Margaret Marshall Saunders's best-selling novel Beautiful Joe (1893) has long been indexed as anthropomorphic children's literature. This article examines the novel to illuminate the connection between nineteenth-century literature and animal-focused research, including studies of the science of the mind. My analysis seeks to coalesce what I see as neighboring discourses, both historical and contemporary, in literature and science about what it means to be a thinking, feeling “self.” In doing so, I reveal how Saunders's novel maps out the stakes of this impasse as consequential to literary criticism and the wider culture through its subject matter's entanglement with questions of consciousness, anthropomorphism, and representation.

Turbofan engines are having a growing role in modern aircraft maintenance. Due to this increase, estimation of remaining useful life (RUL) of these engines is an important area of study in the field of reliability and maintenance optimisation. In this work, we propose a hybrid approach that combines deep learning models with similarity-based methods for accurate RUL estimation. For a better comparison, we evaluate four architectures: dropout long short-term memory (LSTM), bidirectional LSTM, convolutional neural network 1D (CNN 1D), and multi-layer LSTM. The FD002 subset of NASA’s Commercial Modular Aero-Propulsion System Simulation dataset is used in the case study. Root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE) were used for performance metrics. The main output of the study suggests that the dropout LSTM model achieves the best prediction accuracy with an RMSE score of 26.547 and a MAE score of 18.749. It is worth noting that these are achieved despite requiring higher computational resources compared to multi-layer LSTM. Furthermore, all models had difficulties with smaller test trajectory lengths such as 50–100 due to training data imbalance. Overall, the findings highlight the promise of hybrid deep learning and similarity-based approaches for RUL prediction. However, potential advancements such as hyperparameter optimisation and data augmentation still hold potential for further improvements.

Despite their overlapping fin de siècle New Woman communities in London and their correspondence, few scholars have compared the literary works of South African writer Olive Schreiner and Jewish author Amy Levy directly. Reading allegories from Schreiner's first collection, Dreams (1890), in relation to two of Levy's early verse works, “Xantippe” (1881) and Medea (1884), I argue that they both imagine new futures for queer community as an alternative to the oppressive status quo of imperialist England. This paper suggests that Schreiner and Levy, feminist writers with fraught relationships to Englishness, can best be understood as members of a rich community of late Victorian visionaries. When they turn their attention to the forms of allegory and dramatic monologue, Schreiner and Levy are able to explore radical possibilities for gender and community that did not exist in their real lives or their realist fiction. Schreiner and Levy share a deep skepticism about the benefits of marriage, family, and other conventional sources of community, and both offer queer visions of suspended present states or undetermined futures as alternatives.

Early researchers of Yezidis, a small religious minority of the Middle East, often noted with dismay that Yezidis did not say or know prayers. This observation is partially supported by modern-day research, as knowledge of orally transmitted religious texts and their performance is mostly limited to people recognized as religious experts. However, there exists a special sub-genre of prayers which are known and recited by “ordinary” Yezidis. Although they are referred to as “prayers” (dua), these texts do not constitute part of formal religious performances during ceremonial occasions. They could better be described as verbal charms or incantations aimed at healing sickness or warding off evil. This article gives a translation of four previously unrecorded such “prayers”, describes their role in oral tradition, and finally shows how they are now being transformed from performed (and practical) oral religion to written heritage by the younger generation.

A purely elastic linear instability was recently reported for viscoelastic plane Poiseuille flow in the limit of ultra-dilute (solvent to solution viscosity ratio $\beta \gt 0.99$), highly elastic (Weissenberg number $W \sim 1000$) polymer solutions, within the framework of the Oldroyd-B model (Khalid et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., vol. 127, 2021, pp. 134–502). This is the first instance of a purely elastic instability in a strictly rectilinear shearing flow, with the phase speed of the unstable ‘centre mode’ being close to the base-state maximum velocity at the channel centreline. Subsequently, Buza, Page and Kerswell (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 940, 2022, A11) have shown, using the FENE-P model, that the centre-mode instability persists down to moderate elasticities ($W \sim O (100)$), the reduction in threshold evidently due to the finite extensibility of the polymer molecules. In this work, we augment this latter finding and provide a comprehensive account of the effect of finite extensibility on the centre-mode instability in viscoelastic channel flow, using the FENE-P and FENE-CR models, in both the absence and presence of fluid inertia. In both these models, finite extensibility causes a decrease in the polymer relaxation time at high shear rates, and the resulting weakening of elastic stresses would seem to indicate a stabilising effect. The latter trend has been demonstrated by earlier analyses of hoop-stress-driven instabilities in curvilinear flows, and is indeed borne out for the FENE-CR case, where finite extensibility has a largely stabilising influence on the centre-mode instability. In stark contrast, for the FENE-P model, finite extensibility plays a dual role – a stabilising one at lower values of the elasticity number $E$, but, surprisingly, a destabilising one at higher $E$ values. Further, the centre-mode instability is predicted over a significantly larger domain of the $Re$–$E$–$\beta$ parameter space, compared to the Oldroyd-B model, making it more amenable to experimental observations.

The study examines supersonic square jets in a twin nozzle configuration with the aim of identifying and characterising emergent instability modes during overexpanded operation. Unlike screeching rectangular jets that undergo strong fluctuations normal to the wider jet dimension, the equilateral nature of the exit geometry in square nozzles leads to multiple instability states dictated by shock–turbulence interactions and nozzle operating conditions. Furthermore, strong coupling modes between the jets were identified that led to either phase locked or out of phase interactions of the inner shear layers. Results from experimental studies were examined using spatial and temporal decomposition techniques based on spectral methods to identify the resultants from triadic shock–turbulence interactions. The primary instability mode across both operating conditions were driven by optimal interactions while the harmonics were found to be associated with the suboptimal shock–turbulence interactions.

In plasticulture production, smart spray technology can detect weeds and apply herbicides only where needed in the area between raised, plastic-covered beds (row middle). This technology has the potential to reduce herbicide use and lower input costs. A prototype smart spray system was developed at the Gulf Coast Research and Education Center (GCREC) in Wimauma, FL, that utilizes YOLO-V3 convolutional neural networks to differentiate broadleaf, grass, and nutsedge weeds in row middles. Two sets of field experiments were conducted to determine the efficacy of smart spray technology using a combination of preemergence (PRE) and postemergence (POST) herbicides. All treatments reduced weed density, and targeted applications were as effective as banded treatments. Overall, including a PRE herbicide tended to lower weed density compared to POST applications alone, regardless of application technique. Two banded PRE herbicide applications and two targeted POST applications reduced herbicide use by 52% and 13% compared to banded PRE and POST applications in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively. The reduction from two to one PRE-herbicide applications did not result in an overall herbicide use or cost reduction in Experiment 1, as the decrease in PRE herbicides resulted in increased POST-herbicide usage. In the absence of a banded PRE application, targeted compared to banded POST applications, herbicide usage was reduced by 40 to 67% in Experiment 1 and 79 to 84% in Experiment 2. Smart spray technology is an effective weed management tool for row middles in plasticulture production systems with or without PRE-herbicide applications.

While most higher taxa in the Hemiuroidea exhibit remarkable diversity and thrive worldwide in marine ecosystems, a few groups have successfully radiated into freshwater environments. Among them, species of Thometrema are well known from freshwater and brackish fishes in the New World. In this study, specimens of Thometrema from a single specimen of the endangered pimelodid catfish Steindachneridion scriptum in the Upper Paraná River basin, State of São Paulo, Brazil, were subjected to morphological, ultrastructural (first scanning electron microscopy data for the genus) and molecular analyses. Newly obtained sequences of the partial large subunit nuclear ribosomal RNA (28S rDNA) and partial mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI mtDNA) provided strong evidence supporting the identification of the specimens as T. patagonicum, a trematode previously known only from endemic percichthyid fishes (Percichthyidae) in the Argentinian Patagonia. This unexpected finding, along with critical morphological evaluation of new and deposited material, led us to propose T. overstreeti and T. bonariense as junior synonyms of T. patagonicum. Moreover, we reassessed certain morphological features, revealed new potential distinguishing characters (papillae) and raised doubts about the taxonomic value of commonly used features for species differentiation (e.g., vitellarium masses). To overcome taxonomic problems in Thometrema due to the paucity of morphological features to clearly set species boundaries, new descriptions could leverage integrative approaches, as employed here, to establish robust species hypotheses and ultimately unravel the actual species composition in the Americas.

Stability of the ‘rigid’ ($m = 1$) ballooning mode in a mirror axisymmetric trap is studied for the case of oblique neutral beam injection (NBI), which creates an anisotropic population of fast sloshing ions. Since small-scale modes with azimuthal numbers $m>1$ in long thin (paraxial) mirror traps are easily stabilized by finite-Larmor-radius (FLR) effects, suppression of the rigid ballooning and flute modes would mean stabilization of all magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) modes, with the exception of the mirror and firehose disturbances, which are intensively studied in geophysics, but have not yet been identified in mirror traps. Large-scale ballooning mode can, in principle, be suppressed either by the lateral perfectly conducting wall, or by the end MHD anchors such as the cusp, by biased limiters or by a combination of these two methods. The effects of the wall shape, vacuum gap width between the plasma column and the lateral wall, angle of oblique NBI, radial profile of the plasma pressure and axial profile of the vacuum magnetic field are studied. It is confirmed that the lateral conducting wall still creates the upper stability zone, where the ratio $\beta$ of the plasma pressure to the pressure of vacuum magnetic field exceeds the second critical value $\beta_{\text{cr2}}$, $\beta >\beta _{\text {cr2}}$. However, in many cases the upper zone is clamped from above by mirror instability. When the lateral wall is combined with end MHD anchors, a lower stability zone $\beta <\beta _{\text {cr}1}$ appears, where $\beta$ is below the first critical value $\beta_{\text{cr1}}$. These two zones can overlap in the case of a sufficiently smooth radial pressure profile, and/or a sufficiently low mirror ratio and/or a sufficiently narrow vacuum gap between the plasma column and the lateral wall. However, even in this case, the range of permissible values of beta is limited from above by the threshold of mirror instability $\beta_{\text{mm}}$, so that $\beta <\beta _{\text {mm}}<1$, in contrast to the case of transversal NBI, when neutral beams are injected perpendicularly to the magnetic field.

The field of global health law has evolved over the past decade to describe new legal and policy instruments that apply to a changing set of public health threats, non-state actors, and regulatory norms that structure the global response to public health challenges. This special issue—bringing together the O’Neill Institute for National & Global Health Law and the Global Health Law Consortium—examines the expansive evolution of the field of global health law and its continuing development to face new health threats.

We consider the critical temperature for superconductivity, defined via the linear BCS equation. We prove that at weak coupling the critical temperature for a sample confined to a quadrant in two dimensions is strictly larger than the one for a half-space, which in turn is strictly larger than the one for $\mathbb {R}^2$. Furthermore, we prove that the relative difference of the critical temperatures vanishes in the weak coupling limit.

This study aimed to assess the perception of disaster risk and the level of earthquake awareness among students enrolled in the Department of Nursing at Artvin Çoruh University, Faculty of Health Sciences. The study sample comprised 274 students enrolled in the Department of Nursing at Artvin Çoruh University, Faculty of Health Sciences. The data were gathered utilizing the Sociodemographic Characteristics Form, Disaster Risk Perception Scale, and Sustainable Earthquake Awareness Scale. The data was obtained using the SPSS 24.0 program and analyzed using t tests, One-way ANOVA, and Pearson correlation analyses. The study’s findings indicate that most students have yet to undergo disaster training, yet most are interested in such training. Furthermore, it was ascertained that most students had not encountered any calamity. However, they wanted to participate actively and voluntarily in disaster scenarios. A statistically significant difference was observed between the students’ class and the average total scores of disaster risk perception scale and sustainable earthquake awareness scale. Courses on disaster management should be added to nursing education curricula. In order to provide disaster risk perception and sustainable earthquake awareness to nursing students, they need to take part in different activities in the field of disaster management.