From 1976, the works of the Venetian composer Luigi Nono (1924–90) are marked by a noticeable change in both his philosophical and his political outlook. What results is a decade (1980–9) of compositions that feature poetry in librettos, live electronics, the spatialization of sound and a prominent use of microtonal pitches. Together these create completely novel soundscapes that are noticeably different from his previous output. This article will examine a particular influence – the philosophy of Martin Heidegger – in the creation of the 1984 piece for large ensemble A Carlo Scarpa. The purpose of this is not only to allow for an insight into the music and structure of A Carlo Scarpa, but also to illuminate how philosophical and political ideas can be represented within the craft of composition, and the new paths of thinking that guided Nono’s artistic output during the 1980s.

Macrolophus pygmaeus, a predatory mirid used to manage greenhouse whitefly, was illegally imported into New Zealand, and for a time was reared and sold to commercial tomato growers. We designed and implemented a risk-based detection survey to determine whether M. pygmaeus was still present in New Zealand a decade later. The survey was designed to have an 80% chance of detecting a single low density (0.05 per lineal metre of host plants) population within 1 km of known points of introduction. The survey was implemented between 8 and 15 March 2018. Local habitat constraints meant that the planned sampling had to be modified but this was accounted for in the subsequent analysis. No M. pygmaeus were found in the samples, but 93 specimens from seven other mirid taxa were detected, validating the sample methods. The survey gives 60% confidence that M. pygmaeus was not present at a mean density of 0.05 per lineal metre of habitat. It gives 80% confidence that a population at 0.1 m−1 was not present and 90% confidence that no population exists at >0.18 m−1. Though there are no published data on typical field population densities of M. pygmaeus, for related species the survey would have had high confidence in detecting any medium to high density population present. Therefore, it is likely that M. pygmaeus is no longer present in New Zealand, but if extant within the sampled areas then we have high certainty that it was at low densities compared to other predaceous mirids.

The end of the last Ice Age in Britain (c. 11500 BP) created major disruption to the biosphere. Open habitats were succeeded by more wooded landscapes, and changes occurred to the fauna following the abrupt disappearance of typical glacial herd species, such as reindeer and horse (Conneller & Higham 2015). Understanding the impact of these changes on humans and how quickly they were able to adapt may soon become clearer, due to recent discoveries in the Colne Valley on the western edge of Greater London, north of the River Thames. An exceptionally well-preserved open-air site was discovered in 2014 as part of a wider project of archaeological investigation and excavation carried out by Wessex Archaeology (2015), on behalf of CEMEX UK. The site, at Kingsmead Quarry in Horton, is unusual because it has good organic preservation and, in addition to worked flint artefacts, it has yielded groups of articulated horse bone. The extreme rarity of such sites of this period in Britain makes this discovery especially significant and re-emphasises the potential importance of the Colne Valley (Lacaille 1963; Lewis 2011; Morgi et al. 2011).

We describe a versatile infrared camera/spectrograph, IRIS, designed and constructed at the Anglo-Australian Observatory for use on the Anglo-Australian Telescope. A variety of optical configurations can be selected under remote control to provide several direct image scales and a few low-resolution spectroscopic formats. Two cross-dispersed transmission echelles are of novel design, as is the use of a modified Bowen-Burch system to provide a fast f/ratio in the widest-field option. The drive electronics includes a choice of readout schemes for versatility, and continuous display when the array is not taking data, to facilitate field acquisition and focusing.

The linearity of the detector has been studied in detail. Although outwardly good, slight nonlinearities prevent removal of fixed-pattern noise from the data without application of a cubic linearising function.

Specific control and data-reduction software has been written. We describe also a scanning mode developed for spectroscopic imaging.

Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson and others are explaining divergent economic histories with qualitative measures of institutional quality – including Acemoglu and Robinson's popular inclusive/extractive dichotomy. While quantitative studies have sort to confirm these links using econometric proxies, few empirical accounts have shown how these proxies, or indeed the institutions they seek to represent actually influenced economic growth. This study helps fill that gap by testing whether evidence in Zambia's post-colonial history supports a proposed econometric link between its institutional quality and its slow economic growth. Support for this link is found in foreign investors’ interpretation of declining institutional constraint on Zambia's President as the potential for increased policy volatility, and as such an economic inducement to delay critical investment to Zambia's capital constrained economy. These findings add weight to the institutional argument in general, as well as present one concrete example in history of a mechanism through which institutional quality affected economic growth.

Significant new opportunities for astrophysics and cosmology have been identified at low radio frequencies. The Murchison Widefield Array is the first telescope in the southern hemisphere designed specifically to explore the low-frequency astronomical sky between 80 and 300 MHz with arcminute angular resolution and high survey efficiency. The telescope will enable new advances along four key science themes, including searching for redshifted 21-cm emission from the EoR in the early Universe; Galactic and extragalactic all-sky southern hemisphere surveys; time-domain astrophysics; and solar, heliospheric, and ionospheric science and space weather. The Murchison Widefield Array is located in Western Australia at the site of the planned Square Kilometre Array (SKA) low-band telescope and is the only low-frequency SKA precursor facility. In this paper, we review the performance properties of the Murchison Widefield Array and describe its primary scientific objectives.