What can queer theory, and drag performance, contribute to music semiotics? This paper proffers ‘dragging’ as a socio-cultural semiotics that demonstrates how musical meanings are dynamically queered through drag lip-sync performance. Departing from approaches to meaning and semiotics in musicology and popular music studies, I intervene with direct insights from queer theory. I draw out oscillations between queer theoretical perspectives on temporality and (post)structural concepts such as assemblages and mediation as they have been incorporated into music studies. ‘Drag’, not just an art form, is here developed as a specific kind of spatial-temporal mediation: dragging is understood as the displacement and heterochronization of meaning, where musical objects are dragged ‘out of time’ and ‘out of space’ into the alien world of queer experience. Dragging as a conceptual instrument allows us to begin answering questions of how meanings – and their political stakes – coalesce inside and outside, within and without, music.

The field of developmental psychopathology has grown broadly. Here, I draw upon lessons learned from Dante Cicchetti to highlight areas that show promise for continued disciplinary advancement. These include attention to equifinality and multifinality in the conceptualization of initial study designs, and more emphasis on specificity in accounting for developmental change. A shift from reliance on external events and towards greater diversity of research approaches will allow researchers to devote attention to the variety of ways that individuals come to understand and then respond to their own life experiences. The field of developmental psychopathology holds tremendous promise for advancing basic science about human development that can be applied to create interventions that improve the well-being of individuals and address significant societal issues.

The incidence of obesity related glomerulopathy (ORG) is rising worldwide with very limited treatment methods. Paralleled with the gut-kidney axis theory, beneficial effects of butyrate, one of short-chain fatty acids produced by gut microbiota, on metabolism and certain kidney diseases have gained growing attention. However, the effects of butyrate on ORG and its underlying mechanism are largely unexplored. In this study, a mice model of ORG was established with high-fat diet (HFD) feeding for 16 weeks, and sodium butyrate treatment was initiated at the 8th week. Podocytes injury, oxidative stress, and mitochondria function were evaluated in mice kidney and validated in vitro in palmitic acid (PA) treated-MPC5 cells. Further, the molecular mechanisms of butyrate on podocytes were explored. Compared with controls, sodium butyrate treatment alleviated kidney injuries and renal oxidative stress in HFD-fed mice. In MPC5 cells, butyrate ameliorated PA-induced podocyte damage and helped maintain the structure and function of the mitochondria. Moreover, the effects of butyrate on podocytes were mediated via GPR43-Sirt3 signal pathway, as evidenced by the diminished effects of butyrate with the intervention of GPR43 or Sirt3 inhibitors. In summary, we conclude that butyrate has therapeutic potential for the treatment of ORG. It attenuates HFD-induced ORG and podocytes injuries through the activation of GPR43-Sirt3 signaling pathway.

The paper by Castaing et al. (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 204, 1989, pp. 1–30) on turbulent Rayleigh–Bénard convection has been one of the most impactful papers on the subject – not by giving the right and complete answers but by developing versatile concepts and by asking the right questions, namely: (i) What is the overall flow organization? (ii) What is the dependence of the Nusselt number ${\textit {Nu}}$ (the dimensionless heat transport) on the Rayleigh number ${\textit {Ra}}$ (the thermal driving strength)? (iii) What is the ultimate state of turbulence for extremely large ${\textit {Ra}}$? Thanks to Castaing et al. having asked the right questions, the field has made tremendous progress over the last 35 years.

Universities face a critical crossroads, in need of swift, targeted, and efficient actions to address future challenges. This necessities a strategic approach to updating and assessing engineering design education. Efforts to improve teaching and learning require systematic change in many universities, yet research on structuring such change is scarce. Few studies have combined a systems perspective with a functional operational level. This research embeds design thinking to structure to isolated actions. Drawing from an extensive literature review of educational change frameworks and several illustrative cases, this article demonstrates the potential of design-driven change. It highlights how dynamic interrelations can facilitate educational transformations across diverse academic levels. By presenting an educational ecosystem as a framework for systematic educational change, design thinking functions as a catalyst for educational transformation. The article also presents case findings that strengthen supportive actions ingrained in existing change research frameworks connecting, them to a transparent approach for sustainable and careful decision-making.

During the 20th century, dealing with grief through an ongoing involvement with the deceased (such as speaking to their grave) was seen as pathological by Western authors such as Sigmund Freud. Nowadays, we are presented with the opportunity to continue interacting with digital representations of the deceased. As a result, the paper adopts an Ubuntu perspective, i.e., a sub-Saharan African philosophy focussed on community and relationship to provide a toolkit for using this emerging technology. I will argue that the Ubuntu framework I propose contributes to the use of griefbots in two ways. The first is that it shows that it is morally permissible to use griefbots to assuage our grief. The second is that it delineates how we can ethically use the technology. To do so, I split my analysis into four sections. In the first section, I show that meaningful relationships can occur between the bereaved and griefbots. This will be done by exploring the Western theory of continuing bonds proposed by Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman and Steven Nickman. In my second, I flesh out my Ubuntu framework according to Thaddeus Metz’s accounts on Ubuntu as a modal-relational theory. In my third section, I apply my Ubuntu framework to the case of Roman Mazurenko. Furthermore, I consider some counterarguments to the Ubuntu framework regarding privacy, commercialisation and people replacement. Finally, I conclude that, despite these limitations, the Ubuntu framework positively contributes to determining whether we should communicate with the dead through griefbots to assuage our grief.

In a two-dimensional plane, entire solutions of the Allen–Cahn type equation with a finite Morse index necessarily have finite ends. In the case that the nonlinearity is a sine function, all the finite-end solutions have been classified. However, for the classical Allen–Cahn nonlinearity, the structure of the moduli space of these solutions remains unknown. We construct in this paper new finite-end solutions to the Allen–Cahn equation, which will be called fence of saddle solutions, by gluing saddle solutions together. Our construction can be generalized to the case of gluing multiple four-end solutions, with some of their ends being almost parallel.

A long-standing issue in pipe flow physics is whether the friction of the fluid follows a logarithmic or an algebraic decay. In 2005, McKeon et al. (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 538, 2005, pp. 429–443) published a detailed analysis of new measurements in the Princeton facility, and apparently settled the debate by showing that ‘the log is the law’. Almost 20 years later, no better data are presently available to reinforce their statement. Still, the story may not be totally over, and this is bad news for mathematicians who were hoping to get a long awaited final answer to one of their most elusive questions.

The nanoscale is the new frontier of fluid dynamics and its phenomenology can echo at the macroscale as in the canonical example of drop impact on a planar substrate. Unprecedented advances in measurement technology have recently equipped fluid dynamicists with the ability to probe nanoscale effects. The paper by Li et al. (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 785, 2015, R2) uses ultrafast imaging at the hundreds of nanoseconds scale to resolve the first contact between the drop and the substrate and thereby reveal the effect of prescribed nano-roughness on contact line motion.

This article looks again at the history of British migration policy in the 1940s and 1950s by centering international and imperial politics, and by drawing on archives related to shipping. These sources suggest that the British government sought to reactivate a system of race-segregated mobility across the Empire-Commonwealth after the Second World War. This involved subsidizing fares for emigrants bound for Australia, transporting migrants from Europe to the UK, and withdrawing shipping from routes that connected the Caribbean to the UK. Very soon, however, these policies came under strain. There were not enough deep-sea ships to meet demand for berths to Australia or to bring over recruited European migrants. Then the Australian government found new ways to ship migrants from continental Europe by signing a deal with the International Refugee Organization, challenging UK policy to keep Australian immigration British. Meanwhile, new routes were opened up from the Caribbean and South Asia to the UK. These trends raised a host of dilemmas for policymakers and all related to transport infrastructure. Thinking about transport can deepen our understanding of migration history, and the article's conclusion suggests some of the ways that taking such an approach can contribute to existing explanations for the government's fateful decision to amend the UK's nationality and citizenship legislation during the 1960s.

Depicting transgender persons in comics without falling into visual caricature and thereby perpetuating harmful stereotypes can be a delicate task. In this discussion, I draw upon the notion of picture-reading to argue that, despite this fact, comics as a medium is particularly well-suited—both formally and in terms of production-relevant factors—toward capturing and communicating the complexities of transgender experience.

In light of the growing threat of climate change and urgency of mitigation at the societal and individual level, an exponentially growing body of research has addressed how and what people think about climate change—ranging from basic judgments of truth and attitudes about risk to predictions of future outcomes. However, the field is also beset by a striking variety of items and scales used to measure climate change beliefs, with notable differences in content, untested structural assumptions, and unsatisfactory or unknown psychometric properties. In a series of four studies (total N = 2,678), scales for the assessment of climate change beliefs are developed that are comprehensive and balanced in content and psychometrically sound. The latent construct structure is tested, and evidence of high rank-order stability (1-year retest-reliability) and predictive validity (for policy preferences and actual behavior) provided.

Quantum computing has been studied over the past four decades based on two computational models of quantum circuits and quantum Turing machines. To capture quantum polynomial-time computability, a new recursion-theoretic approach was taken lately by Yamakami [J. Symb. Logic 80, pp. 1546–1587, 2020] by way of recursion schematic definition, which constitutes six initial quantum functions and three construction schemes of composition, branching, and multi-qubit quantum recursion. By taking a similar approach, we look into quantum polylogarithmic-time computability and further explore the expressing power of elementary schemes designed for such quantum computation. In particular, we introduce an elementary form of the quantum recursion, called the fast quantum recursion, and formulate $EQS$ (elementary quantum schemes) of “elementary” quantum functions. This class $EQS$ captures exactly quantum polylogarithmic-time computability, which forms the complexity class BQPOLYLOGTIME. We also demonstrate the separation of BQPOLYLOGTIME from NLOGTIME and PPOLYLOGTIME. As a natural extension of $EQS$, we further consider an algorithmic procedural scheme that implements the well-known divide-and-conquer strategy. This divide-and-conquer scheme helps compute the parity function, but the scheme cannot be realized within our system $EQS$.

Advancements in wearable robots aim to improve user motion, motor control, and overall experience by minimizing energetic cost (EC). However, EC is challenging to measure and it is typically indirectly estimated through respiratory gas analysis. This study introduces a novel EMG-based objective function that captures individuals’ natural energetic expenditure during walking. The objective function combines information from electromyography (EMG) variables such as intensity and muscle synergies. First, we demonstrate the similarity of the proposed objective function, calculated offline, to the EC during walking. Second, we minimize and validate the EMG-based objective function using an online Bayesian optimization algorithm. The walking step frequency is chosen as the parameter to optimize in both offline and online approaches in order to simplify experiments and facilitate comparisons with related research. Compared to existing studies that use EC as the objective function, results demonstrated that the optimization of the presented objective function reduced the number of iterations and, when compared with gradient descent optimization strategies, also reduced convergence time. Moreover, the algorithm effectively converges toward an optimal step frequency near the user’s preferred frequency, positively influencing EC reduction. The good correlation between the estimated objective function and measured EC highlights its consistency and reliability. Thus, the proposed objective function could potentially optimize lower limb exoskeleton assistance and improve user performance and human–robot interaction without the need for challenging respiratory gas measurements.

Antenna arrays are a main driver of next generation millimeter-wave communication and radar systems as shrinking antenna sizes leverage larger arrays to compensate for reduced link budget. However, conventional phase controlled arrays exhibit a frequency dependent scan angle that appears as loss to a fixed counterpart. Bandwidth limitations introduced by the so-called beam squint effect hinder larger array sizes and data rates thereby generating a demand for timed arrays as a solution. This paper gives a quantified overview of the beam squint phenomenon, different hardware architectures as well as evaluation parameters and common shortcomings of true-time delay (TTD) elements. A broad variety of TTD realizations from literature are compared by their operational principles and performance. Finally, the delay interpolation principle, its non-idealities, and their impact on a hierarchically time delay controlled D-band antenna array are described. Extended content on a previously published, continuously tunable TTD implementation at a center frequency of 144 GHz with a bandwidth of 26 GHz and a delay range of 1.75 ps that requires only 0.53 × 0.3 mm2 of core chip area is presented. Measurement results have been obtained from a demonstrator manufactured in 130 nm BiCMOS technology.