes from continuous point sources and continuous crosswind line sources in a strong uniform mean flow. A large number of different regimes are identified corresponding to different relative sizes of the many length scales involved. Perhaps the most interesting result is the identification of an ‘Inertial–meander’ subrange when the inertial-subrange eddies contribute to the meandering of the plume.

Objectives: To assess the volume and range of diagnosis in new patients referred to paediatric cardiac outpatient clinics. Methods: Data was collected prospectively, using a proforma completed at all outpatient clinics over a period of three months. Results: There were 526 new referrals, representing an increase of almost one-fifth compared to 5 years ago. Of the referrals, 78 percent came from hospital doctors, and 22 percent from general practitioners, with 221 of those referred being infants. A heart murmur was the most common reason for referral, representing almost two-thirds of cases. In 372 patients referred (71 percent), the heart was discovered to be structurally normal. The proportion of patients with normal hearts referred by general practitioners and hospital doctors were 81 percent, and 68 percent, respectively (p less than 0.004). There was considerable variation in the pattern of referral between doctors working in different hospitals. Conclusion: New referrals to centres dealing with congenital cardiac malformations are increasing alarmingly, with the majority of the children referred having normal hearts. This increase in demand for specialist services has important implications for resources and training.