We report new AMS radiocarbon dates of 16 samples from the Holocene deposits of the Vistula Spit, a large coastal barrier landform on the Southern Baltic coast. Collection of the samples was conducted directly from the sedimentary succession excavated during 2020–2022 construction of the Vistula Spit shipping canal. The dated material represents several paleosol horizons and peat lenses buried in the dune deposits, as well as their substrate – beach and shallow marine deposits.

The Generalised Baker–Schmidt Problem (1970) concerns the Hausdorff measure of the set of $\psi$-approximable points on a non-degenerate manifold. Beresnevich-Dickinson-Velani (in 2006, for the homogeneous setting) and Badziahin-Beresnevich-Velani (in 2013, for the inhomogeneous setting) proved the divergence part of this problem for dual approximation on arbitrary non-degenerate manifolds. The divergence part has also been resolved for the $p$-adic setting by Datta-Ghosh in 2022, for the inhomogeneous setting. The corresponding convergence counterpart represents a challenging open question. In this paper, we prove the homogeneous $p$-adic convergence result for hypersurfaces of dimension at least three with some mild regularity condition, as well as for some other classes of manifolds satisfying certain conditions. We provide similar, slightly weaker results for the inhomogeneous setting. We do not restrict to monotonic approximation functions.

Politicization is one of the most fundamental characteristics of Chinese society, manifested in the direct and comprehensive control of society by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Methods include soft control through ideology and coercive control through campaigns. Based on the varying degrees of the CCP’s social control, the trajectory of China’s regime politicization can be divided into four periods: (1) the politicized regime of 1949–1965, (2) the hyper-politicized regime of 1966–1978, (3) the de-politicized regime of 1979–2012, and (4) the re-politicized regime of 2013–2023. We established an annual politicization index for the years 1949 to 2023 through a content analysis of two million articles in the People’s Daily, validating the trajectory of politicization changes in China. We use a model analysis of CCP membership attainment to demonstrate the applicability of the index in assessing how regime dynamics affect Party membership across the four periods.

Alexander Crichton’s Inquiry (1798) was one of the first systematic English-language works on mental disorder. Although a general physician rather than a specialist, Crichton sought to explain how emotions, attention and the nervous system interacted to produce disturbance. His description of inattention is now regarded as the earliest English medical account of what we would call an attention disorder. He drew extensively on German case reports, vivid accounts of melancholy, delusion and violence. He highlighted how delusion could coexist with calm, purposeful behaviour, influencing both medical and legal views of responsibility. Modern historians see Crichton as a synthesiser rather than an originator, but his Inquiry remains an ambitious attempt to ground the study of mental disorder in physiology, observation and compassion.

This paper presents a comprehensive experimental investigation into the shock characteristics associated with a low-thrust, low-shock separation mechanism incorporating Mild Detonating Cord (MDC) within a rubber bellow interface. Two test configurations were developed with varying explosive charge masses to study their influence on pressure generation and shock propagation. Linear accelerometers and high-speed pressure transducers were employed to capture transient dynamic responses at both piston and cylinder interfaces. The results demonstrate a significant reduction in peak pressure and shock levels, especially in the second test configuration, where the explosive mass was reduced to 60% of the initial configuration. The shock response spectrum (SRS) analysis confirms that the lower charge mass leads to proportionally reduced shock amplitudes across the frequency range of interest. Furthermore, comparative assessment of shock levels reveals a significant reduction of shock levels as compared to conventional separation mechanisms, such as a flexible linear-shaped explosive charge (FLSC) mass or a separation bolt actuated with a pyro cartridge. The experimental pressure values are shown to correlate well with theoretical predictions, validating the design approach. These findings provide critical insights into tailoring explosive-based separation mechanisms for sensitive payload environments, highlighting the importance of confined detonation and charge optimisation in mitigating pyroshock.

Stress is a response to external environmental conditions that encourages individuals to pursue changes in their lives. We examine the relationship between stress and federal and provincial political leaders’ approval ratings. We theorize that, as a strategy to cope with the pandemic stresses outside of their direct control, individuals will redirect their frustrations toward incumbents. We hypothesize that greater experiences with stress will negatively correlate with the approval of political incumbents even among members of incumbents’ political in-group. We analyze data from the COVID-19 Monitor survey, a multi-wave, cross-sectional survey of over 56,000 Canadians. On three out of four measures, we find that stress negatively impacted incumbent approval, and that these negative impacts occur among the incumbent’s supporters and non-supporters. On the fourth measure, we find the effect of stress on approval is moderated, positive or negative, by whether regional leaders took action to limit the spread of coronavirus disease 2019.

In 2024, the U.S. Government introduced, and then quickly rescinded, a new policy to oversee Dual Use Research of Concern (DURC) and Pathogens with Enhanced Pandemic Potential (PEPP). This research explores how biosafety practitioners interpreted and assessed the policy itself and discussed challenges to implementation. An inductive, grounded theory approach was used to identify key insights from qualitative data generated at a 2-day deliberative workshop with 45 biosafety officers, compliance professionals and researchers; analysis was supported using NVivo software. Participants described the policy’s ambiguous language, lack of actionable federal guidance, limited legal scope and unfunded administrative burdens as significant barriers to implementation. Although supportive of the policy’s goals, workshop participants stressed the need for more precise definitions, practical examples and practitioner-informed implementation strategies. The findings demonstrate that durable and effective biosafety and biosecurity oversight requires early, substantive engagement with those operationalizing policy.

A novel family of statistical distributions, called enriched truncated exponentiated generalized family, is theoretically developed to model heavy-tailed data. One of the three-parameter sub-models of this family derived from log-logistic distribution is comprehensively studied. The statistical properties are explored, including moments and Fisher information matrix. In addition, tail-heaviness is studied using the tail-index approach. The method of maximum likelihood is used for parameter estimation, and existence and uniqueness of these estimators are shown. The flexibility of the new family is further validated by applying to the Norwegian fire insurance claim dataset. The goodness-of-fit measures are used to illustrate the adequacy of the proposed family of distributions. Furthermore, a backtesting procedure is conducted for well-known risk measures to assess the accuracy of the right tail fit.

United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples — status in Canadian law — Indigenous children, youth, and families

The rise of digital money may bring about privately issued money that circulates across borders and coexists with public money. This paper uses an open-economy search model with multiple currencies to study the impact of such global money on monetary autonomy – the capacity of central banks to set a policy instrument. I show that the circulation of global money can entail a loss of monetary autonomy, but it can be preserved if government policy that limits the amount or use of global money for transactions is introduced or if the global currency is subject to the threat of counterfeiting. The result suggests that global digital money and monetary autonomy can be compatible.

This article addresses the questions of when mental health advance planning documents are created, the points when circumstances which they are intended to address arise and what consequences should flow when such a situation does arise. It addresses these points primarily from the perspective of what the law could/should be at a conceptual level. It looks at three stages: (a) creation of the document; (b) the period between the creation of the document and the point at which the intended circumstances arise; and (c) the point at which the intended circumstances arise. It does not purport to provide solutions at each stage, but rather to frame the dilemmas to aid discussion. In similar vein, it draws upon case studies from England & Wales, not to purport to dictate similarities of approach, but to flesh out dilemmas that have arisen to stimulate consideration.

The famous Sidorenko’s conjecture asserts that for every bipartite graph $H$, the number of homomorphisms from $H$ to a graph $G$ with given edge density is minimised when $G$ is pseudorandom. We prove that for any graph $H$, a graph obtained from replacing edges of $H$ by generalised theta graphs consisting of even paths satisfies Sidorenko’s conjecture, provided a certain divisibility condition on the number of paths. To achieve this, we prove unconditionally that bipartite graphs obtained from replacing each edge of a complete graph with a generalised theta graph satisfy Sidorenko’s conjecture, which extends a result of Conlon, Kim, Lee and Lee [J. Lond. Math. Soc., 2018].