Auctions that require advance production increase seller costs because inventories must be held. This cost does not exist in production-to-demand markets for which production follows trading, and sales exactly match quantities produced. Data from laboratory computerized double auction markets show that advance-production prices are significantly higher and quantities traded are significantly lower than they are in production-to-demand auctions. Price convergence patterns show advance-production sellers moving toward 9% higher prices and 22% greater earnings.

Dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) is a leading cause of heart failure and the most common indication for a heart transplant. Guidelines are regularly based on studies of adults and applied to the young. Children and adolescents diagnosed with DCM face different lifestyle challenges from individuals diagnosed in adulthood that include medical trauma and are influenced by maturity levels and confidence with advocacy to adults.

Using a UK patient-scientist’s perspective, we reviewed the age-specific challenges faced by the young with DCM, evaluated current guidelines and evidence, and identified areas requiring further recommendations and research. We highlight the importance of (i) the transition clinic from paediatric to adult services, (ii) repeated signposting to mental health services, (iii) standardised guidance on physical activity, (iv) caution surrounding alcohol and smoking, (v) the dangers of illegal drugs, and (vi) reproductive options and health.

Further research is needed to address the many uncertainties in these areas with respect to young age, particularly for physical activity, and such guidance would be welcomed by the young with DCM who must come to terms with being different and more limited amongst healthy peers.

A growing body of research has found that talking to young children is positively associated with language outcomes. However, there is tremendous heterogeneity in the design of these studies, which could potentially affect the strength and reliability of this association. The present meta-analysis, comprising 4760 participants across 71 studies, goes beyond prior research by including: 1) more recent studies, 2) non-English-speaking populations, 3) more fine-grained categorization of measures of input, 4) additional moderators, and 5) a multilevel model design allowing us to consider multiple effect sizes per study. We find a moderate association between input and outcomes (R2=0.04-0.07) across four input measures, with some evidence of publication bias. We find no differences in effect size across any of the input measures. Child age and study duration moderated some effects of input. Our findings suggest that language input-outcome associations remain robust but modest across a multitude of contexts and measures.

We study linear convective instability in a mushy layer formed by solidification of a binary alloy, cooled by either an isothermal perfectly conducting boundary or an imperfectly conducting boundary where the surface temperature depends linearly on the surface heat flux. A companion paper (Hitchen & Wells, J. Fluid Mech., 2025, in press) showed how thermal and salinity conditions impact mush structure. We here quantify the impact on convective instability, described by a Rayleigh number characterising the ratio of buoyancy to dissipative mechanisms. Two limits emerge for a perfectly conducting boundary. When the salinity-dependent freezing-point depression is large versus the temperature difference across the mush, convection penetrates throughout the depth of a high-porosity mush. The other limit, which we will call the Stefan limit, has small freezing-point depression and inhibits convection, which localises at onset to a high-porosity boundary layer near the mush–liquid interface. Scaling arguments characterise variation of the critical Rayleigh number and wavenumber based on the potential energy contained in order-one aspect ratio convective cells over the high-porosity regions. The Stefan number characterises the ratio of latent and sensible heats, and has moderate impact on stability via modification of the background temperature and porosity. For imperfectly conducting boundaries, the changing surface temperature causes stability to decrease over time in the limit of large freezing-point depression, but in the Stefan limit combines with the decreasing porosity to yield non-monotonic variation of the critical Rayleigh number. We discuss the implications for convection in growing sea ice.

We model transient mushy-layer growth for a binary alloy solidifying from a cooled boundary, characterising the impact of liquid composition and thermal growth conditions on the mush porosity and growth rate. We consider cooling from a perfectly conducting isothermal boundary, and from an imperfectly conducting boundary governed by a linearised thermal boundary condition. For an isothermal boundary we characterise different growth regimes depending on a concentration ratio, which can also be viewed as characterising the ratio of composition-dependent freezing point depression versus the temperature difference across the mushy layer. Large concentration ratio leads to high porosity throughout the mushy layer and an asymptotically simplified model for growth with an effective thermal diffusivity accounting for latent heat release from internal solidification. Low concentration ratio leads to low porosity throughout most of the mushy layer, except for a high-porosity boundary layer localised near the mush–liquid interface. We identify scalings for the boundary-layer thickness and mush growth rate. An imperfectly conducting boundary leads to an initial lag in the onset of solidification, followed by an adjustment period, before asymptoting to the perfectly conducting state at large time. We develop asymptotic solutions for large concentration ratio and large effective heat capacity, and characterise the mush structure, growth rate and transition times between the regimes. For low concentration ratio the high porosity zone spans the full mush depth at early times, before localising near the mush–liquid interface at later times. Such variation of porosity has important implications for the properties and biological habitability of mushy sea ice.

Psychosocial rehabilitation and psychosocial disability research have been a longstanding topic in healthcare, demanding continuous exploration and analysis to enhance patient and clinical outcomes. As the prevalence of psychosocial disability research continues to attract scholarly attention, many scientific articles are being published in the literature. These publications offer profound insights into diagnostics, preventative measures, treatment strategies, and epidemiological factors. Computational text mining as a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI) can make a big difference in accurately analyzing the current extensive collection of scientific articles on time, assisting individual scientists in understanding psychosocial disabilities better, and improving how we care for people with these challenges. Leveraging the vast repository of scientific literature available on PubMed, this study employs advanced text mining strategies, including word embeddings and large language models (LLMs) to extract valuable insights, automatically catalyzing research in mental health. It aims to significantly enhance the scientific community’s knowledge by creating an extensive textual dataset and advanced computational text mining strategies to explore current trends in psychosocial rehabilitation and psychosocial disability research.

Herbicides have been placed in global Herbicide Resistance Action Committee (HRAC) herbicide groups based on their sites of action (e.g., acetolactate synthase–inhibiting herbicides are grouped in HRAC Group 2). A major driving force for this classification system is that growers have been encouraged to rotate or mix herbicides from different HRAC groups to delay the evolution of herbicide-resistant weeds, because in theory, all active ingredients within a herbicide group physiologically affect weeds similarly. Although herbicide resistance in weeds has been studied for decades, recent research on the biochemical and molecular basis for resistance has demonstrated that patterns of cross-resistance are usually quite complicated and much more complex than merely stating, for example, a certain weed population is Group 2-resistant. The objective of this review article is to highlight and describe the intricacies associated with the magnitude of herbicide resistance and cross-resistance patterns that have resulted from myriad target-site and non–target site resistance mechanisms in weeds, as well as environmental and application timing influences. Our hope is this review will provide opportunities for students, growers, agronomists, ag retailers, regulatory personnel, and research scientists to better understand and realize that herbicide resistance in weeds is far more complicated than previously considered when based solely on HRAC groups. Furthermore, a comprehensive understanding of cross-resistance patterns among weed species and populations may assist in managing herbicide-resistant biotypes in the short term by providing growers with previously unconsidered effective control options. This knowledge may also inform agrochemical company efforts aimed at developing new resistance-breaking chemistries and herbicide mixtures. However, in the long term, nonchemical management strategies, including cultural, mechanical, and biological weed management tactics, must also be implemented to prevent or delay increasingly problematic issues with weed resistance to current and future herbicides.

According to International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) guidelines, all species must be assessed against all criteria during the Red Listing process. For organismal groups that are diverse and understudied, assessors face considerable challenges in assembling evidence due to difficulty in applying definitions of key terms used in the guidelines. Challenges also arise because of uncertainty in population sizes (Criteria A, C, D) and distributions (Criteria A2/3/4c, B). Lichens, which are often small, difficult to identify, or overlooked during biodiversity inventories, are one such group for which specific difficulties arise in applying Red List criteria. Here, we offer approaches and examples that address challenges in completing Red List assessments for lichens in a rapidly changing arena of data availability and analysis strategies. While assessors still contend with far from perfect information about individual species, we propose practical solutions for completing robust assessments given the currently available knowledge of individual lichen life-histories.

Hedonic analysis of Wisconsin Beef Improvement Association Bull Sale and Development Program data revealed buyer preferences for calving ease, growth, production weight, and carcass merit traits. Attributes like calving ease direct Expected Progeny Differences (EPD), average daily gain, birth to yearling gain EPD, and rib-eye area consistently ranked higher and significantly influenced the bull’s sale price. Further analysis using a 2-Class Finite Mixture Model indicated distinct groups of buyers in the region who prioritized measured bull attributes and others who did not, confirming heterogeneity in buyer preferences.

The problem of leaders and followers is a famous one in intellectual history. Marx once remarked wryly that he was not a Marxist. Dostoevski and Kierkegaard, in mordant moments, saw Christians severed from Jesus. What was the relation between Confucius (551-479 B.C.), an ineffective political adviser in a disintegrating feudal society, and the enormously influential Confucianists in the later highly organized bureaucratic imperial regimes?

Intonation matters, in English as well as in Chinese. We may describe an item in the human record as historically (really) significant, or as (merely) historically significant. The distinction is between an empirical judgment of fruitfulness in time and a normative judgment of aridity in the here and now.

Infections cause substantial morbidity and mortality among patients receiving care in outpatient hemodialysis facilities. We describe comprehensive infection prevention assessments by US public health departments using standardized interview and observation tools. Results demonstrated how facility layouts can undermine infection prevention and that clinical practices often fall short of policies.

Animal models of retinal degeneration are critical for understanding disease and testing potential therapies. Inducing degeneration commonly involves the administration of chemicals that kill photoreceptors by disrupting metabolic pathways, signaling pathways, or protein synthesis. While chemically induced degeneration has been demonstrated in a variety of animals (mice, rats, rabbits, felines, 13-lined ground squirrels (13-LGS), pigs, chicks), few studies have used noninvasive high-resolution retinal imaging to monitor the in vivo cellular effects. Here, we used longitudinal scanning light ophthalmoscopy (SLO), optical coherence tomography, and adaptive optics SLO imaging in the euthermic, cone-dominant 13-LGS (46 animals, 52 eyes) to examine retinal structure following intravitreal injections of chemicals, which were previously shown to induce photoreceptor degeneration, throughout the active season of 2019 and 2020. We found that iodoacetic acid induced severe pan-retinal damage in all but one eye, which received the lowest concentration. While sodium nitroprusside successfully induced degeneration of the outer retinal layers, the results were variable, and damage was also observed in 50% of contralateral control eyes. Adenosine triphosphate and tunicamycin induced outer retinal specific damage with varying results, while eyes injected with thapsigargin did not show signs of degeneration. Given the variability of damage we observed, follow-up studies examining the possible physiological origins of this variability are critical. These additional studies should further advance the utility of chemically induced photoreceptor degeneration models in the cone-dominant 13-LGS.

With the efflorescence of palaeoscientific approaches to the past, historians have been confronted with a wealth of new evidence on both human and natural phenomena, from human disease and migration to landscape change and climate. These new data require a rewriting of our narratives of the past, questioning what constitutes an authoritative historical source and who is entitled to recount history to contemporary societies. Humanities-based historical inquiry must embrace this new evidence, but to do so historians need to engage with it critically, just as they do with textual and material sources. This article highlights the most vital methodological issues, ranging from the spatiotemporal scales and heterogeneity of the new evidence to the new roles attributed to quantitative methods and the place of scientific data in narrative construction. It considers areas of study where the palaeosciences have “intruded” into fields and subjects previously reserved for historians, especially socioeconomic, climate, and environmental history. The authors argue that active engagement with new approaches is urgently needed if historians want to contribute to our evolving understanding of the challenges of the Anthropocene.