This article argues that contemporary Indian law is animated by two intertwined imaginings of law: as a rational, rule-bound process and as a power that makes decisions as a normless act of prerogative. Through ethnographic fieldwork in Delhi’s terrorism courts, the paper examines petitions written by individuals accused under anti-terror laws, revealing how these texts invoke the dual legal imaginaries. Petitions—ranging from formal legal documents to handwritten pleas—are analysed through the idea of epistolarity, to pay attention to both the form and content of these petitions. The article argues that these letters are affective and rhetorical performances that simultaneously invoke imaginings of the law as both rule and prerogative. In doing so, the subjectivity of the petitioners oscillates between rights-bearing citizens and humble supplicants praying for the law’s intervention.

This small project was initiated to create a broader understanding of the working properties of sarsen and its challenges. This notoriously durable coarse-grained sandstone is most familiarly associated with the Phase 3 monument at Stonehenge, Wiltshire, although its exploitation persisted into the twentieth century. Discussion has focused on the probable methods employed in prehistory to work the stone: splitting, flaking and pecking. These techniques have rarely been applied in practice, but have been considered broadly in this project. The preliminary results, obtained from a single block of saccharoidal sarsen, have reawakened understanding and appreciation of the potential provided by shock waves to split and shape this intractable silicate successfully and repeatedly using direct percussion, techniques that were familiar to Neolithic communities to work flint. The flaking properties of the stone are considered together with attributes of hammer mode in comparison with data from prehistoric stone assemblages at Stonehenge. The discussion questions to what extent flaking could be controlled repeatedly to form a major part of monolith production. Results derived from the laborious nature of pecking supplement previous attempts to recreate dressed surfaces at Stonehenge. Efficiency was not improved by applying heat to the surface of the stone; indeed, it confirmed that uncontrolled, excessive heat shatters the structure of sarsen, rendering it unworkable.

How has caste influenced entrepreneurship in India in the past and how does it do so in the present? Using the Industrial Census of 1911, this paper provides the first detailed caste-level mapping of firms in Indian business history and links it to the present by an analysis of the Economic Census of 2013–2014. It finds that while trading castes were dominant, there were significant regional variations and nontrading castes were far more important than usually posited in the literature. Over the course of a century, the social base of entrepreneurship has widened slowly but significant barriers remain. The paper argues that “caste embeddedness” through the nature of wealth distribution, social capital, and ritual purity affects entrepreneurial choices and presents a typology of “caste,” “caste-advantage,” “caste-restricted,” and “noncaste” businesses that characterize the economic life of India.

We define a family of discontinuous maps on the circle, called Bowen–Series-like maps, for geometric presentations of surface groups. The family has $2N$ parameters, where $2N$ is the number of generators of the presentation. We prove that all maps in the family have the same topological entropy, which coincides with the volume entropy of the group presentation. This approach allows a simple algorithmic computation of the volume entropy from the presentation only, using the Milnor–Thurston theory for one-dimensional maps.

We establish large deviation estimates related to the Darling–Kac theorem and generalized arcsine laws for occupation and waiting times of ergodic transformations preserving an infinite measure, such as non-uniformly expanding interval maps with indifferent fixed points. For the proof, we imitate the study of generalized arcsine laws for occupation times of one-dimensional diffusion processes and adopt a method of double Laplace transform.

Between the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, large quantities of wax were exported from the Maghrib to Europe. In the Maghrib, both raw wax and wax candles were involved in various social interactions that transcended mere environmental and economic considerations. For some Muslims, wax came to index Christianity, and its significance during the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday was critiqued as a corrupt innovation. At the same time, to prevent the facilitation of Catholic devotion—and because wax was deemed war material—the sale of wax to Christians was forbidden. Nevertheless, wax remained a profitable product sold to Christians in significant quantities. The anxiety surrounding the movement of wax and the attempts to regulate it indicate that for Muslims, wax served as a religious boundary marker. Christians too utilized the substance to reinforce communal boundaries. Catholics in the Maghrib—captives, clergy, and merchants—used wax to establish and express confessional divides, aiming to deter Catholic captives from converting to Islam. Priests distributed blessed candles to captives, who in turn donated wax to the clergy. Moreover, priests gifted candles to Algerian dignitaries, a practice opposed by the papacy. Wax formed invisible, often unintended connections between Muslim theologians and rulers, Catholic and Muslim captives, slaves, wax makers, merchants, and redeemers. These entanglements sparked anxiety, a sense of impurity, and a drive to reinforce religious boundaries. This article explores a fragmented history of these connections and relationships and argues that the failed attempts to regulate this circulation fostered new entanglements.

The Cambrian Explosion saw the widespread development of mineralized skeletons. At this time, nearly every major animal phylum independently evolved strategies to build skeletons through either agglutination or biomineralization. Although most organisms settled on a single strategy, Salterella Billings, 1865 employed both strategies by secreting a biocalcitic exterior shell that is lined with layers of agglutinated sediments surrounding a central hollow tube. The slightly older fossil, Volborthella Schmidt, 1888, shares a similar construction with agglutinated grains encompassing a central tube but lacks a biomineralized exterior shell. Together these fossils have been grouped in the phylum Agmata Yochelson, 1977, although no phylogenetic relationship has been suggested to link them with the broader metazoan tree, which limits their contribution to our understanding of the evolution of shells in early animals.

To understand their ecology and place them in a phylogenetic context, we investigated Salterella and Volborthella fossils from the Wood Canyon and Harkless formations of Nevada, USA, the Illtyd Formation of Yukon, Canada, and the Shady Formation of Virginia, USA. Thin-section petrography, acid maceration, scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, and X-ray tomographic microscopy were used to provide new insights into these enigmatic faunas. First, morphological similarities in the aperture divergence angle and ratio of central tube diameter to agglutinated layer thickness suggest Salterella and Volborthella are related. Second, both fossils exhibit agglutinated grain compositions that are distinctive from their surrounding environments and demonstrate selectivity on the part of their producers. Finally, the calcitic shell composition and simple layers of blocky prismatic shell microstructure in Salterella suggest a possible cnidarian affinity. Together these data point to these organisms being sessile, semi-infaunal filter or deposit feeders and an early experimentation in cnidarian biomineralization chronicling a hypothesized transition from an organic sheath in Volborthella to a biomineralized shell in Salterella.

This article investigates the transformation of the official historical narrative of the Golden Horde in Kazakhstan, tracing a significant shift from Nazarbayev to Tokayev’s presidencies. The narrative of the Golden Horde became a strategic component of the second president, Tokayev, who announced the commemoration of 750 years of the Horde foundation in Kazakhstan and proclaimed that it laid the foundations for Kazakh statehood. The research explores the abrupt transformation of the official historical narrative and underscores the pivotal role of historians as memory actors. The study investigates the “memory game” between two schools of historians in independent Kazakhstan, revealing the agency of a new generation of historians in reshaping the national historical narrative through historicizing strategies, thus engaging in memory politics. This contribution extends the literature on the mnemonic context in Kazakhstan and non-state memory actors in authoritarian settings, shedding light on the dynamics of historical representation and memory politics in evolving mnemonic landscapes.

Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding has lagged in parasite biodiversity assessments. We implemented this method to examine parasite diversity in sediment and water from 4 physically connected aquatic habitats in coastal South Carolina, USA, as part of a ParasiteBlitz in April 2023. Sediment was collected using a syringe corer, and water was sampled using active filtration and passive collection. Five amplicon libraries, using primers targeting portions of the mitochondrial COI of platyhelminths and 18S ribosomal RNA genes of nematodes, myxozoans, microsporidians, and protists, successfully yielded parasite sequences. Out of >5.8 million sequences, we identified >1,000 parasite amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) corresponding to ~600 parasite operational taxonomic units, from 6 parasite groups. Most diversity was observed among the microsporidians, whose assay demonstrated the highest fidelity. Actively-filtered water samples captured ASVs of all 6 groups, whereas sediment captured only 4, despite yielding 3× as many ASVs. Low DNA yields from passive water samples resulted in fewer, but some unique, ASVs representing 3 parasite groups. The most efficient sampling method varied with respect to parasite group across habitats, and the parasite communities from each habitat were distinct regardless of sampling method. We detected ASVs of 9 named species, 4 of which may represent introductions to the US. The abundance of our results demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of eDNA metabarcoding for assessing parasite diversity during short, intensive surveys, and highlights the critical need for more comprehensive sequence databases and the development of primers for those parasite taxa that elude detection using eDNA methods.

Theoretical perspectives propose that positive childhood experiences (PCEs) are associated with adult mental health symptoms. The aim of the current study was to conduct a meta-analysis to evaluate the correlations between PCEs and adult mental health symptoms. 41 unique studies (N = 74,492) were included. Significant, negative, medium-to-large, effects were observed between PCEs and each mental health symptom (medium-to-large for overall mental health: r = −.268; and depression: r = −.273; for anxiety: r = −.246; and PTSD: r = −.243), indicating that higher levels of PCEs are linked to fewer mental health difficulties in adulthood. Meta-regression analyses identified current age at the time of mental health assessment and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) as significant moderators. Specifically, the promotive effects of PCEs were stronger among younger adults and weakened with higher ACEs exposure, particularly in relation to overall adult mental health symptoms, depression, PTSD, and anxiety. In contrast, no significant moderation effects were found for sex or the type of PCEs measurement tool used. Integrated prevention frameworks that combine ACEs prevention with PCEs promotion can enhance mental health across the lifespan by addressing both risk and promotive pathways and providing developmentally tailored support.

This article examines Conor Cruise O’Brien’s ideas about historical objectivity and the craft of the historian. Drawing on a mix of published material and unpublished manuscript sources, it charts the evolution of the thinking of a key Irish public intellectual about how historians should write history and how their work should relate to their contemporary world. It identifies several unacknowledged intellectual debts O’Brien owed to influential twentieth-century thinkers — namely, the philosophers Michael Oakeshott and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the sociologist C. Wright Mills. The article challenges the claim that O’Brien’s view of historiography underwent significant changes in response to the outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland during the late 1960s. On the contrary, it is argued that O’Brien’s thinking on these themes remained fundamentally unchanged from the mid 1950s until the end of his long career as a public intellectual.