Search Results (244)

This article examines memory and monuments in the science fiction Star Trek franchise as a lens for understanding commemoration technologies and how futuristic visions of memorials anticipated real ones, especially during times of conflict. To understand the cultural reciprocity of sci-fi television and contemporary commemoration of war and trauma, we investigate the interactive website produced by the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation, Kan, titled Kan 7.10.360, which commemorates the victims of the 7 October 2023 Hamas massacre of civilians, soldiers, and policemen in Israel’s Gaza Envelope region. The 7.10.360 website employs advanced technologies to create what we identify as a digital “counter-monument.” By applying the concept of metamemorial science fiction relating to the Shoah, investigating its victims’ commemoration and examining the globital turn in memory work, we demonstrate that the Kan project realizes digital mnemonic practices engaged in Star Trek. We argue that the renowned series performs and anticipates three aspects of globital memory work and novel digital commemoration, also prevalent in the Kan 7.10.360 website: the personalization of memory using images; televisual testimony or documentation that mediates personal experience; and the display of objects that symbolize quotidian aspects of the victims’ lives. Full article

Various maximum power point tracking (MPPT) techniques have been proposed to optimize the efficiency of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems. These techniques differ in several aspects such as design simplicity, convergence speed, implementation types (analog or digital), decision optimal point accuracy, effectiveness range, hardware costs, and algorithmic modes. Choosing the most suitable MPPT controller is crucial in PV system design, as it directly impacts the overall cost of PV solar modules. This paper presents a comprehensive exploration of 64 MPPT techniques for PV solar systems, covering optimization, traditional, intelligent, and hybrid methodologies. A comparative analysis of these techniques, considering cost, tracking speed, and system stability, indicates that hybrid approaches exhibit higher efficiency albeit with increased complexity and cost. Amidst the existing PV system review literature, this paper serves as an updated comprehensive reference for researchers involved in MPPT PV solar system design. Full article

Recent global conflicts have amplified long-standing patterns of religion-related bias and discrimination in the U.S. The continuing war on Gaza has led to bias, hostility, and violence against both Muslims and Jews in the U.S. We present an overview of results from a new 1308-person national survey data collection gathered through NORC’s AmeriSpeak Panel with oversamples of Jews and Muslims. Our findings reveal important reversals, asymmetries, polarities, and solidarities in perceptions and experiences of bias among Jews and Muslims and experiences of and responses to the war among religious groups. Jews were the most likely group to report experiences of religious bias and hostility in the U.S. and the most likely to register fear about future bias, followed by Muslims, a reversal of patterns from earlier research. Jews were the most likely religious group to report experiencing an increase in religious bias or hostility after October 7, 2023. Americans reported warm feelings towards Jews, Muslims, Israelis, and Palestinians but cool feelings towards the Israeli government and Hamas, suggesting that across most religious groups, Americans demonstrate more sympathy towards religious identities when compared to national identities and political entities. Full article

This article interrogates “enforced silence” in higher education as an active, racialised technology of governance that manages speech, polices dissent, and narrows the horizons of legitimate knowledge. Bringing scholarship on institutional racism, decoloniality, and academic freedom into dialogue with analyses of scholasticide, the systematic destruction of education and intellectual life in Palestine, the paper argues that neutrality and professionalism function as administrative veneers that protect institutional reputation while disciplining racialised scholars and erasing Palestinian epistemologies. Palestine operates here as both an acute site of violence and a diagnostic mirror that illuminates a transnational repertoire of epistemic governance: censorship, securitisation, campus injunctions, and weaponised definitions that chill debate and criminalise solidarity. The article extends the concept of scholasticide beyond material destruction to include ideological and institutional assaults on dissent and critical thought, demonstrating how marketised, securitised universities reproduce racial regimes while disavowing complicity. Against this architecture, the paper advances a praxis-oriented framework drawing on critical pedagogy and the Palestinian ethic of Sumud to envision universities as sites of freedom rather than corporate neutrality. It sets out concrete strategies for scholars and institutions, including protections for dissent, refusal of censorious definitions, divestment from complicit partnerships, cross-border classrooms, and recognition of emotional–political labour, to convert witness into transformative action. The article concludes by insisting that academic responsibility is irreducibly collective: education must commit to liberation, not serve domination. Full article

In war and explosion scenarios, buildings often suffer varying degrees of damage characterized by complex, irregular, and fragmented spatial patterns, posing significant challenges for remote sensing–based change detection. Additionally, the scarcity of high-quality datasets limits the development and generalization of deep learning approaches. To overcome these issues, we propose CMSNet, an end-to-end framework that integrates the structural priors of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) with the efficient temporal modeling and fine-grained representation capabilities of CNN–Mamba. Specifically, CMSNet adopts CNN–Mamba as the backbone to extract multi-scale semantic features from bi-temporal images, while SAM-derived visual priors guide the network to focus on building boundaries and structural variations. A Pre-trained Visual Prior-Guided Feature Fusion Module (PVPF-FM) is introduced to align and fuse these priors with change features, enhancing robustness against local damage, non-rigid deformations, and complex background interference. Furthermore, we construct a new RWSBD (Real-world War Scene Building Damage) dataset based on Gaza war scenes, comprising 42,732 annotated building damage instances across diverse scales, offering a strong benchmark for real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments on RWSBD and three public datasets (CWBD, WHU-CD, and LEVIR-CD+) demonstrate that CMSNet consistently outperforms eight state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative metrics (F1, IoU, Precision, Recall) and qualitative evaluations, especially in fine-grained boundary preservation, small-scale change detection, and complex scene adaptability. Overall, this work introduces a novel detection framework that combines foundation model priors with efficient change modeling, along with a new large-scale war damage dataset, contributing valuable advances to both research and practical applications in remote sensing change detection. Additionally, the strong generalization ability and efficient architecture of CMSNet highlight its potential for scalable deployment and practical use in large-area post-disaster assessment. Full article

This research aimed to establish reference intervals and evaluate the influence of age in 56 Nguni cattle raised in Mozambique. Blood samples containing EDTA as anticoagulant were collected. The erythrogram and total leukocyte count were analyzed using the BC-2800 Vet Mindray^® automatic counter. The differential counting of leukocytes was performed in blood smears stained using Giemsa and Mcgruwald’s stain. Statistical analysis was performed using the statistical analysis system (SAS). Analysis of variance was performed using the GLM procedure, and mean contrasts were analyzed using Duncan’s parametric test at 5% significance, with the Shapiro–Wilk and Levene tests for date normalities. The reference intervals for the erythrogram are as follows: red blood cells: 6.78 to 7.40 × 10¹²/L; hemoglobin: 10.77 to 11.36 g/dL; hematocrit: 28.02 to 29.56%; mean corpuscular volume (MCV): 39.91 to 43.02 fL; mean corpuscular hemoglobin (MCH): 15.27 to 16.44 pg; mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentration (MCHC): between 37.86 and 39.10 g/dL; and red blood cell distribution width (RDW): between 16.98 and 19.40%. For leukograms, the following references values were obtained: total leukocytes: between 14,106 and 16,233 × 10⁶/L; basophils: between 32 and 165 × 10⁶/L; eosinophils: between 823 and 1262 × 10⁶/L; band neutrophils: between 25 and 87 × 10⁶/L; segmented neutrophils: between 2510 and 3249 × 10⁶/L; total neutrophils: between 2565 and 3306 × 10⁶/L; lymphocytes: between 9471 and 11,474 × 10⁶/L; and monocytes: between 154 and 296 × 10⁶/L. Age influenced MCV, MCH, leukocytes, eosinophils, and lymphocytes. Leukogram reference intervals of other countries could not be used for the breed of Mozambique without making gross errors. Full article

This article explores the evolving roles of Sunnī and Shīʿī political actors in the current Gaza crisis, with a focus on how Iran has come to occupy the rhetorical and symbolic space once dominated by Sunnī Arab leadership. Historically, since the establishment of Israel in 1948, Sunnī regimes positioned themselves as the primary defenders of the Palestinian cause. However, recent shifts—originating in the late 1970s and evolving into the current wave of normalization agreements between Arab states and Israel—have weakened this leadership role. In this vacuum, Iran has articulated a theological-political narrative grounded in Shīʿī doctrines of resistance, martyrdom, and moral duty toward the oppressed, reframed through Khomeinist ideology to legitimize its regional geopolitical ambitions. Drawing on political theology as a theoretical framework, this article analyzes how sacred history shapes Iran’s foreign policy discourse and legitimizes its regional role. This article argues that the current Gaza crisis illustrates a significant transformation in the religious-political landscape of the Muslim world, as Iran leverages its Shīʿī identity to assert moral and political leadership over a cause once firmly associated with Sunnī solidarity. This study concludes that Shīʿism, led by Iran, has shown unwavering support for the Palestinian cause through its backing of Hamas in its latest conflict, despite Iran’s simultaneous pursuit of wider regional drives and ideological goals. Still, Iran’s foreign policies cannot be separated from the historical incidents that gave rise to the Shīʿī tradition of protest and resistance, which remain integral to how Iran’s Shīʿism positions itself in the present conflict. Full article

Human rights frameworks have historically emphasised physical integrity, yet psychological integrity, the right to mental stability, identity, and emotional safety all remain neglected in health policy and law. This narrative review and commentary argues that psychological integrity is inseparable from ecological integrity, and that contemporary mental health crises are rooted in ruptured human–nature attachments. Drawing on Mother Nature Attachment Theory (MNAT) and supported by emerging empirical evidence, this review traces a trajectory from pre-attachment, through rupture via colonisation, displacement, and ecological collapse, to reconnection through cultural and ecological repair. Gaza exemplifies a contemporary site of deliberate ecological–psychological rupture, where environmental destruction compounds trauma and erodes cultural continuity. In contrast, Indigenous frameworks in Australasia, such as Te Whare Tapa Whā, provide culturally grounded models of reconnection that demonstrate how ecological repair and psychological restoration can proceed together. These contrasting cases illustrate MNAT’s trajectory and emphasise that safeguarding psychological integrity requires embedding ecological security into public health systems. The review concludes that planetary mental health depends on recognising healing of mind and Earth as an indivisible task. Healing mind and Earth must be understood as a single, urgent task within planetary public mental health. Full article

Israel’s military response in Gaza to Hamas’s terrorist attack and hostage taking of 7 October 2023 has led to fears of growing antisemitism. Indications of heightened antisemitism include massive spikes in antisemitic incidents and hate crimes around the world and the US, demonstrations and campus unrest, and antisemitic memes on the internet and social media platforms. Questions remain, however, whether public opinion has become increasingly hostile to Jews. The ADL Global 100 reports nearly a doubling in antisemitic sentiment from 2014 to 2024. This paper explores trends in antisemitism using country-level ADL Global 100 data. Results show some countries exhibiting large increases in antisemitism, but not all. For the 2023–2024 comparisons, European nations display relatively stable antisemitic distributions, but Russia shows a large increase. The study also uses American National Election study (ANES) data, both pooled from 1964–2024 and the 2020–2024 panel. The ANES data show a slight drop in warmth to Jews using the feeling thermometer. Demographics do not account for the slight drop, but analysis of the panel data suggests that attitudes toward Israel may account for the decline in warmth. Full article

Excessive release of ammonium (NH₄⁺) into aquatic ecosystems can promote eutrophication. In this study, the natural adsorbents, coal (C) prepared from Hawthorn (Acacia caven) and coal fly ash obtained from C, were used to remove NH₄⁺ from aqueous systems through batch adsorption–desorption studies. Both adsorbents were physically and chemically characterized, while Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy and zeta potential were used to understand the surface functional groups and surface charge characteristics. CFA showed a higher pH, BET specific surface area, electrical conductivity and higher % values for CaO and MgO than C. Kinetic studies of NH₄⁺ adsorption at pH = 4.5 for both materials fitted the pseudo-second-order model giving the r² of 0.970–0.983 and the χ² of 0.008–0.005 and at pH = 6.5 only for C with the r² of 0.986 and the χ² of 0.013. Meanwhile, the adsorption isotherm data at pH = 4.5 for both materials and 6.5 for CFA complied with the Freundlich model (r² > 0.965 and χ² < 0.012), suggesting that NH₄⁺ adsorption onto both adsorbents at those pH values occurred through the formation of a multilayer adsorption on heterogeneous surfaces. This indicates that the dominant adsorption of both adsorbents was physisorption with no site-specific interaction. Based on these results, CFA is proposed as a promising and economical material for the removal of NH₄⁺ from aqueous systems. Full article

A necessary condition for the success of the 7 October 2023 Hamas deadly incursion into Israel was the absence of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from that region. The IDF was involved in helping the settlers in their conflicts with Palestinians on the West Bank, many miles from the Gaza border. Absent the settlers, it is likely that either the Hamas attack might not have occurred or would have been blunted at the outset, yielding a much more measured Israeli response. Hence it is imperative that we understand the origins of the settler movement. It is to be found in Biblical injunctions that were to be amplified considerably by the outcomes of the extraordinarily successful Six-Day war of 1967 and its sequel the Yom Kippur war of 1973. In the third chapter of the Book of Genesis, that is, of the entire Hebrew Bible, God commands Abraham to leave his current domicile and travel to Canaan where a great nation would be formed. Effectively, this is the religious foundation of the connection between the people of Israel and the land of Israel, then called Canaan. The contrast between the outcomes of 1967 and 1973 was striking. Instead of a lopsided victory in the earlier war, the human losses in 1973 were surprising, even terrifying. This intense ephemeral gain combined with a world view defense engendered by mortality salience established the basis for later religious Zionist extremism. The vastly increased number of casualties in 1973 set the stage for the victory of Likud, much more amenable to West Bank settlements than the ousted Labor government had been. Religious Zionists leaped at this opportunity, justifying this activity by referring to God’s commandment to settle the entire land of Israel in the West Bank territories using their Biblical Hebrew names: Yehuda (Judea) and Shomron (Samaria), whatever the cost in violent Palestinian land dispossession. Full article

The spread of carbapenemase-producing Gram-negative bacteria poses a significant clinical challenge due to their association with severe Difficult-to-Treat nosocomial infections, as available therapies are drastically reduced. Rapid and accurate detection of carbapenemase-producing Gram-negative bacteria is critical for effective patient management, guiding appropriate antibiotic therapy, and implementing infection control measures to limit their dissemination within healthcare settings. Lateral flow immunoassays that detect the five main carbapenemases have become cornerstones in the fight against carbapenemase-producing Gram-negative bacteria. Carbapenemases evolve in response to antibiotic exposure, and therefore regular evaluation of these lateral flow immunoassays is crucial. Here, we have evaluated a novel assay, the KINVO assay (Medomics Medical Technology) and compared it to the Gold Standard of LFIAs for carbapenemase detection, the NG-TEST CARBA 5 assay (NG-Biotech) on a large panel of carbapenemase variants. The comparison between the two assays highlighted that both share key advantages such as rapidity and simplicity. However, NG-Test CARBA 5 demonstrated superior performance overall, particularly in accurately detecting IMP-type carbapenemases and the OXA-48 variant OXA-505. In contrast, the KINVO assay was more effective at detecting a broader range of KPC variants, including some that have lost carbapenem-hydrolyzing activity but gained resistance to ceftazidime/avibactam. If we consider these variants no longer as carbapenemases, and thus that they should not be detected, the NG-Test CARBA 5 performed better for KPC carbapenemase detection. Full article

Purpose: This case series examines the feasibility and outcomes of using a multi-tissue extracellular matrix (ECM) powder as an adjunct to standard wound care in a conflict zone. Primary objectives were granulation by day 7, wound closure, and minimizing early complications among patients with complex ballistic and blast injuries in Gaza during the 2024 Israeli military offensive. Methods: A retrospective observational study was conducted at the European Gaza Hospital from April to June 2024. Fifteen patients with high-energy soft tissue injuries who received ECM powder (XCellistem™) after surgical debridement were included. Data were extracted from operative reports, wound documentation, and clinical follow-up. Outcomes included granulation by day 7, wound closure method, and complications such as infection or dehiscence. Results: All 15 patients (median age 28; 14 male) sustained severe trauma, with 80% having exposed bone or tendon. ECM was applied directly to wound beds and often co-applied with vancomycin. Granulation tissue was observed in 12 patients by day 7, and 13 achieved wound closure via grafting, flap coverage, or secondary intention. No adverse reactions to ECM were reported. Conclusions: Multi-tissue ECM powder seems feasible and safe under austere conditions and appeared to support wound healing in severely injured patients. Its shelf stability, ease of use, and regenerative potential make it a promising adjunct for surgical care in resource-constrained conflict zones. Full article

The systematic attacks against the civilian population in Gaza, including educational institutions, constitute war crimes that violate the right to education and affect not only children but also an entire culture’s ability to recover post-conflict and maintain its identity. This document review analysed the reports issued by Nations agencies to identify the types of violence that occur in educational contexts, the victims of such violence, the impact on the rights to and within education, and the educational measures implemented in response. A thematic analysis guided by Karma Nabulsi’s concept of “scholasticide”, Rita Segato’s “pedagogy of cruelty”, and Sara Ahmed’s “witness” was conducted. The findings reveal that the attacks on educational spaces can be interpreted as ideological strategies against the Palestinian culture due to their critical role in cultural resilience and the recovery of the Palestinian people. The reports highlight significant limitations in recognising education as a priority dimension within the framework of international humanitarian aid. Finally, the analysed documents show that children in Gaza experience feelings of abandonment based on the inaction of the international community to guarantee their right to be free from all kinds of violence. Full article