We present theoretical models for flow and diffusion in microfluidic polygonal mixers of arbitrary shapes. Combining work based on Boussinesq coordinates with modern methods for the calculation of the Schwarz–Christoffel transform, we present an integrated method that yields analytical solutions for both flow and concentration profiles everywhere in microfluidic mixers with arbitrary numbers of inlets. We illustrate how the problem can be reduced to a sequence of conformal maps to a known domain, where the advection–diffusion problem can be readily solved, and map back the solution to the geometry of interest. We use the method to model a number of previously published microfluidic mixer geometries, used in lipid nanoparticle synthesis, among others. The method is also applicable to other problems described by planar transport equations in polygonal domains, for instance, in groundwater flows or electrokinetics.

Here There Are Blueberries (2018–ongoing), the Tectonic Theater Project’s most recent work, tells the story of a photo album from Auschwitz collected in 1944 by Obersturmführer Karl-Friedrich Höcker, adjutant to camp commander SS-Sturmbannführer Richard Baer. The photos, now at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, show Nazi soldiers, their families, and concentration-extermination camp staff relaxing and socializing. Tectonic not only presents the photos but also investigates curating, memory, and historical responsibility. The interview details the process that brought Here There Are Blueberries into existence.

Urogenital schistosomiasis has 2 gender-specific manifestations, male genital schistosomiasis (MGS) and female genital schistosomiasis (FGS). The burdens of MGS and FGS are multifaceted, encompassing financial hardship, emotional and mental health problems and sometimes social stigmatization. Given the pernicious nature of sequelae in the genitalia, managing these chronic health conditions is expensive, difficult and problematic in resource poor settings. Key challenges include lack of epidemiological data on the burden of MGS and FGS, inadequate knowledge among primary and auxiliary health care workers, leading to misdiagnosis, incorrect treatment administration, e.g. overuse of antibiotics, and a lack of appropriate point-of-care diagnostic equipment. Prevention of MGS and FGS is therefore more preferable, however, current preventive programmes and chemotherapy campaigns offering praziquantel are becoming more resource constrained and in most endemic areas are not reaching at-risk adults (and adolescents), sufficiently. Furthermore, there are limited prospects for adequate access to treatment in pre-school children where infections can be first acquired. Therefore, we propose 3 key recommendations guiding movement towards elimination of schistosomiasis as a public health problem: scaling-up praziquantel treatment for other at-risk groups; developing a targeted One Health approach to reduce environmental transmission in both humans and animals; Multi-stakeholder collaboration and community engagement for effective implementation of Water Sanitation and Hygiene components of disease control. Whilst maintaining a school-based approach is still foundational, targeted and sustainable expansion of preventive chemotherapy to other at-risk groups within communities is needed to secure real prospects in elimination of genital schistosomiasis as a public health problem in Africa.

Paleontology provides insights into the history of the planet, from the origins of life billions of years ago to the biotic changes of the Recent. The scope of paleontological research is as vast as it is varied, and the field is constantly evolving. In an effort to identify “Big Questions” in paleontology, experts from around the world came together to build a list of priority questions the field can address in the years ahead. The 89 questions presented herein (grouped within 11 themes) represent contributions from nearly 200 international scientists. These questions touch on common themes including biodiversity drivers and patterns, integrating data types across spatiotemporal scales, applying paleontological data to contemporary biodiversity and climate issues, and effectively utilizing innovative methods and technology for new paleontological insights. In addition to these theoretical questions, discussions touch upon structural concerns within the field, advocating for an increased valuation of specimen-based research, protection of natural heritage sites, and the importance of collections infrastructure, along with a stronger emphasis on human diversity, equity, and inclusion. These questions offer a starting point—an initial nucleus of consensus that paleontologists can expand on—for engaging in discussions, securing funding, advocating for museums, and fostering continued growth in shared research directions.

When a low Mach flow is imposed through an orifice at the end of a cavity, intense whistling can occur. It results from the constructive feedback loop between the acoustic field of the cavity and coherent vortex shedding at the edges of the orifice with bias flow. Whistling is often a source of unwanted noise, demanding passive control strategies. In this study, it is shown that whistling can be suppressed by utilising the slow-sound effect. This periodic arrangement of small cavities detunes the cavity from the frequency range where the orifice flow exhibits a potential for acoustic energy amplification, by reducing the effective speed of sound inside the cavity. Acoustic and optical measurement techniques are employed, including scattering matrix and impedance measurements, and particle image velocimetry to reconstruct the velocity field downstream of the orifice. The production and dissipation of acoustic energy is investigated using Howe’s energy corollary. The spatio-temporal patterns of the vortex sound downstream of the orifice are revealed. They are deduced from phase-averaged acoustic and Lamb vector fields and give qualitative insight into the physical mechanisms of the whistling phenomenon.

Archaeogenetics, the study of ancient DNA, can reveal powerful insights into kinship and the movement of individuals in (pre)history. Here, the authors report on the identification of two individuals with genetic profiles consistent with recent sub-Saharan African ancestry, both of whom were buried in early-medieval cemeteries in southern Britain. Focusing primarily on a sub-adult female from Updown in Kent, the authors explore the societal and cultural contexts in which these individuals lived and died, and the widening geographic links indicated by their presence, pointing back to the Byzantine reconquest of North Africa in AD 533–534.

Kinship can be difficult to discern in the archaeological record, but the study of ancient DNA offers a useful window into one form of kinship: biological relatedness. Here, the authors explore possible kin connections at the post-Roman site of Worth Matravers in south-west England. They find that, while clusters of genetically related individuals are apparent, the inclusion of unrelated individuals in double or triple burials demonstrates an element of social kinship in burial location. Some individuals also carried genetic signatures of continental ancestry, with one young male revealing recent West African ancestry, highlighting the diverse heritage of early medieval Britain.

The next-generation radio astronomy instruments are providing a massive increase in sensitivity and coverage, largely through increasing the number of stations in the array and the frequency span sampled. The two primary problems encountered when processing the resultant avalanche of data are the need for abundant storage and the constraints imposed by I/O, as I/O bandwidths drop significantly on cold storage. An example of this is the data deluge expected from the SKA Telescopes of more than 60 PB per day, all to be stored on the buffer filesystem. While compressing the data is an obvious solution, the impacts on the final data products are hard to predict. In this paper, we chose an error-controlled compressor – MGARD – and applied it to simulated SKA-Mid and real pathfinder visibility data, in noise-free and noise-dominated regimes. As the data have an implicit error level in the system temperature, using an error bound in compression provides a natural metric for compression. MGARD ensures the compression incurred errors adhere to the user-prescribed tolerance. To measure the degradation of images reconstructed using the lossy compressed data, we proposed a list of diagnostic measures, exploring the trade-off between these error bounds and the corresponding compression ratios, as well as the impact on science quality derived from the lossy compressed data products through a series of experiments. We studied the global and local impacts on the output images for continuum and spectral line examples. We found relative error bounds of as much as 10%, which provide compression ratios of about 20, have a limited impact on the continuum imaging as the increased noise is less than the image RMS, whereas a 1% error bound (compression ratio of 8) introduces an increase in noise of about an order of magnitude less than the image RMS. For extremely sensitive observations and for very precious data, we would recommend a $0.1\%$ error bound with compression ratios of about 4. These have noise impacts two orders of magnitude less than the image RMS levels. At these levels, the limits are due to instabilities in the deconvolution methods. We compared the results to the alternative compression tool DYSCO, in both the impacts on the images and in the relative flexibility. MGARD provides better compression for similar error bounds and has a host of potentially powerful additional features.

High-power fiber lasers generate local heat load extremes during their operation, which increase the fiber temperature and lead to adverse thermal effects, such as transverse mode instability or cladding/coating thermal damage. The local temperature extremes are usually located near the end of a fiber where the pump power is delivered. In this paper, longitudinally inhomogeneous doping concentration profiles are applied to reduce the heat load extremes. Utilizing a new degree of freedom, it is shown by both simulations and measurements that the maximal temperature along the fiber can be effectively decreased by using active fibers with an increasing concentration profile in the direction of the pumping power. The concept is studied by a comprehensive numerical model that considers temperature-dependent parameters and is also demonstrated by measurement on an in-house built thulium-doped fiber laser formed by spliced sections with different concentrations. The output power of 54 W with the slope efficiency exceeding 62% was reached.

The Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) on plastic pollution are United Nations member states who will convene for the second part of the fifth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee in Geneva (INC5.2) 5-14 August, 2025 to negotiate a global plastics treaty. The Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty (‘The Scientists’ Coalition’) is an international network of independent scientific and technical experts who have been contributing robust science to treaty negotiators since INC1 in 2022. The Scientists’ Coalition established a series of working groups following INC5.1 in Busan, Korea 25 November – 1 December 2024. Each working group has produced science-based responses to the selected articles of ‘the Chair’s text’ (the latest version of the draft global plastics treaty text). This Letter to the Editor summarises those responses.

Current evidence underscores a need to transform how we do clinical research, shifting from academic-driven priorities to co-led community partnership focused programs, accessible and relevant career pathway programs that expand opportunities for career development, and design of trainings and practices to develop cultural competence among research teams. Failures of equitable research translation contribute to health disparities. Drivers of this failed translation include lack of diversity in both researchers and participants, lack of alignment between research institutions and the communities they serve, and lack of attention to structural sources of inequity and drivers of mistrust for science and research. The Duke University Research Equity and Diversity Initiative (READI) is a program designed to better align clinical research programs with community health priorities through community engagement. Organized around three specific aims, READI-supported programs targeting increased workforce diversity, workforce training in community engagement and cultural competence, inclusive research engagement principles, and development of trustworthy partnerships.

The global challenge of closing the treatment gap highlights the need for innovative interventions. Problem Management Plus (PM+), developed by the World Health Organization (WHO), is an evidence-based brief psychological intervention designed to address this gap by involving non-specialist helpers. In this study, ‘non-specialists’ or ‘helpers’ are individuals without formal training in mental health, who have been trained in and have been delivering individual PM+ for more than 1.5 years. To enhance quality in mental health care, especially with non-specialists, WHO and the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) have launched the Ensuring Quality in Psychosocial and Mental Health Care (EQUIP) platform, an open-access resource for competency-based training. This study evaluates the acceptability and preliminary utility of EQUIP assessment tools. Thirteen helpers were assessed using the ENhancing Assessment of Common Therapeutic Factors (ENACT) and the PM+ assessment tool, culturally adapted and translated for Arabic-speaking helpers in Switzerland. The results indicate that the EQUIP tools can identify strengths and areas for improvement, provide valuable feedback for training, and thus have great potential for enhancing mental health care quality.

The stars of the Milky Way carry the chemical history of our Galaxy in their atmospheres as they journey through its vast expanse. Like barcodes, we can extract the chemical fingerprints of stars from high-resolution spectroscopy. The fourth data release (DR4) of the Galactic Archaeology with HERMES (GALAH) Survey, based on a decade of observations, provides the chemical abundances of up to 32 elements for 917 588 stars that also have exquisite astrometric data from the Gaia satellite. For the first time, these elements include life-essential nitrogen to complement carbon, and oxygen as well as more measurements of rare-earth elements critical to modern-life electronics, offering unparalleled insights into the chemical composition of the Milky Way. For this release, we use neural networks to simultaneously fit stellar parameters and abundances across the whole wavelength range, leveraging synthetic grids computed with Spectroscopy Made Easy. These grids account for atomic line formation in non-local thermodynamic equilibrium for 14 elements. In a two-iteration process, we first fit stellar labels to all 1 085 520 spectra, then co-add repeated observations and refine these labels using astrometric data from Gaia and 2MASS photometry, improving the accuracy and precision of stellar parameters and abundances. Our validation thoroughly assesses the reliability of spectroscopic measurements and highlights key caveats. GALAH DR4 represents yet another milestone in Galactic archaeology, combining detailed chemical compositions from multiple nucleosynthetic channels with kinematic information and age estimates. The resulting dataset, covering nearly a million stars, opens new avenues for understanding not only the chemical and dynamical history of the Milky Way but also the broader questions of the origin of elements and the evolution of planets, stars, and galaxies.

To achieve infectivity, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus responsible for COVID-19, must first traverse the upper respiratory tract mucosal barrier. Once infection is established, the cascading complexities of the pathophysiology of COVID-19 makes intervention extremely difficult. Thus, enhancing the defensive properties of the mucosal linings of the upper respiratory tract may reduce infection by SARS-CoV-2 and indeed by other viruses such as influenza, which have been responsible for the two major pandemics of the last century. In this review we summarise potential opportunities for foods and nutrients to promote an adequate mucosal immune preparedness with an aim to assist protection against infection by SARS-CoV-2, to maximise the mucosal vaccination (IgA inducing) response to existing systemic vaccines, and to play a role as adjuvants to intranasal vaccines. We identify opportunities for vitamins A and D, zinc, probiotics, bovine colostrum and resistant starch to promote mucosal immunity and enhance the mucosal response to systemic vaccines, and for vitamin A to also improve the mucosal response to intranasal vaccination. It is possible that an entirely different virus may in the future, by way of convergent evolution, utilise a similar upper respiratory tract infection pathway. A greater research focus on mucosal lymphoid immune protection in partnership with nutrition would result in greater preparedness for such an event.

In many areas of The Gambia, West Africa, population crowding in a degraded environment has forced close interactions of diurnal primate species with humans. We assessed intestinal parasitic infection prevalence and diversity in 4 diurnal non-human primate (NHP) species, Chlorocebus sabaeus, Erythrocebus patas, Papio papio and Piliocolobus badius across 13 sampling sites. The effect of human activity, determined by the human activity index, and NHP group size on parasite richness was assessed using a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM). The most common protozoa identified were Entamoeba coli (30%) and Iodamoeba buetschlii (25%). The most common helminths were Strongyloides fuelleborni (11%), Oesophagostomum spp. (9%) and Trichuris trichiura (9%). Two of six (6%) Cyclospora spp. infections detected sequenced as Cyclospora cercopitheci (both in C. sabaeus). The more arboreal P. badius trended towards a lower prevalence of intestinal parasites, although this was not statistically significant (χ2 P = 0.105). Human activity or group size did not have any significant effect on parasite richness for P. badius (P = 0.161 and P = 0.603) or P. papio (P = 0.817 and P = 0.607, respectively). There were insufficient observations to fit a GLMM to E. patas or C. sabaeus. Our reports present the richness and diversity of intestinal parasites in 4 diurnal NHPs in The Gambia, West Africa. Despite desertification and habitat loss, our results indicate that the prevalence and diversity of intestinal parasites in Gambian NHPs are seemingly unaffected by human activity. Further investigation with a larger dataset is required to better elucidate these findings.

Geriatric (old age) psychiatry faces growing challenges amid Europe’s ageing population. This editorial emphasises the need for specialised training, mentorship and subspecialty recognition to attract young psychiatrists. By addressing structural gaps and fostering innovation, the field offers a rewarding career in enhancing older adults’ mental healthcare and quality of life.