Drug use among young women has severe consequences for their mental health, increases their developmental vulnerability and highlights the global problem of drug addiction. The purpose of this study was to investigate the socioeconomic and psychological factors influencing drug use among young women in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. The study used a qualitative research design. We collected data from 12 women aged 18–21 years via in-depth qualitative interviews conducted in Mardan and Peshawar from March to June 2022. Research shows that young women frequently use drugs due to peer pressure, emotional challenges and financial concerns, which significantly impact their lives. The study emphasizes the value of cultural intervention programs for young women, concentrating on the region’s mental health services, economic empowerment and gender-specific peer support networks.

This short research article interrogates the rise of digital platforms that enable ‘synthetic afterlives’, with a focus on how deathbots – AI-driven avatar interactions grounded in personal data and recordings – reshape memory practices. Drawing on socio-technical walkthroughs of four platforms – Almaya, HereAfter, Séance AI, and You, Only Virtual – we analyse how they frame, archive, and algorithmically regenerate memories. Our findings reveal a central tension: between preserving the past as a fixed archive and continually reanimating it through generative AI. Our walkthroughs demonstrate how these services commodify remembrance, reducing memory to consumer-driven interactions designed for affective engagement while obscuring the ethical, epistemological and emotional complexities of digital commemoration. In doing so, they enact reductive forms of memory that are embedded within platform economies and algorithmic imaginaries.

How has caste influenced entrepreneurship in India in the past and how does it do so in the present? Using the Industrial Census of 1911, this paper provides the first detailed caste-level mapping of firms in Indian business history and links it to the present by an analysis of the Economic Census of 2013–2014. It finds that while trading castes were dominant, there were significant regional variations and nontrading castes were far more important than usually posited in the literature. Over the course of a century, the social base of entrepreneurship has widened slowly but significant barriers remain. The paper argues that “caste embeddedness” through the nature of wealth distribution, social capital, and ritual purity affects entrepreneurial choices and presents a typology of “caste,” “caste-advantage,” “caste-restricted,” and “noncaste” businesses that characterize the economic life of India.

We define a family of discontinuous maps on the circle, called Bowen–Series-like maps, for geometric presentations of surface groups. The family has $2N$ parameters, where $2N$ is the number of generators of the presentation. We prove that all maps in the family have the same topological entropy, which coincides with the volume entropy of the group presentation. This approach allows a simple algorithmic computation of the volume entropy from the presentation only, using the Milnor–Thurston theory for one-dimensional maps.

With the growing amount of historical infrastructure data available to engineers, data-driven techniques have been increasingly employed to forecast infrastructure performance. In addition to algorithm selection, data preprocessing strategies for machine learning implementations plays an equally important role in ensuring accuracy and reliability. The present study focuses on pavement infrastructure and identifies four categories of strategies to preprocess data for training machine-learning-based forecasting models. The Long-Term Pavement Performance (LTPP) dataset is employed to benchmark these categories. Employing random forest as the machine learning algorithm, the comparative study examines the impact of data preprocessing strategies, the volume of historical data, and forecast horizon on the accuracy and reliability of performance forecasts. The strengths and limitations of each implementation strategy are summarized. Multiple pavement performance indicators are also analysed to assess the generalizability of the findings. Based on the results, several findings and recommendations are provided for short-to medium-term infrastructure management and decision-making: (i) in data-scarce scenarios, strategies that incorporate both explanatory variables and historical performance data provides better accuracy and reliability, (ii) to achieve accurate forecasts, the volume of historical data should at least span a time duration comparable to the intended forecast horizon, and (iii) for International Roughness Index and transverse crack length, a forecast horizon up to 5 years is generally achievable, but forecasts beyond a three-year horizon are not recommended for longitudinal crack length. These quantitative guidelines ultimately support more effective and reliable application of data-driven techniques in infrastructure performance forecasting.

This retrospective cohort study examined the relationship between a continuous measurement of bilingual engagement (operationalized as language entropy) and cognitive aging in regional minority language speakers. We drew Frisian–Dutch bilinguals (n = 7,448) and Low Saxon–Dutch bilinguals (n = 10,114) from the Lifelines Cohort Study and included participants aged 20–80, enabling an adult lifespan perspective. Cognitive functioning was measured using the Cogstate Brief Battery, which assesses processing speed, attention, working memory and recognition memory. We did not observe a robust relationship between bilingual engagement and cognitive functioning. Our results suggest that bilingual engagement does not play a key role in processing speed, attention, working memory and recognition memory performance in Frisian–Dutch and Low Saxon–Dutch bilinguals. Implications for the bilingual engagement measurement and potential investigations into regional minority language bilingualism and cognition are discussed.

We establish large deviation estimates related to the Darling–Kac theorem and generalized arcsine laws for occupation and waiting times of ergodic transformations preserving an infinite measure, such as non-uniformly expanding interval maps with indifferent fixed points. For the proof, we imitate the study of generalized arcsine laws for occupation times of one-dimensional diffusion processes and adopt a method of double Laplace transform.

Between the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, large quantities of wax were exported from the Maghrib to Europe. In the Maghrib, both raw wax and wax candles were involved in various social interactions that transcended mere environmental and economic considerations. For some Muslims, wax came to index Christianity, and its significance during the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday was critiqued as a corrupt innovation. At the same time, to prevent the facilitation of Catholic devotion—and because wax was deemed war material—the sale of wax to Christians was forbidden. Nevertheless, wax remained a profitable product sold to Christians in significant quantities. The anxiety surrounding the movement of wax and the attempts to regulate it indicate that for Muslims, wax served as a religious boundary marker. Christians too utilized the substance to reinforce communal boundaries. Catholics in the Maghrib—captives, clergy, and merchants—used wax to establish and express confessional divides, aiming to deter Catholic captives from converting to Islam. Priests distributed blessed candles to captives, who in turn donated wax to the clergy. Moreover, priests gifted candles to Algerian dignitaries, a practice opposed by the papacy. Wax formed invisible, often unintended connections between Muslim theologians and rulers, Catholic and Muslim captives, slaves, wax makers, merchants, and redeemers. These entanglements sparked anxiety, a sense of impurity, and a drive to reinforce religious boundaries. This article explores a fragmented history of these connections and relationships and argues that the failed attempts to regulate this circulation fostered new entanglements.

Many authors have studied the biogeography of the Southern Ocean (SO), defined its limits and proposed their division into biogeographical zones and provinces. In this work we analyse the biogeography of sea slugs in a broad sense (Mollusca, Gastropoda, Heterobranchia) in the different areas and zones of the SO below 41°S. Most of the published scientific publications, databases and technical reports where records of benthic sea slugs appear in the SO have been analysed in addition to our own records, cataloguing a total of 355 different benthic species. The following areas and zones of the SO have been considered: Antarctica (Weddell Sea, West Antarctica, Ross Sea, East Antarctica), the sub-Antarctic zone (Falkland Islands, South Georgia Island, South Orkney Islands, South Sandwich Islands, Bouvet Island, Crozet and Prince Edward islands, Kerguelen Islands, Macquarie Island), southern South America (Patagonia/Magellan), Tasmania and New Zealand (South Island). A presence/absence table for all recorded species in the different zones has been compiled, and the differences and similarities between them have been calculated using the Sorensen index. The best representation has been obtained by classifying the zones into five groups: G1 (the four Antarctic zones, South Georgia Island, South Sandwich Islands, South Orkney Islands), G2 (Kerguelen Islands, Crozet and Prince Edward islands and Macquarie Island), G3 (Falkland Islands and Patagonia/Magellan), G4 (Tasmania and New Zealand’s South Island) and G5 (Bouvet Island). In addition, the concordance between the non-hierarchical classification (K-mean) and the hierarchical classification obtained using the WARD and UPGMA cluster analysis methods has been verified. The representative and distinctive species of each of these groups are indicated. In this work, as regards benthic sea slugs, the biogeographical affinities between the Antarctic zones and some of the sub-Antarctic zones are confirmed, as well as between the fauna of these molluscs in the Patagonian/Magallan zone and the Falkland Islands, while the affinities between the other zones need further confirmation when more species records become available.

The Cambrian Explosion saw the widespread development of mineralized skeletons. At this time, nearly every major animal phylum independently evolved strategies to build skeletons through either agglutination or biomineralization. Although most organisms settled on a single strategy, Salterella Billings, 1865 employed both strategies by secreting a biocalcitic exterior shell that is lined with layers of agglutinated sediments surrounding a central hollow tube. The slightly older fossil, Volborthella Schmidt, 1888, shares a similar construction with agglutinated grains encompassing a central tube but lacks a biomineralized exterior shell. Together these fossils have been grouped in the phylum Agmata Yochelson, 1977, although no phylogenetic relationship has been suggested to link them with the broader metazoan tree, which limits their contribution to our understanding of the evolution of shells in early animals.

To understand their ecology and place them in a phylogenetic context, we investigated Salterella and Volborthella fossils from the Wood Canyon and Harkless formations of Nevada, USA, the Illtyd Formation of Yukon, Canada, and the Shady Formation of Virginia, USA. Thin-section petrography, acid maceration, scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, and X-ray tomographic microscopy were used to provide new insights into these enigmatic faunas. First, morphological similarities in the aperture divergence angle and ratio of central tube diameter to agglutinated layer thickness suggest Salterella and Volborthella are related. Second, both fossils exhibit agglutinated grain compositions that are distinctive from their surrounding environments and demonstrate selectivity on the part of their producers. Finally, the calcitic shell composition and simple layers of blocky prismatic shell microstructure in Salterella suggest a possible cnidarian affinity. Together these data point to these organisms being sessile, semi-infaunal filter or deposit feeders and an early experimentation in cnidarian biomineralization chronicling a hypothesized transition from an organic sheath in Volborthella to a biomineralized shell in Salterella.