Commentaries on the target article offer diverse perspectives on integrative experiment design. Our responses engage three themes: (1) Disputes of our characterization of the problem, (2) skepticism toward our proposed solution, and (3) endorsement of the solution, with accompanying discussions of its implementation in existing work and its potential for other domains. Collectively, the commentaries enhance our confidence in the promise and viability of integrative experiment design, while highlighting important considerations about how it is used.

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.

Like Euripides’ play, Iphigenia at Aulis, the Shorter-spalding opera is open-ended and unresolved—partly because, again like the Euripidean version, it is multi-authored and somewhat incomplete. Euripides’ play, in the form(s) in which we possess it, presents at least three different endings, none of which is likely to come from Euripides’ own pen; other authors certainly contributed to various sections of the final scene. Euripides himself also had a musical collaborator, Cephisophon, who presumably continued to work on finishing and rehearsing the play after Euripides himself died, up to its first production. The Shorter-spalding opera, …(Iphigenia), likewise is the result of collaboration—often at a distance, and over several years—between musicians, writers, and designers (as Morales describes in her Introduction to this issue). At least six different authors altogether are identified in the program notes as contributing to the libretto, including the three poets whose lyrics were sung in Act II: Ganavya Doraiswamy, Joy Harjo, and Safiya Sinclair, respectively South Asian, Native American, and Jamaican. As for the opera's ending—the most notoriously uncertain aspect of this myth ever since archaic Greek times—esperanza spalding states in her notes on the opera that the process of creating an ending has been one of constant adjustment, wholesale rewriting, and improvisation, and that even through the rehearsals the singers themselves onstage, as well as the instrumental jazz trio, were still trying out new things, right up to and including perhaps the performance that we saw. (I attended the Berkeley performance on February 12, 2022.) The opera is, we may say, unfinished.

Unsustainable hunting threatens biodiversity in the tropics through the removal of key seed-dispersing frugivorous primates. Traditionally, hunting in the Amazon Basin was managed through hunter territoriality, with the threat of social sanctions for overexploitation. We examined hunter territoriality and differential prey selection as alternative hypotheses to central-place foraging. Territoriality occurred beyond common hunting grounds, which were on major rivers and immediately surrounding the community. Hunters displayed selectivity in prey choice, with 50% of hunters not hunting primates. The combination of hunter territoriality and differential prey selection means that over 22% of the hunted area of the Sucusari river basin could be considered primate refuge. Of the remaining hunted area, 16% was hunted relatively little by primate hunters. We suggest that the combination of territoriality and selection against primates creates refuges, mitigating the effects of sustained hunting pressure and contributing to the conservation of these species.

The dominant paradigm of experiments in the social and behavioral sciences views an experiment as a test of a theory, where the theory is assumed to generalize beyond the experiment's specific conditions. According to this view, which Alan Newell once characterized as “playing twenty questions with nature,” theory is advanced one experiment at a time, and the integration of disparate findings is assumed to happen via the scientific publishing process. In this article, we argue that the process of integration is at best inefficient, and at worst it does not, in fact, occur. We further show that the challenge of integration cannot be adequately addressed by recently proposed reforms that focus on the reliability and replicability of individual findings, nor simply by conducting more or larger experiments. Rather, the problem arises from the imprecise nature of social and behavioral theories and, consequently, a lack of commensurability across experiments conducted under different conditions. Therefore, researchers must fundamentally rethink how they design experiments and how the experiments relate to theory. We specifically describe an alternative framework, integrative experiment design, which intrinsically promotes commensurability and continuous integration of knowledge. In this paradigm, researchers explicitly map the design space of possible experiments associated with a given research question, embracing many potentially relevant theories rather than focusing on just one. Researchers then iteratively generate theories and test them with experiments explicitly sampled from the design space, allowing results to be integrated across experiments. Given recent methodological and technological developments, we conclude that this approach is feasible and would generate more-reliable, more-cumulative empirical and theoretical knowledge than the current paradigm – and with far greater efficiency.

Dubourg and Baumard posited that preferences for exploration are the key to the popularity in imaginary worlds. This commentary argues that other forms of exploration may also account for the success and appeal of specific types of imaginary worlds, namely self-exploration within interactive imaginary worlds such as videogames.

Monitoring of cryptic or threatened species poses challenges for population assessment and conservation, as imperfect detection gives rise to misleading inferences about population status. We used a dynamic occupancy model that explicitly accounted for occupancy, colonization, local extinction and detectability to assess the status of the endemic Critically Endangered Bermuda skink Plestiodon longirostris. During 2015–2017, skinks were detected at 13 of 40 surveyed sites in Bermuda, two of which were new records. Ten observation-level and site-specific covariates were used to explore drivers of occupancy, colonization, extinction and detectability. Sites occupied by skinks tended to be islands with rocky coastal habitat and prickly pear cacti; the same variables were also associated with reduced risk of local extinction. The presence of seabirds appeared to encourage colonization, whereas the presence of cats had the opposite effect. The probability of detection was p = 0.45, and on average, five surveys were needed to reliably detect the presence of skinks with 95% certainty. However, skinks were unlikely to be detected on sites with cat and rat predators. Dynamic occupancy models can be used to elucidate drivers of occupancy dynamics, which in turn can inform species conservation management. The survey effort needed to determine population changes over time can be derived from estimates of detectability.

Through drinking water, humans are commonly exposed to atrazine, a herbicide that acts as an endocrine and metabolic disruptor. It interferes with steroidogenesis, including promoting oestrogen production and altering cell metabolism. However, its precise impact on uterine development remains unknown. This study aimed to determine the effect of prolonged atrazine exposure on the uterus. Pregnant mice (n = 5/group) received 5 mg/kg body weight/day atrazine or DMSO in drinking water from gestational day 9.5 until weaning. Offspring continued to be exposed until 3 or 6 months of age (n = 5–9/group), when uteri were collected for morphological and molecular analyses and steroid quantification. Endometrial hyperplasia and leiomyoma were evident in the uteri of atrazine-exposed mice. Uterine oestrogen concentration, oestrogen receptor expression, and localisation were similar between groups, at both ages (P > 0.1). The expression and localisation of key epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) genes and proteins, critical for tumourigenesis, remained unchanged between treatments, at both ages (P > 0.1). Hence, oestrogen-mediated changes to established EMT markers do not appear to underlie abnormal uterine morphology evident in atrazine exposure mice. This is the first report of abnormal uterine morphology following prolonged atrazine exposure starting in utero, it is likely that the abnormalities identified would negatively affect female fertility, although mechanisms remain unknown and require further study.

This commentary explores how emotion fits in the dual-systems model of temporal cognition proposed by Hoerl & McCormack. The updating system would be affected by emotion via the attentional/arousal effect according to the attentional gate model. The reasoning system would be disrupted by emotion, especially for traumatic events. Time discrepancies described in the dual-systems model are also explained.