Living by the Rule:Contemporary Art and the Medieval Monastery

How might assumptions about contemporary life be unsettled by historical models, specifically the 'Rule’ which underpinned medieval monastic life? And how does the rich visual material culture of that historical model find connections with contemporary art? This unique publication offers a vivid means of staging the encounter between the medieval and the contemporary, with many unexpected resonances sounding between recent works and much earlier objects and texts. Offering new perspectives on extraordinary artworks from monastic contexts, such as the Arundel and Gorleston Psalters, and works in a variety of media by celebrated contemporary artists, including Danh Vo, Elizabeth Price, Richard Wright and Andrea Büttner, Living by the Rule makes a compelling case for looking beyond the chronological tracing of art history

The impact of the matrix and buffer properties on residual stresses in TRISO particles during manufacture and early life

A three-dimensional finite-element model was developed using Abaqus to simulate the fabrication and initial power ramp-up of a tri-structural isotropic (TRISO) particle, featuring a UO2 kernel, encapsulated in either a SiC or graphite matrix. After sintering, the residual compressive hoop stress in the SiC coating layer reached -540 MPa when encapsulated in a graphite matrix, 94 MPa more compressive than in a SiC matrix. However, following the initial power ramp-up, the predicted compressive hoop stresses in the SiC layer of a particle embedded in a SiC matrix (-388 MPa) were significantly greater than in a graphite matrix (-222 MPa), emphasizing the matrix material's critical role in the stress state of the SiC layer. Model validation attempts were made with the experimental measurements of the residual stresses of a zirconia-kernel surrogate particle. We found that in a fully-bonded surrogate TRISO particle, the stress state of the SiC layer is highly sensitive to the buffer porosity with compressive SiC layer hoop stresses ranging from up to -1.06 GPa at a porosity of 0.14 to -0.77 GPa at a porosity of 0.60. Partial kernel/buffer delamination simulations revealed a significantly varied geometric stress distribution, with tensile stresses reaching up to +54 MPa and compressive stresses up to -546 MPa at different axes of the sectioned plane in the model. This finding suggests that contrary to the common assumption of complete delamination at the kernel/buffer interface during fabrication, partial delamination is a more plausible explanation for the high compressive stresses observed in the SiC layer experimentally

A review of the management of obesity in primary care

This review highlights the important role primary care plays in obesity management, using England as an example. It includes a comprehensive summary of current management and referral options for primary care clinicians, a discussion of the most up-to-date clinical guidelines for the use of GLP-1 receptor agonists in England, and the evolving ways in which obesity is identified and defined. Reflections from people living with obesity are considered. Despite the potential of primary care to engage with patients regarding obesity prevention and treatment, several factors have limited this, including low prioritisation by clinicians, workload pressures, regional variations in services, insufficient specialist training and ongoing weight stigma. The introduction of new pharmacotherapies, such as GLP-1 receptor agonists, offers both an opportunity and a challenge for primary care providers. These treatments could help patients access more effective obesity management strategies via primary care. However, there is concern about non-specialist clinicians keeping up to date with evolving strategies and understanding how new medications fit into broader care. The current complex referral pathways hinder timely access to appropriate treatment. The need for more straightforward pathways, improved clinician education and a reduction in the stigma associated with obesity is critical for better outcomes. In summary, while primary care could play a pivotal role in addressing obesity, several issues need to be resolved for this potential to be fully realised. Addressing these challenges, via enhancing clinician training, improving referral pathways and ensuring access to new treatments, will be crucial for advancing the care of people living with obesity

Intensive land use enhances soil ammonia-oxidising archaea at a continental scale

Archaea are an important group of soil organisms that play key roles in carbon and nitrogen cycling, particularly in nitrification (ammonia oxidation) and methanogenesis. However, there are knowledge gaps regarding their importance in ecosystem processes relative to other microbial groups and how they may be impacted by land-use and environmental changes. Here, by carrying out a continental-scale sample collection and utilising archaea-specific primers for metabarcoding and shotgun metagenomics, we aimed to decipher the structure and function of archaeal communities across various land-use types in Europe. Metagenomic data reveal that land-use intensification increases the relative abundance of archaea, whereas bacteria and eukaryotes show no increase. Alongside this, ammonia oxidising archaea (AOA) increase as a proportion of the total metabarcoding reads, from 1 % of archaea in coniferous woodland to >90 % in croplands. Functional gene profiles reveal that land-use intensification shifts archaeal communities from adaptive metabolic pathways in forests to specialised, ammonia-oxidising microbes in fertiliser-enriched cropland soils. Our data suggest that land-use intensification may shift archaeal communities toward greater dependence on external nitrogen inputs, with potential consequences for soil fertility and greenhouse gas emissions

Decolonising Intellectual Property Law:An Afrocentric Approach

This book advocates for an Afrocentric approach to intellectual property (IP) law, using lessons from Nigeria’s past to encourage reform for the future of Africa’s legal IP landscape. Highlighting the Eurocentric influence on the history of intellectual property law in Africa, the book demonstrates how this contradicts traditional African community culture. This book makes the case for legitimising cultural expressions of traditional communities despite the western legal framework within which they exist, reimagining a decolonised IP framework whereby African histories are centred. Questioning the fundamentals of the current IP landscape, such as the concept of eligibility in copyright which developed alongside European technological advances, the book also details the role of the courts in resolving IP disputes. It highlights Africa as a powerhouse of original, autonomous innovation, values and traditions which predate the West’s concept of intellectual property. It illustrates the African experience of intellectual property from a pro-African perspective as shared by African authors. This book will be of interest to researchers in the field of Intellectual Property, copyright and patent law, as well as African law

Thirteenth Century England XIX

Essays addressing Anglo-German connections and comparisons across the period from 1190 to 1300, with particular attention to the economic, social and personal aspects of an entangled transregnal connection

Robust Noisy Pseudo-Label Learning for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation Using Diffusion Model

Obtaining pixel-level annotations in the medical domain is both expensive and time-consuming, often requiring close collaboration between clinical experts and developers. Semi-supervised medical image segmentation aims to leverage limited annotated data alongside abundant unlabeled data to achieve accurate segmentation. However, existing semi-supervised methods often struggle to structure semantic distributions in the latent space due to noise introduced by pseudo-labels. In this paper, we propose a novel diffusion-based framework for semi-supervised medical image segmentation. Our method introduces a constraint into the latent structure of semantic labels during the denoising diffusion process by enforcing prototype-based contrastive consistency. Rather than explicitly delineating semantic boundaries, the model leverages class prototypes centralized semantic representations in the latent space as anchors. This strategy improves the robustness of dense predictions, particularly in the presence of noisy pseudo-labels. We also introduce a new publicly available benchmark: Multi-Object Segmentation in X-ray Angiography Videos (MOSXAV), which provides detailed, manually annotated segmentation ground truth for multiple anatomical structures in X-ray angiography videos. Extensive experiments on the EndoScapes2023 and MOSXAV datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art medical image segmentation approaches under the semi-supervised learning setting. This work presents a robust and data-efficient diffusion model that offers enhanced flexibility and strong potential for a wide range of clinical applications

Enduring the heat: The microclimate characteristics that determine site suitability for an endangered grassland bird during post-breeding

Environmental changes, including habitat loss and fragmentation in combination with climate change, have increased population reliance on protected areas (PAs) while also requiring individuals to adapt to changing local conditions or search for refugia when conditions deteriorate. Microclimate refugia within PAs may be critical for allowing species to persist when exposed to extreme thermal conditions, yet the availability of microclimate refugia and the ability of PAs to protect species from extremes has rarely been considered. We GPS-tracked 47 little bustards (Tetrax tetrax) in the Iberian Peninsula in 2009–2019, to understand their micro-scale climate and habitat use in the warmest period of the year, the post-breeding season. We compared post-breeding conditions at locations used in that period with those not used after breeding. We found that increasing temperature may reduce site suitability, while sites with greater microclimate refugia availability were more likely to be used by little bustards post-breeding. Although dispersed shrubs may provide micro-refugia, dense shrubby patches were avoided. While almost 63 % of the breeding locations were in PAs, only under 7 % of all post-breeding locations were within these key conservation areas, showing this species is not well protected across its life cycle. We assessed the impact of expected increasing temperatures from climate change scenarios and found that up to 15 % of currently used locations are predicted to become unsuitable, including those falling within PAs. Habitat management strategies should maintain landscapes with diverse characteristics that may provide shelter from extreme temperatures, such as scarce patches of low-density shrubs