In January 1939, Sir Hubert Wilkins became the first Australian to set foot on several islands and the mainland along the Ingrid Christensen Coast, Antarctica, leaving records reaffirming Australia’s claim to the area at three landing sites. Prior to 2022, only the third of these sites had been identified. Wilkins had indicated that the first of the landings, that of 8 January 1939, was in the Rauer Islands and the second, that of 9 January 1939, at the western end of Vestfold Hills. We prove that these attributions are incorrect. An integrated analysis of all reports on the expedition over the period 3–11 January 1939 and the contemporaneous imagery and film footage, along with modern photographs, establishes that the 8 January 1939 landing was on Skipsholmen, the northernmost island of the Svenner Group, and that Wilkins landed at Macey Peninsula on 9 January 1939. These two important heritage sites should now be visited to locate and record the relics left by Wilkins. This research raises the question of whether Wilkins’ landings and sovereignty actions in 1939 are of greater significance to Australia’s Territorial claim to the area than Mawson’s questionable sighting and naming of Princess Elizabeth Land in 1931.

A century and a half of paleoneurological study of synapsids has provided invaluable insight into the evolution of their brain, sense organs, behavior, and physiology. Here, we review and discuss the evidence for parental care, brooding, intraspecific combat, display, and gregariousness, and conclude that evidence for higher levels of social interactions and communication is piling up and may soon push the origin of sociality in the mammalian lineage to the middle Permian. We also review the paleoneurological cues (the trigeminal canals, parietal foramen, and inner ear) that support a new evolutionary hypothesis in which the homeogene MSX2 mutated early in the probainognathian cynodonts and changed their biology towards a more mammalian condition. This includes the loss of the parietal foramen, inflation of the cerebellar vermis, maintenance of a fur pelt, and appearance of mammary glands, some 247 million years ago. This was followed by the origin of the ability to whisk 241 million years ago, and that of endothermy 233 million years ago, as indicated by the evolution of the trigeminal and semicircular canals, respectively. Finally, we review the immense progress made in the study of encephalization and support that probainognathians went through a neurosensory revolution during the Triassic. Their newly acquired small body size, fur, and nocturnal lifestyle generated sensory input that affected the evolution of all their sensory organs, leading up to the development of the modern mammalian brain.

Within a new Keynesian model of monetary policy with both backward- and forward-looking variables, we investigate the impact of risk aversion by assuming that the central bank is endowed with recursive preferences à la Hansen and Sargent (Hansen and Sargent, 1995). We establish that, since in this model inflation and output are forward-looking, under discretion the optimal policy is found by solving two distinct fixed-point problems: the former pertains to the central bank’s optimization exercise, the latter to the identification of the equilibrium expectations of the forward-looking variables. We show that, in the presence of forward-looking variables, the optimal policy differs from the robust policy chosen by a central bank endowed with quadratic preferences and subject to Knightian uncertainty, confuting the equivalence established by Hansen and Sargent (2008) when only backward-looking variables enter into the laws of motion regulating the dynamics of the economic system. Through our analysis we show: i) how a risk-averse central bank selects a more aggressive policy than one furnished with the standard preferences of a canonical DSGE model; ii) that the “divine coincidence” established within traditional linear-quadratic formulations between inflation and output stabilization no longer holds.

Ambiguity, in the decision-theoretic sense, means that agents are unable to identify unique probabilities for some events that they care about. Ambiguity characterizes many real-life situations, but many important questions surrounding it are still open. Descriptively, we know that people typically perceive and are sensitive to ambiguity in certain kinds of situations. Intuitively, this is well justified. Normatively, however, many think that ambiguous beliefs and ambiguity sensitivity are irrational. This raises questions such as: Why are people sensitive to ambiguity? Does it lead to inferior decisions, in particular given people’s usual decision environments? An interesting clue is that there are many examples of social contexts in which ambiguity benefits everyone involved. Hence, we investigate the possibility that ambiguity sensitivity is ‘ecologically rational’ or adaptive in a multi-agent, strategic setting. We explore the viability of ambiguity sensitive behaviour using evolutionary simulations. Our results indicate that ambiguity sensitivity can be adaptive in strategic contexts, and is especially beneficial when agents have to coordinate.

We consider twist diffeomorphisms of the torus, $f:\mathrm {T^2\rightarrow T^2,}$ and their vertical rotation intervals, $\rho _V(\widehat {f})=[\rho _V^{-},\rho _V^{+}],$ where $\widehat {f}$ is a lift of f to the vertical annulus or cylinder. We show that $C^r$-generically, for any $r\geq 1$, both extremes of the rotation interval are rational and locally constant under $C^0$-perturbations of the map. Moreover, when f is area-preserving, $C^r$-generically, $\rho _V^{-}<\rho _V^{+}$. Also, for any twist map f, $\widehat {f}$ a lift of f to the cylinder, if $\rho _V^{-}<\rho _V^{+}=p/q$, then there are two possibilities: either $\widehat {f}^q(\bullet )-(0,p)$ maps a simple essential loop into the connected component of its complement which is below the loop, or it satisfies the curve intersection property. In the first case, $\rho _V^{+} \leq p/q$ in a $C^0$-neighborhood of $f,$ and in the second case, we show that $\rho _V^{+}(\widehat {f}+(0,t))>p/q$ for all $t>0$ (that is, the rotation interval is ready to grow). Finally, in the $C^r$-generic case, assuming that $\rho _V^{-}<\rho _V^{+}=p/q,$ we present some consequences of the existence of the free loop for $\widehat {f}^q(\bullet )-(0,p)$, related to the description and shape of the attractor–repeller pair that exists in the annulus. The case of a $C^r$-generic transitive twist diffeomorphism (if such a thing exists) is also investigated.

Type 2 diabetes (T2D) incidence has been steadily increasing over the past few decades. Several studies have evaluated the effect of plant-based, vegetarian or vegan diets on the risk of T2D, although their potential benefits need to be confirmed and characterized. We performed a literature search up to July 10, 2025 using the terms/keywords related to plant-based index (PDI), vegetarian/vegan diets, and T2D. We included observational non-experimental studies evaluating adherence to such diets in adult subjects assessing T2D risk. We specifically considered overall PDI and related healthy (hPDI) and unhealthy (uPDI) assessing intake of different food groups. We included 36 studies published between 1999-2025. We found an inverse association between adherence to vegetarian/plant-based dietary patterns and T2D risk. This association was stronger, though statistically imprecise, for the vegan diet (RR=0.65, 95% CI 0.42-1.00) and for lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet (RR=0.68, 0.57-0.82). For studies using plant-based indices, the RRs were 0.82 (0.69-0.82), 0.76 (0.69-0.82), and 1.13 (0.98-1.30) for overall PDI, hPDI and uPDI, respectively. In the dose-response meta-analysis, overall PDI and hPDI showed an inverse and almost linear association with T2D risk. Conversely, adherence to uPDI directly correlated with T2D risk. Overall, adherence to vegan/vegetarian diets may reduce T2D risk, while an unhealthy plant-based diet appears to linearly increase disease risk, indicating caution in the consumption of such unhealthy foods even if of plant-origin. The beneficial association between vegetarian and healthy plant-based diets may have major public health implications.

We study the geometry induced on the local orbit spaces of Killing vector fields on (Riemannian) $G$-manifolds, with an emphasis on the cases $G=\textrm {Spin}(7)$ and $G=G_2$. Along the way, we classify the harmonic morphisms with one-dimensional fibres from $G_2$-manifolds to Einstein manifolds.

The Akkadian ventive is now well understood as a marker that points to the location of the speech act participants. Nonetheless, there remain other domains of its usage which still need clarification. We endeavour to describe these domains of the ventive’s usage, relying upon a single-writer corpus of 178 Old Babylonian letters – those of Samsi-Addu, the king of Upper Mesopotamia (early eighteenth century bc), which contains c. 500 tokens of the ventive.

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has marked a substantial leap toward artificial general intelligence. However, the utilization of LLMs in (re)insurance sector remains a challenging problem because of the gap between general capabilities and domain-specific requirements. Two prevalent methods for domain specialization of LLMs involve prompt engineering and fine-tuning. In this study, we aim to evaluate the efficacy of LLMs, enhanced with prompt engineering and fine-tuning techniques, on quantitative reasoning tasks within the (re)insurance domain. It is found that (1) compared to prompt engineering, fine-tuning with task-specific calculation dataset provides a remarkable leap in performance, even exceeding the performance of larger pre-trained LLMs; (2) when acquired task-specific calculation data are limited, supplementing LLMs with domain-specific knowledge dataset is an effective alternative; and (3) enhanced reasoning capabilities should be the primary focus for LLMs when tackling quantitative tasks, surpassing mere computational skills. Moreover, the fine-tuned models demonstrate a consistent aptitude for common-sense reasoning and factual knowledge, as evidenced by their performance on public benchmarks. Overall, this study demonstrates the potential of LLMs to be utilized as powerful tools to serve as AI assistants and solve quantitative reasoning tasks in (re)insurance sector.

There have been several current review studies on factors influencing obesity in children worldwide (1), however, these have not investigated children with intellectual disabilities in whom a higher prevalence of obesity rate has been reported. The aim of the study is to compare the prevalence of obesity and to discuss the potential factors influencing obesity in children with intellectual disabilities.

This scoping review was based on the JBI scoping review (1) with reference to the PubMed, CINAHL, Medline and Ichushi-Web (in Japanese). Search terms included “obesity” and “children with intellectual disabilities,” “China”, “South Korea”. “Hong Kong”, “Taiwan”, “Mongolia” or “Japan”. The inclusion criteria were: papers should be published in English or Japanese; the full-text articles appear in peer-reviewed journals; the research targeted children with intellectual disabilities (aged 3-18 years).

The exclusion criteria were reviews, case reports, intervention studies, proceedings and studies targeting specific patients, such as those presenting with Prader-Willi syndrome, Bardet-Biedl syndrome, Baraitser-Winter syndrome, Cohen syndrome and mental health disorders. Autism and Down’s Syndrome were included. The results were screened by two people.

In total, 13 studies were identified: 46% (6 studies) from China, Japan (3 studies) and South Korea and Taiwan (2 studies, respectively), Hong Kong (1 study), however no research was found on Mongolia. Children with intellectual disabilities and those with autism were targeted by 5 studies, whereas 3 studies were conducted on obesity in children with Down’s Syndrome. The obesity rate varied between studies. A Taiwanese study targeting children with Down’s Syndrome reported the prevalence of overweight or obese children to be 83%. Whereas other studies reported the prevalence to be around 30% in Taiwanese children with intellectual disabilities, around 30% in Chinese children with intellectual disabilities, and around 20% in Japanese children. These findings determined that children with intellectual disabilities are more at risk of becoming overweight or obese than typically developing children.

The obesity related factors reported included Down’s Syndrome or autism, older age group, reduced physical activity, longer sedentary behaviour, poor sleep quality, intake of sweets and juice, and less healthy parents (2,3,4). It is unclear whether gender was a contributory factor as although the Chinese study indicated that boys were more likely to be obese (5), the Korean study suggested that girls were more likely to be obese (6).

Obesity rates of children with intellectual disabilities was varied from 20%-30% or over. The main factors related to obesity in this population include the amount of time the children engaged in physical activity and the intake of sweets or juice, as well as parental factors which also affected the children’s physical status. It is recommended that more research be conducted on the factors contributing to obesity in children with intellectual disabilities including parental factors.

Breakfast clubs create an opportunity for children to have a nutritious breakfast before school starts(1). Due to the perceived benefits, about 80% of schools across the United Kingdom run breakfast clubs, though this is likely to increase following the new government manifesto commitment on free breakfast provision in schools(2). Breakfast clubs are presently offered through the National School Breakfast Programme(3), charities or funded by schools’ budget(2). There is no standard model for delivery of breakfast clubs and research are limited. This study aimed to investigate how breakfast clubs are delivered, types of food provided and the benefits and constraints of delivery.

Primary schools offering breakfast clubs (n=17) across Yorkshire were visited and researchers observed and engaged with students and staff (including those involved in delivery) through participatory research. Researchers conducted interviews with 17 school leads and focus group discussions with 103 children (between 3-7 children from each school). Topic guides were developed by the research team to understand the food system within schools, including barriers to food provision, nutrition education and whole school approaches to food. The data was audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Thematic analysis was conducted using the CONNECTS-Food principles Framework(4).

Our findings revealed that breakfast clubs provided children with an enjoyable start to the school day. The main themes developed were Type/quality of provision, Eating environment and Pastoral care. The delivery schemes varied and most schools offered places free or subsidised for children on Free School Meals (FSM) or other government schemes. Several schools considered children from disadvantaged families and offered a free breakfast regardless of FSM eligibility. Our findings revealed that there was diversity of foods on offer. However, the quality was perceived to relate to availability and price and was often dictated by providers rather than through school or child preferences. Offers commonly included bagels, cheese sandwiches, toast, cereals, milk, spreads and juice. The potential of schools to offer breakfast was key, particularly for families who do not have the resources or time to provide breakfast for their children. The eating environment was largely dependent on space and facilities; although, pleasant and supportive atmospheres were commonplace. Activities included drawing, reading books and games. We learnt about the value of breakfast clubs to create an environment with social and educational benefits. Our research specifically highlights the importance of breakfast clubs to support working parents through the childcare provision.

The findings suggest that further research is needed to investigate the adherence of the food provided to school food standards. This study is important as it provides insights into how breakfast clubs can be better delivered considering the new government’s manifesto commitment on school breakfast.

FixOurFood Project is funded by UKRI Transforming Food Systems with grant number BB/V004581/1

This report covers the teaching of African languages in American universities and by the United States Government since September, 1961. It is based on 100 percent response to a questionnaire circulated in the spring of 1966. Data are for languages actually taken for credit, not for those that were offered but did not materialize, or that were taken on an informal basis.

The principal facts about university programs are summarized in the accompanying graph. The number of student-semester-hours is shown as a solid line, the number of schools as a broken line, and the number of different languages as a dotted line.

The most obvious trend is, of course, rapid growth. The number of schools that teach African languages and the number of languages taught have more than doubled in five years, and the number of student-semester-hours has increased nearly sevenfold. Another major trend is toward maturity. The ratio of languages to schools has remained nearly constant at about 1.4, while the number of student-semester-hours per language has risen from 57 in 1961 to 172 in 1965. The increase in number of schools and number of languages seems to be leveling off, but the number of student-semester-hours is rising at an increasing rate.