Highly engaging events reveal semantic and temporal compression in online community discourse

People nowadays express their opinions in online spaces, using different forms of interactions such as posting, sharing and discussing with one another. How do these digital traces change in response to events happening in the real world? We leverage Reddit conversation data, exploiting its community-based structure, to elucidate how offline events influence online user interactions and behavior. Online conversations, as posts and comments, are analysed along their temporal and semantic dimensions. Conversations tend to become repetitive with a more limited vocabulary, develop at a faster pace, and feature heightened emotions. As the event approaches, the shifts occurring in conversations are reflected in the users’ dynamics. Users become more active and they exchange information with a growing audience, despite using a less rich vocabulary and repetitive messages. The recurring patterns we discovered are persistent across a wide range of events and several contexts, representing a fingerprint of how online dynamics change in response to real-world occurrences

Understanding the high-order network plasticity mechanisms of ultrasound neuromodulation

Transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS) is an emerging non-invasive neuromodulation technique, offering a potential alternative to pharmacological treatments for psychiatric and neurological disorders. While functional analysis has been instrumental in characterizing TUS effects, understanding the underlying mechanisms remains a challenge. Here, we developed a whole-brain model to represent functional changes as measured by fMRI, enabling us to investigate how TUSinduced effects propagate throughout the brain with increasing stimulus intensity. We implemented two mechanisms: one based on anatomical distance and another on broadcasting dynamics, to explore plasticity-driven changes in specific brain regions. Finally, we highlighted the role of higherorder functional interactions in localizing spatial effects of off-line TUS at two target areas—the right thalamus and inferior frontal cortex—revealing distinct patterns of functional reorganization. This work lays the foundation for mechanistic insights and predictive models of TUS, advancing its potential clinical applications

Emerging Trends in Palladium Nanoparticles: Sustainable Approaches for Enhanced Cross-Coupling Catalysis

Palladium nanoparticles (PdNPs) are transforming the landscape of modern catalysis and offer sustainable and efficient alternatives to traditional catalysts for cross-coupling reactions. Owing to their exceptional surface area-to-volume ratio, PdNPs exhibit superior catalytic activity, selectivity, and recyclability, making them ideal for greener chemical processes. Recent innovations have focused on improving the stability and reusability of PdNPs through environmentally benign approaches, such as water-based reactions, renewable stabilizers, and magnetic nanoparticle supports. Advances in catalyst design, including PdNP immobilization on magnetic nanosilica for enhanced recyclability in Suzuki–Miyaura reactions, nitrogen-doped carbon nanosheets achieving up to ninefold improvements in turnover frequencies, and biodegradable biopolymer matrices that reduce environmental impact, have effectively addressed key challenges such as catalyst leaching, support degradation, and agglomeration. The shift from conventional catalysis to these cutting-edge nanocatalytic techniques signifies a critical movement toward sustainable chemistry, positioning PdNPs at the forefront of industrial applications and the future of eco-friendly chemical synthesis

Power, Propaganda and Medieval Historiography

This article explores the contribution of Antonia Gransden’s article, ‘Propaganda in English Medieval Historiography’. It argues that while the tendency to focus on the political aspects of historical writing has grown more influential in the fifty years since Gransden wrote, a number of new contributions share Gransden’s reservations on the use of history as ‘propaganda’ in the Middle Ages, and points to new ways to appreciate the purposes and powers of medieval historical writing

Distinguishing mechanisms of social contagion from local network view

The adoption of individual behavioural patterns is largely determined by stimuli arriving from peers via social interactions or from external sources. Based on these influences, individuals are commonly assumed to follow simple or complex adoption rules, inducing social contagion processes. In reality, multiple adoption rules may coexist even within the same social contagion process, introducing additional complexity into the spreading phenomena. Our goal is to understand whether coexisting adoption mechanisms can be distinguished from a microscopic view, at the egocentric network level, without requiring global information about the underlying network, or the unfolding spreading process. We formulate this question as a classification problem, and study it through a likelihood approach and with random forest classifiers in various synthetic and data-driven experiments. This study offers a novel perspective on the observations of propagation processes at the egocentric level and a better understanding of landmark contagion mechanisms from a local view

Review of Stephen Robertson, 'Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935'

Review of Stephen Robertson, 'Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935

The Dream Factory: London's First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare

The Theatre, which stood in Shoreditch in London between 1576 and 1598, was London's first purpose-built commercial playhouse. It was also the workplace of William Shakespeare, when he first arrived in London and began his apprenticeship as a playwright in the newly development theatre industry. This book recounts the construction and running of the playhouse, and Shakespeare's career at it, culminating in the writing of Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Nigh's Dream