This article examines the new provisions on contract interpretation and characterisation in Book 5 of the Belgian Civil Code, which entered into force on 1 January 2023. The reform preserves Belgium’s traditional subjective approach to interpretation, prioritising the parties’ common intention over literal textual meaning, contrasting with the objective or mixed approaches adopted by French law and international instruments. Regarding characterisation, Belgium introduces innovative provisions explicitly addressing contract classification and mixed contracts, filling gaps left by other legal systems. These aspects of the Belgian reform are put intto perspective with comparative observations drawn mostly from French, German, and Dutch law.

The steadily growing reliance on international dispute settlement as environmental protection means is not uncontroversial, raising three sets of issues regarding: (i) the nature of adjudicative fora (ontological issues); (ii) wider assumptions and frameworks (methodological issues); and (iii) processes for creating and implementing environmental obligations (processual issues). Accordingly, this review essay is threefold. Despite a trend towards greater reliance on international dispute settlement fora, Part I discusses whether their presumably inherent ‘anthropocentric’ orientation hinders their suitability and assesses the feasibility of solutions advocated in judicial discourses. Having observed inconsistencies between the law-ascertainment methods deployed by adjudicative fora and the general regimes on law-ascertainment, Part II contends, international law-based environmental protection risks becoming overly “judge-centric”, despite international law-making’s state-centric nature. Part III concludes considering various reversals of perspective, potentially countering the shortcomings of overly “judge-centric” environmental protection, in addition to factors such as enforceability, plausibly justifying greater reliance on arbitral fora.

Protecting beneficiaries’ privacy in fundraising has become a common practice in real-world charitable campaigns. However, empirical research directly examining how such privacy protection influences individuals’ donation behavior remains unexplored. This research compares different face anonymization techniques (partial-face and full-face anonymization) with no anonymization on donation amount, and explores the mediating roles of empathy and credibility, as well as the moderating role of need for cognition (NFC). We conducted two studies and used ANOVA and bootstrap analysis to assess these effects. The results showed that partial-face anonymization leads to better donation amounts compared to full-face and no anonymization, with this effect mediated by empathy toward beneficiaries and the perceived credibility of nonprofit organizations. Additionally, the comparative effect of partial-face versus no anonymization is significant for donors with high NFC but not for those with low NFC. Our findings offer several implications for charitable platforms, nonprofit organizations, and beneficiaries.

The world of scholarship and science is currently in disarray and under severe threat. The Institutes for Advanced Study (IAS) have always been internationally recognized symbols for academic freedom and pioneering studies of the highest standards. In the last decades, there has been a remarkable proliferation of these centres, to where they are now a global phenomenon. At their root, these institutes all aim for curiosity-based research and the formation of transnational communities engaged in unobstructed scholarship and science. Alongside the worldwide development of the IAS, there has also arisen a parallel movement, commonly known as Open Science. Seen by many academics, institutions, funding bodies and governments as a much-needed transition in university systems, Open Science implies a significant change in academia. Commencing as an initiative to stimulate discussion on open access publishing, shared data-use, academic recognition and rewards, and the legitimacy of impact factors and university rankings, Open Science increasingly also centres on connecting research and education, and science and society. Both in the IAS, as well as in Open Science, there are important developments with regard to transdisciplinary research and education. As of yet, however, a connection between the ideals and aims of the IAS and Open Science has not explicitly been made in the literature. This article aims to open up a dialogue between these driving academic forces, so that they can face the complex challenges in the world together, and work in unison and synergy towards new academic identities.

The article presents new archaeological data from the Cave of Altamira from two different perspectives: first, it summarizes the results of a comprehensive study of the rock art of a topographic area of the cave; second, it analyses archaeological evidence spatially linked to the studied Palaeolithic imageries. By contrasting the results of the AMS dating of some of this evidence with the results of our study of the superpositions and the formal characteristics of the associated rock art, we have put forth a discussion on the chronology, sequence and nature of the human interactions with the cave art of this area during the Palaeolithic. This has allowed us to define the different times of creation, use and transit for the cave art, thus producing a biography of the Palaeolithic activities in this decorated area of Altamira.

Previous research has shown that the perception of party positions changes when they are in government. To what extent does this also apply to populist radical parties? Including radical actors in a coalition gives some legitimization to their views and normalizes them; therefore, they might be perceived as ideologically more moderate. However, the reactions to government inclusion might be different for supporters of populist radical parties compared to other voters. Hence, this paper aims to examine if populist radical parties that are included in a government coalition are perceived as ideologically more moderate and whether partisanship moderates this effect. A time-series cross-sectional analysis of the public perception of governing populist radical parties in 29 elections across 20 European countries shows that they are not always seen as more moderate when in office. This paper contributes to the study of coalition heuristics and populists in power and has important consequences for our understanding of party mainstreaming.

In Zambia, religious nationalists exploit legal and policy ambiguities to construct abortion and LGBTI+ rights as un-Zambian and un-Christian. This delegitimization narrows the scope of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) to family planning. Drawing on forty-five in-depth interviews with Zambian stakeholders and international aid officials, we argue that while these ambiguities constrain reproductive justice, they also allow activists to advance SRHR by building coalitions that connect advocacy for abortion rights, LGBTI+ rights, and reproductive justice to promote health service access and bodily autonomy for all. In Zambia and elsewhere, such activism and coalition building merit greater attention and support.

We study the bursting of a bubble on a liquid free surface under critical conditions, i.e. those leading to the minimum (maximum) size (velocity) of the first-emitted jet droplet. We consider the effect of a surfactant remaining in the monolayer during the cavity collapse and jetting (the surfactant is considered as insoluble). Our experiments show that a tiny amount of surfactant considerably increases (decreases) the droplet radius (velocity). The volume of the first-emitted droplet increases by a factor of 20 for a concentration that produces an insignificant reduction in the bubble surface tension. The total liquid volume ejected by the bubble increases with the surfactant concentration. Surfactant accumulates at the bubble base due to the shrinkage of the cavity bottom and surfactant convection. The resulting reduction in surface tension narrows the region of free surface reversal. Despite this effect, the droplet size increases because Marangoni stress widens the jet and slows the liquid jet interface, delaying droplet detachment. More liquid flows into the droplets, increasing the mass and energy transfer to the resulting spray. A significant increase in the droplet size is also observed with a weak surfactant. This indicates that natural water contamination can substantially alter bubble bursting under critical conditions. Our results may explain the size of the particles emitted by bubble bursting in seawater.

This study examines the impact of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-specific laws criminalizing HIV non-disclosure, exposure, and transmission on voluntary testing, focusing on the role of HIV stigma. HIV criminalization signals state endorsement of discrimination against HIV-positive individuals, thereby amplifying stigma. I use a regression discontinuity design that exploits the enactment timing of legislation in Mali during a household survey offering voluntary HIV testing, where family members could infer who was tested and speculate that those tested were HIV-positive. Following the legislation, women’s testing uptake declined, especially in rural areas, with stronger effects among those with radios and without completed formal education. Women, being economically dependent on men, are vulnerable to HIV-related mistreatment from family members. Therefore, fear of being considered seropositive by family members might have more strongly discouraged women’s testing uptake compared with men’s.

For a positive braid $\beta \in \mathrm {Br}^{+}_{k}$, we consider the braid variety $X(\beta )$. We define a family of open sets $\mathcal {U}_{r, w}$ in $X(\beta )$, where $w \in S_k$ is a permutation and r is a positive integer no greater than the length of $\beta $. For fixed r, the sets $\mathcal {U}_{r, w}$ form an open cover of $X(\beta )$. We conjecture that $\mathcal {U}_{r,w}$ is given by the nonvanishing of some cluster variables in a single cluster for the cluster structure on $\mathbb {C}[X(\beta )]$ constructed in Casals et al. (2025, J. Amer. Math. Soc. 38, 369–479), Galashin et al. (2026, Invent. Math. 243, 1079–1127), and Galashin et al. (2022, Braid variety cluster structures, I: 3D plabic graphs) and that $\mathcal {U}_{r,w}$ admits a cluster structure given by freezing these variables. Moreover, we show that $\mathcal {U}_{r, w}$ is always isomorphic to the product of two braid varieties, and we conjecture that this isomorphism is quasi-cluster. In some important special cases, we are able to prove our conjectures.

This special issue of the Journal of Clinical Translational Science on Institutional Transformation provides strategies to strengthen community and patient engagement in research in which collaborative knowledge creation is valued and centered in the history, knowledge, and evidence within communities. Recognizing the important role of academic health centers, schools of public health and research institutes in engaged research, the guest editors sought articles that challenged institutions to transform policies, practices, norms and structures towards power-sharing in research and towards commitment to sustainable research partnerships for health equity. While these articles were mostly written before the current context of large-scale terminations of grants and programs, this special issue recognized the well-founded historical distrust of communities in academic centers and the ongoing challenges of regaining trust in science. We first provide an historical context of institutional barriers and facilitators of engaged and participatory research and then review articles, including from the Engage for Equity PLUS national initiative. We end with recommendations for the field, as we recognize we still need to be self-critical about the structures that maintain academic dominance in research rather than valuing multiple ways of knowing and the importance of communities for authentic co-creation and leadership of research.

We propose a novel reformulation of the Vlasov–Ampère equations for plasmas that reveals discrete symmetries that enables simultaneous conservation of mass, momentum and energy; preservation of Gauss’s law; positivity of the distribution function; and consistency with quasi-neutral asymptotics. The approach employs variable and coordinate transformations to yield a coupled system comprising a modified Vlasov equation and associated moment–field equations. The modified Vlasov equation advances a conditional distribution function that excludes mass, momentum and energy densities, which are instead evolved through moment equations enforcing the relevant symmetries, conservation laws and involution constraints. This reformulation aligns naturally with a recent slow-manifold reduction technique, which separates fast electron time scales and simplifies the treatment of the quasi-neutral limit within the reduced moment–field subsystem. Using this framework, we develop a numerical method for the reduced 1D1V subsystem that, for the first time in the literature, satisfies all key physical constraints while maintaining a quasi-neutral asymptotic behaviour. The advantages of the method are demonstrated on canonical electrostatic test problems, including the multiscale ion acoustic shock wave.

This study investigates the influence of wind tunnel ground conditions (stationary/moving) on flow topology and passive scalar dispersion in the wake of the Ahmed body with rear slant angles, $\phi$ = 25$^\circ$ and 40$^\circ$. We implement field measurements of both velocity and scalar concentrations in the wake, for both the ground conditions, within the same experimental set-up, allowing for structural correlation between wake topology and scalar dispersion. Particle image velocimetry measurements reveal the existence of a third spanwise vortex (vortex G) near the stationary wind tunnel ground, due to the floor boundary layer, for both of the Ahmed bodies ($\phi$ = 25$^\circ$, 40$^\circ$). Concentration field measurements performed using quantitative smoke visualisation show higher scalar dispersion in the wake of both Ahmed bodies for the stationary ground condition. Comparing the velocity and concentration fields further identifies vortex G as the primary physical driver for the enhanced vertical dispersion of the scalar, observed in stationary ground conditions. To quantify the dispersion and characterise these effects, we introduce dispersion parameters, such as non-dimensional dispersion ($\mathscr{D}$) and dispersion length scales ($\mathscr{L}_y, \mathscr{L}_z$). These parameters confirm that, while lateral dispersion remains relatively insensitive to wind tunnel ground conditions, the presence of vortex G in stationary ground conditions leads to an overestimation of vertical dispersion by up to $\approx$29 % ($\phi$ = 25$^\circ$) and $\approx$49 % ($\phi$ = 40$^\circ$). This study quantifies the overestimated dispersion, identifies the vortical structures responsible for scalar redistribution, provides physical insight into the wake dispersion phenomenon and highlights the importance of correct wind tunnel ground conditions in the vehicle wake dispersion studies.