Natural enemies serve a crucial role in crop protection through the regulation of pest population dynamics. Cyrtorhinus lividipennis is an important natural enemy of rice planthoppers. Fatty acid synthase (FAS), a multifunctional enzyme crucial for fatty acid biosynthesis, serves as a vital energy source for insect reproduction. However, the function of FAS in the reproductive processes of C. lividipennis remains incompletely understood. In this study, the ClFAS gene was successfully cloned from C. lividipennis. The open reading frame of ClFAS was 7224 bp, encoding a putative protein of 2407 amino acids. The expression levels of ClFAS were notably elevated in the fifth-instar nymphs, adults, as well as in the fat body and ovaries of female individuals. Silencing of ClFAS resulted in a reduction of 58.4%, 34.6%, and 49.0% in the expression levels of ClVg at 1-, 2-, and 3-days post-dsRNA injection, respectively. Furthermore, RNA interference (RNAi)-mediated depletion of ClFAS not only suppressed the Vg protein expression but also significantly impaired oocyte maturation and ovarian development. The fecundity of dsFAS-treated C. lividipennis females was markedly reduced by 49.5%, accompanied by significant decreases of 32.7% in oviposition duration and 26.3% in female adult lifespan. Our findings showed that ClFAS positively regulates the reproduction of C. lividipennis by promoting vitellogenesis and ovarian development, which provides valuable insights into how lipid metabolism governs fecundity in predatory insects.

Cultural evolutionary models of bargaining can elucidate issues related to fairness and justice, and especially how fair and unfair conventions and norms might arise in human societies. One line of this research shows how the presence of social categories in such models creates inequitable equilibria that are not possible in models without social categories. This is taken to help explain why in human groups with social categories, inequity is the rule rather than the exception. But in previous models, it is typically assumed that these categories are rigid – in the sense that they cannot be altered, and easily observable – in the sense that all agents can identify each others’ category membership. In reality, social categories are not always so tidy. We introduce evolutionary models where the tags connected with social categories can be flexible, variable, or difficult to observe, i.e. where these tags can carry different amounts of information about group membership. We show how alterations to these tags can undermine the stability of unfair conventions. We argue that these results can inform projects intended to ameliorate inequity, especially projects that seek to alter the properties of tags by promoting experimentation, imitation, and play with identity markers.

Green/blue wellbeing is increasingly a focus of mental and physical healthcare in the United Kingdom, with green/blue space “prescribing” touted as providing a range of benefits. Attempts to explore the “how” and “why” of potential mental health improvements through these activities to date are primarily quantitative, and/or utilize medical/individualized models. Such approaches are situated within and can reinscribe a humanist, extractivist, one-way relationship with the natural world. Here, we draw on ecofeminist approaches to care to explore findings from our fieldwork with two wild swimming communities in Scotland, enabling us to consider human–nature interactions as relational. The wild swimming focus groups presented a complex picture in which the mental health benefits of swimming are entangled with relationships between group members, and embodied, sensory experiences of and relationships with blue spaces. By conceptualizing these groups as “ecologies of care,” we seek to embrace that intricacy, considering how wild swimming is a political act engaged with through deviant bodies or in deviant temporal/weather conditions, and how care is engendered through mutuality, space, and cold water. In conjunction with this complexity, the emergent nature of these groups has transformative implications for futurity, justice-to-come, and hyper-local ways of living within and alongside blue spaces.

This article presents an integrative literature review that explores citizens’ trust in the welfare state, distinguishing this sub-field from broader research on political trust. The review aims to systematise the factors that shape the experiences of vulnerable welfare users with social policy and so contribute to their (dis)trust in welfare. The first part of the article compares various meanings of trust at different levels of welfare state organisation, from user trust in frontline services to trust in the welfare state as a whole. The ambiguities arising from different operationalisations of ‘trust in the welfare state’ are shown. The second part presents key factors that influence such trust, including prevailing redistributive principles, managerial pressures, institutions’ perceived performance, distributive and procedural justice, and characteristics of frontline workers. The article concludes by linking these factors into causal mechanisms that reveal the tensions users face between bureaucratic procedures and personal interactions with frontline workers.

Although industrial modernization in Eurasia both preceded and outlived the Soviet project, in popular and scholarly imaginations, manufacturing cities located in the continent’s eastern regions are often understood as quintessentially ‘Soviet’. Yet, this perception tends to ignore the ways in which earlier urban developments were integrated with socialist innovations. This special issue seeks to decentre the concept of ‘Soviet urbanism’ by placing socialist forms into a longue durée perspective on industrial modernity and destabilizing popular equations of ‘post-socialism’ with ‘post-industrialism’. The collection’s contributions explore how modernist urbanism has intersected a variety of political and economic regimes over the past century and how evolving industrial processes continue to shape and reconfigure Eurasia’s urban landscapes.

In this clinical reflection, we report on stigma and ageism and their impact on those experiencing signs and symptoms of borderline personality disorder (BPD). We highlight the need for increased collaboration between those with lived experience of the disorder and healthcare providers. This is an important issue in BPD as the impact of structural stigma is significantly affecting the quality of life and short- and long-term trajectories of those with BPD, especially during adolescence.

This article introduces the part-time cyborg as a Black feminist framework for navigating and resisting the demands of visibility, labor, and surveillance in digital and institutional spaces. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory and Black feminist thought, the part-time cyborg reclaims rest and refusal as strategies for survival and defiance. The article argues that mundane authoritarianism operates through small, everyday demands that normalize compliance, particularly for Black women, whose bodies have long been sites of scrutiny and control. By turning off a camera or withdrawing from hypervisibility, the part-time cyborg disrupts these systems, asserting autonomy in the face of extractive logics. In an era of intensifying surveillance and control, these micro-resistances are vital tools for imagining and building more just and equitable futures.

Approaches to different listening practices rarely extend beyond human ears. During the nineteenth century, anatomists’ fascination with non-human hearing emerged in tandem with the professionalization of comparative anatomy. This existed in tension with the professionalization of European music criticism, where the only model for listening was human. Theories of sensationalism, developed particularly in Feuerbach’s and Marx’s writings on the human senses, grounded an anthropocentric outlook, yet numerous commentators considered animal hearing as materially related to that of humans. This article traces the process of decentring human listening. It uncovers a discourse on the materiality of the senses, and asks when did the penny drop that human hearing was neither the only aural reality, nor necessarily the ‘highest’ in the natural world.

Political science is useful for many things but especially for the suite of research methods that we teach our students that generalize to a wide range of careers. However, that training is often buried deep in the major and is not well integrated into further coursework except perhaps for senior research. In reaction to that model, we started a new program that frontloads quantitative research methods, beginning with data visualization and then modeling following an inquiry model. With their newfound independence, students are able to approach substantive upper-level courses ready to engage the worth of theory by evaluating and updating their empirical tests. This article describes the program and reports on survey results from a 2024 sample of political scientists that reveals broadscale support for the program and its operating assumptions.

Despite the long-standing proximity between Ottoman and Iranian reformists, the Young Turk policy toward Iran was notably reserved. The numerous tensions between Istanbul and Tehran during the constitutional period are often attributed to Young Turk pragmatism. Conversely, this study emphasizes the cultural factors in Irano-Ottoman relations and their influence on the Ottoman perception of Iran following the Ottoman Revolution of 1908. Drawing on the reports written by Hüseyin Hasib Efendi, Ottoman ambassador in Iran from 1909 to 1913, it argues that the multilayered nature of Ottoman modernity and the anxieties of the late Ottoman bureaucratic elite were crucial in shaping the Porte’s policy toward Iran. The article introduces the concept of entangled Orientalism to describe the process of Ottoman discursive adaptation to the West-dominated international order. Additionally, it aims to reassess the role of the Russian menace in the Ottoman understanding of regional politics.

Focusing on the case of Mongolia during the Cold War, this article analyses how the goals of resource extraction and socialist development shaped urban and regional planning in the country. The article examines the negotiations for development assistance between Mongolia, the Soviet Union, East Germany and Czechoslovakia since 1962, with a particular focus on the foundation of the mining city of Erdenet in 1973 as a key outcome of these negotiations. It demonstrates that mineral extraction was the central aspect of socialist assistance. The requirements and scale of mining infrastructure provided a distinct logic to urban and regional planning in the country. The article argues that in the socialist development vision, extraction was integral to urban thinking. The socialist approach to resource development in Mongolia employed a heavy-handed approach of extensive urbanization, contrasting sharply with post-socialist urban patterns shaped by investments from private extractive industries.