Perception studies describe numerous discrete morphological facial features as important to judgments of various characteristics. Interestingly, little is known about whether people actually direct their visual attention to these features and how specific contexts or sex affect this attention. We, therefore, examined visual attention to faces in the context of intersexual (opposite-sex assessment of attractiveness) and intrasexual (same-sex assessment of dominance) selection.

In total, 93 women and 33 men rated 80 high-resolution facial photographs of men and women while their gaze was recorded using eye-tracking. To explore patterns of raters’ attention to faces and specific facial features, we used the number of fixations, fixation duration, and visit duration as visual attention measures.

Women directed more visual attention towards the faces of potential partners (more fixations) than potential rivals, and men had longer visit duration when assessing potential partners than rivals. Facial features that acquired the most visual attention across contexts and sexes were the eyes, nose, and mouth, but small differences between the sexes and contexts in visual attention were found for other facial regions suggested by previous perception studies, such as the chin and the cheeks indicating their importance in specific judgements.

Evolutionary scientists argue that prosociality has been central to human ecological success. Theoretical models and behavioral experiments have found that prosociality, and cooperation in particular, is conditional and context dependent, that individuals vary in their propensity to cooperate, and that reciprocity stabilizes these behaviors within groups. Experimental findings have had limited validation with observations of behavior in natural settings, especially in organizational contexts. Here, we report in situ measurements of collective action where reciprocity is abundant in organizations embedded in a cash economy. We study small ‘food clubs’ where members share bulk purchases and are considered to be heavily dependent on cooperation. We take advantage high resolution data of economic interactions for 1,528 individuals across 35 clubs over a combined 107 years of operation. We develop a network method to detect different directional and temporal forms of economic reciprocity, and statistically classify individual behavioral types akin to those in experiments. We find abundant direct reciprocity, supplemented by indirect reciprocity, and that members of most clubs can be identified as consistent reciprocators. This study provides initial observational evidence that economic reciprocity may be more abundant in real world settings, sharpening the findings of the behavioral study of cooperation and contributing to the more naturalistic study of reciprocity and prosociality.

The suffixing bias (the tendency to exploit suffixes more often than prefixes to express grammatical meanings) in world’s languages was identified a century ago, yet we still lack a clear account for why it emerged, namely, whether the bias emerged because general cognitive mechanisms shape languages to be more easily processed by available cognitive machinery, or the bias is speech-specific and is determined by domain-specific mechanisms. We used statistical learning (SL) experiments to compare processing of suffixed and prefixed sequences on linguistic and non-linguistic material. SL is not speech-specific, and we observed the suffixing preference only on linguistic material, suggesting its language-specific origin. Moreover, morphological properties of native languages (existence of grammatical prefixes) modulate suffixing preferences in SL experiments only on linguistic material, suggesting limited cross-domain transfer.

The growth and development of schistosomes are tightly regulated by various receptors throughout their life cycle. Each stage of the parasite inhabits a distinct habitat and responds to different factors that drive its growth and development. With two hosts involved in its life cycle (mammalian and snail), the parasite must go through additional free-living stages to transition between them. Moreover, communication between male and female worms is essential for the maturation of females. The ability of adult schistosomes to survive in human hosts for up to thirty years demonstrates their capacity to efficiently utilize host nutrients for metabolic processes and growth. In Schistosoma mansoni, receptors mediate the utilization of growth factors derived from both the parasite itself and the host. Nuclear receptors, in particular, collaborate with other proteins to regulate the expression of genes essential for various developmental functions. Receptors also play a pivotal role in RNA export, which is crucial for the parasite development. Additionally, neurotransmitter receptors are essential for the growth and development of larval stages. This review aims to elucidate the mechanisms by which these receptors regulate cell proliferation, differentiation, and maturation throughout the parasite life cycle. Understanding these processes could provide insights into the role of receptors in Schistosoma mansoni development and potentially lead to innovative therapeutic strategies to combat human schistosomiasis.

In this article, it is shown that the lattice of C$^*$-covers of an operator algebra does not contain enough information to distinguish operator algebras up to completely isometric isomorphism. In addition, four natural equivalences of the lattice of C$^*$-covers are developed and proven to be distinct. The lattice of C$^*$-covers of direct sums and tensor products are studied. Along the way key examples are found of operator algebras, each of which generates exactly n C$^*$-algebras up to $*$-isomorphism, and a simple operator algebra that is not similar to a C$^*$-algebra.

The convergence of medical and technological developments has continued to transform the delivery of medical care in disaster environments, incorporating advances from telecommunications to physiologic monitoring, artificial intelligence, and computer vision. However, unless the interconnected nature of these developments is conceptualized with a proper framework, there is a risk of overlooking applications, developing silos, and limiting interoperability between innovations. To develop such a framework, this piece integrated a review of current literature, expert insights, and global market trends to propose 4 categories of innovations: (1) Enabling Technologies, (2) Signal Acquisition, (3) Data Utilization, and (4) Applications. Applications can be further subdivided into 4 use cases: (1) Disease and Injury Surveillance and Detection, (2) Population Protection, (3) Responder Protection, and (4) Disease and Injury Management. Practitioners, policymakers, and private sector counterparts can utilize this framework to change their clinical practices, allocate funds in a stepwise fashion, or prioritize development projects, respectively.

Most Supreme Court (SCOTUS) clerk studies explore selection, or impact, during the clerkship. The existing research examining the benefits of clerking for those returning to the Court suggests relational expertise from clerking for a specific justice, not process expertise from the clerkship, enhances SCOTUS oral argument success. Our study suggests the benefits of prior appellate clerkships likely stem from both relational and process expertise. Specifically, justices tend to favor parties represented by former US Court of Appeals (USCA) clerks who never clerked for the SCOTUS and prior SCOTUS clerks, even when the clerk did not serve in the justice’s chambers.

Does prosecuting perpetrators of repression under a dictatorship promote public support for human rights and the courts? We argue that convicting perpetrators in human rights trials reduces public acceptance of these violations. However, while convictions signal judicial efforts to end impunity, they may also call attention to the politicized process by which transitional justice begins. We estimate the effects of human rights trial verdicts on attitudes in Argentina, a country ruled by a military dictatorship from 1976–1983 that, twenty-five years later, initiated sweeping human rights trials for past repression. Using observational day-level opinion data from a survey fielded around the guilty verdict for one of the dictatorship’s top-ranking generals, we find the trial verdict increased the public’s rejection of torture and political killings. Yet belief in judicial fairness declined. These results suggest that trials solidify public commitments to human rights, but confidence in the judiciary is not a necessary condition for this effect.

This study examines the political communication strategies of the Italian Marxist-Leninist and neo-Stalinist party, Sovereign and Popular Democracy (DSP), through a qualitative thematic analysis of its online discourse. The analysis identifies the core elements of the party’s agenda and assesses their potential alignment with the red-brownist movement, often linked to the pro-Russian far right. The research investigates the historical and political intersections between the Stalinist communist sphere and the postfascist Eurasianist and red-brownist factions. Particular attention is given to their shared anti-Western stance and historical connections to ‘left-wing fascism’ in the post-Second World War era. Italy provides a crucial case study, given its postwar role as a hub for radical movements on both the left and the right. The analysis also considers the ideological trajectory of the Italian far-right, particularly the Jeune Europe movement, to situate DSP’s discourse within broader historical and ideological frameworks.

Given a fixed small graph H and a larger graph G, an H-factor is a collection of vertex-disjoint subgraphs $H'\subset G$, each isomorphic to H, that cover the vertices of G. If G is the complete graph $K_n$ equipped with independent U(0,1) edge weights, what is the lowest total weight of an H-factor? This problem has previously been considered for $H=K_2$, for example. We show that if H contains a cycle, then the minimum weight is sharply concentrated around some $L_n = \Theta(n^{1-1/d^*})$ (where $d^*$ is the maximum 1-density of any subgraph of H). Some of our results also hold for H-covers, where the copies of H are not required to be vertex-disjoint.

Answer set programming (ASP), a well-known declarative logic programming paradigm, has recently found practical application in Process Mining. In particular, ASP has been used to model tasks involving declarative specifications of business processes. In this area, Declare stands out as the most widely adopted declarative process modeling language, offering a means to model processes through sets of constraints valid traces must satisfy, that can be expressed in linear temporal logic over finite traces (LTL$_{\text {f}}$). Existing ASP-based solutions encode Declare constraints by modeling the corresponding LTL$_{\text {f}}$ formula or its equivalent automaton which can be obtained using established techniques. In this paper, we introduce a novel encoding for Declare constraints that directly models their semantics as ASP rules, eliminating the need for intermediate representations. We assess the effectiveness of this novel approach on two Process Mining tasks by comparing it with alternative ASP encodings and a Python library for Declare.

The global health crisis prompted Arabian Gulf states to implement extensive social protection measures to address public health and economic challenges. This study critically examines welfare reforms enacted by six Gulf countries – Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman – through the theoretical lenses of Welfare Regime Theory and Punctuated Equilibrium Theory. Initially, governments temporarily expanded exclusion-based welfare systems, primarily benefiting citizens, to support broader populations, including migrant workers. However, the long-term sustainability of these expansions remains uncertain. The findings suggest that although the crisis created a temporary policy window for welfare expansion, there was no fundamental reconfiguration of these exclusionary welfare regimes. This study enhances the understanding of the adaptability of Gulf welfare states during global crises and the potential for future policy shifts.