This article discusses how the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) shaped notions of rural life, rural community, and social reform in the context of South and Southeast Asian decolonisation. Building on scholarship analysing rural development either in term of continuities from the colonial era or as the result of specific circumstances after the Second World War, the argument here is that we can understand approaches to rural welfare after 1945 as the historical intersection of three factors: the rural specificities of decolonisation related to violence and mass displacement; FAO seeking relevance and legitimacy in the post-war order; and urban and rural elites objectifying rural life as a cornerstone of post-imperial nation-building. Empirically, the article analyses two (former) British colonies that experienced two different forms of decolonisation: territorial partition and imperial warfare. It relates these modes of decolonisation to the early formations of FAO’s rural expertise and argues that decolonisation was a structuring event for both local rural policy-making and the evolving international (rural) development agenda.

A new statistical definition for the mean turbulent boundary layer (TBL) thickness is introduced, based on identification of the wall-normal location where the streamwise velocity skewness changes sign, from negative to positive, in the outermost region of the boundary layer. Importantly, this definition is independent of arbitrary thresholds, and broadly applicable, including to past single-point measurements. Furthermore, this definition is motivated by the phenomenology of streamwise velocity fluctuations near the turbulent/non-turbulent interface (TNTI), whose local characteristics are shown to be universal for TBLs under low free-stream turbulence conditions (i.e. with or without pressure gradients, surface roughness, etc.) through large-scale experiments, simulations and coherent structure-based modelling. The new approach yields a TBL thickness that is consistent with previous definitions, such as those based on Reynolds shear stress or ‘composite’ mean velocity profiles, and which can be used practically, e.g. to calculate integral thicknesses. Two methods are proposed for estimating the TBL thickness using this definition: one based on simple linear interpolation and the other on fitting a generalised Fourier model to the outer skewness profile. The robustness and limitations of these methods are demonstrated through analysis of several published experimental and numerical datasets, which cover a range of canonical and non-canonical TBLs. These datasets also vary in key characteristics such as wall-normal resolution and measurement noise, particularly in the critical TNTI region.

Let ABC be a triangle with incentre I, circumcentre O, orthocentre H, centroid G and symmedian point K. In standard notation, the triangle ABC has sides a, b, c, semiperimeter s, circumradius R and inradius r. Euler’s well-known result that the incentre I is always within the orthocentroidal disc DGH, the disc with diameter GH, is probably the first result about the location of the incentre in some disc formed by triangle centres. Investigating the location of the incentre I in other discs, in [1] we proved that the incentre is interior to the Brocard disc DOK, that is, the disc with diameter OK. The disc is named after the French military meteorologist and geometer Henri Brocard (1845-1922), known in triangle geometry for the Brocard points and the Brocard angle (see [2]).

This paper investigates the effect of taxation of polluting products and redistribution on pollution, income and welfare inequalities. We consider a two-sector Ramsey model with a green and a polluting good, two types of households and a subsistence level of consumption for the polluting good. The environmental tax is always effective in reducing pollution regardless of the level of subsistence consumption. However, this level, together with the redistribution rate, matters at the individual level as it shapes the impact of the environmental policy on individual consumption and welfare. Looking at the stability properties of the economy, a high subsistence level of polluting consumption leads to instability or indeterminacy of the steady state, while the environmental externality reduces the scope for indeterminacy. Increasing the tax rate and redistributing more to the worker affect the occurrence of indeterminacy and instability. Considering the subsistence level of consumption and the level of redistribution among households are of importance as it determines the effects of environmental tax policy in the long term and the stability of the economy in the short term.

Cumin (Cuminum cyminum L.) is an annual herbaceous plant from the Apiaceae family, renowned for its medicinal and culinary applications as the second most popular spice globally after black pepper. Germination is a critical stage in the life cycle of plants, particularly for medicinal plants, as it determines successful establishment and productivity. This study explores the impact of ploidy levels (diploid and tetraploid) and genotype interactions on germination traits, seed morphology and early seedling growth in five selected cumin genotypes (YAR1, KBA4, SKD6, SIV8 and NKM9). Induction of tetraploidy significantly influenced germination percentage, rate, seed vigour index, and morphological traits. Notably, diploid genotypes exhibited higher germination percentages, while tetraploid SKD6 displayed the highest germination speed and seedling biomass, demonstrating genotype-specific ploidy effects. For the first time, root growth kinetics were analyzed, revealing distinct growth patterns between diploid and tetraploid seeds. Morphometric evaluations showed that tetraploid seeds and embryos were significantly larger, attributed to the ‘gigas effect’, which enhances storage reserves and seed vigour. However, challenges such as embryo-less seeds and variability in genotype responses to ploidy manipulation were observed. These findings underscore the importance of targeted breeding strategies that optimize genotype-ploidy interactions to improve seed quality, germination performance and early growth in cumin. By advancing our understanding of polyploidy’s role in shaping key agronomic traits, this study provides a foundation for sustainable cultivation practices and enhanced productivity of medicinal plants.

In the near future, individuals and non-financial firms will use generative artificial intelligence (AI) to execute everyday financial tasks. Users may deploy ‘AI agents’ such as Apple’s Siri or Google’s Gemini to pay their bills, recommend financial products or manage investment portfolios, and perform myriad other financial activities. Although users may receive benefits from having AI agents offer financial services, these applications pose significant risks both to customers and to the financial system: they may fail to act in users’ best interests, engage in market manipulation, and cause financial instability. This essay argues that regulators are unprepared for technology firms to use open finance and AI architecture to provide individualized financial services without human interaction. It argues that AI agents are the next technological innovation in finance that should be regulated, but that US banking regulators lack authority to directly regulate deposit brokers, posing risks to financial stability and the general public.

Given the centrality of immediate revelation to early Quaker theology, modern historians have often assumed that the first Quakers disregarded tradition. However, this article demonstrates that the early Friends frequently made historical arguments, both to launch and rebut polemical assaults. The Quakers did not, therefore, turn to history as the movement became increasingly conservative or respectable. Instead, they consistently claimed to be the true heirs of John Foxe’s Protestant martyrs. By maintaining that their movement represented the culmination of the tradition celebrated in the Acts and monuments, they were deeply engaged in the historiographical contests which constituted ‘England’s second Reformation’.

The aim of this study was to evaluate the kinetics of local and systemic immune cell populations in mammary secretions and blood samples from cows free of intramammary infections (IMI) and chronically infected with Staphylococcus aureus during active involution. Cows in late lactation that were either uninfected or with chronic S. aureus IMI were included in this study. The percentages of CD14+ cells in blood samples were significantly higher in S. aureus-infected animals than in uninfected animals at days 7 and 21 post-drying-off. However, the percentages of these cells in the mammary secretions from S. aureus-infected quarters were significantly lower compared with those of the uninfected quarters in all evaluated periods. The percentages of CD4+ cells were similar between uninfected animals and S. aureus-infected animals at all involution times in both blood and mammary secretion samples. The percentages of CD8+ cells decreased significantly in mammary secretions of S. aureus-infected quarters compared with those of the uninfected quarters at all involution stages. The percentages of CD21+ cells decreased in blood samples of S. aureus-infected animals compared with uninfected animals at day 21. In secretion samples, the percentages of CD21+ cells decreased in S. aureus-infected quarters at day 7 compared with those of the uninfected quarters. In conclusion, chronic S. aureus IMI induces a significant increase in the number of CD14+ cells in the blood circulation; however, these cells do not appear to migrate to the mammary secretion being potentially retained in the tissue. Although CD4+ and CD8+ lymphocytes did not vary between S. aureus-infected and uninfected animals throughout involution, the decrease in CD8+ cells in mammary secretion from S. aureus-infected animals suggests that these cells are retained in the mammary tissue, fulfilling their specific functions to eliminate intracellularly infected cells. The low number of CD21+ lymphocytes in mammary secretions of infected animals would reduce the humoral defence potential of the gland.

Who is particularly vulnerable to climate change, how do these vulnerabilities intersect, and what do they mean for climate litigation? For the European Convention on Human Rights, these questions have not yet been conclusively answered. Although recent climate rulings recognized the interdependence of human rights and climate change, the European Court of Human Rights has proven reluctant to engage with the fundamental inequity of climate change and the intersecting vulnerabilities that shape how groups and individuals experience its effects. The present article argues that the Court’s staunch refusal to think intersectionally led to its current, untenably high bar for individual victim status in climate cases. It engages critically with this refusal, arguing that the difficulty of issuing model judgments to face large-scale structural problems like climate change should not come at the cost of engaging with the intersecting vulnerabilities and inequalities at the core of such a case. In doing so, it invites a rethinking of vulnerability in the Court’s parlance.

We introduce the super Alternative Daugavet property (super ADP), which lies strictly between the Daugavet property (DP) and the ADP. A Banach space X has the super ADP if for every element x in the unit sphere and every relatively weakly open subset W of the unit ball intersecting the unit sphere, there are an element $y\in W$ and a modulus one scalar θ such that $\|x+\theta y\|$ is almost two. Spaces with the DP satisfy this condition, and it implies the ADP. We first provide examples of super ADP spaces that fail the DP. We show that the norm of a super ADP space is rough, hence the space cannot be Asplund, and we also prove that the space fails the point of continuity property (particularly, the Radon–Nikodým property). In particular, we get examples of spaces with the ADP that fail the super ADP. For a better understanding of the differences between the super ADP, the DP and the ADP, we consider the localizations of these properties and prove that they behave rather differently. As a consequence, we provide characterizations of the super ADP for spaces of vector-valued continuous functions and of vector-valued integrable functions.