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Let A be a Noetherian local ring with canonical module KA. We characterize A when KA is a torsionless, reflexive, or q-torsionfree module for an integer q ≥ 3. If A is a Cohen–Macaulay ring, H.-B. Foxby proved in 1974 that the A-module KA is q-torsionfree if and only if the ring A is q-Gorenstein. With mild assumptions, we provide a generalization of Foxby’s result to arbitrary Noetherian local rings admitting the canonical module. In particular, since the reflexivity of the canonical module is closely related to the ring being Gorenstein in low codimension, we also explore quasinormal rings, introduced by W. V. Vasconcelos. We provide several examples as well. ©2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH,Berlin/Boston.

This paper surveys and summarizes Wolmer Vasconcelos’ results surrounding multiplicities, Hilbert coefficients, and their extensions. We particularly focus on Vasconcelos’ results regarding multiplicities and Chern coefficients, and other invariants which they bound. The Sally module is an important instrument introduced by Vasconcelos for this study, which naturally relates Hilbert coefficients to reduction numbers. ©2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH,Berlin/Boston.

A degree of a module M is a numerical measure of information carried by M. We highlight some of Vasconcelos’ outstanding contributions to the theory of degrees, bridging commutative algebra and computational algebra. We present several degrees he introduced and developed, including arithmetic degree, jdeg, homological degree, cohomological degrees, canonical degree, and bicanonical degree. For the canonical and bicanonical degrees, we discuss recent developments motivated by our joint works [25, 19, 9]. ©2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH,Berlin/Boston.

Context. We present an observational and theoretical study of the complex stellar system S1082 in the open cluster M67. This system consists of at least four stars: a blue straggler in a 1.07-day eclipsing binary with a main sequence star (binary A) and another blue straggler in a 1185-day orbit with an unknown companion (binary B). Aims. We analyzed observational data to obtain the orbital and stellar parameters of the components of the eclipsing system. We then explored mass transfer and dynamical encounter scenarios that could explain the derived properties of all of the components of S1082. Methods. We combined high-precision photometry from K2 and TESS with archival light curves, new radial-velocity measurements, and speckle imaging to refine the orbital and physical parameters of the system. To explore the formation pathways, we conducted binary evolution simulations with MESA and dynamical scattering experiments with FEWBODY, followed by a tidal evolution modeling procedure. Results. Our revised radial-velocity solutions yield significantly changed dynamical masses for binary A, reducing the tension with the cluster turnoff mass compared to previous studies. Speckle imaging shows two resolved components separated by 390 AU in projection and, in combination with the two spectroscopic orbits, this is suggestive of a hierarchical quadruple configuration. Our results suggest that the two blue stragglers formed separately, with later dynamical encounters assembling the present configuration. This work underscores the importance of stellar dynamics in shaping the evolution of complex stellar systems within cluster environments such as M67. © The Authors 2026.

Underserved communities face persistent challenges due to limited access to healthcare services. Digital volunteering offers opportunities for healthcare professionals to support these populations remotely. This study examined factors associated with healthcare workers’ intentions to participate in digital healthcare volunteering in Algeria. An extended technology acceptance model was used, incorporating perceived organizational support (OS), altruism, and social responsibility. A convenience sample of 142 healthcare workers completed a survey, and hierarchical regression analysis was conducted. Results indicated that perceived ease of use, social responsibility, altruism, perceived OS, and perceived usefulness were each significantly associated with intentions to engage in digital volunteering. The extended model explained 75.6% of the variance in intention, highlighting the relevance of psychological, organizational, and ethical factors. These findings provide insights for policymakers, healthcare organizations, and developers seeking to support digital volunteering initiatives. Limitations include the cross-sectional design and the use of convenience sampling, which may affect generalizability. Future research should consider longitudinal designs, larger and more diverse samples, and cross-cultural comparisons to validate and extend these findings. © 2026 by Author/s and Licensed by Modestum.

Since COVID-19, the public workplace has shifted toward a hybrid and telecommute culture. Maintaining equitable and fair performance evaluations for employees across different working modalities is among the top concerns of leaders in public organizations. Using data from the Employee Viewpoint Survey 2023, this paper compares the experiences of telecommuting and non-telecommuting federal employees regarding fair performance evaluations. The findings reveal that younger employees and telecommuting employees tend to perceive lower fairness in performance evaluations. However, leadership support helps reduce employees’ experiences of unfair performance evaluations. This study suggests that communication support from supervisors is essential to upholding an inclusive and fair workplace as public organizations shift to virtual and hybrid work cultures. © 2025 SPAEF

Recent research proposes that arts-integrated teaching approaches in business education can nurture students' aesthetic sensitivity and emotional capacities, such as self-awareness and empathy. In this chapter, we examine the pedagogical possibility of art appreciation in art museums as a consciousness-raising practice, especially for the sake of cultivating business students' environmental awareness in two different contexts. We have analyzed American and Russian students' reflective essays based on their museum visits in order to explore how business students make sense of their aesthetic experiences and how art appreciation helps them to develop their sustainability mindset in a creative learning space. Through attentive viewing of the works of art, students have learned some key insights from their aesthetic appreciation at art museums. These insights not only facilitated honing their emotional skills, but also deepened their environmental awareness and heightened their sense of personal empowerment to act upon these newly acquired insights and values ensuing from art appreciation. After identifying six key themes extracted from both groups of students' essays based on their museum learning, we further discuss the pedagogical implications of contemplative art appreciation in museums as a means of contributing to more innovative and sustainable management education. © 2026 selection and editorial matter, Ekaterina Ivanova, Isabel Rimanoczy and Divya Singhal; individual chapters, the contributors.

Because physical literacy and activity are not emphasized in special education as they are in physical education or adapted physical education (PE/APE), this editorial explores two important questions: Do high school transition students receive PE/APE programming? And are PE/APE teachers introduced or exposed to transition services at any point in their teacher training?. © 2026 SHAPE America.

Background: Cancer patients admitted to the bone marrow transplant (BMT) unit face life-threatening medical conditions. Consequently, their family members experience uncertainty, resulting in high levels of anxiety and depression (AD). Limited updates and communication from medical staff exacerbate these emotional burdens. To address these challenges, we developed a mobile health (mHealth) intervention, FamCarePlus, and evaluated its feasibility, usability, and efficacy. We hypothesized that the FamCarePlus application would demonstrate a high degree of feasibility and usability and would reduce AD compared to a control group relying solely on traditional communication through the nurses’ station. Methods: We employed a quasi-experimental pretest/posttest non-randomized, non-blinded self-report design over 3 weeks, with an experimental group (n = 10) using FamCarePlus and a control group (n = 9). We selected participants via convenience sampling using the electronic medical record to identify eligible patients and families, guided by inclusion and exclusion criteria. We used descriptive statistics and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) guidelines to analyze the data. Feasibility was defined by a retention rate > 80%, with usability testing using the System Usability Scale (SUS) and NASA Task Load Index (NASA-TLX) surveys. The HADS measured AD, comparing baseline to Week 3. Results: We met our feasibility criteria of >80%. All SUS and NASA scores were in the higher index, suggesting a significant degree of usability and low workload demand on participants. For efficacy, we compared baseline mean scores, with the experimental group reporting lower AD levels at Week 1 (41.9% and 27.8%, respectively) than the control group (55.2% and 34.2%, respectively). From Week 1 to Week 3, the percentage change showed an 8.6% decrease in anxiety in the experimental group, compared to a 12.8% decrease in anxiety in the control group. These results were consistent when analyzed according to HADS guidelines. Conclusions: The findings of this study provide preliminary evidence that the FamCarePlus intervention is feasible and usable, while also demonstrating that its use may be associated with a sustained reduction in AD levels among family members of patients admitted to the BMT unit. These outcomes underscore the potential of digital interventions to address disparities in patient health information access and psychosocial support. © 2026 by the authors.

Purpose – Studies are rare in operations management literature showcasing how leaders ethically influence their employees to perceive safety performance through motivating them to participate in the quality management (QM) program. To bridge this research gap, this study has been carried out (1) to investigate the relationship between ethical leadership and incentives for participating in QM program to predict perceived safety performance and (2) to examine the relationship between ethical leadership and incentives for QM implementation to predict job satisfaction. Design/methodology/approach – Responses of 185 Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration employees who participated in the Office of Personnel Management's Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey 2019, taken from public release data file, were used to test the proposed hypotheses using structural equation modelling. Findings – Results show that ethical leaders motivate their employees to participate in the QM program. Such motivation for QM implementation supports public sector employees to perceive high safety performance and attain job satisfaction with their work agency. Further, employees attain high satisfaction with their job when they work under ethical leaders. Theoretical and practical implications were also offered in this study. Originality/value – This study is the first of its kind to contribute providing evidence that ethical leaders working in a hazardous environment motivate employees to get involved in QM implementation. Another contribution of this study, encouraging employees to participate in the QM initiatives leads employees to attain a high level of job satisfaction and safety performance, also adds value to the QM literature. © 2026 Emerald Publishing Limited

Understanding the thermal sensitivity of reproductive interactions is crucial given global warming. Previous studies have almost exclusively focused on interactions before mating, even though important interactions between the sexes also occur after mating (e.g. gamete interactions), which are likely also affected by temperature. Thus, it remains unknown how temperature affects the influence of female reproductive fluid on sperm performance, thereby altering female control over fertilization (cryptic female choice). This gap limits our understanding of how sexual selection changes with seasonal temperature fluctuations and temperatures outside the range of historical norms. We tested how temperatures relevant to current conditions and climate change projections influence the mechanisms underlying cryptic female choice in a marine fish, Symphodus ocellatus. Under typical, cooler thermal conditions, female reproductive fluid enhances sperm velocity and biases fertilization dynamics to favour preferred, dominant males over sneaker males. We find that warmer temperatures decrease female influence on sperm velocity, especially for dominant males. This results in dominant males having slower sperm than sneaker males at warmer temperatures, reducing the expected paternity of preferred, dominant males. Our results highlight that considering the thermal sensitivity of female–male interactions that occur after mating will be essential for understanding how seasonal variation and climate change can influence fertility, reproduction and sexual selection. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. © 2026 The Author(s). Functional Ecology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society.

Using interpretative phenomenological analysis and grounded in queer, critical feminist, and crip theory, this study explores how transgender and gender-expansive adults with ADHD symptoms, who describe their traits as neurospicy, navigate mental health care. Ten participants revealed masking as a ­survival strategy that fosters exhaustion, barriers posed by executive functioning challenges and provider ignorance, and the importance of affirming therapeutic spaces, self-advocacy, and peer support networks. Findings align with transgender identity development models. Results call for intersectional, neurodivergence-informed counseling practices that are flexible, knowledgeable, and collaborative to address structural and epistemological challenges faced by neurodivergent TGE individuals. © 2025 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

One exciting class of future genetic devices could be those deployed in microbes that join complex microbial environments in the wild. We sought to determine whether genetic parts designed for monoculture are predictable when used in co-culture by testing constitutive Anderson promoters driving the expression of chromoproteins from a plasmid. In Escherichia coli monoculture, a high copy number origin of replication causes stochastic expression regardless of promoter strength, and high constitutive Anderson promoter strength leads to selection for inactivating mutations, resulting in inconsistent chromoprotein expression. Medium- and low-strength constitutive Anderson promoters function more predictably in E. coli monoculture but experience an increase in inactivating mutations when grown in co-culture over many generations with Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Expression from regulated promoters instead of constitutive Anderson promoters can lead to stable expression in a complex wastewater culture. Overall, we show intraspecies selection for inactivating mutations due to a competitive growth advantage for E. coli that do not express the genetic device compared to their peers that retain the functional device. We show additional interspecies selection against the functional device when E. coli is co-cultured with another organism. Together, these two selection pressures create a significant barrier to genetic device function in microbial communities that we overcome by utilizing a regulated E. coli promoter. Future strategies for genetic device design in microorganisms that need to function in a complex microbial environment should focus on regulated promoters and/or strategies that give the microorganism carrying the device a selective or growth advantage. IMPORTANCE: First-generation biotechnology focused on genetic devices designed for use in monoculture conditions. One class of next-generation biotechnology devices could be designed to function in complex ecosystems with other organisms, so we sought to create conditions where the genetic device retained function when the organism carrying it is in co-culture with other organisms. We discovered that when the genetic device is a significant resource burden on the organism carrying the device, mutations will be selected for due to intraspecies and interspecies selection pressures, and the device will be rendered non-functional. Therefore, genetic device design for complex ecosystems in next-generation biotechnology needs to balance functionality of the genetic device with the need to reduce resource burden on the organism carrying it.

The STAR Collaboration reports measurements of acoplanarity using semi-inclusive distributions of charged-particle jets recoiling from direct photon and π triggers, in central Au–Au and pp collisions at √sNN = 200 GeV. Significant medium-induced acoplanarity broadening is observed for large but not small recoil jet resolution parameter, corresponding to recoil jet yield enhancement up to a factor of ≈20 for trigger-recoil azimuthal separation far from π. This phenomenology is indicative of the response of the quark-gluon plasma to excitation, but not the scattering of jets off of its quasiparticles. The measurements are not well described by current theoretical models which incorporate jet quenching. © (2026), (American Physical Society). All rights reserved.

Global climate-finance debates increasingly emphasize tensions between donor competitiveness and environmental responsibility. This paper examines how trade competition shapes the allocation of bilateral environmental official development assistance (BEODA). We develop a partial-equilibrium model showing that aid which lowers recipient production costs can intensify competitive pressure on donor markets, reducing incentives to provide such aid. Using data on 29 OECD donors and 116 non-OECD recipients from 2015–2019, we test whether donors adjust BEODA in response to trade competition. The analysis distinguishes between general BEODA and projects targeting energy efficiency, which more directly reduce marginal costs. Across linear, Tobit, and probit models with multiple fixed effects, we find that donors allocate less BEODA to more competitive recipients, with the effect nearly twice as strong for energy-saving projects. These results indicate that donor concerns over competitiveness constrain environmentally beneficial aid, underscoring a central tension between national economic interests and global climate goals. © 2026 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

The Alder–Andrews Theorem, a partition inequality generalizing Euler’s partition identity, the first Rogers–Ramanujan identity, and a theorem of Schur to d-distinct partitions of n, was proved successively by Andrews in 1971, Yee in 2008, and Alfes, Jameson, and Lemke Oliver in 2010. While Andrews and Yee utilized q-series and combinatorial methods, Alfes et al. proved the finite number of remaining cases using asymptotics originating with Meinardus together with high-performance computing. In 2020, Kang and Park conjectured a “level 2” Alder–Andrews type partition inequality which relates to the second Rogers–Ramanujan identity. Duncan, Khunger, the second author, and Tamura proved Kang and Park’s conjecture for all but finitely many cases using a combinatorial shift identity. Here, we generalize the methods of Alfes et al. to resolve nearly all of the remaining cases of Kang and Park’s conjecture. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2026.