The range of putatively medical animal practices varies widely both functionally and mechanistically. In this article, we argue that the definitions of medicine available in the empirical literature are inadequate for distinguishing genuinely medical practices from other adaptive behaviors. We aim to improve this conceptual landscape by proposing a definition that incorporates both cognitive and functional requirements, enabling finer-grained distinctions across species and behaviors. We apply our definition to the evidence and determine which animal behaviors show a mere difference of degree with paradigmatic medical practices—and should be seen as medicine—and which should be excluded from this nomenclature.

The following communication sets a previously unrecorded manuscript by John Locke in context. The manuscript comprises his remarks on a bill to create a ‘Flax and Hemp Company of Ireland’, laid before the Irish House of Commons in November 1695, which circulated in London in late 1697. Locke likely made his remarks for the lord chancellor, Sir John Somers, among whose papers they survive. The manuscript sheds new light on Locke’s practical involvement in post-revolutionary political economy, on his engagement with Ireland, and on his thought regarding corporations and corporate corruption.

In 1893, the British explorer Frederick George Jackson travelled in the north of the Russian Empire, where he learned lessons—particularly in the areas of diet, transport, and clothing—from the Nenets and Sami people. I argue that his travels in this area influenced both his subsequent Jackson-Harmsworth Expedition (1894–97) and British Antarctic expeditions in the early 20th century, including those led by Robert F. Scott and Ernest H. Shackleton

Studying Jackson’s travels and writings can advance discussions about the role of Indigenous knowledge in British Polar exploration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Based on a new reading of both published and archival materials, the paper also charts some forms of knowledge that Jackson struggled to appropriate—particularly the use of reindeer for transport. In examining his failures, I argue that attempts to write Indigenous contributions into the history of exploration must focus on explorers’ failures as well as their successes—and on forms of Indigenous knowledge that proved difficult to use in other contexts.

Cemeteries of the Early Neolithic Linearbandkeramik culture (LBK, 5500–4900 BC) evoke a sense of emerging permanence of place as agricultural subsistence spread westward through Central Europe. Yet assumptions about the sequence of senescence and longevity of cemetery use are based on limited data. Here, the authors challenge the view that cemetery burial was a long-lasting Neolithic practice, modelling 50 new radiocarbon dates from the cemetery of Schwetzingen alongside published dates from eight other LBK mortuary contexts. The results, they argue, indicate a short-lived, largely contemporaneous cemetery horizon across Central Europe, forcing a re-evaluation of Early Neolithic social history.

Theories of ecological function often appeal to the liberality criterion to evaluate a theory’s adequacy. The liberality criterion requires that a functional description successfully differentiates between functions and nonfunctions. A functional description is considered inadequate if it is excessively liberal or excessively restrictive. I criticize the deference that is shown to the liberality criterion. I present a hypothetical case to illustrate how the application of the liberality criterion needlessly problematizes the four general theories of ecological function. Instead, a theory’s functional description should be considered adequate as long as it produces a better understanding of the complex phenomenon under study.

This article contributes to the understanding of the scales of global capitalism by addressing labour relations from a historical perspective. Firstly, it suggests that the problem of the deadly cost of the expansion and shifting of commodity frontiers can be resolved only with an approach that scrutinizes humans’ consumption habits and lifestyles. Secondly, it proposes to explore the making of commodity frontiers through the respective sites of immobilization as well as workers’ means of escaping such immobilization. Thirdly, it explores the nexus of health, food, and labour by considering the agricultural production of commodities as toxic frontiers against which workers’ unions have historically organized to protect their safety. Finally, it sheds light on the ways in which the global scale of capitalism has met the micro scale of particles owing to the toxicity of twenty-first-century commodity frontiers.

Climate change impacts and stresses young people and although their pro-environmental behaviours have been studied their perspectives have not been widely heard. This creative output is a lo-fi comic engaging with themes of imagined alternative futures in climate fiction. It was constructed to provide an example of a multimodal text with a low barrier to entry for use in the classroom, to complement the study of solar punk texts. The methodology of an autoethnographic art provides a tool for reflection and provides a suitably rebellious outlet for their perspectives, a departure from factual poster assignments on environmental issues. This particular perzine discusses the challenges faced by young people in addressing environmental issues and sustainable practice with limited personal agency.

We develop anapproximation for the buffer overflow probability of a stable tandem network in dimensions three or more. The overflow event in terms of the constrained random walk representing the network is the following: the sum of the components of the process hits n before hitting 0. This is one of the most commonly studied rare events in the context of queueing systems and the constrained processes representing them. The approximation is valid for almost all initial points of the process and its relative error decays exponentially in n. The analysis is based on an affine transformation of the process and the problem; as $n\rightarrow \infty$ the transformed process converges to an unstable constrained random walk. The approximation formula consists of the probability of the limit unstable process hitting a limit boundary in finite time. We give an explicit formula for this probability in terms of the utilization rates of the nodes of the network.

This article presents a multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) of collective remembering of the American War in Vietnam, also known as the Vietnam War, as embodied in forty-nine photographs taken during the war and published in the digital edition of The New York Times on the Vietnam War’s forty-second anniversary commemoration. Collective memory and commemoration are understood as political and discursive practices that make up a site of contestation (Milani & Richardson 2022). This research attempts to unveil The New York Times’ semiotic control in presenting and recontextualizing a historical narrative of the Vietnam War to sustain a necropolitical architecture in the making of collective memory. Three major themes emerging from the data—dehumanized death, gendered death, and paternalized death—are discussed in the context of what we call necropolitical discourse of collective remembering of the Vietnam War. (Necropolitical discourse, Vietnam War, CMDA, collective remembering, lieu de dispute)

We present an extremely rare case of anomalous single coronary artery from the pulmonary artery in a 2-month-old infant with severe heart failure. Due to the unique coronary anatomy, a modified venous arterial extracorporeal membrane oxygenation technique was employed to maintain coronary perfusion and prevent coronary steal. Following surgical reimplantation, the patient showed significant recovery and remains stable at 2-year follow-up.

Focusing on the Šamac–Sarajevo railway project, this article examines how Yugoslavia’s Youth Labour Actions (Omladinska radna akcija; ORAs) served as incipient attempts by the Yugoslav state to develop its cultural diplomacy. Adopting a bottom-up perspective, it explores British volunteers’ participation in Yugoslavia’s post-war reconstruction, situating their mobilisation within broader contexts of international reconstruction, idealism and solidarity. Targeting enthusiastic leftist youth, the Yugoslav government strategically employed the ORAs to promote its image in Britain, turning an economic development project into a vehicle for cultural branding. This article argues that Yugoslavia’s attempt to promote its image through the inclusion of British youth was only partially successful. Despite the seemingly idealistic narratives offered by the brigadists, practical challenges and contradictions remained. It examines the complexities of the British youth brigades’ experiences and how their intended propagandistic role was met with scepticism in Britain.

Keeping an up-to-date three-dimensional (3D) representation of buildings is a crucial yet time-consuming step for Building Information Modeling (BIM) and digital twins. To address this issue, we propose ICON (Intelligent CONstruction) drone, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) designed to navigate indoor environments autonomously and generate point clouds. ICON drone is constructed using a 250 mm quadcopter frame, a Pixhawk flight controller, and is equipped with an onboard computer, an Red Green Blue-Depth camera and an IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) sensor. The UAV navigates autonomously using visual-inertial odometer and frontier-based exploration. The collected RGB images during the flight are used for 3D reconstruction and semantic segmentation. To improve the reconstruction accuracy in weak-texture areas in indoor environments, we propose depth-regularized planar-based Gaussian splatting reconstruction, where we use monocular-depth estimation as extra supervision for weak-texture areas. The final outputs are point clouds with building components and material labels. We tested the UAV in three scenes in an educational building: the classroom, the lobby, and the lounge. Results show that the ICON drone could: (1) explore all three scenes autonomously, (2) generate absolute scale point clouds with F1-score of 0.5806, 0.6638, and 0.8167 compared to point clouds collected using a high-fidelity terrestrial LiDAR scanner, and (3) label the point cloud with corresponding building components and material with mean intersection over union of 0.588 and 0.629. The reconstruction algorithm is further evaluated on ScanNet, and results show that our method outperforms previous methods by a large margin on 3D reconstruction quality.