Recent developments in widefield radio telescopes have enabled searches of a new region of parameter space in the time domain: timescales of seconds to minutes, that have been overlooked in traditional surveys. These searches have revealed a new population of sources: long period transients, which typically show periodic behaviour of minutes to hours. In addition they have detected phenomena ranging from extreme scintillation to stellar radio bursts. However, almost all searches to date have involved archival data that has been processed in offline, batch mode. In this context, we present VASTER, the first short-timescale imaging and transient detection pipeline running in real time on a widefield radio telescope. VASTER has been running on the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) since July 2025, and images most of the ASKAP survey project data on timescales of 15 min. In this paper we describe the VASTER system, and present the results from the first two weeks of operation, including the discovery of two long period transients: ASKAP J165130.3$-$450520 with a period of 6.48 h and ASKAP J170036.6$-$445758 with a period of 4.69 h. The detection of these two sources adds to the small, but growing, population of long period transients, as well as demonstrating the potential of VASTER to explore this region of transient parameter space.

Confucian Constitutionalism can be seen as aiming to translate constitutional democracy into the vernacular cultural language of East Asia: “Confucian democratic constitutionalism invites them to reformulate their constitutional identity and public morality in mediation of Confucian civic culture that is still in play in their social, legal, and political lives but for the institutional expression of which they lack an adequate language” (204). The importance of this task is twofold. The first is that the relatively young democracies of East Asia are frequently characterized by an “incongruence between the formal liberal constitutional order and the Confucian civic culture that continues to inform people’s moral reasoning and judgment” (203–4) and yet, as Jürgen Habermas puts it, constitutional rights must be “enduringly linked with the motivations and convictions of the citizens, for without such a motivational anchoring they could not become the driving force behind the dynamically conceived project of producing an association of free and equal individuals.”1 The second reason this matters is that a significant strand of Confucian political theory—so-called “meritocratic” theories—offers a competing ideal which is not democratic in character. To the extent that these vernacular political theories can get a grip on East Asian societies, they are liable to increase the dissonance between the formal institutional order and the background civic culture in democratic states and weaken the forces of democratization in authoritarian states. Hence Kim aims to provide both the conceptual resources for, and an attractive ideal of, Confucian democratic constitutionalism as well as a critical perspective on Confucian political meritocracy.

Soil porewater chemistry underpins the quantification of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) in enhanced rock weathering (ERW), where alkalinity and dissolved ion measurements are used within monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) frameworks. The reliability of these measurements depends on the extraction method, with many in-field techniques constrained by soil moisture availability. This dependence can limit data continuity, reduce comparability across sites and seasons and introduce uncertainty into CDR-relevant interpretations. Here, we present and evaluate a new soil porewater extraction method, SATuration–Centrifugation (SAT-C), designed to obtain porewater from a defined soil volume independent of moisture conditions. The method combines saturation of intact soil cores using deionized water with centrifugation to recover porewater for chemical analysis. We compare SAT-C with conventional sampling using soils collected from grassland field sites, including sites amended with crushed basalt as part of ERW field trials. Across sites, SAT-C porewater chemistry shows strong agreement with rhizon samples for major ions, and bicarbonate concentrations inferred from charge balance are consistent with measured alkalinity. These initial results show that SAT-C provides a robust and reproducible approach for soil porewater extraction, with the potential to improve sampling reliability across variable conditions and thereby support more reliable carbon accounting in ERW.

This paper considers the implications of COVID for open borders. It notes that while COVID concerns do not directly challenge arguments for open borders, the pandemic has revealed two more general phenomena that are salient for such arguments. The first concerns the increasing unmooring of legal borders from physical spaces and the interaction of surveillance and identification technologies with this process. The second addresses the issue of interdependency and the potentially negative implications of open borders if not underpinned by a global basic structure.