The U.S. Supreme Court has for decades served as an unlikely venue for the performance of music. Between 1988 and 2020, more than 125 musicians, including some of the country's most prominent performers, appeared for intimate audiences in the Supreme Court's East Conference Room. The concerts were officially “off the record,” but details survive in records kept by the U.S. Supreme Court, papers of former justices and friends of the court involved in the creation of the programs, and in interviews with individuals who supported and participated in the events. This article reconstructs the history of this long running but little-known music series and contextualizes it within the court's culture and broader themes of access and power.

Folate and choline are methyl donor nutrients that may play a role in fetal brain development. Animal studies have reported that prenatal folate and choline supplementation are associated with better cognitive outcomes in offspring and that these nutrients may interact and affect brain development. Human studies that have investigated associations between maternal prenatal folate or choline levels and neurodevelopmental outcomes have reported contradictory findings and no human studies have examined the potential interactive effect of folate and choline on children’s neurodevelopment. During the second trimester of pregnancy, maternal red blood cell folate was measured from blood samples and choline intake was estimated using a 24-h dietary recall in 309 women in the APrON cohort. At 3–5 years of age, their children’s neurodevelopment was assessed using the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scales of Intelligence – Fourth EditionCND, NEPSY-II language and memory subtests, four behavioral executive function tasks, and the Movement Assessment Battery for Children – Second Edition. Adjusted regressions revealed no associations between maternal folate and choline levels during pregnancy and most of the child outcomes. On the Dimensional Change Card Sort, an executive function task, there was an interaction effect; at high levels of choline intake (i.e., 1 SD above the mean; 223.03 mg/day), higher maternal folate status was associated with decreased odds of receiving a passing score (β = −0.44; 95%CI −0.81, −0.06). In conclusion, maternal folate status and choline intake during the second trimester of pregnancy were not associated with children’s intelligence, language, memory, or motor outcomes at 3–4 years of age; however, their interaction may have an influence children’s executive functions.

Racially and ethnically minoritized populations have been historically excluded and underrepresented in research. This paper will describe best practices in multicultural and multilingual awareness-raising strategies used by the Recruitment Innovation Center to increase minoritized enrollment into clinical trials. The Passive Immunity Trial for Our Nation will be used as a primary example to highlight real-world application of these methods to raise awareness, engage community partners, and recruit diverse study participants.

Seabirds are highly threatened, including by fisheries bycatch. Accurate understanding of offshore distribution of seabirds is crucial to address this threat. Tracking technologies revolutionised insights into seabird distributions but tracking data may contain a variety of biases. We tracked two threatened seabirds (Salvin’s Albatross Thalassarche salvini n = 60 and Black Petrel Procellaria parkinsoni n = 46) from their breeding colonies in Aotearoa (New Zealand) to their non-breeding grounds in South America, including Peru, while simultaneously completing seven surveys in Peruvian waters. We then used species distribution models to predict occurrence and distribution using either data source alone, and both data sources combined. Results showed seasonal differences between estimates of occurrence and distribution when using data sources independently. Combining data resulted in more balanced insights into occurrence and distributions, and reduced uncertainty. Most notably, both species were predicted to occur in Peruvian waters during all four annual quarters: the northern Humboldt upwelling system for Salvin’s Albatross and northern continental shelf waters for Black Petrels. Our results highlighted that relying on a single data source may introduce biases into distribution estimates. Our tracking data might have contained ontological and/or colony-related biases (e.g. only breeding adults from one colony were tracked), while our survey data might have contained spatiotemporal biases (e.g. surveys were limited to waters <200 nm from the coast). We recommend combining data sources wherever possible to refine predictions of species distributions, which ultimately will improve fisheries bycatch management through better spatiotemporal understanding of risks.

Dietary behaviours and the food systems in which they occur have a significant impact on climate change. The 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports and other major climate reports have identified population-level dietary shifts towards balanced, sustainable healthy diets as an important mitigation (i.e. prevention) solution for climate change. Thus, public health nutrition researchers and practitioners have a crucial role to play in combatting the climate crisis. They have the content expertise, interdisciplinary training and technical skills needed to facilitate wide-scale dietary behaviour changes at multiple levels of influence and ultimately improve both human and planetary health. This commentary article: (i) summarises how dietary behaviours and food systems contribute to climate change, with a particular focus on high-income countries; (ii) reviews food-system-related climate change mitigation solutions most relevant to public health nutrition researchers and practitioners; and (iii) identifies key gaps in the literature and future research directions for the field.

Migratory birds are implicated in dispersing haemosporidian parasites over great geographic distances. However, their role in sharing these vector-transmitted blood parasites with resident avian host species along their migration flyway is not well understood. We studied avian haemosporidian parasites in 10 localities where Chilean Elaenia, a long-distance Neotropical austral migrant species, spends part of its annual cycle to determine local parasite transmission among resident sympatric host species in the elaenia's distributional range across South America. We sampled 371 Chilean Elaenias and 1,818 birds representing 243 additional sympatric species from Brazilian wintering grounds to Argentinian breeding grounds. The 23 haemosporidian lineages found in Chilean Elaenias exhibited considerable variation in distribution, specialization, and turnover across the 10 avian communities in South America. Parasite lineage dissimilarity increased with geographic distance, and infection probability by Parahaemoproteus decreased in localities harbouring a more diverse haemosporidian fauna. Furthermore, blood smears from migrating Chilean Elaenias and local resident avian host species did not contain infective stages of Leucocytozoon, suggesting that transmission did not take place in the Brazilian stopover site. Our analyses confirm that this Neotropical austral migrant connects avian host communities and transports haemosporidian parasites along its distributional range in South America. However, the lack of transmissive stages at stopover site and the infrequent parasite lineage sharing between migratory host populations and residents at breeding and wintering grounds suggest that Chilean Elaenias do not play a significant role in dispersing haemosporidian parasites, nor do they influence local transmission across South America.