Vernacular discourse about science reveals theorizations of it as a power-laden, morally charged experimentation with the world guided by (often implicit) ethical orientations. Applying these vernacular theorizations to interpret professional class science on the continent, the author argues that this science has been shaped most profoundly by the politics of independence. While indigenous projects, European imperialism, and neoliberalism shape scientific institutions, African independence continues to inform the moral and political ends toward which science is thought to work. Understanding the alignment of professional class science with nation-building can help guide the recalibration of science toward the goal of substantive independence.

Cadra cautella is a serious insect pest of stored figs and dates. The irradiation sensitivity of different development stages of C. cautella and large-scale testing of the proposed irradiation quarantine doses (50–500 Gy), were investigated. The impact of a PI dose of 400 Gy on the physiochemical and microbiological quality of dry dates (Bartamoda cv.) stored at room temperature was also investigated. An irradiation dose of 100 Gy prevented egg hatching in the F1 generation when 1–3 days old eggs were irradiated. Irradiation doses of 200 and 300 Gy prevented adult emergence when 2nd and 4th instar larvae were irradiated. When the pupae stage was irradiated, an irradiation dose of 400 Gy prevented the hatchability of F1 generation, indicating that this stage was the most radio-tolerant. The results of large-scale testing of the proposed phytosanitary irradiation dose (400 Gy) applied to 18, 0000 pupae resulted in no reproduction (zero hatching of F1 generation). There were no significant differences in the physiochemical properties of stored dates during the storage period at room temperature. Stable ESR signal intensity was recorded for 6 months in all parts of the irradiated fruits, and the intensity was highest in the kernel. The PI dose of 400 Gy also slightly reduced all microorganisms' counts. In conclusion, the dose level of 400 Gy stopped the reproduction potential of C. cautella. and they maintained the quality characteristics of dry date Bartamoda fruits during storage at room temperature for 6 months in tightly closed packages.

Let $[a_1(x),a_2(x),\ldots ,a_n(x),\ldots ]$ be the continued fraction expansion of $x\in [0,1)$ and $q_n(x)$ be the denominator of its nth convergent. The irrationality exponent and Khintchine exponent of x are respectively defined by

$$ \begin{align*} \overline{v}(x)=2+\limsup_{n\to\infty}\frac{\log a_{n+1}(x)}{\log q_n(x)} \quad \text{and}\quad \gamma(x)=\lim_{n\to\infty}\frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=1}^{n}\log a_i(x). \end{align*} $$

We study the multifractal spectrum of the irrationality exponent and the Khintchine exponent for continued fractions with nondecreasing partial quotients. For any $v>2$, we completely determine the Hausdorff dimensions of the sets $\{x\in [0,1): a_1(x)\leq a_2(x)\leq \cdots , \overline {v}(x)=v\}$ and

$$ \begin{align*}\bigg\{x\in[0,1): a_1(x)\leq a_2(x)\leq\cdots, \lim\limits_{n\to\infty}\frac{\log a_1(x)+\log a_2(x)+\cdots+\log a_n(x)}{\psi(n)}=1\bigg\},\end{align*} $$

where $\psi :\mathbb {N}\rightarrow \mathbb {R}^+$ is a function satisfying $\psi (n)\to \infty $ as $n\to \infty $.

The new EU Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (“MiCA”) emphasises the prevention of market abuse as one of its five main objectives. This paper critically analyzes MiCA’s provisions on market abuse (Title VI), applying the new rules to the primary categories of crypto-asset market integrity risks to provide a coherent interpretation. In doing so, we consider both the pre-existing legal framework for protecting market integrity, chiefly the Market Abuse Regulation (“MAR”), and the unique features of crypto-asset markets. We find that by largely replicating MAR, MiCA presents “new wine in old bottles” challenges, as crypto-assets introduce novel issues that the legislator attempts to address with a subset of existing tools. The extent to which “decentralized finance” (DeFi) activities will incur liability under MiCA’s anti-market abuse provisions remains unclear, particularly regarding various blockchain network participants. Furthermore, classifying MEV strategies as market abuse may prove difficult. The absence of certain safe-harbor provisions present in MAR, such as those for self-insiders and buy-back and stabilisation schemes, may create uncertainty and potentially chill legitimate market behavior under MiCA.

Court restructuring has become a salient national political issue, with proposals to increase the number of justices on the US Supreme Court gaining traction in response to various Court controversies. However, relatively little attention has been paid to state-level efforts, some successful, to increase the number of justices on state supreme courts. Although the number of justices on the US Supreme Court has not been changed since 1869, the size of most state supreme courts has been less stable. To place recent state supreme court expansions into context, this article analyzes the historical dynamics of state supreme court expansion. Analyzing an original dataset that includes every change made to the size of a state supreme court since 1789, it finds that court expansion has been more likely when the political competitiveness of a state is low and when state judicial selection and retention systems provide for lower levels of judicial independence.

We consider the steady flow of a viscoelastic film over an inclined plane featuring periodic trenches normal to the main flow direction. The trenches have a square cross-section and side length 5–8 times the capillary length. Owing to the orientation of the substrate, the film fails to coat the topographical feature entirely, forming a second gas–liquid interface inside the trench and two three-phase contact lines at the points where the free surface meets the wall of the trench. The volume of entrapped air depends on material and flow parameters and geometric conditions. We develop a computational model and carry out detailed numerical simulations based on the finite element method to investigate this flow. We solve the two-dimensional mass and momentum conservation equations using the exponential Phan-Thien & Tanner constitutive model to account for the rheology of the viscoelastic material. Due to the strong nonlinearity, multiple steady solutions possibly connected by turning points forming hysteresis loops, transcritical bifurcations and isolated solution branches are revealed by pseudo-arc-length continuation. We perform a thorough parametric analysis to investigate the combined effects of elasticity, inertia, capillarity and viscosity on the characteristics of each steady flow configuration. The results of our simulations indicate that fluid inertia and elasticity may or may not promote wetting, while shear thinning and hydrophilicity always promote the wetting of the substrate. Interestingly, there are conditions under which the transition to the inertial regime is not smooth, but a hysteresis loop arises, signifying an abrupt change in the film hydrodynamics. Additionally, we investigate the effect of the geometrical characteristics of the substrate, and our results indicate that there is a unique combination of the geometry and viscoelastic properties that either maximizes or minimizes the wetting lengths.

We evaluate three measures of state legislative professionalism: Squire’s (1992) index that measures professionalism relative to the US House, Bowen and Greene’s (2014b) two-dimensional scaling, and legislative operating expenditures per member, an older measure that remains in occasional use. Replications of 18 recent articles show that these three measures regularly produce significantly different estimates of the effect of professionalism, particularly in longitudinal analysis; when they do, the choice of measure often affects whether other central variables retain a significant relationship with the dependent variable. These divergent results appear to reflect differences among these measures in terms of missingness, vulnerability to outliers, measurement of session length, and whether to benchmark to the US House. Researchers seeking a general indicator of professionalism should consider these differences when choosing an appropriate measure.

For the past decade, U.S. communications policymakers have been debating the need for net-neutrality regulation of “dominant” communications carrier platforms. One of the reasons advanced for regulating these carriers derives from a fear that carriers could reduce competition in the production and distribution of video media through their ownership of media companies, but is there any evidence supporting the notion that vertically integrated communications companies have successfully used such a strategy? This paper provides evidence from the financial markets that carrier integration into video production has not redounded to the benefit of these companies’ stockholders. In fact, this integration appears to reduce the value that investors place on such carriers, a result that suggests that the difficulties in managing a large, vertically integrated media and communications company more than offset any benefits (if any) that may derive from anticompetitive behavior induced by vertical integration.

We study the effect of surface texture on an overlying turbulent flow for the case of textures made of an alternating slip/no-slip pattern, a common model for superhydrophobic surfaces, but also a particularly simple form of texture. For texture sizes $L^+ \gtrsim 25$, we have previously reported that, even though the texture effectively imposes homogeneous slip boundary conditions on the overlying, background turbulence, this is not its sole effect. The effective conditions only produce an origin offset on the background turbulence, which remains otherwise smooth-wall-like. For actual textures, however, as their size increases from $L^+ \gtrsim 25$ the flow progressively departs from this smooth-wall-like regime, resulting in additional shear Reynolds stress and increased drag, in a non-homogeneous fashion that could not be reproduced by the effective boundary conditions. This paper focuses on the underlying physical mechanism of this phenomenon. We argue that it is caused by the nonlinear interaction of the texture-coherent flow, directly induced by the surface topology, and the background turbulence, as it acts directly on the latter and alters it. This does not occur at the boundary where effective conditions are imposed, but within the overlying flow itself, where the interaction acts as a forcing on the governing equations of the background turbulence, and takes the form of cross-advective terms between the latter and the texture-coherent flow. We show this by conducting simulations where we remove the texture and introduce additional, forcing terms in the Navier–Stokes equations, in addition to the equivalent homogeneous slip boundary conditions. The forcing terms capture the effect of the nonlinear interaction on the background turbulence without the need to resolve the surface texture. We show that, when the forcing terms are derived accounting for the amplitude modulation of the texture-coherent flow by the background turbulence, they quantitatively capture the changes in the flow up to texture sizes $L^+ \approx 70{-}100$. This includes not just the roughness function but also the changes in the flow statistics and structure.

In the context of climate change, the impacts of extreme weather events are increasingly recognised as a significant threat to mental health in the UK. As clinicians and researchers with an interest in mental health, we have a collective responsibility to help understand and mitigate these impacts. To achieve this, however, it is vital to have an appreciation of the relevant policy and regulatory frameworks. In this feature article, a collaboration amongst mental health and policy experts, we provide an overview of the integration of mental health within current climate policies and regulations in the UK, including gaps and opportunities. We argue that current policy and regulatory frameworks are lacking in coverage, ambition, detail and implementation, as increases in weather extremes and their negative impacts on mental health outpace action. For example, across current national and local climate policies, there is almost no reference to the impacts of extreme weather events on mental health. Whilst alarming, this provides scope for future research to fill evidence gaps and inform policy and regulatory change. We call for mental health and policy experts to work together to improve our understanding of underlying mechanisms and develop practical interventions, helping to bring mental health within climate policy and regulatory frameworks.

Latin America historically has had some of the strictest abortion laws in the world, making unsafe procedures a main cause of mortality among women and girls. However, in the context of the Green Wave, three countries recently have amply decriminalized access to abortion: Mexico (2021, 2023), Colombia (2022), and Argentina (2020) (Uruguay did so in 2012). The recent wave of decriminalization is the culmination of larger, historical processes that involved the gradual judicialization of reproductive rights in the region. Courts have been a central part of the story. In these three cases, arguments advanced by state and nonstate actors in favor of decriminalization significantly built on jurisprudence developed over many years. The process of abortion decriminalization has been partly a tale of gradual judicialization.

In Couette flow, the liquid atoms adjacent to a solid substrate may have a finite average tangential velocity relative to the substrate. This so-called slip has been observed frequently. However, the particular molecular-level mechanisms that give rise to liquid slip are poorly understood. It is often assumed that liquid slip occurs by surface diffusion whereby atoms independently move from one substrate equilibrium site to another. We show that under certain conditions, liquid slip is due not to singular independent molecular motion, but to localized nonlinear waves that propagate at speeds that are orders of magnitude greater than the slip velocity at the liquid–solid interface. Using non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations, we find the properties of these waves and the conditions under which they are to be expected as the main progenitors of slip. We also provide a theoretical guide to the properties of these nonlinear waves by using an augmented Frenkel–Kontorova model. The new understanding provided by our results may lead to enhanced capabilities of the liquid–solid interface, for heat transfer, mixing, and surface-mediated catalysis.