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Topological defects play a central role in the physics of many materials, including magnets, superconductors, and liquid crystals. In active fluids, defects become autonomous particles that spontaneously propel from internal active stresses and drive chaotic flows stirring the fluid. The intimate connection between defect textures and active flow suggests that properties of active materials can be engineered by controlling defects, but design principles for their spatiotemporal control remain elusive. Here, we propose a symmetry-based additive strategy for using elementary activity patterns, as active topological tweezers, to create, move, and braid such defects. By combining theory and simulations, we demonstrate how, at the collective level, spatial activity gradients act like electric fields which, when strong enough, induce an inverted topological polarization of defects, akin to a negative susceptibility dielectric. We harness this feature in a dynamic setting to collectively pattern and transport interacting active defects. Our work establishes an additive framework to sculpt flows and manipulate active defects in both space and time, paving the way to design programmable active and living materials for transport, memory, and logic.

Abstract Containment, as a way of restricting mobilities, ranges from physical infrastructures to diffused control practices in everyday life. Alongside their physical, social, and political dimensions, such restrictions also engender various temporal borders and experiences of time particular to situations of containment. A prolific field of research has identified waiting and hope as strategies for both enforcing and surpassing containment. In response, anthropological research on future-making has highlighted a more diverse set of contextual and emergent practices that derive from imagining and realising migrants’ futures. Yet, in contrast to waiting, migrants’ future-making practices have seldom been related to containment. Besides containment informing future-making, migrants and control actors also manipulate time as they plan or experiment with futures to overcome or reinforce containment. Carrying elusive promises of a better future, containment infrastructures can also motivate migrants to stay put and accommodate restrictions to their mobility. This paper addresses how such different relational, often conflicting, practices of envisioning and realising migrant futures contribute to or subvert different types of containment. Building on empirical studies from Turkey, Niger and Kenya we suggest future-making as a relational, practice-oriented and contextual approach suited to trace the negotiation of migrant futures between migrants, control actors, and infrastructures in situations of spatiotemporal containment. We give special attention to resettlement as a form of containment due to its ability to limit mobility through promises of future mobility and its role in negotiating migrant futures. This article serves as a theoretical introduction into the emerging research field of contested future-making in containment and to the corresponding paper cluster.

This mixed methods study investigates conceptions of gender both in and outside of the media among a sample of 11- and 12-year-olds. Data from a quantitative survey and qualitative writing responses were collected and analyzed from 54 sixth graders at a U.S public elementary school. Results show that the majority held inclusive views of gender, indicating a recognition of gender inequities in media and society and a desire to challenge traditional gender norms. However, perhaps due to gender-typed content, stronger perceptions of the similarity of the people appearing in YouTube videos, commercials, video games, music videos, and movies to the self were associated with more stereotypical views about gender roles and norms in a weak but statistically significant correlation. This may suggest that accepting media representations as accurately reflecting oneself can still be linked to endorsing more traditional roles and norms, even within a sample with generally quite open conceptions of gender.

This study experimentally explores the energetics for the formation of boron-imidazolate frameworks (BIFs), which are synthesized by mechanochemistry. The topologically similar frameworks employ the same tetratopic linker based on tetrakis(imidazolyl)boric acid but differ in the monovalent cation metal nodes. This permits assessment of the stabilizing effect of metal nodes in frameworks with sodalite (SOD) and diamondoid (dia) topologies. The enthalpy of formation from endmembers (metal oxide and linker), which define thermodynamic stability of the structures, has been determined by use of acid solution calorimetry. The results show that heavier metal atoms in the node promote greater energetic stabilization of denser structures. Overall, in BIFs the relation between cation descriptors (ionic radius and electronegativity) and thermodynamic stability depends on framework topology. Thermodynamic stability increases with the metallic character of the cation employed as the metal node, independent of the framework topology. The results suggest unifying aspects for thermodynamic stabilization across MOF systems.

Abstract Background Fasciitis ossificans is a rare subtype of nodular fasciitis, a benign soft tissue tumor with reactive characteristics. Due to its rapid growth, it is often misdiagnosed as a malignant tumor. While fasciitis ossificans commonly originates from the subcutaneous tissue and can appear throughout the body, it may also arise from extraordinary sites. Case presentation We report the first-ever documented case of fasciitis ossificans arising from the penis in a male patient who presented with a tumor on the glans penis. The tumor was surgically resected due to suspicion of penile cancer. Initial histopathological analysis led to a misdiagnosis of squamous cell carcinoma. However, pathological consultation ultimately confirmed the diagnosis of fasciitis ossificans of the penis originating from the glans penis by demonstrating ossification. Conclusion This case underscores the importance of considering fasciitis ossificans in the differential diagnosis of soft tissue tumors, even in unusual locations such as penile soft tissue.

Abstract In this rejoinder we argue, based on the papers of this commentary series, that ‘race’ is such a tricky notion because it can be used in (at least) two very different and contradictory ways—as a concept to disentangle racism and racialisation (what M’charek calls the ‘work race actually does’) and as a way of categorization and social classification, in which case it might create the very essentialised hierarchies ‘race’ as a critical concept tries to disentangle. We wonder if it is indeed possible to use ‘race’ as a concept without evoking ‘race’ as a social classification. At first, we give a short summary of the four discussion papers and then delve into two aspects the papers share, namely the need for spatial and temporal contextualization and comparison, as well as their choice not to take up our invitation to compare race as a category with gender. In a second step we will discuss two points arising from the papers, (1) ‘race’ as category, not as lens, often resulting in essentialism and (2) ‘race’ as potentially obscuring racism and racialisation. We conclude by proposing to give more space to complexity.

Research has shown that laypeople tend to rely on their own evaluations when encountering scientific text information that is easy to comprehend. This easiness effect of science popularization leaves them vulnerable to uncritically accepting misinformation presented in a simplified manner. The present study investigated whether warnings of misinformation frequently used in social networks and other online services mitigate or even prevent the persuasive advantage of information easiness. Forty-one medical laypeople read brief argumentative online texts proposing fictitious health claims. Texts were either easy or difficult to comprehend, and they either were or were not labeled with a warning that independent fact-checkers dispute the information. Results showed that warnings effectively increased laypeople's skepticism toward scientific misinformation. However, findings also suggested that warnings do not reduce the persuasive advantage of misinformation presented in an easily understandable manner, pointing to the limits of this communicative tool.

Bent-core liquid crystals, a class of mesogenic compounds with non-linear molecular structures, are well known for their unconventional mesophases, characterized by complex molecular (and supramolecular) ordering and often featuring biaxial and polar properties. In the nematic phase, their unique behavior is manifested in the formation of nano-sized biaxial clusters of layered molecules (cybotactic groups). While this prompted their consideration in the quest for nematic biaxiality, experimental evidence indicates that the cybotactic order is only short-ranged and that the nematic phase is macroscopically uniaxial. By combining atomic force microscopy, neutron reflectivity and wide-angle grazing-incidence X-ray scattering, here, we demonstrate that multilayer films of a bent-core nematic, deposited on silicon by a combined Langmuir–Blodgett and Langmuir–Schaefer approach, exhibit macroscopic in-plane ordering, with the long molecular axis tilted with respect to the sample surface and the short molecular axis (i.e., the apex bisector) aligned along the film compression direction. We thus propose the use of Langmuir films as an effective way to study and control the complex anchoring properties of bent-core liquid crystals.

Abstract While at the moment the world seems to be divided along racial lines and ‘race’ appears to be a central axe of social inclusion and exclusion, in this article we ask whether it is thinkable to go ‘beyond race’. We want to explore the idea of going ‘beyond race’ in four different ways: (1) ‘Beyond race’ as a demographic reality when people of mixed origin form the majority of population; (2) ‘Beyond race’ in regard to policies that aim at combatting inequalities also along color lines, yet are no longer dependent on a notion of race. (3) ‘Beyond race’ in terms of political mobilizations, e.g. the possibility or desirability of anti-racist movements not grounded in identity politics and (4) ‘Beyond race’ as a conceptualization of race that is decoupling biology and culture, or even to stop thinking in racial categories altogether, yet without de-politicizing any marginalised group’s, history and experience. We are aware that this questioning of race, and by implication of ethnicity, may be a typical hang-up of two authors based in Europe. We have invited authors from different parts of the world, and with different academic backgrounds to reflect in a commentary on the issues we raise and to explain their position.

Previous findings in healthy humans suggest that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) modulate emotional processing via earlier changes in attention. However, many previous studies have provided inconsistent findings. One possible reason for such inconsistencies is that these studies did not control for the influence of either sex or sex hormone fluctuations. To address this inconsistency, we administered 20 mg escitalopram or placebo for seven consecutive days in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled design to sixty healthy female participants with a minimum of 3 months oral contraceptive (OC) intake. Participants performed a modified version of an emotional flanker task before drug administration, after a single dose, after 1 week of SSRI intake, and after a 1-month wash-out period. Supported by Bayesian analyses, our results do not suggest a modulatory effect of escitalopram on behavioral measures of early attentional-emotional interaction in female individuals with regular OC use. While the specific conditions of our task may be a contributing factor, it is also possible that a practice effect in a healthy sample may mask the effects of escitalopram on the attentional-emotional interplay. Consequently, 1 week of escitalopram administration may not modulate attention toward negative emotional distractors outside the focus of attention in healthy female participants taking OCs. While further research in naturally cycling females and patient samples is needed, our results represent a valuable contribution toward the preclinical investigation of antidepressant treatment.

Flerovium (Fl, element 114) is the heaviest element chemically studied so far. To date, its interaction with gold was investigated in two gas-solid chromatography experiments, which reported two different types of interaction, however, each based on the level of a few registered atoms only. Whereas noble-gas-like properties were suggested from the first experiment, the second one pointed at a volatile-metal-like character. Here, we present further experimental data on adsorption studies of Fl on silicon oxide and gold surfaces, accounting for the inhomogeneous nature of the surface, as it was used in the experiment and analyzed as part of the reported studies. We confirm that Fl is highly volatile and the least reactive member of group 14. Our experimental observations suggest that Fl exhibits lower reactivity towards Au than the volatile metal Hg, but higher reactivity than the noble gas Rn.

Fetal congenital heart disease (CHD) is often associated with chromosomal abnormalities. Our primary aim was to assess stillbirth and neonatal mortality rates for pregnancies complicated by trisomies 13, 18, and 21 in the presence of CHD, from a single tertiary referral center during 2000–2020 in a retrospective cohort study. The secondary aims were to investigate maternal morbidity in these pregnancies, and to study the gestational or neonatal age when mortality occurred. Inclusion criteria were the prenatal diagnosis of at least one structural CHD, together with prenatally diagnosed fetal trisomy 13, 18, or 21. One-hundred and sixty patients with fetal trisomy 13 (14.4%), fetal trisomy 18 (28.8%), and fetal trisomy 21 (56.9%) were evaluated. In total, 98 (61.3%) families opted for the termination of pregnancy (TOP). Of the remaining 62 (38.8%) pregnancies, 16 (25.8%) resulted in intrauterine fetal death/death during delivery. Ten out of twenty-one (47.6%) infants with trisomy 13 or 18 were born alive. The livebirth rate was 87.8% (36/41) for infants with trisomy 21. Early neonatal death was observed in nine (19.6%) infants. Thirty-one (86.1%) infants with trisomy 21 survived the first year of life. These data may be helpful for counseling affected parents when the decision to terminate or continue the pregnancy should be considered.

Bent-core mesogens (BCMs) are a class of thermotropic liquid crystals featuring several unconventional properties. However, the interpretation and technological exploitation of their unique behavior have been hampered by the difficulty of controlling their anchoring at surfaces. To tackle this issue, we report the nanoscale structural characterization of BCM films prepared using the Langmuir–Blodgett technique. Even though BCMs are quite different from typical amphiphilic molecules, we demonstrate that stable molecular films form over water, which can then be transferred onto silicon substrates. The combination of Brewster angle microscopy, atomic force microscopy, and X-ray reflectivity measurements shows that the molecules, once transferred onto a solid substrate, form a bilayer structure with a bottom layer of flat molecules and an upper layer of upright molecules. These results suggest that Langmuir–Blodgett films of BCMs can provide a useful means to control the alignment of this class of liquid crystals.