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‘Keep the homosexual lobby at bay’: homosexuality, the UK armed forces and the end to the ‘gay ban’, 1991–2000
No full textIn January 2000, the UK government finally ended the ban on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) military personnel serving in the armed forces. The end of the so-called ‘gay ban’ was the result of a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that the bar violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, protecting an individual’s right to family and private life. Whilst the effects of this ban on individuals before and afterwards have been examined in detail, the deliberations that led to this change using the records of the Ministry of Defence have not. Using material released under the UK’s Freedom of Information Act (2000) to go beyond the public statements of Ministers and service personnel, this article concludes that wider political and societal pressures put the Ministry of Defence on the backfoot, forcing attempts at evidence-based policy and the report of the Homosexuality Policy Assessment Team. Whilst in public the MOD sought to make an evidence-based case for the ban to remain, the article reveals the frank discussions behind closed doors on the future of the ‘gay ban’ and the MOD’s robust response to calls for change
Partial Discharge in Silicone Gel on Power Module Substrates in High-Humidity Conditions
No full textPartial discharge (PD) is known to affect the quality of insulation in power electronics modules. This article provides a comprehensive characterization of PD activity in gel-encapsulated direct bonded copper (DBC) power module substrates when subjected to fast unipolar square excitations. PD characteristics in low- and high-humidity environments are compared. PD inception voltage (PDIV) testing and time-resolved PD (TRPD) analysis are performed to investigate discharges in each condition. Two PD groups are identified, categorized by their amplitude, and prompting further investigation of the weaker group with a statistics-based approach. The strong group does not vary with humidity and is attributed to discharges between the top and bottom copper of the DBC. The weaker group varies significantly with humidity and is attributed to discharges within the lateral trench gap of the DBC top copper
Exploring the cycle of H2 gas using numerical modelling in the context of a deep geological repository
Get PDFHydrogen gas (H2) generation due to microbially influenced corrosion (MIC) is an important evaluation to build confidence in long term safety of the Canada’s proposed high level nuclear waste deep geological repository (DGR). Numerical modelling can be a powerful tool as the DGR design life far exceeds the timescales of laboratory or field studies. This work presents the first numerical modelling study exploring long-term H2 dynamics under DGR environments. The key processes relevant to H2 production and consumption are identified and two numerical models are presented; one that focuses on H2 transport through the bentonite buffer and host rock, and another that considers production of H2 through MIC and the biotic H2 consumption (modelled through a simplified approach). This work is to investigate whether the net amount of H2 would surpass the solubility limit leading to H2 gas formation, using conservative assumptions of HS− and H2 flux conversion when sulfate is a non-limiting species. The modelling study showed that long-term H2 production from MIC may depend on HS− supply to the UFC, H2 transport properties, and biotic H2 consumption processes. While the HS− supply could increase the H2 formation, H2 transport through the rock and biotic H2 consumption processes were shown to control the accumulation of H2. Amongst various modelling scenarios, the H2 solubility limit was never surpassed, indicating the unlikelihood of H2 gas pressure build-up in a DGR under these modelling conditions. Altogether, this study provides valuable insight into H2 production, consumption, and transport dynamics in a DGR environment
Advancing accessible tourism geographies
Get PDFThis collection advances geographic approaches to accessible tourism through six contributions that collectively double the published resources on this topic within Tourism Geographies. Accessible tourism enables people with access requirements to participate in tourism with independence, equity, and dignity. Despite the growth of accessible tourism research, geographic, spatial, and/or mobilities approaches have been conspicuously absent. Thus, the contributions of this collection include new toolkits to support more inclusive and co-designed accessible tourism (Wan et al., 2024; Dickson et al., 2024; Lu et al., 2024) and greater conceptual depth related to embodied tourism (im)mobilities (Chan et al., 2025; Cockburn-Wootten et al., 2025; Farkic et al., 2025). Progressing towards accessible tourism's aim of seamless and equitable tourism experiences, geographic perspectives will have an important role to play in addressing the crucial research gaps that remain: destination-scale analyses, whole-of-journey approaches, and inclusive stakeholder-led methodologies
Widespread co-occurrence of antibiotic mixtures constitutes pervasive one-health risk in China: A national multi-media assessment with novel indicators
No full textAntibiotic contamination poses broad ecological and health threats within the One Health framework, yet a comprehensive understanding of their multi-media distribution, statistical co-occurrence, and integrated risks remains limited. This study compiled a nationwide database of 89,712 records (2005–2024) covering 129 antibiotics in 11 media, constituting the first virtually all-media antibiotic profiling. Within the source-receptor system, median antibiotic concentrations ranged from 0.01 to 1592 ng/L or μg/kg, with aqueous receptors exhibiting the greatest antibiotic diversity. Spearman correlation analysis demonstrated significant positive relationships between total concentrations and numbers of detections (ρ = 0.53–0.88, p < 0.001). Data-driven statistical analyses revealed complex co-occurrence patterns, with the most intricate networks in the Yangtze River Basin and sediment. Norfloxacin, ofloxacin, and ciprofloxacin were identified as the most frequently co-occurring combination of antibiotics. To mitigate traditional risk underestimation, we established a One Health risk framework for antibiotic mixtures by integrating novel indicators for antimicrobial resistance selection and microbial nitrogen cycling benchmarked against realistic environmental concentrations. Landfill leachate and wastewater treatment plant sludge represented the highest-risk media. Enrofloxacin posed the greatest resistance risk in six aqueous media (83.2 % exceedance), whereas ciprofloxacin showed the highest risk in five solid media (125.8 %). For nitrogen cycling, ofloxacin (75.7 %) had the greatest total risk in aqueous environments, and sulfamethoxazole showed the highest risk in solid media (177.3 %). These findings provide essential evidence to systematize the One-Health risk management of antibiotic mixtures across diverse environmental media in China
Self-supervised Text-vision Alignment for Automated Brain MRI Abnormality Detection: A Multicenter Study (ALIGN Study)
Get PDFPurposeTo develop a self-supervised text-vision framework to detect abnormalities on brain MRI scans by leveraging free-text neuroradiology reports, eliminating the need for expertlabeled training datasets.Materials and MethodsThis retrospective and prospective multicenter study included 81,936 brain MRI examinations and corresponding radiology reports for adult patients at two UK National Health Service (NHS) hospitals during January 2008-December 2019 for training and internal testing, and 1,369 prospectively collected examinations between March 2022-March 2024 from four separate NHS hospitals for external testing (clinicaltrials.gov NCT043681). A neuroradiology language model (NeuroBERT) was trained using self-supervised tasks to generate report embeddings. Convolutional neural networks (one per MRI sequence) were trained to map scans to embeddings by minimizing mean squared error loss. The framework then detected abnormalities in new examinations by scoring scans against query sentences using textimage similarity. Model diagnostic performance was assessed using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC).ResultsThe framework achieved an AUC of 0.95 (95% CI: 0.94, 0.97) for normal versus abnormal classification and generalized to external sites with examination-level AUCs of 0.90 (95% CI: 0.86, 0.93), 0.87 (95% CI: 0.83, 0.90), 0.86 (95% CI: 0.83, 0.90), and 0.85 (95% CI: 0.81, 0.89). In five zero-shot classification tasks—acute stroke, multiple sclerosis, intracranial hemorrhage, meningioma, and hydrocephalus—the framework achieved a mean AUC of 0.89 (range, 0.77–0.93). For visual-semantic image retrieval, mean precision was 0.84 among the top 15 images across seven pathologies.ConclusionThe self-supervised text-vision framework accurately detected brain MRI abnormalities without expert-labeled datasets
University of Missouri Responsible AI in Health Research Workshop 2025 (MU RAHR 2025): A Nurse-Led Multidisciplinary Responsible AI Workshop
Get PDFEditorial: Impacts of metal and xenobiotic-induced stress on antibiotic resistance in microbial communities
Get PDFPlant controls over tropical wetland nitrous oxide dynamics: a review
Get PDFTropical wetlands are an important global source of greenhouse gas emissions, including nitrous oxide, a potent and long-lasting greenhouse gas. Tropical wetland ecosystems can be highly heterogeneous, featuring a variety of vegetation types, from grasses through to palms and mangroves. While soil conditions (particularly soil moisture and pH) are essential for determining the formation of nitrous oxide in soils, plants have a central role in determining the balance of emissions. In this review, we summarise the importance of vegetation in regulating tropical wetland nitrous oxide dynamics. We show how a variety of plant-mediated processes can exert key controls over wetland plant–soil nitrogen transportation and transformations. Key mechanisms of plant regulation of dynamics include influencing substrate availability (carbon and nitrogen) through litter inputs, rhizodeposition, root turnover and plant nitrogen uptake, rhizosphere biology, and plant-mediated nitrous oxide transportation, all of which can vary between species and dominant vegetation types. We propose that there is a critical need to better quantify such processes across dominant wetland ecotypes, to support improved upscaling of emissions, and assess their sensitivity to future environmental change
Axial compressive testing of rectangular concrete-filled stainless steel tubes incorporating demolished concrete lumps
No full textConcrete-filled stainless-steel tubes (CFSSTs) exhibit good resistance to compressive loading and possess a high level of corrosion resistance. CFSSTs can be cast using compound concrete (CC) by incorporating coarsely crushed demolished concrete lumps (DCL). The inclusion of DCLs in CFSST members reduces the demand for Portland cement and natural aggregates, which provides clear environmental benefits. CFSST members incorporating DCLs, for which there are currently little experimental data, are the focus of the present study. A comprehensive experimental investigation into the axial compressive behaviour of rectangular CFSST sections is presented in this paper. A total of 17 rectangular CFSST stub columns were tested under axial compression. The influence of the key parameters, including the strengths of DCLs and fresh concrete, as well as the replacement ratio, on the axial compressive behaviour of CFSST sections were investigated. The axial capacities of the investigated CFSST members are predicted using the European Code (EC4), American Specifications (AISC360–22) and Han's method. The applicability of the considered design codes has been assessed by comparing the predicted axial capacities to the experimental failure loads of the CFSST members
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