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The aging of the global population presents a significant challenge to public health, demanding innovative and sustainable dental approaches. This integrative literature review synthesizes research on the intersection of Geriatric Dentistry, Gerodontology, and digital marketing and communication str...

The purpose of this entry is to provide an orientation to new materialism, a form of inquiry or philosophy that brings renewed interest to materiality. New materialist philosophies offer an end to certainty, an end to the belief that meaning, knowledge, and agency are fixed and stable. New materialism, however, is not a cohesive body of work but rather a collection of theories, theorists, works, and assumptions, each with its own goals, methods, and desired end points. What constitutes new materialism, what contributes to new materialism, and what inspires new materialist scholarship are not necessarily the same. We trace some of the historical influences of new materialism, highlighting key theories and theorists, describing the intersecting philosophical traditions that mutually constitute new materialism, and exploring the implications of new materialism both for social justice and for qualitative research. © 2026 selection and editorial matter, Aaron M. Kuntz; individual chapters, the contributors.

This chapter provides commentary on the four chapters in the section on the cultural, social, and linguistic aspects of school consultation. In each case, the authors pose penetrating insights and highlight a need for more extensive literature utilizing the full spectrum of research methodologies. In this spirit, this chapter suggests that strong consultation in these topical domains might be guided by the questions: (a) What is our mindset as researchers?, (b) Is the researcher culturally humble?, and (c) What might be most helpful? Building off the “what might be helpful” question, the commentary closes by framing two relevant areas where consultation research is lacking-consultation research in support of multiracial students and consultation research to address antisemitism and support Jewish students-as ways to expand the cultural, social, and linguistic aspects of school consultation literature. © 2026 selection and editorial matter, S. Andrew Garbacz, Daniel S. Newman, William P. Erchul, and Susan M. Sheridan; individual chapters, the contributors.

Water flow prediction and planning significantly help decision-makers determine the most suitable irrigation strategy and crop type and help avoid risks from flooding, among other benefits. Conventional statistical and physical models are often challenged by the highly dynamic and nonlinear nature of hydrological processes. Recent advances in machine learning (ML), including artificial neural networks (ANNs), provide powerful tools for modeling these complex relationships. However, the performance of these models depends on the optimal parameter tuning. By combining ANN with Crow Search Optimization, we aim to improve prediction accuracy and robustness while providing a clever, adaptable, and reliable solution to real-world water flow forecasting problems. The Crow Search Algorithm (CSA) is one of the most recent metaheuristic algorithms used as a training algorithm for neural network models to achieve higher performance. This research provides an evolutionary-based model to predict the flow of the Black River, a well-known river in the USA. The adopted ANN model was used to train and predict daily flows at the initial Black Water River station (No. 02047500) near Dendron, Virginia. Among the well-known metaheuristic algorithms employed in this study for comparison are the Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), and the Dandelion Optimizer (DO). Based on comparative research, the CSA algorithm outperforms other training algorithms in predicting river flow, achieving an average fitness value of 0.0048926, which is 41% better than SSA, 81% better than PSO, and 49% better than DO. Furthermore, CSA has achieved a superior convergence curve, and high variance accounts for VAFs of up to 99.06% on the training data and 98.45% on the test data. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2026.

Addressing the issues of water insecurity and unequal access to water has been a priority of the Sustainable Development Goals. Poor sanitation and inadequate access to drinking water are the second leading causes of death among children worldwide. Access to safe drinking water is a fundamental human right. Climate change represents one of public health’s greatest challenges and significantly exacerbates health disparities. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 3.6 billion people reside in areas highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Furthermore, climate change is anticipated to result in roughly 250,000 additional deaths each year between 2030 and 2050. In the United States, climate impacts such as severe storms and floods, escalating wildfires, extreme heat, poor air quality, and diminishing access to food and water disproportionately endanger Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities, low-income groups, people with disabilities, women, children, older adults, and others, making them more susceptible to the harmful health effects of climate change. The formulation and implementation of climate policies are essential to address the negative impacts of climate change. This chapter aims to: (a) describe the effects of climate change on access to safe drinking water; (b) emphasize the implications of climate change on drinking water disparities; (c) highlight policies to mitigate the effects of climate change; and d) discuss recommendations to tackle climate change and inequities in access to water. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2026.

In response to a call for PBLL to address language learners’ 21st-century needs, the present chapter showcases two examples of technology-assisted PBLL (TAPBLL) carried out in 100- and 300-level Spanish courses at a regional public university in the eastern United States. The TAPBLL using Generative AI chatbots in the lower-division Spanish course exemplified how content could be foregrounded in foreign language (FL) courses that might otherwise tend to overemphasize grammar. The TAPBLL using collaborative online international learning as a virtual exchange project in an (or the) upper-division course exemplifies how content can be prioritized early and often through projects that address learners’ 21st-century needs. When woven throughout the FL curriculum, TAPBLL can successfully build learners’ bilingualism, digital literacies, and cultural competence while at the same time working to counteract decreasing FL enrollments and imprudent narratives concerning the inapplicability of FL instruction to learners’ future academic and career goals.

This chapter presents a multi-institutional study that explores 38 pre-service English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teachers’ identity development in

We use SrTiO3/Si as a model system to elucidate the effect of the interface on ferroelectric behavior in epitaxial oxide films on silicon. Using both first-principles computations and synchrotron x-ray diffraction measurements, we show that structurally imposed boundary conditions at the interface stabilize a fixed (pinned) polarization in the film but inhibit ferroelectric switching. We demonstrate that the interface chemistry responsible for these phenomena is general to epitaxial silicon-oxide interfaces, impacting on the design of silicon-based functional oxide devices. © 2026 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.

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.