Healthy diets are unaffordable for billions of people worldwide, with food prices rising in high-, middle- and low-income nations in recent times. Despite widespread attention to this issue, recent actions taken to inform policy prioritisation and government responses to high food inflation have not been comprehensively synthesised. Our review summarises (i) innovative efforts to monitor national food and healthy diet price, ii) new policy responses adopted by governments to address food inflation and (iii) future research directions to inform new evidence. Evidence synthesis. Global. None. We describe how timely food and beverage pricing data can provide transparency in the food industry and identify key areas for intervention. However, government policies that improve food affordability are often short-lived and lack sustained commitment. Achieving meaningful impact will require long-term, cross-sectoral actions that are led by governments to support food security, healthy diets and resilient sustainable food systems. This will necessitate a better understanding of how the political economy enables (or hinders) policy implementation, including through coherent problem framing, mitigating conflicts of interest in policymaking, working together as coalitions and developing and utilising evidence on the food security and related impacts of food pricing and affordability policies. Diverse actors must be better equipped with robust data platforms and actionable policy solutions that improve the affordability of healthy and sustainable diets, including by lowering food prices and addressing the broader socio-political determinants of food insecurity.

Empathic accuracy (EA) is the ability to accurately understand another person’s thoughts and feelings, which is crucial for social and psychological interactions. Traditionally, EA is assessed by comparing a perceiver’s moment-to-moment ratings of a target’s emotional state with the target’s own self-reported ratings at corresponding time points. However, misalignments between these two sequences are common due to the complexity of emotional interpretation and individual differences in behavioral responses. Conventional methods often ignore or oversimplify these misalignments, for instance by assuming a fixed time lag, which can introduce bias into EA estimates. To address this, we propose a novel alignment approach that captures a wide range of misalignment patterns. Our method leverages the square-root velocity framework to decompose emotional rating trajectories into amplitude and phase components. To ensure realistic alignment, we introduce a regularization constraint that limits temporal shifts to ranges consistent with human perceptual capabilities. This alignment is efficiently implemented using a constrained dynamic programming algorithm. We validate our method through simulations and real-world applications involving video and music datasets, demonstrating its superior performance over traditional techniques.

Bilinguals simultaneously activate both languages during word retrieval. False cognates, words overlapping in form but not meaning across languages, typically trigger crosslinguistic interference relative to non-cognates. Crosslinguistic interference resolution can be impaired in bilinguals with stroke-induced aphasia, yet little is known about the neural dynamics supporting these interference resolution processes. We recorded scalp electroencephalography in 21 age-matched controls and five bilinguals with aphasia participating in a picture-word interference paradigm eliciting crosslinguistic interference and a nonlinguistic spatial Stroop task. Bilinguals with aphasia showed lower performance than age-matched controls and crosslinguistic interference was present across both groups. A medial frontal component peaking around 400 ms post stimulus presentation was present in controls across tasks but was absent in the linguistic task in bilinguals with aphasia. This suggests that while bilinguals typically engage the medial frontal cortex to resolve crosslinguistic interference, this mechanism is disrupted in bilinguals with aphasia.

Qualitative research addresses important healthcare questions, including patients’ experiences with interventions. Qualitative evidence syntheses combine findings from individual studies and are increasingly used to inform health guidelines. However, dissemination bias—selective non-dissemination of studies or findings—may distort the body of evidence. This study examined reasons for the non-dissemination of qualitative studies. We identified conference abstracts reporting qualitative, health-related studies. We invited authors to answer a survey containing quantitative and qualitative questions. We performed descriptive analyses on the quantitative data and inductive thematic analysis on the qualitative data. Most of the 142 respondents were female, established researchers. About a third reported that their study had not been published in full after their conference presentation. The main reasons were time constraints, career changes, and a lack of interest. Few indicated non-publication due to the nature of the study findings. Decisions not to publish were largely made by author teams. Half of the 72% who published their study reported that all findings were included in the publication. This study highlights researchers’ reasons for non-dissemination of qualitative research. One-third of studies presented as conference abstracts remained unpublished, but non-dissemination was rarely linked to the study findings. Further research is needed to understand the systematic non-dissemination of qualitative studies.

Two Xiphinema species, one new and one known, were found from Bushehr province, southern Iran, and are herein described based on morphological and molecular data. These include Xiphinema pedrami sp. nov. and X. basiri, both belonging to the ‘Xiphinema non-americanum group’. The new dagger nematode is characterised by a body length of 3.54–5.00 mm, a lip region separated from the rest of body by a depression, odontostyle 128–148 μm long, 60–89 μm long odontophore, guiding ring at 107–138 μm from anterior end, female tail rounded to dorsally more convex with small bulge and four juvenile stages. Males have one pair of cloacal and three to five ventromedian single supplements. The new species belongs to morphospecies Xiphinema non-americanum group 5, characterised by having two equally developed female genital branches with uterine differentiation in the form of pseudo-Z-organ along with the rhomboid-shaped crystalloid bodies, and a short, rounded tail ending in a peg. The polytomous identification codes of the new species are A4, B2, C5a5b, D6, E56, F4(5), G23, H2, I34, J5a5b, K3, L2. Morphologically, the new species comes close to several known species (namely, X. andalusiense, X. artemisiae, X. baetica, X. hyrcaniense, X. ingens, X. macroacanthum and X. pseudocoxi) belonging to morphospecies group 5. The morphological differences of the new species and the aforementioned species are discussed. The second recovered species, Xiphinema basiri, belongs to the same group and has a pseudo-Z-organ in the shape of globular bodies close to pars dilatata uterus and short, conical, distinctly digitate tail. Integrative diagnosis was completed using molecular data obtained from partial sequences of the D2-D3 region of 28S rDNA, ITS1 rDNA, 18S rDNA, and COI mtDNA genes.

This article explores the notion of colour at the crossroads of humoral medicine and chymistry in late Renaissance Europe. First, it considers the broader context of the traditional analogy between the transmutation of the stone and the formation of humours in medieval alchemy. By highlighting colours as visual markers of material change, alchemical texts drew analogies and metaphors from Galenic medicine to describe the gradual transformation of bodies and their corresponding chromatic change during transmutation. As argued in this paper, such views shifted with the emergence of Paracelsian medicine. This ‘new’ chymical philosophy downplayed the humoral conception of colours in favour of the chymical ‘principles’ and ‘seminal powers’ obtained by distillation. In examining the views of Petrus Severinus, Joseph Du Chesne, and Daniel Sennert, this article aims to appraise their reception of the medical and alchemical tradition on colours, as well as their contribution to a novel yet epistemically ambivalent understanding of colour and sensory properties in the early seventeenth century.