This editorial considers the value and nature of academic psychiatry by asking what defines the specialty and psychiatrists as academics. We frame academic psychiatry as a way of thinking that benefits clinical services and discuss how to inspire the next generation of academics.

During the past 30 yr an impasse has developed in the discovery and commercialization of synthetic herbicides with new molecular targets and novel chemistries. Similarly, there has been little success with bioherbicides, both microbial and chemical. These bioherbicides are needed to combat fast-growing herbicide resistance and to fulfill the need for more environmentally and toxicologically safe herbicides. In response to this substantial and growing opportunity, numerous start-up companies are utilizing novel approaches to provide new tools for weed management. These diverse new tools broaden the scope of discovery, encompassing advanced computational, bioinformatic, and imaging platforms; plant genome–editing and targeted protein degradation technologies; and machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI)-based strategies. This review contains summaries of the presentations of 10 such companies that took part in a symposium held at the WSSA annual meeting in 2024. Four of the companies are developing microbial bioherbicides or natural product–based herbicides, and the other six are using advanced technologies, such as AI, to accelerate the discovery of herbicides with novel molecular target sites or to develop non-GMO, herbicide-resistant crops.

Björn Heile's 3 × 10 Musical Actions for Three Socially Distanced Performers features frequent changes in musical material, playing style and instrumental combinations. Throughout a series of short sections, the performers play, sing, speak, conduct and move around, following instructions that appear on tablets. This article reflects on audiences’ experiences of the work and on musical actions more generally. We consider musical actions as short, coherent motion chunks and distinguish between several types of action that appear in the piece: gestures (communicative actions, with or without sound), reactions (where a player responds to another) and interactions (where players mutually coordinate). The musicians’ individual and collective actions create a sense of play: on the one hand, they seem free and depart from standard concert conventions; on the other hand, they seem to be following a set of rules, even if these rules are not explained to the audience. As such, we approach the piece via theories of play and relate it to earlier modernist musical games. Ultimately, 3 × 10 Musical Actions emphasises several aspects of musical actions, as social, functional, expressive, playful and embodied.

Natural history museums house numerous previously undescribed species and unknown information hidden in their collections. We describe lower Carboniferous slit-bearing gastropods (order Pleurotomariida, subclass Vetigastropoda; and family Goniasmatidae, subclass Caenogastropoda) from previously unreported gastropod collections made by Jane Longstaff (Jane Donald), one of the pioneering paleontologists of Paleozoic gastropods in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The gastropods were collected from the Lower Limestone Formation (Visean, Brigantian) near Dalry, Ayrshire, Scotland. The collection consists largely of microgastropods, many of which are unusually well-preserved including delicate ornament and protoconchs (larval shells). Three new pleurotomariidan species are described—Biarmeaspira heidelbergerae new species, Neilsonia seussae new species, Tapinotomaria longstaffae new species—in addition to seven species belonging to Borestus Thomas, 1940, Stegocoelia (Stegocoelia) Donald, 1889, Stegocoelia (Hypergonia) Donald, 1892, Donaldospira Batten, 1966, and Platyzona Knight, 1945. The caenogastropod-type protoconch is documented for the first time in Hypergonia, which is therefore placed in Goniasmatidae. The new data confirm that Neilsonia Thomas, 1940 (type genus of Neilsoniinae) belongs to Pleurotomariida and is distinct from the morphologically convergent Peruvispira Chronic, 1949 (Goniasmatidae). The selenizone morphology is identical in Biarmeaspira Mazaev, 2006 and Baylea de Koninck, 1883 during their early ontogeny, and Biarmeaspira develops an angulation on the selenizone (the diagnostic feature) in late ontogeny. This corroborates earlier suggestions that Biarmeaspira evolved from Baylea. Biarmeaspira heidelbergerae n. sp. is the first Carboniferous record of Biarmeaspira, which was previously only known from the Permian. The angulated selenizone evidently evolved several times in Pleurotomariida and the repeated appearance of this character in different groups (e.g., Phymatopleuridae, Eotomariidae, Pleurotomariidae) needs further studies using phylogenetic methods.

UUID: http://zoobank.org/92ae9a99-5774-4ee9-bf5d-9a9319494ef6

PET imaging is increasingly recognized as an important diagnostic tool to investigate patients with cognitive disturbances of possible neurodegenerative origin. PET with 2-[18F]fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose ([18F]FDG), assessing glucose metabolism, provides a measure of neurodegeneration and allows a precise differential diagnosis among the most common neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia or dementia with Lewy bodies. PET tracers specific for the pathological deposits characteristic of different neurodegenerative processes, namely amyloid and tau deposits typical of Alzheimer’s Disease, allow the visualization of these aggregates in vivo. [18F]FDG and amyloid PET imaging have reached a high level of clinical validity and are since 2022 investigations that can be offered to patients in standard clinical care in most of Canada.

This article will briefly review and summarize the current knowledge on these diagnostic tools, their integration into diagnostic algorithms as well as perspectives for future developments.

The Reynolds number dependent flow resistance of heterogeneous rough surfaces is largely unknown at present. The present work provides novel reference data for spanwise-alternating sandpaper strips as one idealised case of a heterogeneous rough surface. Experimental data are presented and analysed in direct comparison with drag measurements of homogeneous sandpaper surfaces and numerical simulations. Based on the homogeneous roughness data, the related challenges and sensitivities for the evaluation of roughness functions from experiments and simulations are discussed. A hydraulic channel height is suggested as an alternative measure for the drag impact of rough surfaces in internal flows. For the investigated heterogeneous roughness, it is found that turbulent flow does not exhibit a fully rough flow behaviour, indicating that the assignment of an equivalent sand grain height as commonly applied for homogeneous roughness is not possible. A prediction of the drag behaviour of rough strips based on an average between rough and smooth drag curves appears promising, but requires further refinement to capture the impact of turbulent secondary flows and spatial transients linking smooth and rough surface parts. While turbulent secondary flow induced by the roughness strips yield significant spanwise variation of the mean velocity profile for the investigated rough strips, we show that the spanwise averaged velocity profiles collapse reasonably well with a smooth or homogeneous rough wall flow. This allows to extract a global roughness function from the spanwise averaged flow field in good agreement with the one deduced from global pressure drop measurements.

Using hydrodynamic simulations and photoionization calculations, we demonstrate that quasar emission line spectra contain information on the driving mechanism of galaxy-scale outflows. Outflows driven by a hot shocked bubble are expected to exhibit LINER-like optical line ratios, while outflows driven by radiation pressure are expected to exhibit Seyfert-like line ratios. Driving by radiation pressure also has a distinct signature in the narrow UV lines, which is detected in an HST-COS spectrum of a nearby quasar hosting a large-scale wind.

This study investigated sex differences in Fe status, and associations between Fe status and endurance and musculoskeletal outcomes, in military training. In total, 2277 British Army trainees (581 women) participated. Fe markers and endurance performance (2·4 km run) were measured at the start (week 1) and end (week 13) of training. Whole-body areal body mineral density (aBMD) and markers of bone metabolism were measured at week 1. Injuries during training were recorded. Training decreased Hb in men and women (mean change (–0·1 (95 % CI –0·2, –0·0) and –0·7 (95 % CI –0·9, –0·6) g/dl, both P < 0·001) but more so in women (P < 0·001). Ferritin decreased in men and women (–27 (95 % CI –28, –23) and –5 (95 % CI –8, –1) µg/l, both P ≤ 0·001) but more so in men (P < 0·001). Soluble transferrin receptor increased in men and women (2·9 (95 % CI 2·3, 3·6) and 3·8 (95 % CI 2·7, 4·9) nmol/l, both P < 0·001), with no difference between sexes (P = 0·872). Erythrocyte distribution width increased in men (0·3 (95 % CI 0·2, 0·4)%, P < 0·001) but not in women (0·1 (95 % CI –0·1, 0·2)%, P = 0·956). Mean corpuscular volume decreased in men (–1·5 (95 % CI –1·8, –1·1) fL, P < 0·001) but not in women (0·4 (95 % CI –0·4, 1·3) fL, P = 0·087). Lower ferritin was associated with slower 2·4 km run time (P = 0·018), sustaining a lower limb overuse injury (P = 0·048), lower aBMD (P = 0·021) and higher beta C-telopeptide cross-links of type 1 collagen and procollagen type 1 N-terminal propeptide (both P < 0·001) controlling for sex. Improving Fe stores before training may protect Hb in women and improve endurance and protect against injury.

Psychological and cultural evolutionary accounts of human sociality propose that beliefs in punitive and monitoring gods that care about moral norms facilitate cooperation. While there is some evidence to suggest that belief in supernatural punishment and monitoring generally induce cooperative behaviour, the effect of a deity's explicitly postulated moral concerns on cooperation remains unclear. Here, we report a pre-registered set of analyses to assess whether perceiving a locally relevant deity as moralistic predicts cooperative play in two permutations of two economic games using data from up to 15 diverse field sites. Across games, results suggest that gods’ moral concerns do not play a direct, cross-culturally reliable role in motivating cooperative behaviour. The study contributes substantially to the current literature by testing a central hypothesis in the evolutionary and cognitive science of religion with a large and culturally diverse dataset using behavioural and ethnographically rich methods.

Previous research has revealed that intuitive confidence is an important predictor of how people choose between an intuitive and non-intuitive alternative when faced with information that opposes the intuitive response. In the current study, we investigated the speed of intuition generation as a predictor of intuitive confidence and participant choice in choice conflict situations. Participants predicted the outcomes of several National Basketball Association games, both with and without reference to a point spread. As hypothesized, the faster participants were to predict the outright winner of a game (i.e., generate an intuition) the more likely they were to predict the favourite against the point spread for that game (i.e., endorse the intuitive response). Overall, our findings are consistent with the notion that the speed of intuition generation acts as a determinant of intuitive confidence and a predictor of choice in situations featuring equally valid intuitive and non-intuitive alternatives.

Previous research has demonstrated a link between illusory pattern perception and various irrational beliefs. On this basis, we hypothesized that participants who displayed greater degrees of illusory pattern perception would also be more likely to rate pseudo-profound bullshit statements as profound. We find support for this prediction across three experiments (N = 627) and four distinct measures of pattern perception. We further demonstrate that this observed relation is restricted to illusory pattern perception, with participants displaying greater endorsement of non-illusory patterns being no more likely to rate pseudo-profound bullshit statements as profound. Additionally, this relation is not a product of a general proclivity to rate all statements as profound and is not accounted for by individual differences in analytic thinking. Overall, we demonstrate that individuals with a tendency to go beyond the available data such that they uncritically endorse patterns where no patterns exist are also more likely to create and endorse false-meaning in meaningless pseudo-profound statements. These findings are discussed in the context of a proposed framework that views individuals’ receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit as, in part, an unfortunate consequence of an otherwise adaptive process: that of pattern perception.

An important open problem is how values are compared to make simple choices. A natural hypothesis is that the brain carries out the computations associated with the value comparisons in a manner consistent with the Drift Diffusion Model (DDM), since this model has been able to account for a large amount of data in other domains. We investigated the ability of four different versions of the DDM to explain the data in a real binary food choice task under conditions of high and low time pressure. We found that a seven-parameter version of the DDM can account for the choice and reaction time data with high-accuracy, in both the high and low time pressure conditions. The changes associated with the introduction of time pressure could be traced to changes in two key model parameters: the barrier height and the noise in the slope of the drift process.

Individuals often assess themselves as being less susceptible to common biases compared to others. This bias blind spot (BBS) is thought to represent a metacognitive error. In this research, we tested three explanations for the effect: The cognitive sophistication hypothesis posits that individuals who display the BBS more strongly are actually less biased than others. The introspection bias hypothesis posits that the BBS occurs because people rely on introspection more when assessing themselves compared to others. The conversational processes hypothesis posits that the effect is largely a consequence of the pragmatic aspects of the experimental situation rather than true metacognitive error. In two experiments (N = 1057) examining 18 social/motivational and cognitive biases, there was strong evidence of the BBS. Among the three hypotheses examined, the conversational processes hypothesis attracted the greatest support, thus raising questions about the extent to which the BBS is a metacognitive effect.

Across four studies participants (N = 818) rated the profoundness of abstract art images accompanied with varying categories of titles, including: pseudo-profound bullshit titles (e.g., The Deaf Echo), mundane titles (e.g., Canvas 8), and no titles. Randomly generated pseudo-profound bullshit titles increased the perceived profoundness of computer-generated abstract art, compared to when no titles were present (Study 1). Mundane titles did not enhance the perception of profoundness, indicating that pseudo-profound bullshit titles specifically (as opposed to titles in general) enhance the perceived profoundness of abstract art (Study 2). Furthermore, these effects generalize to artist-created abstract art (Study 3). Finally, we report a large correlation between profoundness ratings for pseudo-profound bullshit and “International Art English” statements (Study 4), a mode and style of communication commonly employed by artists to discuss their work. This correlation suggests that these two independently developed communicative modes share underlying cognitive mechanisms in their interpretations. We discuss the potential for these results to be integrated into a larger, new theoretical framework of bullshit as a low-cost strategy for gaining advantages in prestige awarding domains.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, public health guidance (e.g., regarding the use ofnon-medical masks) changed over time. Although many revisions were a result ofgains in scientific understanding, we nonetheless hypothesized that makingchanges in guidance salient would negatively affect evaluations of experts andhealth-protective intentions. In Study 1 (N = 300), wedemonstrate that describing COVID-19 guidance in terms of inconsistency (versusconsistency) leads people to perceive scientists and public health authoritiesless favorably (e.g., as less expert). For participants in Canada(n = 190), though not the U.S. (n = 110),making guidance change salient also reduced intentions to download a contacttracing app. In Study 2 (N = 1399), we show that a briefforewarning intervention mitigates detrimental effects of changes in guidance.In the absence of forewarning, emphasizing inconsistency harmed judgments ofpublic health authorities and reduced health-protective intentions, butforewarning eliminated this effect.