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Only One Percent of Important Shark and Ray Areas in the Western Indian Ocean Are Fully Protected From Fishing Pressure
Get PDFThe Western Indian Ocean (WIO) is known for its high diversity of chondrichthyans (sharks, rays, and chimaeras). However, intense fishing pressure has led to severe population declines and local extinctions of several species. The Important Shark and Ray Area (ISRA) process is a collaborative, evidence‐based approach used to identify critical habitat for chondrichthyans. We analysed ISRAs across the WIO to quantify the diversity of research methods used to identify them, evaluate spatial overlap with designated marine protected areas (MPAs), model the influence of several species‐ and jurisdiction‐specific variables on ISRA delineation, and explore the importance of incorporating unpublished data into the delineation process. In total, 125 ISRAs (covering > 2.8 million km2; ~10% of total regional surface area) were identified within the WIO from surface waters to ~2000 m depth. These ISRAs contain over one‐third (n = 104, 39%) of the 270 chondrichthyan species reported from the region, with 76% being threatened with extinction according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The underlying evidence supporting ISRA identification was primarily drawn from relatively inexpensive research methods, such as visual census (25%) or fish‐market/landing site surveys (22.6%), as well as citizen science (9.5%). Incorporating unpublished records substantially increased the frequency of ISRA delineation, leading to expanded taxonomic and geographic coverage. Still, the full dataset was influenced by the same biases as the published record, tending to favour large‐bodied, wide‐ranging, and shallow‐dwelling species. Only 7.1% of ISRAs are within designated MPAs, with just 1.2% in fully protected no‐take areas. The highest no‐take overlap occurs in the Seychelles and Chagos Archipelago. These findings highlight the shortfalls in spatial protection of chondrichthyan habitats, but also present a strategic opportunity for policy‐makers and resource managers to improve current MPA coverage and meet their commitments under international agreements, such as the Global Biodiversity Framework
Necropolitics and state-sponsored drug violence: the death penalty for drug offences in Indonesia
Get PDFBackground: Much of the literature on drug-related violence focuses on the Americas, its applicability to other regions of the world unobvious (Liem and Moeller, 2025). Focusing on the death penalty for drug offences in Indonesia – with findings generalisable to other Southeast Asian jurisdictions – we find that, while contemporary theories focus on the violence within drug markets, here the violence is unidirectional: from the state to civilians.
Methods: We apply a necropolitical theoretical framework (Mbembe, 2003) to data from interviews and focus groups with high level judges (8 participants), prosecutors (32), narcotics police (8) and other police officers (6) in Jakarta, Indonesia from 2023 to 2024.
Results: Our data reveal three key features of the necropolitical theoretical framework:
1) State of exception and siege: our participants harnessed the language of a ‘drugs emergency’ in Indonesia, with concerns about invasion, a foreign ‘insurgency’ of drugs, justifying the most punitive criminal justice response.
2) Annihilation for preservation: judicial and extrajudicial executions of drug traffickers are justified for the protection of current and future generations from the scourge of drugs.
3) Racism in post-colonial practice: executions for drug offences have been disproportionately directed at foreign nationals.
Conclusion: This paper invites the reader to zoom out from the typical focus on violence within the drug trade to consider punishment – judicial and extrajudicial – as a form of state-sponsored, necropolitical violence, part of the continuum of ‘drug-related violence’ rather than simply a matter of penal policy
Cardiac health assessment across scenarios and devices using a multimodal foundation model pretrained on data from 1.7 million individuals
Get PDFCardiovascular diseases remain a major contributor to the global burden of healthcare, highlighting the importance of accurate and scalable methods for cardiac monitoring. Cardiac biosignals, most notably electrocardiograms (ECG) and photoplethysmograms (PPG), are essential for diagnosing, preventing, and managing cardiovascular conditions across clinical and home settings. However, their acquisition varies substantially across scenarios and devices, while existing analytical models often rely on homogeneous datasets and static bespoke models, limiting their robustness and generalizability in diverse real-world contexts. In this study, we present a cardiac sensing foundation model (CSFM) that leverages transformer architectures and a generative masked pretraining strategy to learn unified representations from heterogeneous health records. CSFM is pretrained on a multimodal integration of data from various large-scale datasets, comprising cardiac signals from approximately 1.7 million individuals and their corresponding clinical or machine-generated text reports. The embeddings derived from CSFM act as effective, transferable features across diverse cardiac sensing scenarios, supporting seamless adaptation to varied input configurations and sensor modalities. Extensive evaluations across diagnostic tasks, demographic recognition, vital sign measurement, clinical outcome prediction, and ECG question answering demonstrate that CSFM consistently outperforms traditional one-modal-one-task approaches. Notably, CSFM maintains favorable performance across both 12-lead and single-lead ECGs, as well as in scenarios involving ECG only, PPG only, or a combination of both. This highlights its potential as a versatile and scalable foundation for comprehensive cardiac monitoring
The Most Luminous Known Fast Blue Optical Transient AT 2024wpp: Unprecedented Evolution and Properties in the Ultraviolet to the Near-infrared
Get PDFWe present an extensive photometric and spectroscopic ultraviolet–optical–infrared campaign on the luminous fast blue optical transient (LFBOT) AT 2024wpp over the first ∼100 days. AT 2024wpp is the most luminous LFBOT discovered to date, with Lpk ≈ (2–4) × 1045 erg s−1 (5–10 times that of the prototypical AT 2018cow). This extreme luminosity enabled the acquisition of the most detailed LFBOT UV light curve thus far. In the first ∼45 days, AT 2024wpp radiated >1051 erg, surpassing AT 2018cow by an order of magnitude and requiring a power source beyond the radioactive 56Ni decay of traditional supernovae. Like AT 2018cow, the UV–optical spectrum of AT 2024wpp is dominated by a persistently blue thermal continuum throughout our monitoring, with blackbody parameters at a peak of T > 30,000 K and RBB/t ≈ 0.2c–0.3c. We find evidence for cooling until ∼10 days; thereafter, T ≳ 20,000 K is maintained. We interpret the featureless spectra as a consequence of continuous energy injection from a central source of high-energy emission that maintains high ejecta ionization. After 35 days, faint (equivalent width (EW) ≲ 10 Å) H and He spectral features with kinematically separate velocity components centered at 0 and −6400 km s−1 emerge, implying spherical symmetry deviations. A near-infrared excess of emission above the optical blackbody emerges between 20 and 30 days, with a power-law spectrum Fν,NIR ∝ ν−0.3 at 30 days. We interpret this distinct emission component as either reprocessing of early UV emission in a dust echo or free–free emission in an extended medium above the optical photosphere. LFBOT asphericity and multiple outflow components (including mildly relativistic ejecta), together with the large radiated energy, are naturally realized by super-Eddington accretion disks around neutron stars or black holes and their outflows
Journalism and technology trends and predictions 2026
Get PDFThis annual Reuters Institute predictions report looks at the key trends that will impact news media in 2026. Fewer than four in ten (38%) of our sample of editors, CEOs, and digital executives say they are confident about the prospects for journalism. Stated concerns relate to perceived loss of influence for institutional media, low audience trust, verbal and legal attacks by politicians, and the growing power of AI enabled platforms. Publishers expect a significant fall in referrals from search as big tech companies integrate AI overviews and other ‘story-like’ responses to news queries. The report also shows how publishers are adopting generative AI. Beyond efficient workflows, publishers will be looking to use AI for newsgathering and to speed up product development. Publishers will also be looking to invest more in video and audio content in 2026 with a particular focus on YouTube. This is partly in response to the rise of creator-led media which is providing increasing competition for audience attention
Decoupling generalised configuration spaces on surfaces
No full textThe configuration space of k points on a manifold carries an action of its diffeomorphism group. The homotopy quotient of this action is equivalent to the classifying space of diffeomorphisms of a punctured manifold, and therefore admits results about homological stability. Inspired by the works of Segal, McDuff, B¨odigheimer, and Salvatore, we look at generalised configuration spaces where particles have labels and even partially summable labels, in which points are allowed to collide whenever their labels are summable. These generalised configuration spaces also admit actions of the diffeomorphism group and we look at their homotopy quotients. Our main result is a decoupling theorem for these homotopy quotients on surfaces: in a range, their homology is completely described by the product of the moduli space of surfaces and a generalised configuration space of points in R∞. Using this result, we show these spaces admit homological stability with respect to increasing the genus, and we identify the stable homology. This can be interpreted as a Diff-equivariant homological stability for factorization homology. In addition, we use this result to study the group completion of the monoid of moduli spaces of configurations on surfaces
Human-induced temperature rise is driving Africa towards drought-prone climatic conditions
Get PDFThis study focuses on the role of human activities in shaping climate forcings and their impact on surface air temperature (SAT) and drought intensification over Africa, emphasizing the human contributions to these phenomena. Through the analysis of observations, various model experiments, and Regularized Optimal Fingerprinting detection technique, our findings indicate that human-induced factors have contributed to an increase in surface air temperatures ranging from 0.8 to C above pre-industrial benchmarks. Greenhouse gases (GHGs) emerge as the primary driver of this rise (0.47 to C), followed by land use (LU) changes (0.47 to C). In contrast, anthropogenic aerosols (Aaer) exert a cooling effect (-1.82 to C) on SAT. The analysis reveals that SAT anomalies, particularly during the industrial period, have significantly contributed to the intensification of drought-prone climatic conditions. During the pre-industrial period, the absence of anthropogenic warming kept SAT stable, resulting in mildly wet conditions (Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI)=0.54). However, in the industrial period, the sharp rise in SAT due to GHG and LU forcings led towards significantly drought-prone climatic conditions (SPEI=-0.73), while the cooling effect of Aaer was insufficient to offset the warming trend. Estimates based on Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) 4.5 and 8.5 suggest that the SAT over Africa could rise by around C and C, respectively, by the end of the century, highlighting the significant influence of human-driven factors in driving temperature rise. Strategic oversight of GHG emissions, LU changes, and aerosol concentrations in Africa offers the possibility potential to mitigate further warming and consequent drought intensification in this region
The past in the present: The Russian exodus to Georgia and the temporalities of misfitting
Get PDFThis article explores the experiences of Tbilisi residents and Russian migrants in the wake of the full-scale war in Ukraine and the subsequent Russian exodus to Georgia. Attending to the sense in both communities that history is repeating itself, the article argues that this feeling of repetition stems from two overlapping but distinct temporalities. For Georgians, opposition to the influx of Russians and the anxiety about the repetition of history are driven by the perceived threat to their European future. In contrast, Russian migrants experience the present as a déjà vu, a repetition of previous waves of migration, from which the possible future also emerges as another cycle of misfitting and exclusion
Tissue response to deep brain stimulation electrodes: a review of animal and neurohistopathological studies
Get PDFObjective. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a neuromodulation therapy widely used to treat various neurological and neuropsychiatric conditions, with thousands of patients undergoing the procedure every year. However, despite the immense improvement in quality of life that most patients experience after surgery, many questions still remain surrounding various elements of DBS, including how the brain tissue responds to DBS electrodes and how that interaction may affect the therapy. Approach. In this review, we build off a previous neurohistopathological review to encompass studies up to present date. Main results. We identified 33 cases with 63 electrodes from patients with various disease pathologies and DBS targets. We supplemented the findings with animal studies. Significance. These studies can provide evidence where neurohistopathological studies have not been performed. They can also offer predictions to guide future neurohistopathological studies. Better understanding of the tissue response to DBS electrodes can contribute to improved clinical outcomes
The European Biophysics Journal Prizes 2025: Recognising biophysical science at sub-cellular, cellular and tissue levels of organisation
Get PDFThe European Biophysics Journal Prizes for 2025, awarded at the European Biophysical Societies Association (EBSA) Congress in Rome last July, recognised three of the outstanding papers published by the Journal in 2022 and 2023. In making these awards, the Journal and EBSA again sought to recognise publications which were already proving their impact. The studies recognised are diverse and highlight the vitality of biophysical science in the 2020s. They concern studies of (i) synaptic vesicles undergoing glutamate uptake, (ii) red blood cells under pressure and the effects of mechanically triggered calcium influx, and (iii) how ciliary beating, the resulting wave effects and downstream transport processes interrelate in trachea. As such these Prizes recognise excellent biophysical science at sub-cellular, cellular and tissue levels of organisation