In this article we adopt a political economic lens to analyse the revival of the concept of ecocide in present international legal scholarship and practice. The current campaign to codify the crime of ecocide under international criminal law represents the epitome of a problem-solving approach, which conceives of the law as external to society and as a corrective to its evils. Yet, a large body of critical literature has drawn attention to the constitutive role of international law and to the problems with its depoliticized approach when it comes to tackling global injustices. We build upon this diverse scholarship to illuminate how the technical, acontextual, and ahistorical legal debate on the codification of ecocide ends up normalizing the violent structures of extractive capitalism and its hierarchies. Further, we situate the proposed crime within the wider context of how international law regulates and constitutes the natural world. Drawing on critiques of sustainable development and of business and human rights discourse, we argue that the ‘imbroglio’ of ecocide, in its current legal definition, lies in presenting ecological preservation and devastation as simultaneously legitimate aims. The article ultimately raises the question of the role of international law in progressive political agendas, a question that could not be more pressing in times of entangled socio-ecological-economic disruptions.

Documenting the intentional structuring of space by hunter-gatherers can be challenging, especially in complex cave contexts. One approach is the spatial analysis of discard patterns. Here, the authors consider the spatial distribution of faunal remains from the Lower Magdalenian Level 115 in El Mirón Cave, Cantabria, to assess a possible structuring function for an unusual alignment of rocks. Although it is impossible to determine whether the alignment was intentionally constructed, differences in the distributions of taxa and in specimen sizes on different sides of this feature suggest that it played a role in structuring the living space of the cave's inhabitants.

High-quality evidence from prospective longitudinal studies in humans is essential to testing hypotheses related to the developmental origins of health and disease. In this paper, the authors draw upon their own experiences leading birth cohorts with longitudinal follow-up into adulthood to describe specific challenges and lessons learned. Challenges are substantial and grow over time. Long-term funding is essential for study operations and critical to retaining study staff, who develop relationships with participants and hold important institutional knowledge and technical skill sets. To maintain contact, we recommend that cohorts apply multiple strategies for tracking and obtain as much high-quality contact information as possible before the child’s 18th birthday. To maximize engagement, we suggest that cohorts offer flexibility in visit timing, length, location, frequency, and type. Data collection may entail multiple modalities, even at a single collection timepoint, including measures that are self-reported, research-measured, and administrative with a mix of remote and in-person collection. Many topics highly relevant for adolescent and young adult health and well-being are considered to be private in nature, and their assessment requires sensitivity. To motivate ongoing participation, cohorts must work to understand participant barriers and motivators, share scientific findings, and provide appropriate compensation for participation. It is essential for cohorts to strive for broad representation including individuals from higher risk populations, not only among the participants but also the staff. Successful longitudinal follow-up of a study population ultimately requires flexibility, adaptability, appropriate incentives, and opportunities for feedback from participants.

This article builds on a close palaeographical, liturgical and musicological reading of a single Old Hispanic manuscript (Santo Domingo de Silos, Biblioteca del Monasterio MS 6) to draw conclusions about scriptorium size, working practices and scribal mobility in early medieval Iberia. We identify eight music scribes who worked in four distinct layers of scribal engagement with the manuscript. These scribes used three different notational styles, and draw on elements of both the León and Rioja melodic dialects. In this manuscript, León notation is used to notate Rioja dialect; Rioja notation can be used to notate León dialect. The notational styles and melodic dialects tell us that different groups of scribes had distinct cultural identities and were likely working across two or three institutions, and at different times. Some scribes specialised in particular solo genres, as we explore, suggesting strongly that some music scribes were also trained as solo singers.

There has been much recent interest in developing data-driven models for weather and climate predictions. However, there are open questions regarding their generalizability and robustness, highlighting a need to better understand how they make their predictions. In particular, it is important to understand whether data-driven models learn the underlying physics of the system against which they are trained, or simply identify statistical patterns without any clear link to the underlying physics. In this paper, we describe a sensitivity analysis of a regression-based model of ocean temperature, trained against simulations from a 3D ocean model setup in a very simple configuration. We show that the regressor heavily bases its forecasts on, and is dependent on, variables known to be key to the physics such as currents and density. By contrast, the regressor does not make heavy use of inputs such as location, which have limited direct physical impacts. The model requires nonlinear interactions between inputs in order to show any meaningful skill—in line with the highly nonlinear dynamics of the ocean. Further analysis interprets the ways certain variables are used by the regression model. We see that information about the vertical profile of the water column reduces errors in regions of convective activity, and information about the currents reduces errors in regions dominated by advective processes. Our results demonstrate that even a simple regression model is capable of learning much of the physics of the system being modeled. We expect that a similar sensitivity analysis could be usefully applied to more complex ocean configurations.

There is a need for the field of global constitutionalism to consider a wider array of voices, such as women’s voices and perspectives from the Global South. Here, I argue that global constitutionalism must pay attention not only to a wider array of human perspectives, but also to non-human perspectives and to different understandings of what the law is and can be. Evaluating how international law categorizes the environment and non-human animals as things or objects to be exploited for human needs, I argue that posthuman feminism provides an alternative epistemic frame for rethinking both global constitutionalism and international law.

Co-regulation of physiological arousal within the caregiver–child dyad precedes later self-regulation within the individual. Despite the importance of unimpaired self-regulatory development for later adjustment outcomes, little is understood about how early co-regulatory processes can become dysregulated during early life. Aspects of caregiver behavior, such as patterns of anxious speech, may be one factor influencing infant arousal dysregulation. To address this, we made day-long, naturalistic biobehavioral recordings in home settings in caregiver–infant dyads using wearable autonomic devices and miniature microphones. We examined the association between arousal, vocalization intensity, and caregiver anxiety. We found that moments of high physiological arousal in infants were more likely to be accompanied by high caregiver arousal when caregivers had high self-reported trait anxiety. Anxious caregivers were also more likely to vocalize intensely at states of high arousal and produce intense vocalizations that occurred in clusters. High-intensity vocalizations were associated with more sustained increases in autonomic arousal for both anxious caregivers and their infants. Findings indicate that caregiver vocal behavior differs in anxious parents, cooccurs with dyadic arousal dysregulation, and could contribute to physiological arousal transmission. Implications for caregiver vocalization as an intervention target are discussed.

Global law and the environment is an increasingly prominent and rapidly evolving area of scholarship. In confronting global challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, freshwater scarcity, and other symptoms of planetary breakdown, critical scholars from different intellectual traditions are questioning the traditional approach taken within environmental law which has, so far, only managed to save “some trees” but failed to keep “the forest”. These dominant legal interactions often use the law to address “problems” after they arrive. However, the law plays a key role also in constituting these “problems” by incentivizing certain harmful activities, upholding socio-political-economic structures, and through the limited framing of the issues it claims to solve. It is becoming increasingly clear that we live in a “legally constituted world”. Against this background, there is a need for further critical reflection on the role of the law in preventing, addressing, and even driving the entangled socio-ecological-economic crises of modernity. Through interrogating the assumptions that underlie environmental law, critical scholars have exposed, challenged, and put forward alternative visions to its neo-colonial and gendered biases; its exclusion of indigenous perspectives and voices; its construction upon problematic representations of “the environment” that centres an anthropocentric worldview; and a neoliberal economic order that fosters vast environmental damage.

Irritability is a transdiagnostic symptom dimension in developmental psychopathology, closely related to the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) construct of frustrative nonreward. Consistent with the RDoC framework and calls for transdiagnostic, developmentally-sensitive assessment methods, we report data from a smartphone-based, naturalistic ecological momentary assessment (EMA) study of irritability. We assessed 109 children and adolescents (Mage = 12.55 years; 75.20% male) encompassing several diagnostic groups – disruptive mood dysregulation disorder (DMDD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anxiety disorders (ANX), healthy volunteers (HV). The participants rated symptoms three times per day for 1 week. Compliance with the EMA protocol was high. As tested using multilevel modeling, EMA ratings of irritability were strongly and consistently associated with in-clinic, gold-standard measures of irritability. Further, EMA ratings of irritability were significantly related to subjective frustration during a laboratory task eliciting frustrative nonreward. Irritability levels exhibited an expected graduated pattern across diagnostic groups, and the different EMA items measuring irritability were significantly associated with one another within all groups, supporting the transdiagnostic phenomenology of irritability. Additional analyses utilized EMA ratings of anxiety as a comparison with respect to convergent validity and transdiagnostic phenomenology. The results support new measurement tools that can be used in future studies of irritability and frustrative nonreward.

Established chronologies indicate a long-term ‘Hoabinhian’ hunter-gatherer occupation of Mainland Southeast Asia during the Terminal Pleistocene to Mid-Holocene (45 000–3000 years ago). Here, the authors re-examine the ‘Hoabinhian’ sequence from north-west Thailand using new radiocarbon and luminescence data from Spirit Cave, Steep Cliff Cave and Banyan Valley Cave. The results indicate that hunter-gatherers exploited this ecologically diverse region throughout the Terminal Pleistocene and the Pleistocene–Holocene transition, and into the period during which agricultural lifeways emerged in the Holocene. Hunter-gatherers did not abandon this highland region of Thailand during periods of environmental and socioeconomic change.

Across Eurasia, horse transport transformed ancient societies. Although evidence for chariotry is well dated, the origins of horse riding are less clear. Techniques to distinguish chariotry from riding in archaeological samples rely on elements not typically recovered from many steppe contexts. Here, the authors examine horse remains of Mongolia's Deer Stone-Khirigsuur (DSK) Complex, comparing them with ancient and modern East Asian horses used for both types of transport. DSK horses demonstrate unique dentition damage that could result from steppe chariotry, but may also indicate riding with a shallow rein angle at a fast gait. A key role for chariots in Late Bronze Age Mongolia helps explain the trajectory of horse use in early East Asia.

Background: During the COVID-19 pandemic, public-health decision makers have increasingly relied on hospitalization forecasts that are routinely provided, accurate, and based on timely input data to inform pandemic planning. In North Carolina, we adapted an existing agent-based model (ABM) to produce 30-day hospitalization forecasts of COVID-19 and non–COVID-19 hospitalizations for use by public-health decision makers. We sought to continually improve model speed and accuracy during forecasting. Methods: The geospatially explicit ABM included movement of agents (ie, patients) among 104 short-term acute-care hospitals, 10 long-term acute-care hospitals, 421 licensed nursing homes, and the community in North Carolina. Agents were based on a synthetic population of North Carolina residents (ie, >10.4 million agents). We assigned SARS-CoV-2 infections to agents according to county-level susceptible, exposed, infectious, recovered (SEIR) models informed by reported COVID-19 cases by county. Agents’ COVID-19 severity and probability of hospitalization were determined using agent-specific characteristics (eg, age, comorbidities). During May 2020–December 2020, we produced weekly 30-day forecasts of intensive care unit (ICU) and non-ICU bed occupancy for COVID-19 agents and non–COVID-19 agents statewide and by region under a range of SARS-CoV-2 effective reproduction numbers. During the reporting period, we identified optimizations for faster results turnaround. We evaluated the incorporation of real-time hospital-level occupancy data at model initialization on forecast accuracy using mean absolute percent error (MAPE). Results: During May 2020–December 2020, we provided 31 weekly reports of 30-day hospitalization forecasts with a 1-day turnaround time. Reports included (1) raw and smoothed 7-day average values for 42 model output variables; (2) static visuals of ICU and non-ICU bed demand and capacity; and (3) an interactive Tableau workbook of hospital demand variables. Identifying code efficiencies reduced a single model runtime from ~100 seconds to 28 seconds. The use of cloud computing reduced simulation runtime from ~20 hours to 15 minutes. Across forecasts, the average MAPEs were 21.6% and 7.1% for ICU and non-ICU bed demand, respectively. By incorporating hospital-level occupancy data, we reduced the average MAPE to 6.5% for ICU bed demand and 3.9% for non-ICU bed demand, indicating improved accuracy. Conclusions: We adapted an ABM and continually improved it during COVID-19 forecasting by optimizing code and computing resources and including real-time hospital-level occupancy data. Planned SEIR model updates for enhanced forecasts include the addition of compartments for undocumented infections and recoveries as well as permission of reinfection from recovered compartments.

Funding: No

Disclosures: None