Several epidemiological studies have shown that consumption of coffee and green tea is inversely associated with risks of death and disability; however, the relationship between caffeine consumption and these outcomes remains unclear. We examined these associations in Japanese older adults. This was a prospective study of 7708 adults (aged ≥ 65 years) recruited from the Kyoto–Kameoka study. Dietary intake was estimated using a validated FFQ. Caffeine consumption was classified into four categories. Disability and mortality data were collected between 15 February 2012 and 30 November 2016. Hazard ratios (HR) and 95 % CI of outcomes were calculated using multivariable Cox proportional hazard models. During the median 4·75-year follow-up period, a total of 593 deaths and 1379 disability incidents were recorded. After adjusting for confounders, caffeine consumption was inversely associated with the incidence of disability (< 100 mg/d: reference; 100–149 mg/d: HR, 0·91 (95 % CI 0·80, 1·04); 150–199 mg/d: HR, 0·84 (95 % CI 0·72, 0·99); ≥ 200 mg/d: HR, 0·75 (95 % CI 0·63, 0·89), Pfor trend = 0·001) but not all-cause mortality. High coffee consumption was inversely associated with mortality (≥ 3 cups/d: HR, 0·62 (95 % CI 0·43, 0·88)) and disability (≥ 3 cups/d: HR, 0·81 (95 % CI 0·65, 0·99)) compared with non-consumption. However, green tea consumption was not associated with mortality or disability. Caffeine and coffee consumption was inversely associated with disability and/or mortality. Further research is needed to clarify whether high caffeine intake is safe and effective for older adults.

The war in Ukraine raises concerns for potential hazards of radiological incidents and their impact on humans, especially families. Preparedness and response to radiological and nuclear incidents necessitates familiarity with pharmaceutical countermeasures, including antidotes and cytokines. Searches found no published study comparing adult indications and dosing among standard references. This study addresses this gap by collecting, tabulating, and disseminating information to health care professionals. Expert consensus chose the following references to compare adult indications and dosing of medical countermeasures for radiation exposure and internal contamination with radioactive materials: Advanced Hazmat Life Support (AHLS) for Radiological Incidents & Terrorism, DailyMed, Internal Contamination Clinical Reference, Medical Aspects of Radiation Incidents, Medical Management of Radiological Casualties, Micromedex, National Stockpiles for Radiological and Nuclear Emergencies: Policy Advice, POISINDEX, and Radiation Emergency Medical Management (REMM). This is the first study comparing adult indications and dosing for medical countermeasures among common references for radiological and nuclear incidents.

People regularly get information about the political world in visual form, such as graphs of past economic growth, nonverbal cues from politicians, or projections of future climate change. Visual characteristics affect people’s preferences, but it is difficult to measure the extent of this effect precisely and concisely in surveys. We present a new adaptive design that measures the impact of visual characteristics on people’s preferences: The plot staircase. We apply it to graphs of time series data, identifying the effect of the slope of a sequence on evaluations of the sequence. The plot staircase replicates the existing finding that people have a strong preference for increasing trends. Using fewer survey questions than past approaches, it measures at the individual level how much overall welfare a survey respondent is willing to sacrifice for an increasing trend. We demonstrate the flexibility of the plot staircase across domains (economic growth, jobs creation, and the COVID-19 vaccine rollout) and across sequence characteristics. Survey measurement is more difficult for concepts that cannot be represented textually or numerically; our method enables researchers to measure preferences for graphical properties not reducible to the individual pieces of information.

Only 15% of African households possess a formal title for their agricultural land, despite the widespread availability of titles and their documented benefits. Local politics combine with national land regimes to explain this empirical anomaly. I combine 170,216 household-level observations of titling across 22 African countries with a novel geospatial measure of land values and the returns to agricultural investment. Households in areas with high returns to potential agricultural investment title more. However, in countries with centralized land tenure regimes, strong customary institutions attenuate this relationship; in countries with decentralized land regimes, strong customary institutions reinforce it. I use a case study in Côte d’Ivoire, including an original survey of 801 households and 194 customary elites, to trace these mechanisms at work. This research documents granular variation in the uptake of land titles, illustrates how local politics explain this variation, and outlines conditions under which customary elites impede development.

Oran—Algeria’s second-largest city—is an archive of displacement, containing the imprint of overlooked, erased, or forgotten (often violent) pasts stored in everyday things like trees, trash, talk, and translations. Uniting all these unintended archival deposits are the dead—especially the uncommemorated, forgotten, or abandoned dead—and the urban spaces they co-inhabit with the most marginalized of the living. Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper centers on urban cemeteries as archival nodes that gather together impressions—physically and psycho-semiotically—of uncommemorated pasts that nevertheless have left their mark on the urban fabric and people’s lives. This material “documentation” embedded in the built environment provides a vernacular alternative to the “fantasy” of official, national archives, foregrounding the blurry colonial-postcolonial divide in ordinary people’s historical imaginaries. Urban traces of displaced people and pasts show how complex semiotic residues get carried across otherwise disparate urban spaces where the postcolonial present has yet to reckon fully with colonialism’s mortal remains.

This study aimed to identify and quantify the various stem-like cell types in dairy cows’ colostrum and milk at the onset of lactation. Five second parity Holstein cows were monitored from calving until the seventh-day postpartum. Mammary secretions were collected immediately after calving, then every 3 h until 12 h during day (d) 0, and during morning milking on d 1, d 2, d 4 and d 7. Cells were prepared from mammary secretions and analysed by flow cytometry using relevant cellular markers. The highest total and viable cell concentrations were observed in colostrum collected at calving and up to 6 h, with these concentrations decreasing substantially in samples collected later at d 0. Then, the concentrations of both total and viable cell populations continued to slowly decrease until d 7, the kinetic curves reaching a baseline plateau. Flow cytometry showed that the CD49fposCD24pos population, which identifies mammary epithelial stem cells, represented about 0.9% of viable cells at calving and about 0.1% 12 h later, the mammary epithelial stem cell concentration therefore being at its highest level in the very first colostrum. In contrast, the percentage of mesenchymal stem-like cells, defined as the population of CD34negCD105posCD90posCD29pos cells, was roughly constant (≈0.3%) during the first two milkings and decreased mainly during the first day to a basal level close to 0. Concerning haematopoietic stem-like cells, defined as the CD45negCD34posCD117posCD90pos cell population, they were only observed in the colostrum collected at calving. All the types of stem cells studied here were therefore only present in substantial quantities in the colostrum of the very first hours after calving, a period during which the calf’s intestine is permeable, possibly allowing the transfer and integration of these cells in the tissues of the newborn calf.

The family Glassiidae from Silurian and Devonian strata exhibits barrel-shaped and medially directed spiralia as primary characteristics. Membership in this family is small with five known genera, of which only two possess recognized spiralia. This paper aims to investigate the two Devonian glassiides: Karbous Havlíček, 1985 and Trigonatrypa Havlíček, 1990. In mature specimens, the type species K. aperinus Havlíček, 1985 and the species K. hassiacus (Siehl, 1962) show dorsally directed spiralia. Karbous is here placed in the family Karpinskiidae based on similar internal characteristics. The type species of Trigonatrypa was not available for study. A closely related species, T. baucis (Barrande, 1847), was sectioned and found to possess medially directed spiralia. The type species is likely to have the same kind of spiralia. Therefore, the case for placing Trigonatrypa in the Glassiidae is strengthened.

Mediation is characterised as a voluntary, consensual process, with self-determination a core value. The literature does, however, indicate a significant evolution in its role within society. Scholars contend that government-backed mediation exhibits capacity to ‘govern’ where the process has disputants reconfigure their selves and orientation to the conflict and align their behaviour with a guiding norm (or ideal). In this way, ‘mentalities’ can be moulded by the state to secure wider political aims. This paper provides empirically grounded insights into the efficacy of mediation-based governance in the context of environmental disputes. It analyses complaints submitted to National Contact Points (NCPs) by interested parties (eg individuals and non-governmental organisations (NGOs)) against multinational enterprises. NCPs are state-based non-judicial grievance mechanisms which seek to assist the resolution of alleged breaches of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct. I argue that the empirical reality exposes tensions within mediation-based governance which present challenges and opportunities for it: (in)consistency in the state’s influence over negotiations, background levels of (dis)trust between disputants and (future-orientated) temporal focus. Until these are remedied, it will remain incapable of realising wider political aims, such as sustainable development. Private interests are too deeply ingrained and prevailing power structures too dominant.

The term “customary law” is a label given by outsiders to what is simply the “law” for the local people. This article proposes an analytical framework for the case studies in this special issue in observing the normative contests through land and forestry dispute resolution in Asia and Africa, as a challenge to a changing regime of positive law under the pressures of contemporary “legal transplant.” A comparative view across jurisdictions may tell us the commonalities as well as the variation of the modes of normative modification through dialogues. As an attempt to demonstrate such an analytical approach, this article looks into the cases of normative resistance by local communities, similarly facing the eviction orders in the context of post-disaster reconstruction: in post-2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami in Aceh, Indonesia, and Moken villages in southern Thailand; in the post-2013 Typhoon Yolanda in Leyte, the Philippines; and post-2011 tsunami-affected communities in the East Japan.

Judicial authority relies heavily on the reader’s perception that judges make fair and legitimate decisions. Do such perceptions rest primarily on the reader’s agreement with the decision? Or does an opinion’s reasoning style, as distinct from outcome, impact a reader’s perceptions of legitimacy? In this study, we test whether incorporating elements of procedural fairness into judicial opinions impacts readers’ perceptions of fairness and legitimacy, distinct from their agreement with the decision. In doing so, we also test whether members of the public are sensitive to elements of procedural fairness in written judicial opinions — a different context from the interpersonal interactions in which procedural fairness has been most often studied. We ran two survey experiments that sort participants into four conditions, varying the outcome of the case and whether the judicial opinion employs elements of procedural fairness. After reading a procedurally fair or one-sided opinion, participants reported on their perceptions of fairness and judicial legitimacy. We found strong support for the hypothesis that agreement with the outcome impacts readers’ perceptions of fairness and legitimacy, and weak support for the hypothesis that procedural fairness impacts these perceptions.

Food refusal behaviours in preschool children can significantly impact their nutritional status and overall quality of life. This study investigated the relationship between food refusal behaviours, compliance with the Mediterranean diet and quality of life in preschool children. Conducted as a cross-sectional study, it included 400 children aged 4–6 years and their parents. The Child Food Rejection Scale measured food refusal behaviours, The Children’s Mediterranean Diet Quality Scale (KIDMED) assessed compliance with the Mediterranean Diet and the Children Quality of Life-Questionnaire (Kiddy-KINDL) scale evaluated quality of life. The mean age of the children was 4·80 (sd 0·71) years. According to age-based BMI-Z scores, 71·0 % were normal, 15·5 % underweight, 9·0 % slightly overweight and 4·5 % obese. Parents’ average age was 34·65 (sd 5·35) years; 96·8 % were married, 88·8 % had a nuclear family structure, 58·0 % were university graduates and 69·8 % rated their income level as moderate. Girls had higher food refusal scores than boys (P < 0·05). Children who frequently fell ill also scored higher in food refusal (P < 0·05). Food refusal decreased with higher family income, larger family size and older parental age (P < 0·05). Parental nutrition education significantly reduced food refusal scores (P < 0·05). Higher KIDMED scores were associated with lower food refusal (P < 0·01), and children with low Kiddy-KINDL scores exhibited higher food refusal behaviours (P < 0·01). A positive correlation was found between KIDMED and Kiddy-KINDL scores (P < 0·01). No significant associations were detected between BMI Z scores and food rejection and its subscales. The findings suggest that compliance with the Mediterranean diet reduces food refusal behaviours in preschool children and increases quality of life, while low quality of life is associated with increased food refusal behaviours.

The Song of Songs—a biblical celebration of love and desire—holds a unique place in literary history, revered not only for its religious significance, but also for its poetic beauty. Early Chinese translations of this biblical book struggled to resonate with local audiences until the release of the Delegates’ Version, which is acclaimed as the first Chinese Bible that can truly be regarded as a work of Chinese literature. The Song of Songs in the Delegates’ Version, titled Yage 雅歌 (The Refined Song), undergoes a noticeable acculturation in which its imagery and themes are intricately woven into the fabric of Chinese literary tradition. This article explores how this biblical love song has been recontextualised to resonate with Chinese cultural and literary sensibilities. By examining the portrayal of lovers, the nature of love, and the poetic resonance established through the integration of verses from the Shijing in the Yage, it highlights the intricate interplay between biblical text and Chinese literature. Ultimately, this study reveals that, while the Bible shapes the life of its community, it is also shaped by the cultural and linguistic contexts in which it is translated.

Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Americans are politically visible yet institutionally invisible, long categorized as “white” by the U.S. government despite neither self-categorizing nor racially assigned as such. Most forms—across public and private sectors—still lack a “MENA” category option. What are the political consequences of institutional invisibility? Across two survey experiments and in-depth interviews, I find that exclusion from official identity categories triggers the experience of categorization threat, a psychological response rarely linked to political behavior. When MENA Americans experience categorization threat, they respond by expressing opinions on politics in ways that attempt to signal and assert their MENA identity and, to a lesser extent, Person of Color (POC) identity. Such identity assertion demonstrates that bureaucratic categorization influences expressions of public opinion on politics, not simply how people self-categorize. Researching the effects of category exclusion on public opinions creates opportunities for more accurate and democratic scholarship.