The recent wave of executive orders and other actions at the federal level has received a great deal of attention in recent months. Receiving relatively less attention, however, has been ongoing efforts at the state level over the past couple of years to exercise more control over higher education. The present brief reviews recent state legislation impacting higher education with a particular focus on the recently enacted Ohio Senate Bill 1, as an illustrative example. We suggest that these state legislative efforts pose a threat to academic freedom through attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), curricular control, tenure, and faculty unionization. We provide an overview of these state legislative efforts and implications for I-O psychologists, particularly those in academia.

This brief piece addresses the dispute sparked by Donald Trump’s executive order denying birthright citizenship to two classes of people traditionally included under the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. A primary goal is to provide a historical perspective on arguments made by both sides that are too frequently neglected in media coverage of the dispute. The piece does not predict how SCOTUS might rule, but it does make a case for the nation’s responsibility to children who have violated no law. Through textual and historical analysis, it also refutes two law professors who propose an originalist interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that supports Trump’s effort to deny birthright citizenship to children born to undocumented immigrants. Drawing on works of literature, this article hopes to clarify the consequences of the complicated legal issues involved, including the bigoted history of previous efforts to restrict birthright citizenship.

Employer attitudes towards maternity leave are often framed as a tension between opposition based on costs or ideal worker norms, versus normative or ethical support. How do employers combine and prioritise these justifications in practice? Drawing on interviews with thirty-seven British managers, this article develops a typology of employers – risk-averse, business-first, and value-driven – distinguishing the nature of support and underlying blends of economic, normative, and moral justifications. It shows how moral reasoning – often assumed to align only with a supportive stance – is also mobilised to justify exclusionary attitudes and even overt discrimination against maternity leave-takers. Further, against assumptions that shifting cultural norms and expanding rights foster greater employer support, discomfort with these changes can reinforce resistance. Relational dynamics also shape attitudes, with positive affective–personal ties between managers and staff prompting greater support. These findings offer a new lens on how family leave rights are interpreted in everyday managerial practice.

How did resource use, trade, and patterns of everyday life change at visita mission towns in the early decades of the colonial period in northern Yucatán, Mexico? We consider this question with an analysis of archaeological material assemblages from the site of Hunacti, occupied from 1557 to 1572. Household archaeology performed at three elite residences and investigations at the central plaza and church provide evidence of continuity, change, and metrics for assessing relative prosperity by which Hunacti can be compared to its contemporaries. This spectacularly built mission town evinces several signs of initial wealth and privilege enjoyed by the site’s Maya elites, but historical records reveal relentless persecution of these leaders for idolatry, which affected the longer-term prospects of the settlement. Our findings indicate the persistence of Maya religious rites through the site’s occupation, the importance of traditional Maya tools and technologies, and relative impoverishment (as conventionally measured). These patterns offer a profile of material life at a site that chose, ultimately, abiding resistance—and consequently, greater local self-sufficiency—in the face of accelerating external scrutiny and persecution.

This article surveys the recent literature on the politics of memory. It sets out the nature of research in this area over the last 25 years and distils its main trends and areas of focus. Investigating monographs and edited volumes published since the year 2000, it gives an overview of a rich and evolving area of study. It demonstrates the extent to which the increasing politicization and securitization of memory has started to underpin new strategies for political conflict with different groups on different levels using collective memory to assert identities. While the boundaries between the national and the transnational in studying the politics of memory are often blurred, the article broadly distinguishes between studying political conflict within and between states.

This paper draws upon the theoretical literature on migration policy and health, and empirical data on three European states with differing welfare models – Sweden (social democrat), France (conservative), and the United Kingdom (liberal) – during Covid-19, to highlight the often hidden and contradictory politics through which refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented migrants were forced to navigate during the most uncertain period of the pandemic. Although migrants’ treatment during Covid-19 was generally better in Sweden with a social democrat welfare tradition, we see migration management priorities greatly undermining the extent to which welfare systems function overall for the benefit of population health. Furthermore, Sweden’s recent political shift to the right exacerbates those negative tendencies. As the paper shows, there was considerable effort by civil society and local government to fill the gap where national governments failed to protect this group, stepping in to provide health information, and support.

Many archaeologists recognize a need for a more proactive archaeology, one that is responsive to the goals of communities and so one that carries the potential to advance restorative justice and reclamation. But this work requires shifts in time and resources. Such high-investment community archaeology comes with unfolding developments, or cascade effects. We frame positive ones as including finding, honoring, elevating, and protecting cultural heritage and suggest these may offer those grappling with accommodating such shifts practical examples of the benefits. Our example comes from the Great Bay Archaeological Survey (GBAS) focused on colonial New Hampshire’s Great Bay Estuary/P8bagok (ca. AD 1600–1780). With years of community engagement in place, a landowner had heard of GBAS and stopped development when he noticed large stones. Here, we found an early colonial homestead site, the Meserve Garrison, and our attendant research traced out a trajectory of colonial expansion from Indigenous homelands transformed into English property, property into intergenerational wealth. With rising wealth came the dispossession of labor; GBAS found enslaved (freed) Africans lived in this rural northern New England frontier, a place not typically associated with chattel slavery. We are working to protect the site and publicly commemorate and restore an accurate, inclusive, colonial history.

Climate change and other anthropogenic stressors are reshaping Earth’s biodiversity, motivating efforts to monitor changing faunal diversity. Canada is home to 80 documented species of mosquitoes, 38 of which are reported in New Brunswick. Using Centers for Disease Control and Prevention miniature CO2 light traps, three adult mosquito collection surveys were performed to encompass 43 trapping sites across New Brunswick, Canada. Study one took place from 21 July 2022 to 9 September 2022, study two took place from 29 May 2023 to 24 October 2023, and study three took place from 15 May 2024 to 19 September 2024. Among the specimens collected, a total of 18 Uranotaenia sapphirina (Osten Sacken) (Diptera: Culicidae) were identified from five separate trapping sites. This species, previously documented only in Ontario, Quebec, and Manitoba, is considered rare in Canada and is known for its specialisation in feeding on annelids rather than vertebrates. Our detection of Ur. sapphirina in New Brunswick, where it has been absent in earlier surveys, suggests a recent range expansion, possibly driven by climate change. This observation highlights the need for ongoing surveillance to monitor the impacts of environmental changes on mosquito distribution.

We define the chain Sobolev space on a possibly non-complete metric measure space in terms of chain upper gradients. In this context, ɛ-chains are finite collections of points with distance at most ɛ between consecutive points. They play the role of discrete curves. Chain upper gradients are defined accordingly and the chain Sobolev space is defined by letting the size parameter ɛ going to zero. In the complete setting, we prove that the chain Sobolev space is equal to the classical notions of Sobolev spaces in terms of relaxation of upper gradients or of the local Lipschitz constant of Lipschitz functions. The proof of this fact is inspired by a recent technique developed by Eriksson-Bique in Eriksson-Bique (2023 Calc. Var. Partial Differential Equations 62 23). In the possible non-complete setting, we prove that the chain Sobolev space is equal to the one defined via relaxation of the local Lipschitz constant of Lipschitz functions, while in general they are different from the one defined via upper gradients along curves. We apply the theory developed in the paper to prove equivalent formulations of the Poincaré inequality in terms of pointwise estimates involving ɛ-upper gradients, lower bounds on modulus of chains connecting points and size of separating sets measured with the Minkowski content in the non-complete setting. Along the way, we discuss the notion of weak ɛ-upper gradients and asymmetric notions of integral along chains.

Foundation models – models trained on broad data that can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks – can pose significant risks, ranging from intimate image abuse, cyberattacks, to bioterrorism. To reduce these risks, policymakers are starting to impose obligations on the developers of these models. However, downstream developers – actors who fine-tune or otherwise modify foundational models – can create or amplify risks by improving a model’s capabilities or compromising its safety features. This can make rules on upstream developers ineffective. One way to address this issue could be to impose direct obligations on downstream developers. However, since downstream developers are numerous, diverse, and rapidly growing in number, such direct regulation may be both practically challenging and stifling to innovation. A different approach would be to require upstream developers to mitigate downstream modification risks (e.g., by restricting what modifications can be made). Another approach would be to use alternative policy tools (e.g., clarifying how existing tort law applies to downstream developers or issuing voluntary guidance to help mitigate downstream modification risks). We expect that regulation on upstream developers to mitigate downstream modification risks will be necessary. Although further work is needed, regulation of downstream developers may also be warranted where they retain the ability to increase risk to an unacceptable level.

Discontinuous shear-thickening (DST) fluids exhibit unique instability properties in a wide range of flow conditions. We present numerical simulations of a scalar model for DST fluids in a planar simple shear using the smoothed particle hydrodynamics approach. The model reproduces the spatially homogeneous instability mechanism based on the competition between the inertial and microstructural time scales, with good congruence to the theoretical predictions. Spatial inhomogeneities arising from a stress-splitting instability are rationalised within the context of local components of the microstructure evolution. Using this effect, the addition of non-locality in the model is found to produce an alternative mechanism of temporal instabilities, driven by the inhomogeneous pattern formation. The reported arrangement of the microstructure is generally in agreement with the experimental data on gradient pattern formation in DST. Simulations in a parameter space representative of realistic DST materials resulted in aperiodic oscillations in measured shear rate and stress, driven by formation of gap-spanning frictional structures.

At the London Tech Week event in early June, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang praised the UK as the ‘envy of the world’ when it comes to AI researchers, but he also criticised it as the largest AI ecosystem in the world without its own infrastructure. The criticism is somewhat self-serving: when the UK does get around to building out that infrastructure, it’s certain to consist largely of chips sold by Huang’s company. It’s also unsurprising: Huang has been pitching the idea of ‘sovereign AI’ since at least 2023, conscious that nation states are the next deep pockets to target after the hyperscalers and generously funded model builders. In a world where the only real contenders in the race for AI supremacy are the US and China, we look at how the pursuit of AI sovereignty is playing out across the rest of the planet.

Underwater capillary tubes fill rapidly with the surrounding liquid. Capillary and hydrostatic pressures push the liquid into the tube, causing the air to exit as bubbles at the other end. We study the natural filling process of a vertical capillary tube immersed in water during several bubble formation events. A theoretical model is proposed that captures the dynamics of the meniscus inside the capillary tube as it fills with water. We find good agreement with the experimental data that describe this special case of spontaneous flow using a dynamic contact angle model based on molecular kinetic theory.