The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was concerned about both poverty and race, inextricably linked because of the long and brutal history of racial injustice in housing, employment, and education. What Dr. King called the beloved community reflected a vision of a world built on peace, human dignity, and shared material abundance for all people. To explore this linkage of poverty and race, I employ two related Christian theological concepts: the universal destiny of the goods of the earth and the social mortgage that encumbers all private property to ensure the equitable provision of those goods to all and for all generations. I analyze the ways in which the universal destiny of goods can be mediated through U.S. property law by structuring the ownership and use of land and buildings within the context of social obligation. But while the law has the capacity to ensure ownership, security, and infrastructure for all, U.S. society has failed to make the necessary payments on the social mortgage that would create this reality—a failure due primarily to severe racial and economic injustices, both historical and contemporary. Yet there is hope: I present examples that offer glimpses of the beloved community.

The article analyses the book Economic Constitutionalism in a Turbulent World edited by Skordas, Halmai and Mardikian, criticising the assumptions of societal constitutionalism and ordoliberalism on which it is based. The book concurs with the view that the current crisis of global legal institutions cannot be tackled going back to Nation States. Such an assumption seems to be inspired by societal constitutionalism à la Teubner. In contrast to traditional constitutionalism, which hinges on the dichotomy between constituent and constituted power, societal constitutionalism assigns a central role to independent institutions, whose main function is to avoid any hegemony of one social sub-system over another, in particular of politics over economics. The limit of societal constitutionalism lays in its assumption that the economic sub-system has its own rationality that the political–constitutional system can only irritate, taking for granted that the paradigm of that economic rationality is the one established after 1989, thus implicitly adhering to the neo-ordoliberal vision and legitimising its absolute immanentism. Coming to the materiality of the issues underlying the book, most of the contributions conceive globalisation as an engine for the increase of global prosperity. This confidence rests in the Ricardian theory of comparative advantage. However, the latter is valid only under condition of restrictions on the movement of capital. Another assumption made by several contributions is the theory of the varieties of capitalism, according to which individual models of capitalism tend to stabilise around certain production regimes whose key actors are large firms and business associations. According to an alternative, neo-Kaleckian paradigm, there is no natural convergence of the actors of the economic system towards a mutually beneficial institutional set-up, and it is quite unlikely that, without the external intervention of politics, the system can return to equilibrium.

Buoyancy-driven bubbly flows play pivotal roles in various scenarios, such as the oxygenation and mixing in the upper ocean and the reaction kinetics in chemical and bio-reactors. This work focuses on the convective flow induced by the localised release of large air bubbles ($D_b=3.7$ mm, ${Re}_b=950$) in a water tank, exploring the resulting flow and the transition from laminar to disturbed states as a function of the Rayleigh number ranging from $3\times 10^3$ to $2\times 10^5$. At low ${Ra}$ the flow is smooth and laminar with weak temporal oscillations, while a highly disturbed state appears above a critical value ${Ra}_c$. A theoretical analysis is presented that links the mean flow circulation to the Rayleigh number. Through an experimental investigation, utilising three-dimensional particle tracking velocimetry and flow visualisation, we confirm the theory presented, and characterise the laminar to disturbed transition in the system. These findings not only enhance our fundamental understanding of buoyancy-driven convective flows but also hold significant implications for practical applications, particularly in the optimisation of bio-reactor design and other industrial processes reliant on controlled convective dynamics.

The awareness of words’ morphological structure has been thought to allow generalizing meaning to other, similarly constructed words. Conversely, a large vocabulary is thought to facilitate the recognition of words’ morphological regularities, thereby contributing to morphological awareness. For this reason, morphological awareness and vocabulary have been suggested to be reciprocally associated across development. We followed 242 (girls = 119) Norwegian preschoolers (Mage = 5.5 years) from preschool through Grade 2 and examined the cross-lagged relations between morphological awareness (inflections and derivations) and vocabulary (receptive and expressive). Our results confirm that the traditional cross-lagged panel model shows significant cross-lagged relations between morphological awareness and vocabulary, as previous studies have shown. However, no cross-lagged relations were found when we accounted for longitudinal measured stability through a cross-lagged panel model with lag-2 paths or unmeasured stability through the random intercept cross-lagged panel model. We found that approximately 50% of the variation in morphology and vocabulary was due to highly stable and invariant factors across grades. We discuss how the significant cross-lagged relations found in previous studies could have been due to their not accounting for the right type of stability when using longitudinal panel data.

In the question put forward by Scott et al., implications about the role of immune activation in depressive or other mood disorders were suggested. Low-level inflammation, triggered by the release of inflammatory molecules such as cytokines, has been detected in individuals with major mood disorders. These markers can be present in very low concentrations, posing a significant analytical challenge and complicating their use as reliable biomarkers. In this Perspective, we discuss the potential promise in leveraging nanotechnology and trace-level analysis of biomarkers of immune activation to enhance our molecular understanding of the immune system’s functioning and its association with depressive and other mood disorders. This Perspective critically discusses the analytical challenges of trace biomarker detection, highlighting issues with variability in study methodologies and cohort heterogeneity and emphasising the need for diurnal and longitudinal sampling to study circadian disruption and immune activation. Profiling inflammatory markers in this manner could create individualised molecular fingerprints, revealing disruptions in immune synchronisation with circadian rhythms and detecting abnormalities linked to specific mood disorder subtypes, and particularly ‘circadian depression’. As the profiling of general inflammatory markers may not be sufficient to study any causative relationship between immune activation and major mood disorders, we propose the exploration of novel biomarkers such as extracellular vesicles to support these investigations. The use of nanotechnologies for trace profiling of diurnal variations of inflammatory molecules, in combination with novel biomarkers, offers a promising strategy to develop a molecular understanding of the role of immune activation in depressive and other mood disorders.

The history of environmental education in Australia is political, and fraught with power battles. Indeed, environmental education in Australia (as in many places elsewhere) has always been political. The early calls for environmental education came as a response to the perceived growing environmental crises on the 1960s. At this time, it was seen as a scientific and social priority by scientists, environmentalists and academics, but it was not seen as an educational priority by education departments. Rather, environmental educators were treated as yet another adjectival education lobby group wanting space in an already overcrowded curriculum. There was a time when most state education authorities were engaging with environmental education, but the politicisation of the placement of sustainability as (an optional) cross-curriculum priority has enabled avoidance of the politics of environmental issues and thereby a political stance that is tacitly supporting the status quo of the current neoliberal political systems. This article argues that the times have changed and so has the nature of politics and power bases, and it is time to rethink approaches to environmental education research and recognise that the politics of the past may not be the politics of the future as the generations grow different.

A broad and extensive literature has investigated the cognitive consequences of bilingualism on cognitive control. Results from these studies, while controversial, support the conclusion that speaking a second language confers non-linguistic benefits. Whether other related linguistic experiences, such as dialect use, confer similar benefits remains an underexplored and open question. The common use of a diverse range of local dialects across China provides ideal conditions under which to explore this question. Using a dialectally heterogeneous sample of Mandarin-English bilingual young adults (n = 74), the present study investigated whether differences in dialect proficiency impacted on inhibition and attentional control while accounting for variation in language experience. Dialect proficiency was not associated with improved performance on the Simon task, Attention Network Test, or Flanker task, suggesting no benefits in inhibition or attentional control. Considerations for future studies investigating the influence of Chinese dialect experience on cognitive control are discussed.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play important roles in regulating salt tolerance in Dongxiang wild rice (DXWR, Oryza rufipogon Griff.). The development of salt-responsive miRNA-simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers will significantly bolster research on DXWR, providing novel tools for exploring salt-tolerant genetic resources and advancing the development of salt-tolerant rice varieties. In the present study, a total of 137 miRNA-SSR markers were successfully developed, specifically derived from miRNAs responsive to salt stress in DXWR. Subsequently, a subset of 20 markers was randomly selected for validation across three distinct DXWR populations, along with 35 modern rice varieties. Notably, 13 of these markers exhibited remarkable polymorphism. The polymorphic markers collectively amplified 52 SSR loci, averaging four alleles per locus. The polymorphism information content values associated with these loci spanned from 0.23 to 0.70, with a mean value of 0.49. Particularly noteworthy is the miR162a-SSR marker, which demonstrated distinct allelic patterns and holds potential as a diagnostic marker for discriminating the salt-tolerant rice varieties from the non-tolerant varieties. This study provides a valuable tool for genetic analysis and precision breeding, facilitating the identification and utilization of valuable salt-tolerant genetic resources.

The production of speech and gesture is exquisitely temporally coordinated. In autistic individuals, speech-gesture synchrony during spontaneous discourse is disrupted. To evaluate whether this asynchrony reflects motor coordination versus language production processes, the current study examined deliberately performed hand movements during speech in youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) compared to neurotypical youth. Neurotypical adult performance provided a mature baseline. Participants read aloud rhythmic nursery rhymes, while producing a beat-like hand movement. An automated pixel-change video measure identified kinematic peaks; using smoothed acoustic envelope analyses, we identified peaks in speech. Results indicated few diagnostic group differences in explicit speech-movement coordination, although adolescent performance differed from adults. Adults demonstrated higher tempo and greater rhythmicity in their coordination; this group difference suggests that the method is sufficiently subtle to reveal individual differences and that this form of complex coordination undergoes ongoing maturation beyond adolescence. The sample is small, and thus results are necessarily preliminary. In the context of prior speech-gesture coordination studies, these findings of intact synchrony are consistent with the hypothesis that it is the demands of discourse planning, rather than motor coordination, that have led to prior findings of asynchrony during spontaneous speech; this possibility awaits future research.

Second language (L2) learners need to acquire large vocabularies to approach native-like proficiency. Many controlled experiments have investigated the factors facilitating and hindering word learning; however, few studies have validated these findings in real-world learning scenarios. We use data from the language learning app Lingvist to explore how L2 word learning is affected by valence (positivity/negativity) and concreteness of target words and their linguistic contexts. We found that valence, but not concreteness, affects learning. Users learned positive and negative words better than neutral ones. Moreover, positive words are learned best in positive contexts and negative words in more negative contexts. Word and context valence effects are strongest on the learner’s second encounter with the target word and diminish across subsequent encounters. These findings provide support for theories of embodied cognition and the lexical quality hypothesis and point to the linguistic factors that make learning words, and by extension languages, faster.

We present a detailed analysis of nearly two decades of optical/UV and X-ray data to study the multi-wavelength pre-explosion properties and post-explosion X-ray properties of nearby SN2023ixf located in M101. We find no evidence of precursor activity in the optical to UV down to a luminosity of $\lesssim$$1.0\times10^{5}\, \textrm{L}_{\odot}$, while X-ray observations covering nearly 18 yr prior to explosion show no evidence of luminous precursor X-ray emission down to an absorbed 0.3–10.0 keV X-ray luminosity of $\sim$$6\times10^{36}$ erg s$^{-1}$. Extensive Swift observations taken post-explosion did not detect soft X-ray emission from SN2023ixf within the first $\sim$3.3 days after first light, which suggests a mass-loss rate for the progenitor of $\lesssim$$5\times10^{-4}\,\textrm{M}_{\odot}$ yr$^{-1}$ or a radius of $\lesssim$$4\times10^{15}$ cm for the circumstellar material. Our analysis also suggests that if the progenitor underwent a mass-loss episode, this had to occur $>$0.5–1.5 yr prior to explosion, consistent with previous estimates. Swift detected soft X-rays from SN2023ixf $\sim$$4.25$ days after first light, and it rose to a peak luminosity of $\sim10^{39}$ erg s$^{-1}$ after 10 days and has maintained this luminosity for nearly 50 days post first light. This peak luminosity is lower than expected, given the evidence that SN2023ixf is interacting with dense material. However, this might be a natural consequence of an asymmetric circumstellar medium. X-ray spectra derived from merging all Swift observations over the first 50 days are best described by a two-component bremsstrahlung model consisting of a heavily absorbed and hotter component similar to that found using NuSTAR, and a less-absorbed, cooler component. We suggest that this soft component arises from cooling of the forward shock similar to that found in Type IIn SN2010jl.

This paper assesses the information content and predictive capabilities of Divisia monetary indicators concerning sector-specific economic activities. Although existing evidence strongly supports the informative nature and predictive potential of various Divisia indicators at an aggregate level, studies focusing on Divisia information content for specific industries are notably sparse. Sector-level data provide a more detailed insight into economic and labor market dynamics. By analyzing comprehensive sector-specific data on real GDP, value added, employment, and unemployment rates across thirteen diverse sectors in the United States, this paper investigates the predictive abilities of narrow and broad Divisia money across three categories (original, credit card-augmented, and credit card-augmented inside money). The results show that narrow Divisia money serve as robust predictors of sector-specific economic and labor market indicators, often surpassing the predictive capacity of the conventional Fed funds rate and slightly outperforming broad Divisia measures in relation to these indicators.