Paraglacial conditions, climate and isostacy control river incision and terrace development; the example of the River Lune, NW England

Within Britain, post-last-glacial river terraces are frequently indicators of catchment-wide extrinsic eustatic and isostatic drivers, as the landscape adjusted through paraglacial conditions and latterly experienced temperate climates. Climate drove changes in river discharge and sediment loads at the catchment scale, mediated by local intrinsic controls on terrace formation. The terraces of the River Lune, NW England, are described and related primarily to climatic drivers with a subordinate role for isostacy. Localized drivers include: 1) glacial over-deepening; 2) terrace effacement due to change in the river style; 3) a moraine blocking the river course; 4) the influence of bedrock gorges. Humans may have had a reinforcing effect on climatically-driven terrace formation. The terrace levels are from highest to lowest: T1 to T3. The T1 level is a degraded, broad, glacifluvial surface; an ice-front braidplain that formed early during deglaciation (c. < 19 ka). The T2 level consists of gravel deposits on straths cut into bedrock, till or the T1 deposits, where the river bed aggraded during the Windermere Interstadial, then incised during the Younger Dryas. The T1 and T2 levels formed during the last glacio-eustatic sea level fall. The T3 level is broadly synonymous with the modern floodplain, which developed from the Early Mediaeval Period, due both to changes in climate and human use of the catchment. In upstream reaches, this level is in the process of abandonment. Major bedrock controls on terrace formation occur at the Lune Gorge and at the Knot Anticline. The latter limited isostatic and eustatic drivers from propagating incision upstream from the modern coast

Just transition as transition in justice : Really learning from, about and with China

Humanity is undergoing an unprecedented and irreversible transformation, reshaping both the planet and society. The concept of "just transition" has become a central narrative in climate and environmental discourses, yet prevailing scholarship often treats justice as a fixed, universal ideal, attaching it to transition without critically examining its contextual and evolving nature. This Perspective challenges such static interpretations, arguing that just transition should be understood as an ongoing process embedded in historically and culturally specific contexts, and so as a question, not a settled standpoint. We delineate what just transition is not: it is neither a predefined endpoint, nor simply the absence of injustice, nor a mechanism that inherently flattens power hierarchies. Drawing on empirical insights from China, we illustrate how local understandings of justice are shaped by place-specific cultural values and historical power structures. By critiquing dominant assumptions and advocating for a more dynamic, context-sensitive approach, this Perspective contributes to a more inclusive and globally relevant discourse on just transition, offering critical insights for scholars and policymakers navigating the complexities of sustainability transformations

Classification of donkey systems in Ethiopia

Working donkeys play a critical role in transportation, agriculture and household resilience in low- and middle-income countries. Other animals that are kept for production purposes, such as cattle, are often grouped into broad production system classes, such as dairy or pastoral, for comparison between and better understanding of the needs and outputs of animals within specific sectors. Despite the importance of working donkeys for sustaining livelihoods there are no systematic classifications of these populations. The aim of this study was to classify and characterise donkey systems in Ethiopia using household-level questionnaire data which included donkey ownership, husbandry, use and local environment data, through multiple factor and hierarchical cluster analysis. Household questionnaire data from 241 donkey-owning households in three districts of Ethiopia were used. Three distinct clusters of donkey ownership were identified: ‘Domestic-Pastoral’; ‘Domestic-Agricultural’ and ‘Commercial’. Differences between systems are primarily influenced by donkey purpose, environmental (agro-ecological) factors, and husbandry practices. Constraints associated with donkey ownership varied across clusters: households in the commercial system reported higher incidence of injuries and welfare concerns, in the pastoral system the main constraints were drought and feed shortage, and domestic-agricultural households reported infectious diseases as the main challenge. This new classification of donkey systems provides a framework for analysing donkey health and welfare data, enabling more context-specific needs assessments and facilitating the design of targeted interventions to improve equid health and household livelihoods

Mechanistic insights into the sediment accumulation and fractionation of PAHs : Role of sedimentary organic carbon and an assessment of environmental implications

Increasing anthropogenic activities and carbon aging processes pose a significant global concern to understanding the accumulation mechanisms of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in sediments, especially regarding the overlooked role of nonextractable residues (NERs). Herein, we investigated the accumulation patterns of three PAHs fractions (bioavailable-BPAHs, extractable -EPAHs, and NERs), hydrodynamic conditions, and organic matter sources of sediment across different types lakes. This study reveals a previously overlooked potential relationship among anthropogenic factors, hydrodynamic condition, sedimentary organic carbon (SOC) profiles, and PAH fractions based on the mantel’s test and structural equation model (SEM). A significant feature influencing the occurrence of EPAHs and NERs was attributed to SOC fractions, especially for sedimentary labile (LOC) and recalcitrant organic carbon (ROC) pools. LOC mainly controlled the EPAH distributions, while ROC may further accelerate the sedimentary accumulation of NERs. The quantitative structure activity relationship (QSAR) modelling further suggested that a strong positive relationship between hydrophobic PAH and the proportion of EPAHs was attributed to molecular reactivity and mobility based on high Egap, increased entropy, and van der Waals interactions. However, the formation of NERs was primarily driven by molecular polarity (μ, α) and electrophilic potential (qC⁺). The inclusion of BPAHs into PAH-based risk calculations and subsequent sediment management strategies is recommended, improving our understanding of the environment significance of the three PAHs fractions. Overall, this study provided a mechanistic insight into the fate of PAHs in sediment by carbon cycling processes and molecular-scale interactions

Corpus Analysis of Online Communication

The connectivity of the Internet has created new ways of interacting and facilitated new communicative practices. Online communication is of interest to corpus linguists not only as an ever-expanding domain of language interaction, but also with respect to the particular affordances of networked technologies for corpus construction and accessibility. This entry will offer an overview of how procedures from corpus linguistics, which is characterized by the use of software tools to support the investigation of frequency-based patterns in large-scale datasets, have been applied to map out types of online communication and to document features such as emoji that have become emblematic of such interactions. The steps involved in constructing corpora of online communication are discussed, along with the challenges facing corpus linguists looking to explore emergent forms of online communication

Emotive content and sleep enhance memory for metaphorical language

Memory for emotional information is greater than for non-emotional information, and is enhanced by sleep-related consolidation. Previous studies have focused on emotional arousal and valence of established stimuli, but what is the effect of sleep on newly acquired emotional information? Figurative expressions, which are pervasive in everyday communication, are often rated as higher in emotionality than their literal counterparts, but the effect of emotionality on the learning of metaphors, and the effect of sleep on newly acquired emotionally negative, positive, and neutral language is as yet poorly understood. In this study, participants were asked to memorise conventional (e.g., “sunny disposition”) and novel (e.g., “cloudy disposition”) metaphorical word pairs varying in valence, accompanied by their definitions. After a 12-hour period of sleep or wake, participants were tested on their recognition of word pairs and recall of definitions. We found higher arousal ratings were related to increased recognition and recall performance. Furthermore, sleep increased accurate recognition of all word pairs compared to wake, but also reduced the valence of word pairs. The results indicate better memory for newly acquired emotional stimuli, a benefit of sleep for memory, but also a reduction of emotional arousal as a consequence of sleep consolidation

A Licence to Kill: Necroeconomic Suffocation by Stealth and the Fight for Life

Three decades of austerity in the UK have seen the deterioration of the elemental infrastructures, those that provided a basic level of security for the population. In this article, we analyse the case of Awaab Ishak, who died (age two) when he suffocated from mould in his home in Rochdale, North‐West England. We investigate why and how this child was allowed to die in a rich Western European country with a welfare state, and how this case made visible the necroeconomic policies that have made our most intimate spaces for daily living and breathing dangerous. Exploring the relationship between capital and state, we reveal those who profit from slum housing and examine how premature death from indoor air pollution is symbolically legitimated. We argue that the state's invitation to asset managers to take over social housing has granted property owners and managers a licence to kill

Gender, sexuality and viral safety : A mixed-methods examination of the negotiation of risk and precautions through dating apps during a pandemic

This paper examines the role of dating apps as mediators of intimacy and risk during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing quantitative and qualitative data from a UK based study of heterosexual and LGBQ + people's (lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer plus ‘other’ identified) dating app use, we investigate how users navigated the tensions between their desires for intimate and social connections and the imperatives of viral safety. Existing studies of dating app use tend to be based on samples of mostly heterosexual people, with unidentified or small numbers of LGBQ + people. This undermines a fuller understanding of the potentially diverse ways in which gender and sexuality interact to shape the negotiation of risk. The paper examines study participants' practices in negotiating viral risk in app-based interactions, and positions dating apps as actors within broader sociocultural and public health contexts. We argue that while dating apps have potential to facilitate intimacy and viral safety in future pandemics, their use raises sidelined challenges for health promotion that are linked partially to the interaction of gender and sexuality, but more so to trust