The windmill palm is a distinctive outdoor ornamental palm adapted to cooler climates. Weeds pose significant challenges in palm nurseries, particularly during seedling and establishment stages. This research was conducted in a nursery with 5,500 windmill palm seedlings, starting in April 2014 when the palm trees were three years old. Experiments were terminated in October 2018 when weed control was no longer necessary due to the advanced growth stages of the palm trees. The objectives were to determine the weed composition and diversity, elucidate the effects of mechanical weed management (MWM) on growth rate of palm, and develop a sustainable program to maximize palm tree growth through effective weed management and soil tillage. Owing to the lack of registered nursery herbicides in Türkiye, weed control was performed mechanically using garden hoeing machines between rows and hand hoeing for intra-row strips. The most common and dense weeds were purple nutsedge, annual mercury, and common purslane in summer-autumn, and burning nettle in winter-spring. In 2014, weed densities were 100, 127, and 145 weeds m–2 for MWM, hand-weeding (HW), and nontreated (NT), respectively. Transplanted palm seedlings required at least two, ideally three growing seasons of intensive weed control until the palm tree crowns block sunlight and suppress weed growth. The research indicated palm trees in the MWM treatment had approximately 84 leaves and a height of 210 cm by October 2018, compared to 54 leaves and 136 cm for HW, and 40 leaves and 100 cm for NT. These results highlight the critical role of MWM in promoting optimal growth of Chinese windmill palms. Effective and sustainable weed management, combining MWM and HW, is essential for producing high-quality palm trees, which are valuable insights for nursery managers and contribute to best practices for cultivating windmill palm trees in similar climatic regions.

Lightning-related accidents were relatively frequent among age-of-sail seafarers, due to tall ships’ exposure and prominence above the sea. Yet lightning remains largely neglected in the historiography on sailors’ experiences. Examining a range of contemporary medical and philosophical literature, shipboard surgeons’ journals, operational correspondence and seamen’s memoirs, this article argues that lightning strikes created unique moments of epistemological and social crisis aboard naval ships. With its awesome multi-sensorial manifestations, divine symbolism and catastrophic and erratic effects on human bodies, lightning loomed large in many seafarers’ consciousness, as a powerful source of panic and trauma. At the same time, despite contemporary developments in natural philosophical understandings of electricity, surgeons’ training on how to treat these injuries remained limited. As a result, lightning could substantially affect naval shipboard relations between officers and ‘common’ seamen, creating challenges to the former’s authority and mobilising a range of competing emotions and knowledges. Considering lightning illustrates the fruitfulness of looking at uncommon but devastating types of injury, for historians interested in medical authority and in the doctor–patient relationship. It also helps us to start sketching accounts of seafaring bodies, health and maritime medical and religious cultures that give the sky its due place alongside the water.

Current standard microbiological techniques are generally very time consuming, usually requiring 24–72 h to establish a diagnosis. Consequentially, contemporary clinical practices implement broad-spectrum antibiotic administration prior to pathogen detection, prompting the emergence of extremely dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Additionally, lengthy test-to-result turnover times can greatly exacerbate the rate of disease spread. Rapid point-of-care (POC) diagnostics has quickly gained importance since the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic; accordingly, we have developed a rapid four-channel POC plasmonic quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) machine (Kimera P-IV) to respond to the deficiencies in infection control. Utilizing gold nanorods (GNRs) as nano-heaters and integrating vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSEL) to replace traditional Peltier blocks, the Kimera P-IV has also incorporated quantitative real-time fluorescent monitoring. Using Chlamydia trachomatis genetic material to evaluate the rapid thermocycling performance of the platform, we have generated positive amplicons in less than 13 min; however, to achieve these results, several biological reagent considerations needed to be taken into account, specifically primer design. The device can achieve a limit of detection (LoD) of <101 DNA copies, a PCR efficiency of 88.3%, and can differentiate positive from negative results with 100% accuracy. Moreover, it can also analyze C. trachomatis DNA spiked urine samples via a simple dilution, suggesting that a separate nucleic acid step may not be needed for diagnosing infections. In conclusion, the operation of the Kimera P-IV prototype places it in a unique position of POC devices to revolutionize infectious disease diagnosis.

Cocoa is an important agricultural product that plays a crucial role in local communities in South America. In Brazil, it is traditionally grown in agroforestry systems, which are more sustainable and contribute to biodiversity conservation. However, the recent expansion of intensive monocultures in tropical forests poses significant threats to this activity. Using historical data on land use and cocoa productivity at the municipality level from Brazil’s primary cocoa-producing states, we show that maintaining and restoring forest cover are positively correlated with cocoa productivity, particularly in areas with less anthropogenic disturbance. This highlights the dependence of cocoa production on ecosystem services. Recent data reveal that in municipalities where local agriculture is less reliant on cocoa, only larger farms have benefitted from increased forest cover, probably due to their greater dependence on fragments of natural habitat for ecosystem services. In municipalities that are more reliant on cocoa, the effects of forest cover were not detected, while strong negative effects of forest fragmentation were observed in both small- and large-scale farms. We emphasize the importance of preserving natural forests near cocoa plantations to optimize productivity in Amazon and Atlantic Forest agroforestry, especially in deforested areas.