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This work describes the development and testing of a sensitive and selective potentiometric nitrate microsensor that are scaleable to large, dense sensor networks required to study environmental systems. We have developed flexible, miniature and inexpensive nitrate sensors by electropolymerizing pyrrole onto carbon fiber substrates, using nitrate as a dopant. Carbon microfibers were found to be an excellent substitute to expensive conductive materials, such as glassy carbon or platinum.

Sin resumen

Sin resumen

Sin resumen

Sin resumen

Sin resumen

At the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Atlantisch Perspectief asked me to take stock of U.S. foreign policy towards the conflict. After the midterm elections and half way through Joe Biden’s presidential term, is America still all-in as a supporter of Ukraine or has fatigue and the success of Trumpian isolationists tempered U.S. enthusiasm for acting as the arsenal of democracy? Add to this uncertainty, equally important questions about Biden’s willingness to continue to lead and to unify NATO members against Putin. The recent debate on whether and when to supply tanks to a Ukrainian army that was obviously in need of more heavy military hardware and more ammunition, suggests that cracks were appearing in leadership, unity, and the ability to arm the defender.

It is certainly interesting and somewhat bemusing to witness the shift in Dutch public opinion towards the Joe Biden administration over the course of November to early January. Views swung from overt signs of relief that Republicans did not realize a significant red wave in the midterms to frustration that Biden had pulled the rug out of his promised “we’re back” multilateral foreign policy when it comes to free trade. I have two truths for my Dutch audience, one you will find a little comforting and the other a little frustrating.

In the months leading up to the 2022 U.S. midterm elections many Europeans let it be known that these elections felt exceedingly consequential, certainly more than the average midterm election round. A first indication was that my son asked me in September to remind him how to apply for an absentee ballot. A second indication came during a dinner in mid-September hosted by the U.S. Mission to the Netherlands where it was noted that the Dutch were paying close attention to the campaign. The big reason, of course, were concerns raised by Donald J. Trump and his possible impact on both U.S. domestic and foreign policy as well as possible knock-on effects to American democracy. The question that I was asked the most: will Trump be the kingmaker for Republicans running this November? And if so, what does that portend for November 2024, when Trump himself runs again, and what impact might that have for the future of American foreign policy?

While my American friends were mostly silent on the search and seizure of classified files retrieved from former U.S. President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, my European friends were scandalized. In late August, many in Europe voiced to me the certainty that this would be Trump’s undoing. My answer was that I thought that the Justice Department and the FBI acted in a way that would surely backfire against them—that they were striking the ball into their own net.

This spring and early summer several people in the Netherlands and the United States relayed to me dire apocalyptic warnings or offered complex schemes about world events. Whether it is believing that the FBI is actually behind many of the recent mass murders in the U.S. or that the CIA assisted freedom struggles in Georgia, Ukraine and Belarus, many of the explanations I heard centered on a powerful but corrupt U.S. government. The disconnect between these conspiracies and my own experience of watching a patriotic, smalltown 4th of July parade, with a good deal of candy thrown my way, is stark. Why are so many people currently spouting so many conspiracy theories on both sides of the Atlantic?

International audience; Compounds of general formula ABO3 are widely studied due to their versatility regarding chemical composition, structure and physical properties. The use of high-pressure and high-temperature synthesis method allows the introduction of small Mn 2+ cation into the often-large A site, giving rise to the so-called Asite manganites, with a few exceptions to this rule. Polymorphism, structural features and magnetic properties of A-site manganites are revisited in this short review dedicated to Miguel A. Alario y Franco on his 80 th birthday. We extend this dedication to John B. Goodenough and J. Paul Attfield on their 100 th and 60 th birthdays in recognition of their ground work. Happy birthday all three!

New religious movements in modern western culture often emphasize experience at the expense of reason; for that reason, some scholars have described their teachings as “flights from reason.” This description has been rightly criticized. Nevertheless, it is not entirely wrong. Many founders of new religious movements do claim immediate insight into a (divine) reality that transcends the intellect. And yet, they and their followers often spendmuch of their lives building an intellectual frame around this anti-intellectual claim. Why did such paradoxical “reasoned flights beyond reason” emerge? Based on the life and teachings of Franklin Merrell-Wolff (1887–1985) and his Assembly of Man, the intellectualization of anti-intellectual claims by founders and followers of new religious movements in twentieth-century North America can be partly explained by three sociohistorical developments: (1) increasing access to an academic education, (2) increasing demand for a reflexive spirituality, and (3) increasing competition between eastern and western esoteric movements that answered this call for a reflexive spirituality.

Sociological scholarship on social movements has shed important light on the role of knowledge production for processes of collective action and mobilization. However, much of this research overlooks the question of how movement-based knowledge emerges from within institutionalized settings of formal education. Drawing on a qualitative case study, this article examines the repertoire of knowledge-building practices mobilized from within a state-based system of adult education in francophone Belgium. Building on social movement theory, it is shown how formalized sites of adult education can empower the presence of social movements in society when they adopt counter-hegemonic principles of popular education that allow them to act as free spaces which facilitate the construction of strategic capacities and collective identities.

The disenchantment of reality has bankrupted conventional sources of meaning for many people in modern Western cultures. This has led a growing number of figures and groups to search for alternative sources of meaning. Typical of their quests for meaning is the entanglement of secular and religious discourses. Since the twentieth century, scholars have studied the social configurations of these figures and groups as “cults” or “new religious movements” and their ideologies as “New Age” or “spirituality,” which are seen as parts of a longer tradition of “Western esotericism” (Europe) or “metaphysical religion” (North America). Several leading scholars have also interpreted them as forms of “secular religion,” but this has yet to gain academic traction. This article argues that the former concepts are lacking or losing a logical connection with the socio-historical phenomena to which they pertain and reintroduces the latter concept as a more appropriate one.

Discourses on Responsible Innovation and Responsible Research and Innovation, in short R(R)I, have revolved around but not elaborated on the notion of critique. In this article, generative critique is introduced to R(R)I as a practice that sits in-between adversarial armchair critique and co-opted, uncritical service. How to position oneself and be positioned on this spectrum has puzzled humanities scholars and social scientists who engage in interdisciplinary collaborations with scientists, engineers, and other professionals. Recently, generative critique has been presented as a solution to the puzzle in interdisciplinary collaborations on neuroscientific experiments. Generative critique seeks to create connections across disciplines that help remake seemingly stable objects in moments when taken-for-granted ways of seeing and approaching objects are unsettled. In order to translate generative critique from the neurosciences to R(R)I, socio-technical integration research (STIR) is proposed as a practice of generative critique in interdisciplinary R(R)I collaborations. These collaborations aim to account for societal aspects in research and technology development. For this purpose, a variety of approaches have been developed, including STIR and video-reflexive ethnography (VRE). STIR and VRE resemble each other but diverge on affective, collaborative, and temporal dimensions. Their juxtaposition serves to develop suggestions for how STIR could be modified on these dimensions to better enact generative critique in interdisciplinary R(R)I collaborations. In this way, the article contributes to ongoing discussions in R(R)I and in the engaged programme in science and technology studies more broadly on the dynamics of positioning in collaborative work.

Experiments based on the premise of uniformitarism are an effective tool to establish patterns of taphonomic processes acting either before, or after, burial. One process that has been extensively investigated experimentally is the impact of trampling to large mammal bones. Since trampling marks caused by sedimentary friction strongly mimic cut marks made by humans using stone tools during butchery, distinguishing the origin of such modifications is especially relevant to the study of human evolution. In contrast, damage resulting from trampling on small mammal fossil bones has received less attention, despite the fact that it may solve interesting problems relating to site formation processes. While it has been observed that the impact of compression depends on the type of substrate and dryness of the skeletal elements, the fragility of small mammal bones may imply that they will break as a response to compression. Here, we have undertaken a controlled experiment using material resistance compression equipment to simulate a preliminary experiment, previously devised by one of us, on human trampling of owl pellets. Our results demonstrate that different patterns of breakage can be distinguished under wet and dry conditions in mandibles, skulls and long bones that deform or break in a consistent way. Further, small compact bones almost always remain intact, resisting breakage under compression. The pattern obtained here was applied to a Pleistocene small mammal fossil assemblage from Wonderwerk Cave (South Africa). This collection showed unusually extensive breakage and skeletal element representation that could not be entirely explained by excavation procedures or digestion by the predator. We propose that trampling was a significant factor in small mammal bone destruction at Wonderwerk Cave, partly the product of trampling caused by the raptor that introduced the microfauna into the cave, as well as by hominins and other terrestrial animals that entered the cave and trampled pellets covering the cave floor., This project was funded by a Leakey Foundation grant to F.-J.Y. and the project CGL2016-79334-P of the Spanish National Program funded by the Ministry of Scientific Research and Innovation and the Spanish Council of Scientific Research (COOPB20287). Funding for field work at Wonderwerk Cave is provided by a grant from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to C.M. The Université de Rennes 1 (France) and the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (CSIC, Spain) provided the Convention de Stage n. 46360 to R.L. to do this work as practical stage of the Master M2 mention Biologie-agro-santé spécialité préhistoire, paléontologie et paléoenvironnememt in 2015. G.-M.S. has a pre-doctoral grant funded by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) and Banco Santander (CT42/18-CT43/18).

International audience; The materialization of autofiction in cinematic practice allows a new identification, adding to the literary author-narrator-character that of the actor. The filmmaker then plays himself generating multiple and interesting procedures of this autofictional presence only possible in audiovisual narration. This article aims to analyse these procedures in French cinematic creation, in which the exhaustiveness and relevance of literary autofiction have a determining influence. The analysis of this practice establishes a double axis. The first classifies the films in a progressive evolution from the factualisation of the fictional (documentary starting point) to the fictionalisation of the factual (fictional starting point). The second analyses them regarding the filmmaker's presence: from the cinéaste-filmeur(e) who stands behind the camera and records the images himself to the cinéaste-acteur/actrice who exclusively appears in front of it. This cinematic exploration of the self situates the filmmaker in all possible positions, developing autofictional procedures that delve into the concepts of postmodern identity and alterity using parody and irony as efficient tools. In this laboratory of the self, filmmakers experiment with the topics they address-cinematic reflection, creative search, intimate self-knowledge, ideological self-criticism, social and political criticism-as well as they create valuable materialisations of resilience, empathy, sisterhood and even pedagogy.

International audience; Cation ordering in ABX3 perovskites is important to structural, physical and chemical properties. Here we report discovery of CaCuFeReO6 with the tetragonal AA′BB′O6 double double perovskite structure that was previously only reported for A′=Mn compositions. CaCuFeReO6 occurs in the same phase field as CaCu3Fe2Re2O12 demonstrating that different A-cation ordered peroskites may be obtained in the same chemical system. CaCuFeReO6 has ferrimagnetic order of Fe, Re and Cu spins below TC=567 K, in contrast to Mn analogues where the Mn spins order separately at much lower temperatures. The magnetoresistance of CaCuFeReO6 displays low-field “butterfly” hysteresis with an unusual change from negative to positive values as field increases. Many more AA′BB′O6 double double perovskites may be accessible for A′=Cu and other divalent transition metals at high pressure, so the presently known phases likely represent only the “tip of the iceberg” for this family.