Progesterone is an endogenous hormone which is derived from cholesterol steroids. It is secreted in women principally by the corpus luteum in the ovaries during normal menstrual cycles. Progesterone exerts a number of essential effects vital for the support and maintenance of a pregnancy. The role of progesterone in threatened and recurrent miscarriage was a matter of debate for many decades, until the findings of the PROMISE and PRISM trials. Vaginal micronized progesterone may increase the live birth rate for women with a history of one or more previous miscarriages and early pregnancy bleeding, with likely no difference in adverse events. There remains an uncertainty over the effectiveness and safety of alternative progestogen treatments for threatened and recurrent miscarriage.

We consider relativistic stars and find the equations of gravitational collapse. In particular, we write the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkov (TOV) equation. We define general stellar models. We find the Chandrasekhar limit for white dwarfs to break electron degeneracy pressure and collapse to a neutron start, and the TOV limit for neutron stars to break neutron degeneracy pressure and collapse to a black hole. Finally, we describe a simple model (Oppenheimer–Snyder) for collapse to a black hole, and the resulting Penrose diagram.

The standard philosophical model of intentional action-explanation appeals to states of belief and desire to do the explaining. This chapter evaluates what philosophers have had to say about the nature of desire. Chapter 5 showed that the ordinary notion of desire encompasses two very different kinds of mental state: goals and intentions, on the one hand, and affective or emotion-like forms of desire, on the other. The focus here is on the latter. The chapter shows that desires of this sort always incorporate anticipatory pleasure, and that pleasure itself is an analog-magnitude representation of value. The chapter begins with what the science can tell us about the respective natures of pleasure and desire, before comparing the results with claims made by armchair-philosophers. Many of the latter are false, albeit sometimes containing partial insights.

The chapter gives an overview of dispute settlement during the Old Regime. Contrary to older assessments of the historiography, dispute settlement retained its importance in this era, both in qualitative and in quantitative terms. This was true for the field of theoretical literatures, which, from the last decades of the seventeenth century, dealt intensively with the subject. Normally, a clear distinction was made between an elected arbiter, who definitively decided a dispute, and a mediator, who only made peace proposals. Diplomatic practice, which made intensive use of the instruments of dispute settlement until the last decades of the eighteenth century, was much more flexible. The transitions between arbitration and mediation were fluid; the boundaries of confession and rank were also frequently crossed. In Old Regime Europe, mediation was also used for the first time in peace negotiations between Christian and Islamic powers. New forms of mediation emerged as well. One was the armed mediation, in which a power intervened in a conflict uninvited and set a peace ultimatum; this could easily lead to war. This indicates that dispute settlement did not automatically contribute to an increase in peace; the relationship of dispute settlement to war and peace remained rather ambivalent in Old Regime Europe.

This chapter charts the profound transformations undergone by diplomacy, both secular and papal, in an age of dramatic intellectual, political and military upheaval. Considering both scholarship and practice, the chapter assesses the rise of ‘resident diplomacy’ and highlights the new structures that were put in place in order to manage longer missions. The investigation of the right to send ambassadors reveals persistent traits of pluralism in early modern Europe, while the plurality of diplomatic envoys and roles is taken into account to make the complexity of the notion of diplomatic status more apparent: this status, in fact, cannot be reduced to that of a fully fledged ambassador exclusively committed to the object of their official mission. Information-gathering, negotiation and mediation are singled out as the most significant diplomatic functions. Changes in the conception of diplomatic inviolability and immunity are also considered, and include the emergence of the idea of extraterritoriality concerning both the person of the ambassador and diplomatic premises.