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We use the resonant dipole-dipole interaction between Rydberg atoms and a periodic external microwave field to engineer XXZ spin Hamiltonians with tunable anisotropies. The atoms are placed in one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) arrays of optical tweezers. As illustrations, we apply this engineering to two iconic situations in spin physics: the Heisenberg model in square arrays and spin transport in 1D. We first benchmark the Hamiltonian engineering for two atoms and then demonstrate the freezing of the magnetization on an initially magnetized 2D array. Finally, we explore the dynamics of 1D domain-wall systems with both periodic and open boundary conditions. We systematically compare our data with numerical simulations and assess the residual limitations of the technique as well as routes for improvement. The geometrical versatility of the platform, combined with the flexibility of the simulated Hamiltonians, opens up exciting prospects in the fields of quantum simulation, quantum information processing, and quantum sensing.

What does feminist theory have to offer sociology? Defining feminist theory as work that problematizes the gender binary and the relations of domination that constitute and emerge from it, we explore four key aspects of feminist scholarship. We begin with work that explores gender as a structuring trope. We then turn to how gender is coconstituted with other structures of power and domination. Next, we survey how feminists have theorized the relationship between nature and the social through the body. Finally, we examine feminist epistemological claims. We conclude by demonstrating the inextricability of feminist conceptual work and feminist politics. As we move across these bodies of work, we show how they are linked with one another and suggest some of the ways in which thinking like a feminist would help sociologists better grasp the dynamics of the social worlds we study.

Marker-assisted selection (MAS) plays a crucial role in crop breeding improving the speed and precision of conventional breeding programmes by quickly and reliably identifying and selecting plants with desired traits. However, the efficacy of MAS depends on several prerequisites, with precise phenotyping being a key aspect of any plant breeding programme. Recent advancements in high-throughput remote phenotyping, facilitated by unmanned aerial vehicles coupled to machine learning, offer a non-destructive and efficient alternative to traditional, time-consuming, and labour-intensive methods. Furthermore, MAS relies on knowledge of marker-trait associations, commonly obtained through genome-wide association studies (GWAS), to understand complex traits such as drought tolerance, including yield components and phenology. However, GWAS has limitations that artificial intelligence (AI) has been shown to partially overcome. Additionally, AI and its explainable variants, which ensure transparency and interpretability, are increasingly being used as recognised problem-solving tools throughout the breeding process. Given these rapid technological advancements, this review provides an overview of state-of-the-art methods and processes underlying each MAS, from phenotyping, genotyping and association analyses to the integration of explainable AI along the entire workflow. In this context, we specifically address the challenges and importance of breeding winter wheat for greater drought tolerance with stable yields, as regional droughts during critical developmental stages pose a threat to winter wheat production. Finally, we explore the transition from scientific progress to practical implementation and discuss ways to bridge the gap between cutting-edge developments and breeders, expediting MAS-based winter wheat breeding for drought tolerance.

In this study, we propose a scalable deep learning approach to automated phenotyping using UAV multispectral imagery, exemplified by yellow rust detection in winter wheat. We adopt a high-granularity scoring method (1 to 9 scale) to align with international standards and plant breeders’ needs. Using a lower spatial resolution (60 m flight height at 2.5 cm GSD), we reduce the data volume by a factor of 3.4, making large-scale phenotyping faster and more cost-effective while obtaining results comparable to those of the state-of-the-art. Our model incorporates explainability components to optimise spectral bands and flight schedules, achieving top-three accuracies of 0.87 for validation and 0.67 and 0.70 on two separate test sets. We demonstrate that a minimal set of bands (EVI, Red, and GNDVI) can achieve results comparable to more complex setups, highlighting the potential for cost-effective solutions. Additionally, we show that high performance can be maintained with fewer time steps, reducing operational complexity. Our interpretable model components improve performance through regularisation and provide actionable insights for agronomists and plant breeders. This scalable and explainable approach offers an efficient solution for yellow rust phenotyping and can be adapted for other phenotypes and species, with future work focusing on optimising the balance between spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions.

The primary neural circuit affected in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) patients is the corticospinal motor circuit, originating in upper motor neurons (UMNs) in the cerebral motor cortex which descend to synapse with the lower motor neurons (LMNs) in the spinal cord to ultimately innervate the skeletal muscle. Perturbation of these neural circuits and consequent loss of both UMNs and LMNs, leading to muscle wastage and impaired movement, is the key pathophysiology observed. Despite decades of research, we are still lacking in ALS disease-modifying treatments. In this review, we document the current research from patient studies, rodent models, and human stem cell models in understanding the mechanisms of corticomotor circuit dysfunction and its implication in ALS. We summarize the current knowledge about cortical UMN dysfunction and degeneration, altered excitability in LMNs, neuromuscular junction degeneration, and the non-cell autonomous role of glial cells in motor circuit dysfunction in relation to ALS. We further highlight the advances in human stem cell technology to model the complex neural circuitry and how these can aid in future studies to better understand the mechanisms of neural circuit dysfunction underpinning ALS.

Caenorhabditis (C.) elegans has become a popular toxicological and biological test organism in the last two decades. Furthermore, the role of C. elegans as an alternative for replacing or reducing animal experiments is continuously discussed and investigated. In the current study, we investigated whether C. elegans survival assays can help in determining differences in the virulence of Salmonella enterica strains and to what extent C. elegans assays could replace animal experiments for this purpose. We focused on three currently discussed examples where we compared the longevity of C. elegans when fed (i) with S. enterica serovar Enteritidis vaccination or wild-type strains, (ii) with lipopolysaccharide (LPS) deficient rough or LPS forming smooth S. enterica serovar Enteritidis, and (iii) with an S. enterica subsp. diarizonae strain in the presence or absence of the typical pSASd plasmid encoding a bundle of putative virulence factors. We found that the C. elegans survival assay could indicate differences in the longevity of C. elegans when fed with the compared strain pairs to a certain extent. Putatively higher virulent S. enterica strains reduced the lifespan of C. elegans to a greater extent than putatively less virulent strains. The C. elegans survival assay is an effective and relatively easy method for classifying the virulence of different bacterial isolates in vivo, but it has some limitations. The assay cannot replace animal experiments designed to determine differences in the virulence of Salmonella enterica strains. Instead, we recommend using the described method for pre-screening bacterial strains of interest to select the most promising candidates for further animal experiments. The C. elegans assay possesses the potential to reduce the number of animal experiments. Further development of the C. elegans assay in conjunction with omics technologies, such as transcriptomics, could refine results relating to the estimation of the virulent potential of test organisms.

Since the "Black Lives Matter" reckoning of 2020, professional health organizations have made public statements and apologized for not recognizing the role of racism in the creation of health disparities. For the American Nurses Association, this has taken the form of the National Commission to Address Racism in Nursing. One result of that work has been the Report on the History of Racism in Nursing, which details the constant maligning of the competence of Black nurses and their systematic exclusion from institutions within the profession. In this article, we want to take these ideas further and argue that the issue for nursing is not so much a generic kind of racism that a professional reorganization can address, but rather a deep and abiding "anti-blackness" that is intrinsic to the heart and soul of medical and health knowledge itself. Anti-blackness as an idea comes from a collection of theoretical interventions developed by Black philosophers, literary theorists, sociologists, and historians who continue to grapple with the question posed by W.E.B. DuBois: "How does it feel to be a problem?" Anti-blackness is the "relegation of Black people to inhumanity and non-being" and "is a global phenomenon that takes on distinct forms of expression in each sociocultural context." Given the call to understand the role of historical, social, political, environmental, and economic factors via the social determinants of health, a more expansive approach is needed to articulate the Black lived experience. Anti-blackness is one tool available to nurses interested in a deeper level of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives Motor neuron disease (MND) is an incurable progressive neurodegenerative disease with limited treatment options. There is a pressing need for innovation in identifying therapies to take to clinical trial. Here, we detail a systematic and structured evidence-based approach to inform consensus decision making to select the first two drugs for evaluation in Motor Neuron Disease-Systematic Multi-arm Adaptive Randomised Trial (MND-SMART: NCT04302870), an adaptive platform trial. We aim to identify and prioritise candidate drugs which have the best available evidence for efficacy, acceptable safety profiles and are feasible for evaluation within the trial protocol.Methods We conducted a two-stage systematic review to identify potential neuroprotective interventions. First, we reviewed clinical studies in MND, Alzheimer’s disease, Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis, identifying drugs described in at least one MND publication or publications in two or more other diseases. We scored and ranked drugs using a metric evaluating safety, efficacy, study size and study quality. In stage two, we reviewed efficacy of drugs in MND animal models, multicellular eukaryotic models and human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) studies. An expert panel reviewed candidate drugs over two shortlisting rounds and a final selection round, considering the systematic review findings, late breaking evidence, mechanistic plausibility, safety, tolerability and feasibility of evaluation in MND-SMART.Results From the clinical review, we identified 595 interventions. 66 drugs met our drug/disease logic. Of these, 22 drugs with supportive clinical and preclinical evidence were shortlisted at round 1. Seven drugs proceeded to round 2. The panel reached a consensus to evaluate memantine and trazodone as the first two arms of MND-SMART.Discussion For future drug selection, we will incorporate automation tools, text-mining and machine learning techniques to the systematic reviews and consider data generated from other domains, including high-throughput phenotypic screening of human iPSCs.

The characterization of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) is necessary to assess their pathogenic potential, but isolation of the strain from complex matrices such as milk remains challenging. In previous work, we have shown the potential of long-read metagenomics to characterize eae-positive STEC from artificially contaminated raw milk without isolating the strain. The presence of multiple E. coli strains in the sample was shown to potentially hinder the correct characterization of the STEC strain. Here, we aimed at determining the STEC:commensal ratio that would prevent the characterization of the STEC. We artificially contaminated pasteurized milk with different ratios of an eae-positive STEC and a commensal E. coli and applied the method previously developed. Results showed that the STEC strain growth was better than the commensal E. coli after enrichment in acriflavine-supplemented BPW. The STEC was successfully characterized in all samples with at least 10 times more STEC post-enrichment compared to the commensal E. coli. However, the presence of equivalent proportions of STEC and commensal E. coli prevented the full characterization of the STEC strain. This study confirms the potential of long-read metagenomics for STEC characterization in an isolation-free manner while refining its limit regarding the presence of background E. coli strains.

Neoliberalism is produced on and through the terrain of gendered meanings. Gender naturalizes capitalist relations and addresses and constitutes subjects across economic arenas. As the unmarked side of the pair, masculinity is too often overlooked in these processes, thus obscuring both the masculine character of elite performances and the growing relegation of non-elite men to the margins of the economy. Ethnographic immersion in two pivotal sites of neoliberal emergence at the nexus of the Mexican and global economies—one in production and one in finance—provides a window onto the enactment of the post-Fordist global economy and into the role of gendered subjectifying processes in propelling it forward. This analysis reveals the role of gender in the global dispersal of production and the incitement and legitimation of transnational finance, thus throwing empirical light on the routine functioning of actually existing capitalism.

This study explores the differences in the profile of relationships between sensory processing and attention abilities among children with sensory processing disorder (SPD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and typically developing (TD) children. The Test of Everyday Attention for Children (TEA-Ch), a performance-based measure of attention, was administered to 69 children (TD: n = 24; SPD: n = 21; ASD: n = 24), ages 6–10 years. All participants’ parents completed the Short Sensory Profile (SSP), a standardized parent-report measure of sensory-related behaviors. Discriminant analyses using the TEA-Ch and the SSP domains revealed two classification functions; the first revealed that both clinical groups significantly differed from the TD group with greater sensory processing challenges in the categories of auditory filtering, under-responsive/seeks sensation, low energy/weak, and taste/smell sensitivity subscales of the SSP. The second function discriminated between the two clinical groups, indicating that children with ASD had significantly greater control and sustained attention deficits and less sensory issues than did children with SPD. Together, the two functions correctly classified 76.8% of the participants as to their group membership. The different profiles of sensory processing and attention abilities in children with SPD and ASD may provide guidance in identifying appropriate individualized therapeutic strategies for these children.

Marker-assisted selection (MAS) plays a crucial role in crop breeding improving the speed and precision of conventional breeding programmes by quickly and reliably identifying and selecting plants with desired traits. However, the efficacy of MAS depends on several prerequisites, with precise phenotyping being a key aspect of any plant breeding programme. Recent advancements in highthroughput remote phenotyping, facilitated by unmanned aerial vehicles coupled to machine learning, offer a non-destructive and efficient alternative to traditional, time-consuming, and labour-intensive methods. Furthermore, MAS relies on knowledge of marker-trait associations, commonly obtained through genome-wide association studies (GWAS), to understand complex traits such as drought tolerance, including yield components and phenology. However, GWAS has limitations that artificial intelligence (AI) has been shown to partially overcome. Additionally, AI and its explainable variants, which ensure transparency and interpretability, are increasingly being used as recognised problem-solving tools throughout the breeding process. Given these rapid technological advancements, this review provides an overview of state-of-theart methods and processes underlying each MAS, from phenotyping, genotyping and association analyses to the integration of explainable AI along the entire workflow. In this context, we specifically address the challenges and importance of breeding winter wheat for greater drought tolerance with stable yields, as regional droughts during critical developmental stages pose a threat to winter wheat production. Finally, we explore the transition from scientific progress to practical implementation and discuss ways to bridge the gap between cuttingedge developments and breeders, expediting MAS-based winter wheat breeding for drought tolerance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global restructuring is a gendered process. In transnational production, the creation and allocation of labor power is organized around and in terms of tropes of gendered personhood, and this has consequences for the way production works in general, above and beyond its implications for workers themselves. The paper explores this process through narrating the evolution of a local labor market in Mexico's export-processing (maquila) industry. In so doing, the account reveals globalization to be less linear, obdurate and inevitable than many theories suggest. In this context, managers gendered commitments, desires and understandings prove to be literally counterproductive, undermining industry-wide shop-floor control.

Scholars frequently recount the ups and downs, the purportedly embarrassing – although always heroically turned to account – mishaps of research. However, acknowledging that one has rethought an analysis in the absence of new data makes explicit that social science is an interpretive project, and as such is rarely discussed in print. In this article I break that taboo, analyzing how I began to doubt my claim that a global shop floor was organized around an ungendered shop-floor subject. I then detail the more contextually sensitive reading of my fieldnotes that allowed me to grasp the fundamental masculinization of the shop floor in question. In the process, I theorize the aspects of gendered structure that enabled the error at the outset. Thus, the discussion reconstructs the life history of an argument – tracing the shifting development of analysis in a particular ethnographic case. In so doing, it follows epistemic problems back to their ontological roots, looking at how the tricky, obdurate situatedness of meanings – gendered and ungendered alike – requires an ongoing analysis of context in interpreting even our most minute and focused observations.

Standing for all instances of problematic workplace sexuality, the notion of ‘sexual harassment’ illuminates but also obscures the role of desire in work relations. It spotlights isolated individual interactions at the expense of structural processes and stresses choice and blame rather than the way in which a given workplace evokes particular sexual subjectivities in the service of production. An ethnography of shopfloor relations in a Mexican export-processing plant shows how labor control operates through the interpellation of both workers and supervisors as sexual subjects. In this plant, panoptic architecture evokes and focuses the male gaze in the service of ‘quality’ and ‘efficiency’, and desire emerges as a force of production. Male supervisors are located as voyeurs and young female workers as sexual objects to be consumed. Worker efficiency and desirability are conflated and workers become subject to management for the affirmation of both. In such a setting, framing shopfloor sexuality as aberrant distracts from its primary, and equally problematic, function as a shopfloor discipline. © 2000, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.

Standing for all instances of problematic workplace sexuality, the notion of ‘sexual harassment’ illuminates but also obscures the role of desire in work relations. It spotlights isolated individual interactions at the expense of structural processes and stresses choice and blame rather than the way in which a given workplace evokes particular sexual subjectivities in the service of production. An ethnography of shopfloor relations in a Mexican export-processing plant shows how labor control operates through the interpellation of both workers and supervisors as sexual subjects. In this plant, panoptic architecture evokes and focuses the male gaze in the service of ‘quality’ and ‘efficiency’, and desire emerges as a force of production. Male supervisors are located as voyeurs and young female workers as sexual objects to be consumed. Worker efficiency and desirability are conflated and workers become subject to management for the affirmation of both. In such a setting, framing shopfloor sexuality as aberrant distracts from its primary, and equally problematic, function as a shopfloor discipline. © 2000, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.