University College London, which operates as UCL, is a public research university in London, United Kingdom. It is a member institution of the federal University of London, and is the second-largest university in the United Kingdom by total enrolment and the largest by postgraduate enrolment.Established in 1826, as London University, by founders inspired by the radical ideas of Jeremy Bentham, UCL was the first university institution to be established in London, and the first in England to be entirely secular and to admit students regardless of their religion. UCL also makes contested claims to being the third-oldest university in England[note 1] and the first to admit women.[note 2] In 1836, UCL became one of the two founding colleges of the University of London, which was granted a royal charter in the same year. It has grown through mergers, including with the Institute of Ophthalmology (in 1995), the Institute of Neurology (in 1997), the Royal Free Hospital Medical School (in 1998), the Eastman Dental Institute (in 1999), the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (in 1999), the School of Pharmacy (in 2012) and the Institute of Education (in 2014).UCL has its main campus in the Bloomsbury area of central London, with a number of institutes and teaching hospitals elsewhere in central London and satellite campuses at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford, east London and in Doha, Qatar. UCL is organised into 11 constituent faculties, within which there are over 100 departments, institutes and research centres. UCL operates several museums and collections in a wide range of fields, including the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology and the Grant Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy, and administers the annual Orwell Prize in political writing. In 2019/20, UCL had around 43,840 students and 16,400 staff (including around 7,100 academic staff and 840 professors) and had a total income of £1.54 billion, of which £468 million was from research grants and contracts. The university generates around £10 billion annually for the UK economy, primarily through the spread of its research and knowledge (£4 billion) and the impact of its own spending (£3 billion).UCL is a member of numerous academic organisations, including the Russell Group and the League of European Research Universities, and is part of UCL Partners, the world's largest academic health science centre. It is considered part of the "golden triangle" of research-intensive universities in southeast England. UCL has publishing and commercial activities including UCL Press, UCL Business and UCL Consultants.UCL has many notable alumni, including the respective "Fathers of the Nation" of India, Kenya and Mauritius, the founders of Ghana, modern Japan and Nigeria, the inventor of the telephone, and one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA. UCL academics discovered five of the naturally occurring noble gases, discovered hormones, invented the vacuum tube, and made several foundational advances in modern statistics. As of 2020, 34 Nobel Prize winners and three Fields medallists have been affiliated with UCL as alumni, faculty or researchers.
Network congestion often hinders the deployment of reserves needed to balance forecast errors during real-time operations. A pertinent idea to tackle this challenge involves adding deployment scenarios of spatial distributions of forecast errors as contingencies to the day-ahead problem. However, current approaches disregard the effect of grid characteristics and the day-ahead schedule on the induced congestion and, consequently, reserve deliverability. In this work, we formulate a two-stage adaptive robust optimization problem to jointly consider interactions between day-ahead and real-time operations and forecast errors. Using a column-and-constraint algorithm, we iteratively construct deployment scenarios by finding the worst-case forecast error for reserve deliverability. Simulations on the RTS-GMLC system show that adding these scenarios to the day-ahead problem significantly reduces the frequency of congestion-driven reserve undeliverability. Notably, the choice and number of scenarios dynamically adapts to the day-ahead schedule.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis remains the leading cause of death from a single infectious pathogen globally despite decades of effective chemotherapy. In 2024, an estimated 10·7 million people developed tuberculosis, including approximately 620 000 people living with HIV (PLHIV), and tuberculosis caused an estimated 1·23 million deaths overall, including approximately 150 000 deaths among PLHIV. Men accounted for more than half of the cases, and children represented a substantial burden, reflecting ongoing transmission and diagnostic gaps. Approximately a quarter of the world's population has been infected with M tuberculosis, with immunological evidence of previous or current infection. This population includes groups at increased risk of progression to tuberculosis disease, particularly those with recent infection, HIV, undernutrition, young age, or other clinical and social vulnerabilities. Following 3 years of COVID-19-related setbacks, global tuberculosis incidence declined modestly (1%) from 2023 to 2024 but remains higher than in 2020 and far off-track to meet the 2025 WHO End TB Strategy milestones. Case detection improved to 8·3 million notifications (78% of estimated incident cases), supported by expanded molecular diagnostics; however, prevalence surveys continue to reveal substantial proportions of bacteriologically confirmed but asymptomatic tuberculosis, highlighting persistent transmission and missed diagnoses. 30 high-burden countries accounted for 87% of cases, led by India, Indonesia, the Philippines, China, Pakistan, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Bangladesh. M tuberculosis-HIV co-infection remains a major driver of mortality in sub-Saharan Africa. Drug-resistant tuberculosis threatens progress: of 390 000 estimated multidrug-resistant or rifampicin-resistant tuberculosis cases in 2024, only 42% initiated treatment, although treatment success improved to 71%. Tuberculosis-preventive treatment reached 5·3 million people, including 58% of PLHIV and 25% of eligible household contacts, well below global targets. Persistent undernutrition, poverty, HIV, diabetes, smoking, alcohol use, air pollution, migration, and conflict continue to shape tuberculosis epidemiology. With financing at only 27% of global targets, accelerated prevention, proactive case finding, social protection, and sustained political commitment are essential to eliminate tuberculosis.
Solar energy is critical for achieving universal, affordable energy access. As solar energy becomes increasingly popular across the world, with uptake in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) growing significantly in recent years, how to deal with the waste from these products and systems is of high importance, to avoid an e-waste crisis. However, legislation and infrastructure tackling the end of life of solar e-waste is insufficient, especially in SSA. This paper addresses this limitation and argues for stronger legislation and implementation of end of life management. Policy and industry are both critical players in this process, drawing from experience in this field, we outline the current system in Kenya and make recommendations for a more comprehensive system.
In psychology there is a plethora of different measures and constructs. However, the literature also shows that many of these measures overlap and may even sometimes be redundant. Recognizing such overlap in measures is essential for consolidation and for moving the field forward. Accordingly, we suggest a role herein of the General Factor of Personality (GFP), which emerges from the correlations between specific personality dimensions and reflects a mix of desirable traits (e.g. being sociable, honest, and emotionally stable). It is argued and shown that the GFP is highly correlated with a wide range of psychological traits. We further postulate that this phenomenon provides a parsimonious way of looking at the overlap between many trait measures. This idea is discussed in light of the ongoing debate on the GFP in which some scholars suggest the general factor is substantive and relevant for understanding personality, whereas others consider it to solely reflect a measurement artifact. Irrespective of whether the substantive, artifact, or a mixed explanation of the GFP is adopted, overlooking the presence of a common general factor in psychological measures may, respectively, either impede the development of unifying theories of human behavior, or otherwise compromise measurement validity.
OBJECTIVES:This study aimed to investigate the efficacy and safety of filgotinib, a JAK1 preferential inhibitor, in patients with axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA). METHODS:The phase 3 OLINGUITO trial comprises 2 international, randomised, double-blind, placebo (PBO)-controlled studies. Patients with an established diagnosis of radiographic (r) or nonradiographic (nr) axSpA and an inadequate response/intolerance to ≥2 nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs were randomised 1:1 to filgotinib 200 mg or PBO once daily through week (W) 16 (double-blind period; stratified by high-sensitivity C-reactive protein [hs-CRP] level and prior biologic disease-modifying antirheumatic drug [bDMARD] use). After W16, patients received open-label filgotinib 200 mg through W52; patients ≥65 years and/or with prespecified risk factors received response-based dosing (100 or 200 mg). The primary (Assessment of SpondyloArthritis international Society ≥40% response [ASAS40 response]) and secondary efficacy endpoints were assessed at W16. Efficacy and safety were assessed through W52. RESULTS:At W16, the primary endpoint was met in both studies (ASAS40 response rates: r = axSpA [n = 258], 39.5% filgotinib vs 20.9% PBO [P = .001]; nr-axSpA [n = 237], 34.5% vs 17.8% [P = .003], respectively). ASAS40 improvements, irrespective of hs-CRP level/prior bDMARD use, were observed as early as W1. For secondary endpoints, significant improvements were seen in Axial Spondyloarthritis Disease Activity Score and Spondyloarthritis Research Consortium of Canada magnetic resonance imaging sacroiliac joint inflammation in both studies, and in Bath Ankylosing Spondylitis Functional Index and Ankylosing Spondylitis Quality of Life Questionnaire in patients with r-axSpA. Improvements with filgotinib were maintained/increased further through W52. Overall, 2 cases of myocardial infarction (PBO: n = 1; PBO-filgotinib: n = 1), 3 of herpes zoster (PBO-filgotinib), and 4 of malignancies (excluding nonmelanoma skin cancer; filgotinib: n = 3; PBO-filgotinib: n = 1) occurred. CONCLUSIONS:Across the whole spectrum of axSpA, filgotinib provided rapid and significant patient-relevant improvements in axSpA signs and symptoms and was well tolerated.
