Microplastics are found in all oceanic environments and represent a growing concern for researchers and managers of marine environments. A systematic review was carried out to investigate the accumulation of microplastics (MPs) in filter feeders, focusing on the potential relationship between the feeding mechanism and MPs’ accumulation. The accumulation of microplastics was compared among marine benthic filter feeders that use different filtering mechanisms. Rayyan® software was employed to screen the articles, and data extraction was subsequently carried out. The review followed well-structured protocol PRISMA 2020 guidelines to guarantee methodological rigor and minimize biases. Due to the high heterogeneity (Higgins I2 test, I2 > 95%) of data methodologies, a narrative synthesis was used as the output of the review. Most publications report microplastics in mollusks (oysters, mussels, and clams), and bivalves were the group most studied (76.67%). Sponges (91 to 612 items g – 1 DW) and polychaetes (1 to 880 items g–1 WW) had the highest number of MPs. Although it is possible to establish relationships between feeding mechanisms and MPs accumulation, using distinct methodologies makes comparing the results of different studies difficult, leading to an urgent call for standardizing methods for microplastic studies in marine organisms.

Morphological examination of recently collected barnacle specimens confirms the presence of Tesseropora atlantica (Cirripedia, Balanomorpha, Tetraclitidae) along the coastlines of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, the easternmost islands of the Canary Archipelago. This constitutes the first documented occurrence of T. atlantica in the Canary Islands and establishes a new southern range limit for this relict species in the eastern Atlantic Ocean. Additionally, 16S and COI mitochondrial gene sequences were obtained for the first time for this species, allowing comparisons with related taxa. The study also explores plausible hypotheses concerning the species’ arrival in the Canary Islands.

This study aims to determine the age and growth of Anguilla anguilla from Lake Bafa, Türkiye. A total of 128 samples of European eel were purchased from a small-scale fisherman who caught them in Lake Bafa in November 2016 and 2017, using 34-mm mesh size and 15-m-long fyke nets. The total length (TL) and total weight were measured, and the sex, age, and life stage were identified. The mean TL for females was 54.1 ± 10.1 (36.1–76.2) cm, and for males 43.6 ± 3.7 (35.7–47.8) cm. Yellow and silver eel mean TLs were 48.9 ± 6.6 (35.7–63.7) and 61.9 ± 10.8 (39.9–77.2) cm, respectively, and for pooled data 53.3 ± 10.3 (35.7–77.2) cm. The growth for pooled samples was positive allometric. The age of eels varied from 2 to 9 years. The Von Bertalanffy growth parameters for pooled specimens were determined as L∞ = 71.9 cm, K = 0.25, and t0 = −0.11. The sex ratio (M:F = 1:11.2) was biased in favour of females. It is inferred from this and other studies that eels in Türkiye have comparable length and age distributions in similar habitats.

This article examines the ways that alternative musicians in Lebanon tactically engage in corporate collaborations as a mode of aspirational cartography. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it explores three artists’ entanglements with Red Bull, underscoring the imaginative, ethical, and aesthetic manoeuvres musicians undertake in pursuit of alternative futures through strategic corporate affiliation. I build on Appadurai’s theory of aspiration in order to argue that in cases like Lebanon, aspiration is a cartographic undertaking through which musicians sonically map and shape spaces of possibility. In the absence of governmental support or infrastructure for the arts, transnational corporations take on developmental roles, allowing artists to leverage personal relationships, material resources, and aesthetic and creative control in pursuit of possibility.

We study universal-existential fragments of first-order theories of fields, in particular of function fields and of equicharacteristic henselian valued fields. For example, we discuss to what extent the theory of a field k determines the universal-existential theories of the rational function field over k and of the field of Laurent series over k, and we find various many-one reductions between such fragments.

Dedicated to the memory of Alexander Prestel (1941–2024)

Mixture of experts is a prediction aggregation method in machine learning that aggregates the predictions of specialized experts. This method often outperforms Bayesian methods despite the Bayesian having stronger inductive guarantees. We argue that this is due to the greater functional capacity of mixture of experts. We prove that in a limiting case of mixture of experts will have greater capacity than equivalent Bayesian methods, which we vouchsafe through experiments on non-limiting cases. Finally, we conclude that mixture of experts is a type of abductive reasoning in the Peircean sense of hypothesis construction.

In this paper, we study the T-periodic solutions of the parameter-dependent ϕ-Laplacian equation

\begin{equation*}(\phi(x'))'=F(\lambda,t,x,x').\end{equation*}

Based on the topological degree theory, we present some atypical bifurcation results in the sense of Prodi–Ambrosetti, i.e., bifurcation of T-periodic solutions from λ = 0. Finally, we propose some applications to Liénard-type equations.

Dedicated to Professor Maria Patrizia Pera on the occasion of her 70th birthday

Introduced over a century ago, Whittaker–Henderson smoothing remains widely used by actuaries in constructing one-dimensional and two-dimensional experience tables for mortality, disability, and other life insurance risks. In this paper, we reinterpret this smoothing technique within a modern statistical framework and address six practically relevant questions about its use. First, we adopt a Bayesian perspective on this method to construct credible intervals. Second, in the context of survival analysis, we clarify how to choose the observation and weight vectors by linking the smoothing technique to a maximum likelihood estimator. Third, we improve accuracy by relaxing the method’s reliance on an implicit normal approximation. Fourth, we select the smoothing parameters by maximizing a marginal likelihood function. Fifth, we improve computational efficiency when dealing with numerous observation points and consequently parameters. Finally, we develop an extrapolation procedure that ensures consistency between estimated and predicted values through constraints.

For cardinals $\mathfrak {a}$ and $\mathfrak {b}$, we write $\mathfrak {a}=^\ast \mathfrak {b}$ if there are sets A and B of cardinalities $\mathfrak {a}$ and $\mathfrak {b}$, respectively, such that there are partial surjections from A onto B and from B onto A. $=^\ast $-equivalence classes are called surjective cardinals. In this article, we show that $\mathsf {ZF}+\mathsf {DC}_\kappa $, where $\kappa $ is a fixed aleph, cannot prove that surjective cardinals form a cardinal algebra, which gives a negative solution to a question proposed by Truss [J. Truss, Ann. Pure Appl. Logic 27, 165–207 (1984)]. Nevertheless, we show that surjective cardinals form a “surjective cardinal algebra”, whose postulates are almost the same as those of a cardinal algebra, except that the refinement postulate is replaced by the finite refinement postulate. This yields a smoother proof of the cancellation law for surjective cardinals, which states that $m\cdot \mathfrak {a}=^\ast m\cdot \mathfrak {b}$ implies $\mathfrak {a}=^\ast \mathfrak {b}$ for all cardinals $\mathfrak {a},\mathfrak {b}$ and all nonzero natural numbers m.

High body mass index (BMI) is an important risk factor for female colon and rectal, ovarian, and uterine cancers. Current comprehensive studies on its effects on these cancers are limited. This paper aims to explore regional and age differences in the impact of high BMI on these cancers and the commonalities among the three by using the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2021. Deaths, disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), and their age-standardized rates (ASRs) for these cancers were retrieved from 1990 to 2021, and burden trends were assessed using the estimated annual percentage change (EAPC) and percentage changes. The study also analyzed the correlation between ASR and socio-demographic index (SDI) across 21 regions and projected future disease burden trends using the Bayesian Age-Period-model (BAPC) model. Results showed that the global burden of female colon and rectal cancer declined since 1990 but remained at the highest level among the three cancers in 2021. At the same time, these three cancers had high burdens in high-income areas. Since 1990, ovarian and uterine cancer burdens attributable to high BMI increased, and all three burdens grew fastest in low-middle-income regions and among younger people. The burden of all three is projected to continue increasing through 2050. This study confirms that high BMI’s impact on these cancers is regional and age-specific, with long-term effects. Therefore, subsequent public health interventions should adopt more targeted obesity prevention and control strategies based on national and regional situations to effectively mitigate the adverse effects of high BMI on these cancers.

This paper advocates for a pragmatist view on quantum theory, offering a response to David Wallace’s recent criticisms of Richard Healey’s quantum pragmatism. In particular, I challenge Wallace’s general claim that quantum pragmatists—and anti-representationalists more broadly—lack the resources to make sense of the novel ‘quantum’ language used throughout modern physics in applications of quantum theory. I conclude by posing a challenge to quantum representationalists.