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A miniature tunnel diode oscillator for condensed matter physics experiments
No full textWe have developed a new design for a small tunnel diode oscillator circuit, which minimizes eddy current pickup in changing magnetic fields, minimizes parasitic reactance for achieving high frequency operation, and is small enough to fit in the confined spaces that are common in high magnetic field dilution refrigerator environments. The new design has been tested up to 1.5 GHz and at temperatures from room temperature down to 25 mK. We have also used the system to take measurements up to 60 T in a pulsed magnetic field. In this manuscript, we analyze the circuit and give guidance for using the circuits and the limits of operation. © 2025 Author(s)
Refugee stigma and its toll on mental health: Development and validation of the refugee stigma scale (RSS)
No full textBackground Unprecedented, forced displacement, especially from conflict and war areas, requires addressing resultant mental health issues. Aim Refugees experience mental and physical health problems due to post-displacement stressors, and the pervasive stigma associated with refugee status can exacerbate these difficulties, highlighting the need for a comprehensive assessment tool to understand various facets of refugee stigma. Method We developed the refugee stigma scale (RSS), consisting of 43 items informed by the literature, qualitative and quantitative data. The scale includes four theoretical dimensions of stigma: perceived community stigma, experienced stigma, anticipated stigma and internalised stigma. To examine convergent validity, validated self-report measures assessing depression, anxiety, post-Traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), somatic symptoms (SSs), post-migration difficulties and contact experiences were used. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) examined the scale structure, and multiple-group CFA (MG-CFA) was used to assess measurement invariance. Cronbach\u27s alpha was used to test internal reliability, and associations of the stigma dimensions with depression, anxiety, PTSD and SSs were examined to test validity. Results In a sample of (n=851, 404 Syrian, 63.9% men; 447 Afghan, 67.1% men) refugees in Türkiye, the CFA supported the hypothesised four-factor structure of the RSS (fit indices: χ 2 =4051.880, df=1169, p\u3c 0.001, comparative fit index=0.99, Tucker-Lewis index=0.99, root mean square error of approximation=0.054). MG-CFA suggested that RSS is invariant across Syrian and Afghan refugees, gender, educational level, length of stay and legal status in the host country. High internal reliability (α\u3e0.88) and strong associations of the stigma dimensions with health outcomes support the reliability and convergent validity of the RSS. Conclusion This study provides robust evidence for the RSS as a scale assessing different dimensions of stigma related to refugee status. The RSS can provide valuable insight into the complex web of refugee status stigma and mental and physical health difficulties. © 2025 BMJ Publishing Group. All rights reserved
There Is No Socio-Political Transformation Without an Epistemic Revolution: On Democratizing the Literature Classroom through Antiracist Pedagogy
No full textWritten by a postcolonial/decolonial scholar whose primary area of instruction is francophone literatures and cultures, this chapter describes the antiracist actions undertaken in a new course on Afrofuturism: Democratizing learning and the educational experience through horizontal, communal knowledge production and the validation of diverse learners and ways of knowing. This chapter identifies ways to leverage Afrofuturism as a tool to organize the course materials, develop more authentic and diverse assignments, and innovate in teaching. It also outlines how this praxis transformed the instructor\u27s other courses and concludes with a reflection on structural barriers to antiracist pedagogy. © 2026 selection and editorial matter, Jie Y. Park and Laurie Ross; individual chapters, the contributors
Designing the Community of Praxis
No full textThis chapter argues that praxis groups are not just informal gatherings of interested faculty. Instead they are designed with a structure as well as a set of social and intellectual practices for problem-posing, action, and reflection. In the praxis groups, faculty were not told how to be antiracist, but rather drew upon the rich texts and resources and a sense of community that built up gradually over time. The chapter offers the theory of and approach to learning that was fundamental to the praxis group. Then we offer several resources for facilitating faculty learning. Finally, we address higher education administrators and instructional leaders (e.g., directors of teaching and learning centers) about how to structure faculty learning through the concept of guided emergence. © 2026 selection and editorial matter, Jie Y. Park and Laurie Ross; individual chapters, the contributors
Maritime labour regimes in the North Atlantic offshore wind energy industry: On the socialization of labour and the structural power of the working class
No full textThis article examines the emergence and transformation of maritime labour regimes in the North Atlantic offshore wind energy industry. Drawing on an array of published materials, observation at industry conferences, and semi-structured interviews with workers, managers, trade union officials, and others involved in the offshore wind industry in Northwestern Europe and the United States, the article analyses the development of labour regimes through an analysis of the contradictions between the production of use value and the production of surplus value. Through this dialectical approach, the article shows how the particular natural conditions and competitive dynamics of offshore wind power production necessitate an increasing socialization of labour, generating greater bargaining power for some skilled workers and more favourable conditions for collective organization. Through a discussion of recent industrial actions in two different divisions of the offshore wind energy industry, the article then shows how some workers are leveraging their structural power to contest an individualization of class relations. It concludes by arguing that the offshore wind industry is not simply a new frontier of capital accumulation, but potentially also a key terrain for the reconstitution of working-class power. © The Author(s) 202
Earth Action in Transition: Highlights From the 2025 ESA–NASA International Workshop on AI Foundation Models for EO [Space-Agencies]
No full textOver 850 people joined the first International Workshop on AI Foundation Model (FM) for Earth Observation (EO) co-organized by ESA and NASA 5-7 May 2025. Hosted at ESRIN (ESA’s Earth Observation Center, Italy), the event welcomed around 300 people on site, and an additional 550 online, with the promise that FMs can revolutionize EO and Earth sciences. The workshop marked a pivotal moment in aligning the EO and FM communities, fostering a shared commitment to developing open and trustworthy tools that support science discovery, operational applications, and prescriptive analytics. EO data is massive, complex and high dimensional requiring specific yet scalable AI architectures. The workshop emphasized the need for training and architecture enabling interpretability, explainability, and physical consistency. Coordination should be strengthened to minimize redundant development and to better leverage collective expertise. The focus has shifted from prototyping to real-world deployment, with FMs needing further design for integration into digital twins, dashboards, and edge platforms. Transparent benchmarking and user-driven evaluation are key to guiding model development and decision-making. In addition, parameter-efficient adaptation, neural compression, and embedding-based workflows offer promising paths for scaling EO analytics. While FMs show promise, their effectiveness remains context-dependent. The community debated whether to pursue universal models, specialized solutions, or mixtures of experts. The workshop envisioned the future of agentic AI in EO, with multi-agent system powered by EO FMs and vision-language models, that can dynamically reason and act on EO data. This shift from static pipelines to adaptive, smarter systems could redefine the future of EO. This paper summarizes key discussions and concludes with thought-provoking remarks. © 2013 IEEE
The Scarlet - Volume CIV, No. 3 (October 3, 2025)
No full textThe October 3, 2025 edition of The Scarlet (est. 1939), Clark University\u27s student-run newspaper. The Scarlet is intellectually and editorially independent of the University.https://commons.clarku.edu/scarlet/1178/thumbnail.jp
The Political Ecology of Soybean Infrastructure in Brazil
No full textInfrastructure has become more than objects of analysis in political ecology. It is now a fashionable ‘analytical lens’ in own right for theorizing ontology, relationality, materiality, and non-human agency. Yet the theory-driven character of this ‘infrastructural turn’ also creates great risks and limitations, while enduring traditions of political economy and the production of nature continue to generate valuable insights on the political ecology of infrastructure as well. The current challenge for the political ecology of infrastructure is to glean politically valuable insights from theoretical innovations while maintaining analytical precision. This chapter illustrates the possibilities, benefits, and challenges of such a strategic synthesis through research on soybeans in Brazil. This includes struggles through and over roads, railroads, waterways, warehouses, ports, means of communication, and discourses about such infrastructures, including competition among agribusinesses and government officials, class struggle between owners, workers, and those marginalized by these infrastructures, and political struggles that leverage control over bottlenecks and chokepoints of these infrastructures for various aims. The approach extends well beyond critique of deforestation and social marginalization resulting from expansion of infrastructures for ‘extractivism’ to a more nuanced effort to denaturalize both materialities and discourses about infrastructures and the socio-ecological relations they reflect and mediate. © 2026 selection and editorial matter, Jessica Hope, Elia Apostolopoulou and Yolanda Ariadne Collins
Differential Effects of Aβ Peptides on the Plasmin-Dependent Degradation of ApoE3 and ApoE4
No full textThe ApoE4 allele of apolipoprotein E (ApoE4) is the strongest hereditary predisposition to Alzheimer’s disease, even though ApoE4 only differs from the more common ApoE3 by a single amino acid substitution. Previous studies have shown that ApoE4 is more susceptible to proteolytic degradation than ApoE3. This is an important finding because of ApoE’s role in cholesterol homeostasis and lipid transport in the brain. The molecular determinants of the increased susceptibility of ApoE4 to proteolysis are unknown. Here, we apply a combination of spectrometric and spectroscopic methods to show that amyloid-β (Aβ) peptides, including Aβ(1-40) and Aβ(pyroE3-42), differentially modulate the plasmin-dependent degradation of ApoE3 and ApoE4. In particular, our data reveal that while the Aβ peptides do not affect the proteolysis of ApoE3, the peptides enhance the degradation of ApoE4 significantly. Overall, this work motivates therapeutic development that targets the Aβ-induced dysregulation of ApoE4 homeostasis in individuals carrying the ApoE4 allele. © 2025 American Chemical Society
María Acosta Cruz – Introducing Disaster Nation: An Ecocritical Study of Puerto Rican Culture
No full textClark University faculty member María Acosta Cruz (Language, Literature, and Culture) discusses her new book, Disaster Nation: An Ecocritical Study of Puerto Rican Culture. In it, she explores Puerto Rico’s national culture through a complex web of references to the disasters that the nation has suffered and to how the environment has been portrayed. Sometimes Puerto Rican history, literature and arts highlight the drama of hurricanes and earthquakes. But often, the classics read in universities and gazed at in museums depict an Edenic garden of eternal spring. Since cultural depictions of the environment are never innocent and always have socio-political motivations, Acosta Cruz’s ecocritical project explores Puerto Rico through its unique convergences of calamities: cyclonic location and ecological instability, as well as continuous colonialism.
Sponsored by the Alice Coonley Higgins Institute for Arts and Humanities and the Department of Language, Literature, and Culture at Clark Universit