Recent root items

Adverse Childhood Experiences Are Associated With History of Overdose Among Patients Presenting for Outpatient Addiction Care.

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Objectives

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are associated with mental health issues and substance use. Having a substance use disorder increases the risk of overdose (OD). Research on ACEs and risk of OD is limited. This study examined the relationship between ACE scores and a self-reported history of OD among patients in an addiction and mental health outpatient setting.

Methods

This single-center, cross-sectional design included adults in a dual-diagnosis addiction and mental health outpatient recovery and treatment program from November 2017 to August 2020. Patients (N = 115) were assessed with self-report questionnaires, which included ACEs and history of OD. Bivariate and multivariable logistic regression was used to determine factors associated with self-reported OD history. We assessed the reliability and validity of the ACEs scale.

Results

Of the 115 participants, 26 (22.6%) reported a past OD at intake. The mean ACE score for participants with...

The Party's Over: McCutcheon, Shadow Parties, and the Future of the Party System

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

McCutcheon v Federal Election Commission can only be understood against the deep shifts taking place in American politics. By some measures, party identity is very strong, and the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are at the height of their power. Other measures suggest that the parties are losing their grip on politics to “outside groups” – SuperPACs and nonprofits – which have taken over a startling array of core party functions. But these “outside groups” are are deeply and durably aligned with one party or the other and run by consummate party insiders. That’s why we call them shadow parties.

The explosive growth of outside groups explains why many campaign-finance supporters saw a silver lining to Shaun McCutcheon’s suit. McCutcheon struck down the FECA’s aggregate limits, which capped how much hard money into one donor could give to candidates and party committees in a given year. The crude version of the “silver lining” argument suggests that McCutcheon...

The Use of Synchrotron Radiation in the Medical Sciences

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Synchrotron radiation (SR) sources provide unparalleled brilliance, collimation, coherence, and tunability, enabling specialized techniques that are crucial for advancing medical research across diverse fields from radiation oncology to rational drug design. Certain SR methods, such as macromolecular crystallography, are highly developed and automated, and have been used for decades for both fundamental understanding of biomolecules as well as pharmaceutical design, while other methods, such as microbeam radiation therapy, represent relatively recent developments. Scattering and diffraction methods using SR can provide atomic-level structural mapping of proteins, nucleic acids, and complexes. Imaging applications using SR continue to be developed and advanced for mapping of biological structures and potential use as diagnostics in disease detection. Spectroscopic methods are used to study elemental distributions relevant for detection of contamination in biological systems. Collectively,...

Resurrection: Cooper v. Harris and the Transformation of Racial Gerrymandering into a Voting Rights Tool

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The United States Supreme Court, like the Lord, sometimes works in mysterious ways.

Back in the 1990s, a group of conservative activists convinced a majority of conservative Justices on the United States Supreme Court to create a new cause of action under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause for “racial gerrymandering.” Unlike claims of “vote dilution” — where redistricting authorities draw lines for electing members of Congress, or state or local legislators to order to diminish someone’s political power — “racial gerrymandering” was said to be about an “expressive harm,” or the message sent by government action. In the 1993 case, Shaw v. Reno, the Court held that the “bizarre” shape of two North Carolina congressional districts sent a message to the public that the government was separating voters on the basis of race without adequate justification. The Court later refined the claim to focus less on a district’s shape and more on a legislature’s “predominant...

Plexus 2026: Mosaic

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the 27th issue of PLEXUS, UC Irvine School of Medicine's Journal of Medical Humanities & Arts. PLEXUS is an annual, medical-student-organized publication that proudly showcases the vast talents, diverse perspectives, and nuanced experiences of the greater UCI Health community through art. It is our mission to spark introspection, catalyze meaningful discussions, and ultimately apply the tenets of medical humanities to foster a cohort of compassionate healers.

This year, we present to you MOSAIC. Every person embodies an amalgamation of stories, identities, and lived experiences which shape their perspective on health and healing. Like the tessellated fragments of a mosaic, no single piece tells the whole story — and yet, each is irreplaceable. The practice of medicine benefits from looking at each situation through an interdisciplinary lens, considering the different facets of patients' lives, and thinking carefully about what defines their vision of well-being....

Brief of Legal Scholars in Support of Petitioner, United States v. Texas, No. 21-588 (U.S.)

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In United States v. Texas and Whole Woman's Health v. Jackson, the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari to consider the federal courts' authority to review S.B. 8, Texas's "heartbeat" abortion law. S.B. 8's defenders have argued that its private enforcement scheme is "entirely commonplace." This brief shows that S.B. 8 departs from the models it purports to draw upon in ways that elevate vigilantism over the rule of law. The brief argues that S.B. 8's departures from traditional private rights of action violate due process, and that S.B. 8's novel enforcement scheme sets a dangerous precedent that already is being exported to other areas, with grave implications for constitutional governance and the rule of law.

Mineralized tissue of shark vertebral centra studied with microCT under in situ load

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Shark vertebral bodies (centra) possess remarkable resistance to millions of cycles of large in vivo strains exceeding 4 to 8%. These strains are enormous for a mineralized tissue, and it appears that the centra evolved to achieve this performance through a hierarchy of structures spanning dimensions from centimeters to nanometers. At the 1μm scale, blocks cut from centra and imaged with synchrotron microCT demonstrate that the centra tissue consists of closely spaced, mineralized trabeculae. An outstanding question is: How do these trabeculae deform to accommodate these large strains. This paper presents recently obtained synchrotron microCT results on in situ loading of blocks of shark centra and examines the deformation modes of the interconnected array of trabeculae.

The How of Unequal Opportunity

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This essay argues that we ought to think differently about unequal opportunity. Instead of focusing only on overall prospects in life, we ought to train our attention on the particular moments of decision and the particular developmental processes that shape, in different respects, the trajectories of people's lives. A new wave of research in the social sciences makes possible this shift in focus, which will have profound implications for our understanding of the both concept of equal opportunity itself and its applications in public policy and law.

Asymmetric Constitutional Hardball

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Many have argued that the United States' two major political parties have experienced "asymmetric polarization" in recent decades: The Republican Party has moved significantly further to the right than the Democratic Party has moved to the left. The practice of constitutional hardball, this Essay argues, has followed a similar—and causally related—trajectory. Since at least the mid-1990s, Republican officeholders have been more likely than their Democratic counterparts to push the constitutional envelope, straining unwritten norms of governance or disrupting established constitutional understandings. Both sides have done these things. But contrary to the apparent assumption of some legal scholars, they have not done so with the same frequency or intensity.

After defining constitutional hardball and defending this descriptive claim, this Essay offers several overlapping explanations. Asymmetric constitutional hardball grows out of historically conditioned differences between...

Attosecond response of molecules to impulsive ionization

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Attosecond response of molecules to impulsive ionization

Amicus Brief of Admin Law Scholars; FTC v. Illumina, (5th Cir.) 23-60167 (2023)

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This amicus brief was filed in FTC v. Illumina, a Fifth Circuit case dealing with the application of SEC v. Jarkesy's nondelegation holding to the FTC. The brief argues that even if Jarkesy's remains good law, a century of precedent suggests that the FTC is guided by an intelligible principle.

Taking Virtual Representation Seriously

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Virtual representation-the representation of people who cannot vote-has come to occupy a distinctly disfavored position in modern conceptions of democracy. For most of our history, this was not the case. Before women's suffrage, most U.S. citizens were represented only virtually. Today, virtual representation remains a substantial part of our democratic order, but it is a part that we tend to ignore. For instance, about a quarter of all U.S. citizens cannot vote because they are children. They, and others who cannot vote, are virtually represented.

This Article argues, first, that virtual representation is an inevitable part of any democratic system; second, that it has value, even if it is generally second-best to actual representation; and third, that as long as we are going to do this, we ought to try to do it as well as we can. The Article traces the origins of the American aversion to virtual representation, then begins to build an account of how some forms of virtual...

Community Development Law and Economic Justice--Why Law Matters

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The evolution of community economic development (CED) over the past several decades has witnessed dramatic growth in scale and complexity. New approaches to development and related lawyering, and to philosophies underlying these approaches, challenge us to reimagine the framework of CED. From the early days of community development corporations to today’s sophisticated tools of finance and organization, this evolution reflects “why law matters” in pursuit of economic justice and opportunity. Change is visible in new approaches to enterprise development and novel grassroots initiatives that comprise a virtual “sharing economy,” as well as intensified advocacy around low-wage work and efforts to contain runaway housing markets against a backdrop of stressed municipal budgets. There has also been a parallel evolution in the legal academy—the maturing of CED programs and expanded attention in scholarship and teaching.

At the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) annual...

Combined effective field theory interpretation of measurements sensitive to quartic gauge boson couplings in pp collisions at s = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A combination of measurements sensitive to anomalous quartic electroweak gauge boson couplings is presented using proton–proton collision data collected by the ATLAS detector at s = 13 TeV at the LHC. Contributing analyses include measurements of vector-boson scattering in numerous final states as well as a tri-boson measurement. The combined measurement is used to constrain anomalous electroweak boson quartic self-couplings that result from dimension-8 operators in the Éboli model using an effective field theory. Results are presented as 68% and 95% confidence level intervals parameterised by one or two Wilson coefficients, both with and without unitarity constraints applied. Theoretical bounds from unitarity and positivity are overlaid where relevant. Confidence intervals obtained from simultaneous profiled fits to all Wilson coefficients are also presented.

Biocatalytic C3 β‑O‑Glycosylation of Triterpenes and Sterols to Synthesize Natural and Unnatural Saponins

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Saponins are natural products that consist of triterpene or sterol cores decorated with oxidations, glycosylations, and sometimes other modifications. Many saponins are utilized as nutraceutics (e.g., glycyrrhizin) or therapeutics (e.g., QS-21 and digitoxin/digoxin). The structure-activity relationships that govern saponin bioactivity can be identified by studying structurally related saponins; however, the production of varied sets of saponins remains challenging via either chemical (semi)synthesis or native/heterologous biosynthesis. This report describes the discovery that the GT1 family enzyme GuUGT73F15 (Glycyrrhiza uralensis) can be used to biosynthesize many different saponins via triterpene/sterol C3 β-O-glycosylation. GuUGT73F15 utilized 22 sugar acceptors (C3 hydroxyl-containing triterpenes/sterols) and 12 sugar donors (uridine diphosphate [UDP]-sugars) as substrates to produce 130 unique monoglycosylated saponins, of which more than 100 have not been reported...

The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

America has awakened to the threat of oligarchy. While inequality has been growing for decades, the Great Recession has made clear its social and political consequences: a narrowing of economic opportunity, a shrinking middle class, and an increasingly entrenched wealthy elite. There remains broad agreement that it is important to avoid oligarchy and build a robust middle class. But we have lost sight of the idea that these are constitutional principles.

These principles are rooted in a tradition we have forgotten – one that this Article argues we ought to reclaim. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, generations of reformers responded to moments of mounting class inequality and crises in the nation’s opportunity structure with constitutional claims about equal opportunity. The gist of these arguments was that we cannot keep our constitutional democracy – our republican form of government – without constitutional restraints against oligarchy and a...

Positive and Negative Emotion Persistence as Transdiagnostic Measures of Psychological Well-Being

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Understanding emotion dynamics is important in order to ascertain transdiagnostic mechanisms underlying anxiety and mood disorders. Emotional inertia, the stability of emotion over time, and emotion network density, a measure of the interconnectedness of emotions, both represent the persistence of emotions over time. Previous literature suggests that emotional persistence, particularly of negative emotions, is related to depression, anxiety, and difficulty with emotion regulation. However, this research is limited in that studies examining idiographic network density, longitudinal relationships, and transdiagnostic, continuous, or objective outcome measures are scarce. Additionally, existing studies present mixed findings on the implications of positive emotional persistence. This dissertation contains three studies designed to address these shortcomings and examine relationships among emotional persistence and transdiagnostic psychological well-being in adults with moderate-to-severe...

Movement Lawyering Roundtable Symposium

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This symposium presents case studies of the often difficult ethical and tactical issues confronted by lawyers for social justice movements. These case studies were developed by the pairing of movement lawyers with legal ethicists and enriched by the discussions at the Movement Lawyering Ethics Roundtable. They seek to provide guidance to lawyers facing these recurrent issues. This issue also includes an essay entitled "rebuilding the Ethical Compass of the Law" and reading guides with selected bibliographies.

Increased aluminum exposure induces widespread changes in silicon, carbon, and nitrogen metabolism in Entomoneis vertebralis

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

BackgroundDiatoms are a class of algae that play an essential role in global ecology and produce valuable chemicals. They are known for forming intricate nanostructured silica cell walls (frustules). The introduction of non-siliceous elements like aluminum into diatoms induces properties such as a lower dissolution rate of the frustule, increasing the specific surface area of the frustule and enhancing metabolism. Previous studies have focused primarily on characterizing physiological impacts, leaving the genetic response(s) to non-siliceous elements largely unexplored.ResultsThis study investigates the transcriptional response of the pennate diatom, Entomoneis vertebralis to dissolved aluminum. Our findings reveal that in the presence of added 10 µM aluminum, biogenic silica content of the cell wall increases approximately twofold along with significant changes to core metabolism. An increase in transcription of genes encoding nitrate transporters has been observed despite...

Law and Social Movements: Reimagining the Progressive Canon

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This Article examines the “progressive legal canon” — iconic legal campaigns to advance progressive causes — and explores the implications of canon construction and critique for the study of lawyers and social movements. Looking backward, it reflects on why specific cases, like Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade, have become fundamental to progressive understandings of the role that lawyers play in social movements and how those cases have come to stand for a set of warnings about lawyer and court overreach. It then explores what might be gained from constructing a contemporary progressive legal canon and under what criteria one would select cases for inclusion. A core contribution of the Article is to synthesize examples of significant contemporary campaigns that respond to original canon concerns and complicate notions of lawyering in current movements of social import around labor, the War on Terror, LGBT rights, immigrant rights, and racial justice. The comparison...

Boundaries and Defects in Quantum Field Theory and Gravity

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Boundaries and defects host localized interactions of the dynamic degrees of freedom and provide the certain conditions on the field at the location of them. In guage theories and gravity, the dynamics of the large gauge degrees of freedom is localized on the boundary and are best described within the covariant phase space formalism using the symplectic form and boundary action. When the gravitational effects are strong, these large gauge degrees of freedom dress the on-shell matter action, which can be described using Hamiltonian formulation by integrating out these edge modes. We present the two efficient methods of computing the symplectic form associated with the boundary degrees of freedom. We then consider the near-extremal charged black holes in 4d, where the gravitational effects are enhanced at low temperature and study the Hawking radiation at near-horizon AdS2 using the Hamiltonian formulation, with emphasis on comparing this to the JT gravity. Extending this perspective...

Comparisons of Real-World Vehicle Energy Efficiency with Dynamometer-Based Ratings and Simulation Models

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Software tools for fuel economy simulations play an important role during design stages of advanced powertrains. However, calibration of vehicle models versus real-world driving data faces challenges owing to inherent variations in vehicle energy efficiency across different driving conditions and different vehicle owners. This work utilizes datasets of vehicles equipped with OBD/GPS loggers to validate and calibrate FASTSim (software originally developed by NREL) vehicle models. The results show that window-sticker ratings (derived from dynamometer tests) can be reasonably accurate when averaged across many trips by different vehicle owners, but successfully calibrated FASTSim models can have better fidelity. The results in this paper are shown for nine vehicle models, including the following: three battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), four plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), one hybrid electric vehicle (HEV), and one conventional internal combustion engine (CICE) vehicle....

KG-Microbe - Building Modular and Scalable Knowledge Graphs for Microbiome and Microbial Sciences

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

BACKGROUND: The integration of many disparate forms of data is essential for understanding the microbial world and its interaction with the environment and human health. Doing so is particularly challenging in the context of microbe-host and microbe-microbe interactions that contribute to health or environmental outcomes. There are thousands of relevant microbial species, and millions of interactions among those microbes and with their environment or host. Integrated information (e.g., about host and microbial physiology, genetics, and metabolism) facilitates deeper understanding of complex mechanisms and helps interpret correlative results. RESULTS: The KG-Microbe construction framework is a novel approach to harmonizing bacterial and archaeal data in the form of a Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR) and AI-ready knowledge graph (KG). Starting from a core KG with organismal traits, environments and growth preferences and the integration of established ontologies,...

Stability and Adaptation of Proteins, Membranes and Cells to Extreme Temperature and Pressure

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

All biological systems, from low complexity (single molecules) to high complexity (whole cells), must find a way to maintain stability and function under a wide array of environmental conditions. Archaea have been found to be particularly effective at inhabiting the most extreme environments found on Earth. Proto-cells at the origin of life are hypothesised to have originated under even harsher conditions. Therefore, in this review, we summarise our recent works which have provided insights into the molecular bases for adaptation in various archaeal and proto-cell systems, to temperature and high hydrostatic pressure. First, we discuss adaptation in archaeal membranes, which differ significantly from membranes of Bacteria and eukaryotes, having been adapted by evolution to extreme environments. Next, we consider how functionality could have arisen and been maintained in simple proto-membranes. Finally, we discuss proteome and cell-wide adaptation strategies seen in adapted vs...

Identifying Strain Stacking Boundaries between Multiphase Domains in Atomically Thin Two-Dimensional Magnets

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Stacking engineering of van der Waals materials is an important strategy to control the materials' properties, such as electronic correlations, ferroelectricity, and layer-dependent two-dimensional magnetism. A timely testbed for the study of the latter is atomically thin chromium trihalides (CrX₃, X = Cl, Br, I). Notably, by understanding the sliding mechanism between different stacking sequences, control of the stacking arrangement, and thus magnetic properties in CrX₃, can be achieved. Such insight, however, is currently lacking. Here, advanced electron microscopy methods are used to identify multiple stacking sequences corresponding to different bulk phases in atomically thin CrX₃ (X = Cl and Br) down to bilayer thickness and with lateral domain sizes as small as tens of nanometers. Indications of nanometer scale transitions and interactions at the stacking boundaries are found, including a universally preferred sliding direction that is consistent...

BSxCuBE‐Web – a web application for bioSAXS high‐throughput collection and experimental control

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The biological small-angle X-ray scattering (bioSAXS) beamline BM29 at the ESRF, operated by the ESRF-EMBL Joint Structural Biology and bioImaging Group (JSBIG), resumed user operation in September 2020 following the ESRF extremely brilliant source (EBS) upgrade. To exploit the high quality of X-ray beam delivered by this new fourth-generation synchrotron source, BM29 underwent significant refurbishment, including source optimization, instrument upgrades, and a complete redesign of the whole experimental control system. Here, we introduce the BioSAXS Customized Beamline Environment (BSxCuBE-Web), a new open-source, web-based platform designed to streamline, automate and enhance bioSAXS data collection. BSxCuBE-Web offers an intuitive and user-friendly interface for expert and non-expert users alike, to easily define and run bioSAXS experiments, as well as to monitor both raw and processed data. Its adaptable architecture facilitates its deployment on beamlines beyond the ESRF....

Elderly Male with a Painful Red Eye

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Case Presentation: An 83-year-old man with a history of left corneal transplant presented to the emergency department with several days of left eye pain, redness, and tearing. Visual acuity was 20/50 in the right eye and bare light perception in the left eye. Intraocular pressure was 15 millimeters fo mercury in the right eye and unobtainable in the left. The left conjunctiva and sclera were injected, and slit-lamp examination revealed a full-thickness corneal perforation with corneal haze in the transplanted cornea. We placed a rigid eye shield, provided systemic analgesia, kept the patient nil per os, and obtained urgent ophthalmology consultation.

Discussion: Corneal perforation is a full-thickness corneal defect that disrupts globe integrity and allows aqueous leakage. It may result from infection, ocular surface disease, autoimmune disorders, trauma, or prior keratoplasty, with graft–host junction instability representing a key...

Poverty Law: United States

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“Poverty law” refers to policy and lawyering strategies to contest inequality. The rise of the federal welfare state shaped the contours of poverty law in the first half of the twentieth century. This combined with the rights revolution at mid-century to mobilize legal services lawyers and courts in the War on Poverty, which was the zenith of the antipoverty movement. The welfare state’s subsequent decline and federal court retrenchment have channeled the antipoverty movement in new directions forged by decentralization, privatization, and globalization.

This encyclopedia entry traces poverty law's history and more recent response to these trends by moving downward (from federal to local), outward (from state to market), and beyond (from domestic to global).

Is OpenAI Foundation a Private Foundation? Should It Be?

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Is OpenAI Foundation a Private Foundation? Should It Be?

Reproductive health and ChatGPT: an evaluation of AI-Generated responses to commonly asked abortion questions

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Reproductive health and ChatGPT: an evaluation of AI-Generated responses to commonly asked abortion questions

Cosmological constraints from a joint DESI DR1 Full-Shape and DR2 BAO

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We present a cosmological analysis combining full-shape (FS) clustering measurements from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) DR1 with baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) measurements from DESI DR2. To achieve a robust combination that accounts for the correlation between the two data releases, we employ the ShapeFit compression method and estimate the joint covariance using EZmocks. This compressed approach inherently mitigates the prior volume effects that have previously dominated Bayesian constraints from DESI data with minimal external priors. Consequently, we obtain — for the first time within a Bayesian framework — reliable DESI-only constraints on extensions to ΛCDM using only a Big Bang Nucleosynthesis prior on the baryon density and a wide prior on the spectral index. In flat ΛCDM, we find Ω m = 0.3035 ± 0.0085, h = 0.6876 ± 0.0059, and σ 8 = 0.822 ± 0.034. For the w 0 wa CDM dynamical dark energy model, we measure w 0 = -0.49 ± 0.25 and wa = -1.52 ± 0.77,...

Genome assembly and annotation of microalga Nannochloropsis oceanica C018

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The microalga Nannochloropsis is an important organism for algae-based biocommodity production of food, feed, and fuel, among other products. Using PacBio Revio, we sequenced, assembled, and annotated a 26.41 Mbp Nannochloropsis oceanica C018 genome.

Abelian instantons and monopole scattering

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Abelian instantons and monopole scattering

Flux Footprints: A Critical Link to Bridge Eddy‐Covariance Measurements With Models, Remote Sensing, and Other Observations

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Global networks of eddy-covariance flux towers play a pivotal role in enhancing our predictive understanding of carbon and water cycling of biological systems in response to regional and global environmental change. Despite their broad application in numerous studies, the spatial aspects of the flux measurements have often been ignored or treated ambiguously, thereby remaining a primary source of uncertainty. The area contributing to the flux-referred to as the flux footprint-varies over time depending on wind direction, atmospheric turbulence, effective measurement heights, surface characteristics, and mesoscale forcings. The footprint dynamics, along with underlying source-sink heterogeneity, lead to spatial and temporal variability in the sensed fluxes, complicating the interpretation of flux data and their integration with a range of observations and models. This article addresses this critical link by reviewing the most up-to-date research, identifying knowledge gaps and...

Case Report: Lidocaine Toxicity Presenting with Focal Neurologic Findings

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction: Lidocaine toxicity is a rare but potentially dangerous consequence of a frequently used medication. Most commonly, it has generalized neurologic and cardiac effects. Discontinuation of lidocaine is sufficient with less severe symptoms. With more severe symptoms, such as seizures and arrhythmia, intravenous (IV) lipid emulsion therapy can be used. To date, lidocaine toxicity presenting as focal neurologic deficits has rarely been documented in the literature. In the case reported here, the patient was receiving lidocaine injections when she developed palpitations and left arm and facial weakness and numbness, which resolved after IV lipid emulsion therapy.

Case Report: A 52-year-old female with a past medical history of migraines, cholecystectomy, nephrolithiasis, and hypothyroidism presented to the emergency department (ED) via ambulance from her dental office with acute neurologic symptoms. While receiving an injection...

Seasonality of composition, genomic potential and activity of coniferous forest soil microbiomes

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Coniferous forest soils represent a globally important carbon sink, where the microbiome is essential for carbon flux between tree roots, rhizosphere, litter and soil. Soil habitats, such as roots, rhizosphere, bulk soil and litter differ in physicochemical properties and composition of highly specialized microbial communities, whose activity reflects the seasonality of temperature and tree activity of these mid- to high-latitude biomes. Here we present a multi-omic dataset encompassing 160 samples collected from four coniferous forest soil habitats in the Czech Republic and Norway, sampled in early summer, late summer, early winter and late winter that characterize the composition, genomic potential and activity of tree roots and microbiome. For each sample, we provide metabarcoding-based composition of bacterial, fungal and eukaryotic communities, results of shotgun DNA sequencing (metagenomes) and shotgun RNA sequencing (metatranscriptomes) illustrating the functional potential...

Weightless Votes

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Does one-person-one-vote protect persons, or voters? The Court has never resolved this question. Current practice overwhelmingly favors equal representation for equal numbers of persons. Opponents charge, however, that this approach dilutes the “weight” of some individual voters’ votes. This Essay examines what that might mean, and concludes that there is no coherent individual interest in the “weight” of a vote. It argues that the one-person-one-vote doctrine is really about something else: protecting the political power of numerical groups. In light of this conclusion, the last section of this Essay explores whether the numerical groups this doctrine protects ought to include all persons living in a jurisdiction, or only the citizens of voting age.

Making Public Interest Lawyers In A Time Of Crisis: An Evidence-Based Approach

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Now is a critical time to consider the role that lawyers—and the law schools that produce them—can play in movements for social transformation. Over the past half-century, public interest lawyers who represent subordinated communities in the pursuit of equal justice have contributed significantly to such movements: mobilizing law to fight discrimination, expand access to social benefits, promote the inclusion of immigrants and others branded outsiders, and protect the rights of low-wage workers and the unhoused. While some law schools have invested resources to train students seeking public interest careers, most continue to focus on placing students in lucrative law firms: elevating a neoliberal conception of legal education that seeks to maximize return on investment, rather than promoting the professional role of lawyers in democratic society. Even those law schools dedicated to helping students enter public interest careers lack basic information about which interventions...

Magnetic Mishaps—Small Bowel Obstruction Caused by Ingested Magnets Complicated by Appendicitis: A Case Report

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction: Magnet ingestions are a growing pediatric emergency due to the use of widely available stronger magnets in toys. A legislative ban briefly reduced injuries, but cases rose after its reversal in federal court. Magnet ingestions are resulting in increasing morbidity and mortality, specifically due to bowel obstruction and perforation.

Case Report: We present a complex case involving a child with global developmental delay presenting to the emergency department for evaluation of abdominal pain. While the initial evaluation focused on working up appendicitis, which he was found to have, he was also found to have ingested multiple magnets causing small bowel obstruction and perforation.

Conclusion: This case highlights the need for emergency physicians to maintain a high level of suspicion when evaluating pediatric patients with abdominal pain, especially those with developmental delay....

Future Projections of Lifecycle Cost and Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Light-Duty Vehicles

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Vehicles with electrified powertrains carry the promise of significant reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from a lifecycle analysis (LCA) standpoint compared to conventional internal combustion engine (CICE) vehicles. However, trade-offs exist between different types of electrified powertrains in terms of cost, consumer acceptance, and GHG reduction efficacy for different operating conditions. The open-source tool CarGHG was developed with an aim to enable the exploration of a plethora of parametric study scenarios, including the cost of electrification technologies, different driving patterns and charging habits, and the cost and carbon intensity of electricity and fuel blends. This paper introduces the framework of CarGHG, then showcases total cost of ownership (TCO) and LCA GHG results for select models of light-duty vehicles. Another capability of CarGHG, which is the ability to estimate the performance of “virtual” vehicle models (perceived vehicle design specifications...

The Dignity of the South

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The plaintiffs in Shelby County v. Holder argue that section 5 of the Voting Rights Act should be struck down because it offends the “equal dignity" of the covered states — an argument the Court appeared to credit in its last brush with section 5 in NAMUDNO. This Essay, written in advance of the decision in Shelby County, critically examines this equal dignity of the states argument and situates it in a larger context. Americans have been fighting for 150 years, since the Civil War and Reconstruction, about the structural implications of the events of 1861-70 for the sovereignty, dignity, and equality of the states — especially the Southern states. The implications of adopting the “equal dignity” of the covered states as a constraint on Congress’s Reconstruction Power are deeply problematic and profound.

Mobilizing Law for Justice in Asia: A Comparative Approach

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article offers a comparative framework for studying why and how law is mobilized to advance justice claims by marginalized groups in Asia. In it, we build upon a series of collaborative exchanges between practitioners and scholars on the role of social justice lawyers in eleven Asian countries: Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Based on lessons from this collaboration, we suggest that one way to understand variation in the type and scope of legal mobilization for the politically weak is in relation to two important domestic factors: political openness and autonomy of law. We use these factors to explore the institutions that shape legal mobilization across the region, focusing attention on how they influence sites and strategies for advancing justice in specific countries. We then consider how political openness and autonomy of law interact with global factors to influence the availability and...

Catalytic visible light-driven alkane dehydrogenation by a di-uranyl germanotungstate

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The dehydrogenation of alkanes to alkenes is an appealing strategy for upgrading abundant hydrocarbons, yet it is constrained by the inherent challenge of cleaving two inert C(sp³)-H bonds with selectivity and without overoxidation. We report a cooperative photocatalytic dehydrogenation of unactivated cycloalkanes under visible light irradiation enabled by a new dinuclear uranyl complex supported by an oxidatively stable germanotungstate, [NBu ⁿ ₄]₈[(UO₂)₂(GeW₁₀O₃₄(µ₂-OH)₂)₂]·(CH₃)₂CO (1). The uranyl complex catalytically converts cyclooctane to cyclooctene under ambient conditions with a TON per molecule of 44 and 9,10-dihydrophenanthrene to phenanthrene with a TON of 73 per molecule, using 1 mol% 1 in MeCN solution, under 427 nm irradiation, using [S₂O₈]^2- or chloranil (C₆Cl₄O₂)...

Fast solvers for tokamak fluid models with PETSc

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Multigrid (MG) is widely recognized as a highly effective solver for the model problem, the Laplacian, but textbook MG fails on most problems of interest. MG methods have been applied to complex, real-world applications with careful consideration of the physical model and discretization. This work develops the first step in applying MG methods to science and engineering relevant magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) tokamak models in the M3D-C1 (https://m3dc1.pppl.gov) fusion energy science code. The semi-implicit time integrator in M3D-C1 is composed of many linear solves. The implicit advance of the momentum equation is the most challenging and is the focus of this work. The current production solver in M3D-C1 is a block Jacobi (BJ) preconditioner within a Krylov solver, where blocks group degrees of freedom on planes of constant toroidal coordinate. BJ convergence degrades as the number of planes increases due to the spectral properties of the matrix preconditioned with BJ. The partially...

Administrative Guidance in the United States

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Agency guidance is a crucial and hotly contested tool of US administrative law. Such nonbinding, soft law documents are exempt from the onerous ‘notice-and-comment’ requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act, which apply to the issuance of binding regulations. Guidance facilitates political accountability, administrative flexibility, and consistent enforcement. But it may at the same time coerce compliance, or under-enforce the law, without adequate procedural protection or substantive justification. These documents also impact private parties’ moral reasoning, insofar as they can clarify otherwise binding moral obligations. Finally, guidance can play a fraught role in mediating intense political disputes, as it stakes out uncertain and contestable official stances, which may deepen existing social fissures and legitimation deficits.

Observation of a cross-section enhancement near the t(t)over-bar production threshold in √s=13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract: A measurement of t t ¯ production is presented in the invariant-mass region near the pair production threshold, m t t ¯ ...

Ion Transport and Crystal Rotation in Plastic Crystal Electrolytes Under Applied Electric Fields

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ion Transport and Crystal Rotation in Plastic Crystal Electrolytes Under Applied Electric Fields

Catalytic Ambient Temperature Dinitrogen Conversion to a Bis(silyl)amine by Mononuclear Group 4 Aryloxide Complexes

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The homogeneous conversion of ambient dinitrogen to amine products via the N₂ reduction reaction (N₂RR) remains a prized yet challenging feat for d-block complexes and is scarcely reported for f-block complexes. New, mononuclear Ti^IV and Zr^IV aryloxide complexes Ti(DP)₂ (1Ti), Zr(DP)₂ (1Zr), and DP = [2-(OC₆H₂-2-^tBu,4-Me)₂CHPh] produce up to 51 eq. and up to 7.0 eq. of HN(SiMe₃)₂ per Ti/Zr, from N₂, K⁰, weak acid, and chlorotrimethylsilane. Complex 1Ti exhibits more than double the activity toward N₂-silylation of any previously reported Ti N₂RR catalyst and can also catalyze the formation of up to 19 eq. of NH₃, a new feature in early metal N₂RR chemistry. The mononuclear 1Zr is the most active Zr catalyst for N₂-silylation to date. [KSm(DP)₂(THF)₃]...

Search for electroweak tt¯Wj production in multileptonic final states at s=13 TeV with the ATLAS detector and bounds on effective field theory operators

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A search is presented for the electroweak production of a top-quark pair in association with a boson and at least one additional jet known as the process. This process has embedded within it a -scattering vertex, which is probed directly for the first time. The collision data were collected with the ATLAS detector during Run 2 of the LHC and correspond to an integrated luminosity of at . The search uses same-charge pairs of electrons and muons together with jets, of which at least one is -tagged. The properties of the most forward jet relative to the rest of the event are used to discriminate the electroweak production process from its strong production counterpart. A measured (expected) 95% CL upper limit on the cross section is set at (230 fb), to be compared with the expected Standard Model (SM) cross section of 47.7 fb. Limits are set on the SM effective field theory (EFT) operators and , which modify the electroweak couplings of the top quark through...

Persistent and Progressive Exfoliative Dermatitis: A Case Report

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction: Exfoliative dermatitis, also known as erythroderma, represents an infrequent clinical presentation in emergency departments (ED) and often contributes to considerable diagnostic uncertainty. The differential diagnosis is broad, and the condition may arise from a wide variety of etiologies. We report a case of severe exfoliative dermatitis characterized by gradual progression and resistance to multiple therapeutic interventions over several weeks, ultimately resulting in significant systemic complications and marked hematological abnormalities.

Case Report: A 57-year-old man presented to the ED with severe pain, pruritus, and widespread skin peeling involving more than 90% of his body surface area. The patient developed a rash following a trip to Korea about six months prior to presentation, which progressively worsened despite multiple prior diagnoses and treatments including corticosteroids, immunosuppressive therapy,...

The Beginning of Chinese Overseas Travel and Settlement: Merchants, Officials, and Trade Communities in Maritime Asia (9th–12th c. CE)

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This dissertation examines the early history of Chinese people traveling and migrating overseas (c. 800–1127 CE). Despite the political, cultural, and economic significance of ethnic Chinese communities across much of the world today, as well as international interest in China’s involvement in the greater domain of maritime Asia, very few attempts have been made to understand the origins of Chinese people living and traveling beyond Chinese borders. Through the examination of primary sources written in Classical Chinese, Kanbun, Arabic, Old Malay, and Old Javanese, as well as the material record of shipwrecks and former port cities, this dissertation explores the earliest records of Chinese people living and trading outside of China, the regions where they were active, the communities they formed or joined, their reasons for traveling long distances, and how their migration was viewed both within and beyond China. Such an analysis reveals that Chinese people were active across...

Seiberg-Witten axion

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We present a calculable toy model of an axion coupled to magnetic monopoles and electric charges, with manifest electric-magnetic duality. Our axion-photon coupling incurs periodic corrections due to monopoles (equivalently UV instantons), which are large for light monopoles. Axion periodicity is manifestly duality invariant since the axion itself transforms under duality. Our model is the original Seiberg-Witten theory, which naturally hosts an -axion and light monopoles. We calculate the axion-photon amplitude in different duality frames and prove its duality invariance.

Therapist Missteps in Youth Mental Health Services

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Treatment engagement challenges are among the most persistent barriers to effective youth mental health treatment, with a substantial proportion of youth and families terminating services before achieving expected clinical gains (Becker & Chorpita, 2023). Despite growing recognition of the multidimensional, dynamic, and transactional nature of treatment engagement, relatively little is known about the within-session therapist behaviors that may occur in the context of and inadvertently contribute to engagement challenges. This dissertation examined therapist “missteps,” or inadvertent, less optimal, or noncollaborative therapist behaviors, across two studies using observational data from the Reaching Families Study, a multisite cluster-randomized trial focused on improving use of evidence to target low treatment engagement in publicly funded youth mental health settings (Chorpita et al., 2025). Study 1 sought to first understand how therapists misstep by examining the...

Advancing FAIR data towards comparable, organized, predictive AI-ready data for community validation

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The interrogation of data across biological and environmental systems has become increasingly complex. Fortunately, communities are adopting the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles for individual datasets, and continue to develop domain-specific, machine-actionable standards. However, integrating FAIR data for meta-analysis across data resources is still challenging. Understanding how disparate datasets are organized remains a manual, time-consuming process. Updating FAIR databases to reflect changes in knowledge is slow, allowing stale annotations and incorrect relationships to propagate, amplified by Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems that harvest data. Building on FAIR, we argue that data should be iteratively updated and improved. FAIR + COPE (Comparable, Organized, Predictive, Engaged) takes FAIR data and makes it Comparable, rapidly Organized (applying / updating standards) for Predictive models, which can be validated and improved by an...

Electrostatic‐Attraction‐Driven Self‐Assembled Graphene‐Disordered Rocksalt Composite Cathode for Lithium‐Ion Batteries

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

ABSTRACT Disordered rocksalt cathodes hold promise for achieving high‐capacity lithium‐ion batteries while using low‐cost, earth‐abundant elements. However, their electrochemical performance remains critically limited by their poor electronic conductivity. Conventional strategies such as high‐energy ball milling with excess carbon additives can improve conductivity but remain challenging to scale and often produce defects and increase surface area, thereby accelerating capacity degradation. Herein, we report an alternative approach of electrostatic‐attraction‐driven self‐assembly to fabricate Li 1.2 Mn 0.6 Ti 0.2 O 1.8 F 0.2 (LMTOF) particles uniformly wrapped with electronically conductive graphene sheets without associated materials degradation. The graphene‐wrapped LMTOF demonstrates significantly improved cycling stability (89% capacity retention after 100 cycles) and superior rate capability compared with an LMTOF‐carbon composite electrode fabricated using the conventional...

Equal Citizenship and the Individual Right to Vote

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An emerging consensus among election law scholars urges courts to break out of “the stagnant discourse of individual rights and competing state interests” and instead adopt a jurisprudence of “structural” democratic values that sidelines individual rights. This structuralist approach won out in the great “rights-structure” debate in election law, and came to dominate the field, during a period in which the main controversies – vote dilution, gerrymandering, ballot access, campaign finance – were all ones in which the structuralist move was illuminating. However, structuralism is now causing both scholars and courts to evaluate the new vote denial controversies – such as voter roll purges and voter identification laws – in problematic ways that bypass the importance of each individual voter’s right to cast a ballot.

This Article breaks out of the rights-structure debate by offering a distinctive, pluralistic account of the interests at stake in all voting controversies....

Evaluating Constitutional Hardball: Two Fallacies and a Research Agenda

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This Reply addresses the responses by Professors David Bernstein and Jed Shugerman to our essay Asymmetric Constitutional Hardball. Bernstein's response, we argue, commits the common fallacy of equating reciprocity with symmetry: assuming that because constitutional hardball often "takes two" to play, both sides must be playing it in a similar manner. Shugerman's response, on the other hand, helps combat the common fallacy of equating aggressiveness with wrongfulness: assuming that because all acts of constitutional hardball strain norms of governance, all are similarly damaging to democracy. We suggest that whereas Bernstein's approach would set back the burgeoning effort to study constitutional hardball, Shugerman's distinction between hardball and "beanball" provides a useful starting point for theorizing the conditions under which constitutional hardball may be more or less justified as a matter of political and constitutional morality.

Empirical Studies of Law and Social Change: What is the Field? What are the Questions?

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The question of whether and how law plays a role in producing social change has received renewed scholarly attention, powered by research on the role of social movements in law making and the relation between court decisions and backlash. Reflecting the broader turn to empiricism within legal scholarship, this research either directly engages in or builds upon the empirical study of law in ways that chart exciting new scholarly directions — but also raise important conceptual and methodological questions. This essay explores these questions in an effort to frame what is at stake and guide future research. It makes three contributions.

First, it offers a map of the law and social change field, suggesting how researchers across disciplines have asked a set of questions that can be understood as part of a coherent model in which law is viewed as both an “input” and “output” of social change campaigns. Within this model, debate centers on what factors cause lawyers and activists...

Reconstruction of cosmic-ray muon events with CUORE

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We report the in-situ 3D reconstruction of through-going muons in the CUORE experiment, a cryogenic calorimeter array searching for neutrinoless double beta (0νββ$$0 u \beta \beta $$) decay, leveraging the segmentation of the detector. Due to the slow time response of the detector, time-of-flight estimation is not feasible. Therefore, the track reconstruction is performed using a multi-objective optimization algorithm that relies on geometrical information from the detector as a whole. We measure the integral flux of cosmic-ray muons underground at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, and find our value to be in good agreement with other experiments that have performed a similar measurement. To our knowledge, this work represents the first demonstration of 3D particle tracking and reconstruction of through-going muons with per-event angular determination in a millikelvin cryogenic detector array. The analysis performed for this work will be critical for validating the muon-related...

LocatingUndocumentedWells Using Historical Oil andGas Exploration Maps: A Case Study in Osage County, Oklahoma

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Undocumented oil and gas wells lack reliable information about their locations and characteristics, making them difficult to identify. These wells can result in unanticipated delays and costs in the development of nearby surface and subsurface resources, and, if improperly plugged, can cause contamination. This study leverages historical petroleum exploration maps to locate such wells, focusing on Osage County, Oklahoma. Two sets of early 20th century oil and gas exploration maps by the United States Geological Survey were georeferenced and analyzed using a computer vision model to detect well symbols. The locations of detected wells were compared to the location of known wells in the database from the Bureau of Indian Affairs Osage Agency to identify potential undocumented wells. The analysis yielded over 500 potential undocumented wells, with dry holes constituting the largest fraction. Field verification confirmed the presence of some undocumented wells. Comparison with prior...

Search for emerging jets in pp collisions at s=13TeV with the ATLAS experiment

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A search is presented for emerging jets using 140fb-1$$140~\textrm{fb}^{-1}$$ of proton–proton collision data at s=13TeV$$\sqrt{s} = 13~\textrm{TeV}$$, collected by the ATLAS experiment between 2015 and 2018. The search looks for the existence of a dark sector with symmetries similar to those in quantum chromodynamics. This dark sector is populated with dark quarks, which undergo showering similar to quarks in the Standard Model, leading to a high multiplicity of long-lived dark hadrons within a dark jet. These dark hadrons subsequently decay to Standard Model particles via a new heavy scalar mediating particle ϕ$$\phi $$. This results in jets which contain multiple displaced vertices, known as emerging jets. This analysis targets four-jet topologies, with two emerging jets and two Standard Model jets, resulting from the decay of pair-produced scalar mediators. No significant excess above the Standard Model background is observed. For dark pion proper decay lengths of 20mm$$20~\textrm{mm}$$,...

Community Economic Development Is Access to Justice

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What gaps exist in the justice system that result in a need for services provided by community economic development attorneys? What is the evidence that those gaps actually exist? How do we know that community economic development practitioners fill those gaps, and in what way? These are merely a few of the questions addressed in this collection.At the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) annual meeting in San Diego in January 2018, legal scholars gathered to discuss this evolution as part of the discussion group, “Community Economic Development Is Access to Justice.” The goal of the discussion group was to identify how community economic development (CED) law school courses, experiential and other, increase access to justice and the kind of justice. The participants included clinicians and non-clinicians.Professors Ted De Barbieri, and CJ Vachon organized the convening and formally invited eleven additional law scholars to participate, along with a number of informal participants...

Intersection of School Safety, Mental Health and Wellness, and Family and Community Issues

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Intersection of School Safety, Mental Health and Wellness, and Family and Community Issues

Considering Hippocampal Inflammation in the Pathogenesis of Cognitive Deficits and Symptoms in Psychotic Disorders

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Accumulating evidence suggests a neuroinflammatory subtype of psychotic illness. Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) can indirectly assess neuroinflammation via measurements of neurometabolite biomarkers: myo-inositol (mI) for glia; choline (Cho) for membrane turnover; creatine (Cr) for energy metabolism; N-acetylaspartate (NAA) for neural integrity; and glutamate and glutamine (Glx) for glutaminergic neurotransmission. Previous MRS studies of psychoses show mixed findings, which could reflect most: 1) only comparing metabolite levels between cases and controls rather than also examining associations with symptoms and cognitive deficits; 2) intermixing different psychoses (e.g., schizophrenia vs. affective psychoses) rather than stratifying them, a common research practice that echoes transdiagnostic approaches like NIMH’s Research Domain Criteria (RDoC), which posits similar cellular pathologies across diagnostic categories for deficits with neurobehavioral functions. The present...

The 2016 U.S. Voting Wars: From Bad to Worse

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If the “voting wars” which have broken out across the post-2000 election landscape in the United States could be characterized as kind of trench warfare, the 2016 election saw a major escalation in weaponry, from the irresponsible rhetoric of a candidate who became commander-in-chief, to foreign interference and a flood of social media-driven propaganda, to troubling machine breakdowns and human error in election administration. Together the escalation threatens to undermine the public’s confidence in the fairness of the U.S. election process and ultimately American democracy itself. We live in dangerous times, which could get worse, and it is not easy to conceive of simple solutions for de-escalation and bolstering of legitimacy, especially given rapid technological change which has interfered with mediating and stabilizing democratic institutions.

This Article provides an overview of the legal and political integrity issues in the 2016 elections. It begins by describing...

The WalRK two-component system in Streptococcus pneumoniae ensures robustness of secondary wall polymer attachment.

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Capsular polysaccharide (CPS) is essential for Streptococcus pneumoniae virulence. Yet, the mechanism linking CPS to peptidoglycan (PG) remains unclear. Here, we identified a strong negative genetic interaction between the genes encoding the putative capsule ligase CpsA and the WalK histidine kinase, a component of the WalRK two-component system regulating cell wall homeostasis. In the absence of cpsA, capsule polymers compete with wall teichoic acids for ligase activity to PG. This induces cell wall stress and is sensed by the WalRK system. Overexpression of the PG hydrolase pcsB or disruption of the PG-modifying enzymes pgdA and oatA(adr) restored growth of strains lacking cpsA and walK. Furthermore, CpsA overproduction compensates for the loss of other LytR-Cps2A-Psr (LCP) ligases, suggesting it can support capsule and wall teichoic acid syntheses. These findings support the model that LCP ligases are semi-redundant, although...

Recommendations and considerations for hydroxyl radical protein footprinting–mass spectrometry

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Protein oxidative footprinting, using hydroxyl radical labeling detected by bottom-up proteomics, has progressed from an emerging method to a widely used approach in structural biology. Hydroxyl radicals generated from hydrogen peroxide (via photolysis, Fenton chemistry or electrochemistry) or directly from water (via X-rays, plasma or gamma rays) irreversibly encode structural information within protein side chains, which is read out using standard liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry workflows. Quantitative changes in labeling report on solvent accessibility and reveal effects of protein–protein interactions, ligand binding, protein folding, conformational changes or applied stress. Comparing labeling patterns between states provides detailed maps of structural changes and interaction sites. Over the past decade, oxidative footprinting has proven valuable as a solution-phase and in-cell method for protein structure analysis. This Perspective summarizes best practices for...

Beyond the Numbers: What We Know — and Should Know — About American Pro Bono

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The provision of pro bono services by private lawyers has become a crucial source of legal assistance to poor clients within the U.S. civil justice system. As other features of the system — particularly federally sponsored legal services — have been in decline over the past quarter century, powerful actors in the profession have mobilized to increase pro bono activity. Within large law firms, there is evidence that this project has been a success, at least measured by the significant increase in the aggregate and per-attorney average pro bono hours provided by the large firm sector in the decade prior to the recession.

As a result of a new wave of empirical research, scholars and policy makers now know a great deal about how these vast numbers of pro bono hours are produced. But we know much less about how good they are and what good they do. As civil legal aid and public interest law undergo profound changes, including an increasing role for private sector delivery,...

Affirmatively Furthering Equal Protection: Constitutional Meaning in the Administration of Fair Housing

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This Article argues that the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s recent “Affirmatively Further Fair Housing” (AFFH) Rule at once adheres to the formal requirements of current equal protection doctrine, and challenges one of the principal rationales for those requirements. The Rule requires HUD grant recipients to perform, document, and submit a planning process, in which they use data to identify fair housing issues, develop goals to address these issues, and commit to concrete actions to achieve these goals. The Rule cautions against the use of racial classifications, but requires local governments to engage in race-conscious policy-making in consultation with the affected public. This requirement of race-consciousness discourse on the part of local policymakers challenges an important motivation for the Court’s current equal protection regime: its effort to make the consideration of race less conspicuous, salient, and visible to the public. I argue that the Rule...

Wealth, Commonwealth, & the Constitution of Opportunity

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We live in a time of profound and justified anxiety about economic opportunity. The number of Americans facing poverty is growing, opportunities for middle-class livelihoods are shrinking, and economic clout is becoming concentrated at the top to a degree that recalls the last Gilded Age. For reformers throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, economic circumstances like these posed not just an economic, social, or political problem but a constitutional one. A society with a “moneyed aristocracy” or a “ruling class,” these reformers understood, was an oligarchy, not a republic. This understanding was rooted in a constitutional discourse we have largely forgotten — one that this essay suggests we ought to reclaim. From the beginning of the Republic through roughly the New Deal, Americans vividly understood that the guarantees of the Constitution are intertwined with the structure of our economic life. This understanding was the foundation of a powerful constitutional...

New Directions for Student and Learning Supports: From Fragmented Initiatives to System Transformation

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This report examines major national initiatives designed to strengthen student and learning supports, including whole-child approaches, integrated student supports, community schools, comprehensive school mental health systems, Multi-Tiered Systems of Supports (MTSS), expansion of support personnel, and system transformation efforts. While these initiatives have increased attention to barriers that interfere with learning and teaching, the report concludes that student and learning supports remain fragmented and marginalized within school improvement policy and practice. The authors argue that fragmentation is not the fundamental problem but rather a symptom of the failure to establish addressing barriers to learning and teaching as a primary responsibility of schools. The report advocates expanding the traditional two-component framework of school improvement, focused on instruction and management/governance, to a three-component framework that includes a unified, comprehensive,...

Nonstationary random dynamical systems

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This thesis is dedicated to studying the quantitative regularity of measures produced by actions of random dynamical systems and to applying these geometric estimates to products of random matrices. First, we consider smooth random dynamical systems defined by a distribution with a finite moment of the norm of the differential, and prove that under suitable non-degeneracy conditions any stationary measure must be Hölder continuous. This result is a vast generalization of the classical statement on Hölder continuity of stationary measures of random walks on linear groups. Second, we extend this framework to rougher settings by considering Lipschitz and Hölder continuous random dynamical systems defined by a distribution with a finite logarithmic moment, proving that under suitable non-degeneracy conditions every stationary measure must be log-Hölder continuous. Finally, we leverage these regularization properties to prove a Central Limit Theorem for non-stationary random products...

Universal Relationshipbetween Limiting Current andElectrochemical Transport Properties in Malonate-Based Polymer Electrolytes

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Universal Relationshipbetween Limiting Current andElectrochemical Transport Properties in Malonate-Based Polymer Electrolytes

Combination of Measurements of CP Properties of Higgs Boson Interactions with Vector Bosons Using Proton-Proton Collisions at s=13 TeV with the ATLAS Detector

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A combination of measurements of the properties of Higgs boson interactions with electroweak gauge bosons is presented, using of proton-proton collisions at recorded by the ATLAS detector. Results from vector boson fusion , inclusive , and channels are combined. No evidence of violation is observed, and constrains on the -violating operators in the Standard Model effective field theory framework (SMEFT) are set in the Warsaw basis. The results from the combination improve by over 40% on previous individual limits on and, for the first time, simultaneous constraints on three coefficients , , and are set. These limits are the most stringent constraints to date on the relevant Wilson coefficients in the SMEFT framework with minimum model dependence.

A Constitutional Minimum Threshold for the Actus Reus of Crime? MPC Attempts and Material Support Offenses

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Material support crimes combined with the modern law of attempted offenses have the capability to magnify significantly the ability of the government to prosecute inchoate criminal activity. Examination of attempts to commit federal material support/terrorism offenses (with Model Penal Code attempts law being applied by the federal courts) can help us to understand how this potent combination of bases for inchoate criminal liability is being used in the legal arena of anti-terrorism enforcement.It also lays the foundation for addressing a basic question of constitutional law and theory--whether this kind of combined inchoateness could involve a breach of constitutional norms. Stated another way, is there a minimum constitutional threshold of actus reus conduct for inchoate crime? Does the fact that the crimes here at issue involve terrorism need to be taken into account in applying a constitutional calculus? Would it be a matter of concern were a similar basis for criminal liability...

Liberty and Democracy Through the Administrative State: A Critique of the Roberts Court’s Political Theory

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The values of liberty and democracy repeatedly arise in recent Supreme Court opinions on administrative law. The conservative Justices have argued that the power vested in government agencies threatens individual freedom and collective self-government. This Article critiques these Justices’ use of political theory. It shows that the Justices’ do not faithfully and even-handedly apply the complex tradition of American political thought on which they rely. They invoke several different and competing aspects of liberty and democracy to criticize the administrative state. But because the conservative Justices do not disentangle the various aspects of these two values from one another, they draw faulty inferences about how best to protect them. Furthermore, they do not acknowledge the ways in which properly structured administrative power promotes liberty and democracy. They thereby aggrandize judicial power at the expense of the elected branches without effectively promoting individual...

Inequities in job-based health coverage for California low-wage workers

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Most Californians under age 65 receive health coverage through their or a family member’s employer. Workers earning low wages, however, are far less likely to have job-based coverage, and more likely to be on Medi-Cal or uninsured. This creates a real public cost: California spends tens of billions in state and federal dollars covering low-wage workers through Medi-Cal. In the face of federal Medicaid cuts in H.R. 1, California must revisit the question of who bears responsibility for the health coverage of low-wage workers in a system that primarily relies on job-based coverage for working-age adults and their dependents. This brief examines the low-wage health coverage gap, its costs to the state, and possible policy options—drawing on lessons from other states—available to California lawmakers.

Two-component exciton condensates in an electron–hole bilayer

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Macroscopic quantum coherence emerges when bosons condense into a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC)1, 2, 3, 4–5. Excitons are a long-sought solid-state route to high-temperature BECs with strong interactions, electrical tunability and potentially multicomponent spinor order, but conclusive evidence for equilibrium condensation has remained elusive. Here we report evidence for two-component exciton BECs in MoSe2/hBN/WSe2 electron–hole bilayers6, 7, 8–9 by probing the spin–valley susceptibility of constituent electrons and holes. This heterostructure hosts equilibrium exciton fluids with four spin–valley flavours. Magneto-optical spectroscopy in a dilution refrigerator reveals three exciton condensate phases with distinct flavour polarizations. At zero magnetic field, the many-body ground state is a coherent superposition of two condensed intravalley exciton flavours. Under a magnetic field, the intravalley exciton condensate first switches to a two-component intervalley condensate...

Public Care in Public Law: Structure, Procedure, and Purpose

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This Article responds to recent mobilization around the “politics of care” by articulating alegal principle of public care within U.S. constitutional, statutory, and administrativelaw. Public care requires executive officials to attend to the needs and values of those whohave a stake in law’s administration. This principle has three components. The regulatorypurpose of public care, which is recognized in various statutory authorities of the welfarestate, requires government to provide those goods and services that are necessary for peopleto exercise moral and political agency. The administrative procedure of public care, whichis recognized by the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, requires that federal agenciesact with due regard for the interests and input of affected parties. The constitutionalstructure of public care, recognized by the Take Care Clause, requires that the Presidentlisten to subordinate officials who have specific legal, professional, and expert authority.These...

Historic Designation and Housing Production in Los Angeles

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Historic Designation and Housing Production in Los Angeles

AI for Cross-Domain Mobility Data Fusion, Human Activity Generation, and Travel Demand Modeling

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

AI for Cross-Domain Mobility Data Fusion, Human Activity Generation, and Travel Demand Modeling

VP Shunt Malfunction Simulation Case for Emergency Medicine Residents

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Audience: This simulation was designed primarily for emergency medicine residents and pediatric emergency medicine residents. Additionally, off-service residents, neurosurgical residents, pediatric residents, faculty, and medical students may benefit.

Introduction: Ventriculoperitoneal (VP) shunts are the treatment of choice for patients suffering from hydrocephalus.Hydrocephalus affects about 125,000 patients in the United States, and 33,000 VP shunts are implanted in patients every year.¹ However, these devices can malfunction and can cause complications. It is important for the emergency department physician to recognize when these devices are not functioning correctly to prevent...

Addressing the Guantanamo 'Legacy Problem': Bringing Law-of-War Prolonged Military Detention and Criminal Prosecution into Closer Alignment

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The U.S. government claims authority under the law of war to detain enemy belligerents captured in the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda for the duration of the conflict. Enemy belligerents in this war are generally regarded by U.S. authorities as unprivileged under the Geneva Conventions, and acts they commit in furtherance of the war are therefore likely to be crimes under the law of war and/or under U.S. domestic law. Regarding those belligerents who, because they are considered dangerous, have not qualified for release and transfer to another country, the government has had two choices — to detain them in military custody on a prolonged basis (for the duration of the conflict), or to prosecute them for crimes they are alleged to have committed.

President Obama has stated a strong preference for the criminal prosecution option. But for many of the detainees, prosecution is not feasible — for a variety of reasons. These detainees are likely to remain in prolonged...

Linking teacher mindsets to equity-oriented SEL integration: The role of teachers' culturally relevant skills

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Linking teacher mindsets to equity-oriented SEL integration: The role of teachers' culturally relevant skills

Unsupervised Segmentation and Clustering Workflow for Efficient Processing of 4D-STEM and 5D-STEM Data

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy (4D-STEM) enables mapping of diffraction information with nanometer-scale spatial resolution, offering detailed insight into local structure, orientation, and strain. However, as data dimensionality and sampling density increase, particularly for in situ scanning diffraction experiments (5D-STEM), robust segmentation of structurally consistent behavior across sequential measurements becomes essential for efficient and physically meaningful analysis. Here, we introduce a clustering framework that identifies crystallographically distinct domains from 4D-STEM datasets. By using local diffraction-pattern similarity as a metric, the method extracts closed contours delineating spatially contiguous regions. This approach produces cluster-averaged diffraction patterns that improve signal quality while reducing data volume by orders of magnitude, enabling rapid and accurate orientation, phase, and strain mapping. We demonstrate...

The Claims of Official Reason: Administrative Guidance on Social Inclusion

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This Article examines the legal validity and effect of recent administrative actions concerning civil rights and social inclusion. Agencies under the Obama Administration issued “guidance” concerning sexual assault and harassment on college campuses, transgender rights, the use of arrest and conviction records in employment decisions, and deferral of deportation proceedings against undocumented immigrants. These actions have either been set aside by circuit courts or rescinded under the Trump Administration, in part on the grounds that they were issued without notice-and-comment rulemaking. Nonetheless, two district courts have blocked the Trump Administration’s rescission of the deferred action program because the government failed to take into account the “serious reliance interests” the program had generated. I explore these controversies over guidance on social inclusion in order to address some of the most difficult and long-disputed questions of administrative law: what...

Author Correction: Large-scale network analysis of the cerebrospinal fluid proteome identifies molecular signatures of frontotemporal lobar degeneration

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Correction to: Nature Aginghttps://doi.org/10.1038/s43587-025-00878-2, published online 16 May 2025. This article was originally published under standard Springer Nature license (© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature America, Inc.). It is now available as an open-access paper under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license, © The Author(s). The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

Ten Questions on National Security

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Our public discourse about the "War on Terror" has become stale and mired in hyperbole. The nation needs to forge a new path in the armed conflict against al Qaeda. Six years into the international armed conflict, the public debate is void of any fresh ideas about how to move the country forward in the conflict of our generation. This lack of vision in the public debate is readily apparent as the 2008 presidential race unfolds. We are deluged with debates, commercials, and solicitations about minor issues, but there have been no new ideas introduced to win the "War on Terror." In fact, it rarely is discussed. A new doctrine needs to be embraced by both policymakers and the candidates. Reviewing, studying, and presenting new ideas is not a partisan issue; but rather one that we, as a nation that promotes human rights, must fully support. Our standing among friends and foes alike has been tarnished. A new doctrine, with four major components, is needed. They are: 1) Change the name...

Structure of domain walls in chiral spin liquids.

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The chiral spin liquid is a canonical state of quantum spins combining topological and symmetry-breaking order, and possible experimental realizations have attracted growing interest. We examine the physics at interfaces between chiral spin liquid domains of opposite chirality. We show that a self-consistent mean-field description of spinons remains possible in the vicinity of a domain wall and use this to formulate a Ginzburg-Landau theory of the domain wall. The bulk of a chiral spin liquid contains gapped spinon excitations and gauge fluctuations, set by a finite spinon mass and a nonzero spinon Chern number. A third class of excitations consists of amplitude fluctuations of the spinon hoppings, which admit a geometric interpretation in terms of effective vielbein fields. These fluctuations are usually neglected because they are irrelevant for a homogeneous chiral spin liquid and are suppressed in standard large-[Formula: see text] treatments. Going beyond the purely topological...

The Existential Challenge to the Administrative State

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A set of constitutional claims today strikes at the heart of the administrative authority of the federal government. Claims regarding administrative policymaking, interpretation, adjudication, and official removal variously reject agencies’ legal powers or their insulation from the President. These claims together pose an existential challenge to the administrative state. If they were all successful, agencies would cease to exercise independent, legally binding powers. This Article diagnoses and responds to this existential challenge. It shows how the discrete claims that comprise the challenge are each grounded in a legal theory that treats the administrative state as antithetical to constitutional structures and values. This existential challenge is not merely a creature of conservative constitutional politics, however. It is also facilitated by a judicial self-conception, transcending political ideology, that readily entertains and obliquely supports the categorical...

Communicating Change Across Scales: Turbulence causes small things to make big impacts

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Winds and tides force oceanic motion at many different scales from basin scale overturning to centimeter scale turbulence. The physical mechanisms that transfer kinetic energy and momentum between these scales allow the global climate to be influenced by processes that are too small to be resolved by models. Understanding the physics behind these transfers of energy and momentum holds the key to parameterizing their impact in models. Observations allow us to understand the physics on a deeper level, and continue to see the ocean from new perspectives as technology evolves. This thesis uses observations to illuminate the physical mechanisms by which internal wave breaking transfers energy and momentum between scales, and the human mechanisms that allow those observations to exist. In Chapter 1 we use observations to show the pathway of kinetic energy cascade from internal tides to turbulence in frequency-space. Chapter 2 presents observations and ray tracing of near-inertial wave...

Medium-induced modification of azimuthal correlations of electrons from heavy-flavor hadron decays with charged particles in Pb–Pb collisions at sNN=5.02 TeV

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The azimuthal-correlation distributions between electrons from the decays of heavy-flavor hadrons and associated charged particles in Pb–Pb collisions at sNN=5.02$$\sqrt{s_{\textrm{NN}}} = 5.02$$ TeV are reported for the 0–10% and 30–50% centrality classes. This measurement provides access to the jet-like correlation observables in the heavy-flavor sector in Pb–Pb collisions. The analysis is performed for trigger electrons from heavy-flavor hadron decays with transverse momentum 44$$p_\textrm{T}>4$$ GeV/c on the away side. The IAA$$I_\textrm{AA}$$ for electron triggers from heavy-flavor hadron decays is compared with that for light-flavor and strange-particle triggers to investigate the dependence on different fragmentation processes and parton-medium dynamics, and is found to be the same within uncertainties.

The global policy landscape of ISO 50001 energy management systems

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

While many options exist to improve industrial demand-side energy efficiency, energy management systems (EnMSs)—particularly those aligned with ISO 50001—are proven to drive continuous and meaningful energy performance improvements. Governments leverage these EnMSs in their policies to advance national objectives including enhancing industrial competitiveness and achieving environmental goals. Existing research has focused on the impact of EnMSs at the company level, while comprehensive work on EnMSs in a global policy context is lacking. We seek to close this gap by investigating the extent to which current national policies incorporate the utilization of EnMSs, particularly the ISO 50001 standard. Our paper employs a hybrid approach, combining a literature review and expert interviews across 28 governments representing > 86% of global primary energy consumption. We dissect policy mechanisms, governance levels, underlying motivations, and trends in present EnMS policies. We...

Building Green, Staying Affordable: Sustainability Development Strategies for Little Tokyo’s Mangrove Site

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Building Green, Staying Affordable: Sustainability Development Strategies for Little Tokyo’s Mangrove Site

Multimodal Understanding, Alignment and Reasoning in Language Models

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across vision-language tasks, yet fundamental challenges remain in understanding their internal multimodal processing, aligning their behavior with human preferences, and enabling faithful reasoning. This dissertation addresses these challenges through three lines of work spanning multimodal understanding, alignment, and reasoning. We begin with multimodal understanding, where we develop an information-theoretic framework that traces how visual information is encoded, compressed, and shaped by textual instructions across MLLM layers. Building on these insights, we introduce CoMMIT, a coordinated instruction tuning approach that resolves the learning imbalance between visual encoders and the backbone LLM, and MDGD, which preserves visual knowledge during fine-tuning by decoupling modality-specific gradient updates. We then turn to multimodal alignment, proposing OCEAN, which models chain-of-thought...

PIK3CA-Related Overgrowth Syndrome: A Case Report

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

PIK3CA-related overgrowth syndrome (PROS) is characterized by a range of mutations in the phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) pathway, resulting in diverse and variable imaging findings. Hyperplasia in PROS can affect multiple organ systems and commonly presents with asymmetric limb and brain enlargement, venous anomalies, and pigmented nevi. While genetic testing for PROS may be considered in the presence of these features, diagnosis and treatment are often delayed in patients with atypical phenotypes or those without visible external anomalies. We report a case of newly diagnosed PROS in a 20-year-old woman with a lifelong history of abdominal pain. This patient exhibited no external signs of the disease and had unusual vascular manifestations identified through imaging. The unique clinical and imaging features in this case provide valuable insight into the broad spectrum of PROS findings and offer guidance for radiologists in recognizing these elements.

California State Fair

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This book reproduces photographs taken on July 20th, 2026 at the California State Fair, at Cal Expo in Sacramento, showing amusements, concessions, games, people and exhibits, including California First Peoples’ Art Showcase, The Sacramento Lowrider Commission’s CaLOWfornia Love, Mazes and A·MAZE·D America 250, TUT: Wonderful Things,and others.

Diffusion Models for Musician-Centered Music AI: Generation, Separation, Interpretation, and Performance

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Recent breakthroughs in generative AI have produced a new generation of powerful music synthesis models; the dominant paradigm to emerge is text-to-music generation, in which complete musical pieces are synthesized from natural language descriptions. While technically impressive, this paradigm does not always reflect how real-life musicians actually work. Music-making rarely begins with a sentence — it is a practice that spans orchestrating individual parts, separating and analyzing musical textures, interpreting notation, accompanying other performers, and ultimately engaging in real-time musical interaction. This dissertation presents four works that collectively explore these dimensions of music-making through the lens of diffusion models. The works presented in this dissertation trace a coherent arc through the musical process as a practitioner may experiences it. The first addresses the structural understanding and creation of music — how individual tracks relate and...

Sonic Worlding, Posthuman Listening, and Cyborgian Entanglements: Towards a Theory–Practice Cartography of Electroacoustic Composition

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This dissertation presents three works composed during my six years as a PhD student in Composition at the University of California, San Diego, and lays out a theoretical and philosophical groundwork for understanding my electroacoustic and electronic sonic practice. I specifically unpack sonic worlding, posthuman listening, and cyborgian entanglements as analytical and theoretical lenses for understanding my compositional work, and as a roadmap for future creative engagements and further development of these ideas. All three use Rosi Braidotti’s notion of posthumanism, which I seek to demonstrate is fertile ontological and aesthetic framework for grounding my creative practice, analyzing my works, and situating them in dialogue with current discourse. The theory–practice cartography I develop here contextualizes three electroacoustic pieces: Machine Spectre, for chamber orchestra and electronics; INTRA for cello, live electronics and lights; and noocambriidæ, for multichannel...

In Memoriam: Dieter Enzmann, MD (1945–2026)

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Dr. Dieter R. Enzmann, who led UCLA's Department of Radiological Sciences for 25 years and transformed it into one of the nation's leading academic radiology programs, passed away peacefully on June 18, 2026, at the age of 80.