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Despite isolated areas of improvement, no country to date has reversed its obesity epidemic. Governments, together with a broad range of stakeholders, need to act urgently to decrease the prevalence of obesity. In this Series paper, we review several regulatory and non-regulatory actions taken around the world to address obesity and discuss some of the reasons for the scarce and fitful progress. Additionally, we preview the papers in this Lancet Series, which each identify high-priority actions on key obesity issues and challenge some of the entrenched dichotomies that dominate the thinking about obesity and its solutions. Although obesity is acknowledged as a complex issue, many debates about its causes and solutions are centred around overly simple dichotomies that present seemingly competing perspectives. Examples of such dichotomies explored in this Series include personal versus collective responsibilities for actions, supply versus demand-type explanations for consumption of unhealthy food, government regulation versus industry self-regulation, top-down versus bottom-up drivers for change, treatment versus prevention priorities, and a focus on undernutrition versus overnutrition. We also explore the dichotomy of individual versus environmental drivers of obesity and conclude that people bear some personal responsibility for their health, but environmental factors can readily support or undermine the ability of people to act in their own self-interest. We propose a reframing of obesity that emphasises the reciprocal nature of the interaction between the environment and the individual. Today's food environments exploit people's biological, psychological, social, and economic vulnerabilities, making it easier for them to eat unhealthy foods. This reinforces preferences and demands for foods of poor nutritional quality, furthering the unhealthy food environments. Regulatory actions from governments and increased efforts from industry and civil society will be necessary to break these vicious cycles.

This paper presents a review on the formability evaluation of AHSS, enhancing necking-based failure criteria limitations. Complementary fracture/damage constitutive modeling approaches specifically tailored to formability evaluation, validated through numerical and experimental methods, are also subjects of research. AHSS are widely processed through sheet metal forming processes. Although an excellent choice when lightweight, high-strength, and ductility are critical factors, their multi-phase microstructure accentuates forming challenges. To accurately model forming behavior, necking-based failure criteria as well as direct fracture models require improvements. As a necking-based failure model, the conventional forming limit diagram/curve (FLD/FLC) presents limitations in estimating direct fracture (surface cracks, edge cracks, shear cracks), as well as deformation histories under non-linear strain paths. Thus, significant research efforts are being made towards the development of advanced fracture constitutive models capable of predicting fracture scenarios without necking, which are more frequently observed in the realm of AHSS. Scientific community research is divided into several directions aiming at improving the forming and fracture behavior accuracy of parts subjected to sheet metal forming operations. In this review paper, a comprehensive overview of ductile fracture modeling is presented. Firstly, the limitations of FLD/FLC in modeling fracture behavior in sheet metal forming operations are studied, followed by recent trends in constitutive material modeling. Afterwards, advancements in material characterization methods to cover a broad range of stress states are discussed. Finally, damage and fracture models predicting failure in AHSS are investigated. This review paper supplies relevant information on the current issues the sheet metal forming community is challenged with due to the trend towards AHSS employment in the automotive industry.

Public mobilisation is needed to enact obesity-prevention policies and to mitigate reaction against their implementation. However, approaches in public health focus mainly on dialogue between public health professionals and political leaders. Strategies to increase popular demand for obesity-prevention policies include refinement and streamlining of public information, identification of effective obesity frames for each population, strengthening of media advocacy, building of citizen protest and engagement, and development of a receptive political environment with change agents embedded across organisations and sectors. Long-term support and investment in collaboration between diverse stakeholders to create shared value is also important. Each actor in an expanded coalition for obesity prevention can make specific contributions to engaging, mobilising, and coalescing the public. The shift from a top-down to a combined and integrated bottom-up and top-down approach would need an overhaul of current strategies and reprioritisation of resources.

From the 15th to the 19th century, the Trans-Atlantic Slave-Trade (TAST) influenced the genetic and cultural diversity of numerous populations. We explore genomic and linguistic data from the nine islands of Cabo Verde, the earliest European colony of the era in Africa, a major Slave-Trade platform between the 16th and 19th centuries, and a previously uninhabited location ideal for investigating early admixture events between Europeans and Africans. Using local-ancestry inference approaches, we find that genetic admixture in Cabo Verde occurred primarily between Iberian and certain Senegambian populations, although forced and voluntary migrations to the archipelago involved numerous other populations. Inter-individual genetic and linguistic variation recapitulates the geographic distribution of individuals’ birth-places across Cabo Verdean islands, following an isolation-by-distance model with reduced genetic and linguistic effective dispersals within the archipelago, and suggesting that Kriolu language variants have developed together with genetic divergences at very reduced geographical scales. Furthermore, based on approximate bayesian computation inferences of highly complex admixture histories, we find that admixture occurred early on each island, long before the 18 th -century massive TAST deportations triggered by the expansion of the plantation economy in Africa and the Americas, and after this era mostly during the abolition of the TAST and of slavery in European colonial empires. Our results illustrate how shifting socio-cultural relationships between enslaved and non-enslaved communities during and after the TAST, shaped enslaved-African descendants’ genomic diversity and structure on both sides of the Atlantic.

Decolonizing European Sociology builds on the work challenging the androcentric, colonial and ethnocentric perspectives eminent in mainstream European sociology by identifying and describing the processes at work in its current critical transformation. Divided into sections organized around themes like modernity, border epistemology, migration and 'the South', this book considers the self-definition and basic concepts of social sciences through an assessment of the new theoretical developments, such as postcolonial theory and subaltern studies, and whether they can be described as the decolonization of the discipline. With contributions from a truly international team of leading social scientists, this volume constitutes a unique and tightly focused exploration of the challenges presented by the decolonization of the discipline of sociology.

Brucellosis, a bacterial infection acquired from herd animals, remains one of the most common zoonotic diseases worldwide. Chronic infection often results in spondyloarthritis-like complications. Investigation into pathogenesis has been limited by the lack of overt disease in standard laboratory mice. We addressed this issue using spondyloarthritis-susceptible SKG mice. Upon infection with B. melitensis , SKG mice develop robust, fully penetrant large joint arthritis. Arthritis development required viable bacteria, and live Brucella persisted in paw tissue out to 12 weeks. Disease onset, severity, and manifestations varied upon infection with different Brucella species and mutants, suggesting an additional immune reactive component. Together, these results suggest that this new model will be very useful to the scientific community for determining correlates of bacterial virulence leading to clinical disease.

This study presents a Digital Image Correlation (DIC)-based experimental framework for the calibration of the Hosford-Coulomb (HC) and Modified-Mohr Coulomb (MMC) damage initiation criteria in an Advanced High Strength Steel (AHSS) DP1000. Three characteristic loading conditions in sheet metal forming—pure shear, uniaxial tension, and plane strain tension—were reproduced using flat specimens in a universal tensile testing machine, thus eliminating the need for costly and time-consuming tooling systems. An additional notch tension specimen was employed to validate the stress-state sensitivity of the proposed calibration approach. By integrating full-field strain data from DIC with tensile test results, stress–strain relationships were directly obtained without finite element modeling. The results confirm the effectiveness of dogbone, mini shear, and plane strain tension specimens in achieving proportional loading path histories up to fracture initiation, with constant stress state evolution during deformation. Comparison of the HC and MMC damage criteria reveals similar fracture loci, with the HC model exhibiting slightly higher resistance between shear and uniaxial tension conditions. This study discusses the suitability of a fully experimental DIC-based methodology for the calibration of stress-state-dependent damage initiation criteria. The results highlight the ability of the proposed methodology as a simplified and lower time-consuming alternative to traditional numerical assisted frameworks.

Background Latinos in the United States (U.S.) represent a heterogeneous minority population disproportionally impacted by obesity. Colombians in the U.S. are routinely combined with other South Americans in most obesity studies. Moreover, most studies among Latino immigrants in the U.S. solely focus on factors in the destination context, which largely ignores the prevalence of obesity and contextual factors in their country of origin, and warrant transnational investigations. Methods Using 2013-17 data from the New York City Community Health Survey (NYC CHS, U.S.) and the National Survey of the Nutritional Situation (ENSIN, Colombia), Colombians that immigrated to the U.S. and are living in NYC (n = 503) were compared to nonimmigrant Colombians living in their home country (n = 98,829). Prevalence ratios (PR) for obesity (BMI ≥ 30 kg/m 2 ) by place of residence were estimated using multivariable logistic regression adjusting for socio-demographic characteristics and daily consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages. Results The prevalence of obesity was 49% greater for immigrant Colombians living in NYC when compared to nonimmigrant Colombians living in in their home country (PR = 1.49; 95% CI 1.08, 2.07). Colombian immigrant men in NYC were 72% more likely to have obesity compared to nonimmigrant men living in their home country (PR = 1.72; 95% CI 1.03, 2.87). No significant differences were found in the adjusted models among women. Conclusions Colombian immigrants in NYC exhibit a higher prevalence of obesity compared to their nonimmigrant counterparts back home and sex strengthens this relationship. More obesity research is needed to understand the immigration experience of Colombians in the U.S. and the underlying mechanisms for sex difference. Public health action focused on women in Colombia and both Colombian men and women immigrants in the U.S. is warranted to avert the long-term consequences of obesity.

Porous baffles can be used to enhance heat transfer in various engineering applications, including electronic cooling, gas turbine blades, and chemical reactors. Also, the backward-facing step is a widely used configuration in fluid dynamics studies due to its simplicity and relevance to real-world geometries. This study examines heat transfer and flow characteristics in a backward-facing step channel featuring a heated bottom wall and two porous baffles. A computational fluid dynamics model, validated against prior research, is used to investigate flow and temperature fields. The innovation of this work lies in the application of multi-objective optimisation to search for a set of solutions that establish a trade-off between the average Nusselt number and the pressure drop. The optimisation specifically considers various parameters of the porous baffles, including height, width, distance from the step, and Darcy number, to identify optimal design configurations. Results show that porous baffles significantly improve heat transfer compared to a backward-facing step channel without them, despite an increase in pressure drop due to their presence. This work offers valuable insights into the trade-off between heat transfer performance and pressure drop, crucial for designing efficient heat transfer systems. By exploring the Pareto-Frontier, which represents various optimal design solutions, the study provides practical guidance when seeking to optimise heat transfer in backward-facing step channels with porous baffles. The findings contribute to advancing the understanding of heat transfer enhancement, highlighting the potential of porous baffles as a viable solution for improving thermal management in engineering systems.

BackgroundIn 2012, the Government of Spain enacted Royal Decree-Law (RDL) 16/2012 and Royal Decree (RD) 1192/2012 excluding undocumented immigrants from publicly funded healthcare services. We conducted a policy implementation analysis to describe and evaluate the legal and regulatory actions taken at the autonomous community (AC) level after enactment of 2012 RDL and RD and their impact on access to general healthcare and HIV services among undocumented immigrants.MethodsWe reviewed documents published by the governments of seven ACs (Andalucía, Aragón, Euskadi (Basque Country), Castilla-La Mancha, Galicia, Madrid, Valencia) from April 2012 to July 2018, describing circumstances under which undocumented immigrants would be able to access free healthcare services. We developed indicators according to the main systemic barriers presented in official documents to analyse access to free healthcare across the participating ACs. ACs were grouped under five access categories: high, medium-high, medium, medium-low and low.ResultsAndalucía provided the highest access to free healthcare for undocumented immigrants in both general care and HIV treatment. Medium-high access was provided by Euskadi and medium access by Aragón, Madrid and Valencia. Castilla-La Mancha provided medium-low access. Galicia had low access. Only Madrid and Galicia provided different and higher level of access to undocumented migrants in HIV care compared with general healthcare.ConclusionsImplementation of 2012 RDL and RD across the ACs varied significantly, in part due to the decentralisation of the Spanish healthcare system. The challenge of healthcare access among undocumented immigrants included persistent systemic restrictions, frequent and unclear rule changes, and the need to navigate differences across ACs of Spain.