Mathematical reasoning, often treated solely as an abstract cognitive achievement, may emerge within the embodied, technical, and socially transmitted practices of material production. Here, we examine the relationship between mathematical ideas and material culture through a cross-cultural study of fibre technologies, including netting, basketry, and loom weaving. By analysing the operations involved in fibre crafts, we identify a range of actions that correspond to foundational numerical and geometric concepts, including grouping, ordering, pairing, counting, sequencing, memory, cardinality, and proportional reasoning. The material properties of threads, knots, and looms enable quantities and spatial relations to be stabilised, visualised, and manipulated, thereby externalising and scaffolding both arithmetic and geometric thought.Across techniques, these operations appear in nested and overlapping ways: the iterative loops of netting, the geometric constraints and symmetries of basketry, and the binary and algebraic structures of loom weaving each reorganise shared procedures into increasingly structured systems without implying a linear progression. Linguistic and symbolic evidence further suggests that weaving has shaped the conceptual vocabulary of mathematics, serving as a source of conceptual metaphors for space, time, and cosmology, and as a medium through which patterned knowledge is memorised and transmitted.Drawing on evidence from anthropology, linguistics, and cognitive science, we argue that fibre technologies afford and stabilise mathematical ideas, situating the development of mathematics within processes of embodied action and cultural evolution. Textile practices thus provide a bridge between cognition and culture, showing how mathematical knowledge is enacted, materialised, and historically accumulated through craft.
Nanopores widely developed in shale reservoirs can alter confined fluid phase behavior and affect CO2 based recovery and storage processes. Existing studies have mainly emphasized pore size effects, whereas the role of pore wall wettability is often treated qualitatively or indirectly. In this study, a modified Peng Robinson equation of state framework is developed to evaluate the coupled influence of pore size and representative pore wall wettability on confined phase behavior and miscibility. A dimensionless confinement factor is introduced by combining normalized pore radius with a contact angle dependent term, and a semi empirical critical property shift correlation is incorporated into the PR-EOS parameter correction. The confined phase equilibrium calculation is further coupled with the multiple mixing cell method to estimate minimum miscibility pressure. The model is compared with published saturation pressure data for ethane, propane, and butane in mesoporous materials, showing reasonable agreement within the investigated pore size and wettability range. Model predictions suggest that smaller pores and lower contact angles lead to larger apparent shifts in critical temperature and pressure, while the corrections weaken as pore size increases or the surface becomes less wetting. Under the present correction framework, CH4 exhibits larger predicted critical property deviations than CO2 under the same pore size and contact angle conditions. For a representative Eagle Ford condensate composition, pore size and representative pore wall wettability may affect vapor liquid composition redistribution, including the CH4 fraction in the vapor phase and the heavy component fraction in the liquid phase. The predicted MMP increases with contact angle and decreases with decreasing pore size, while higher CO2 content in the injection gas reduces both MMP and its sensitivity to wettability. This work provides an engineering thermodynamic framework for assessing model predicted confinement and wettability effects in shale nanopores, with potential relevance to CO2 enhanced recovery and storage applications.
The social care sector across the globe is increasingly witnessing customer mistreatment incidents that pose significant personal and work-related challenges for frontline employees. Extant research suggests that human resource management (HRM) can be instrumental in extending support to the frontline to overcome the adversities of such mistreatment. In this study, we first develop a comprehensive account of the types of customer mistreatment prevalent in social care. Then, drawing on psychological contract theory, we outline the frontline's expectations of support from HRM practices to deal with such incidents. We further elaborate on gaps in social care that inhibit extending such support through HRM practices to the frontline and establish how the HR co-creation approach can be utilized to plug these gaps. In this multistage qualitative study, we collect data in three stages from 51 frontline employees and 15 HR professionals working in the social care sector who have witnessed customer mistreatment. Based on our study's findings, we propose a novel framework called "FRESH against mistreatment" (Frontline Expectations for Support from HRM), which can aid HR professionals in identifying expectations, gaps, and possibilities for extending support through HRM practices to the frontline in social care to handle incidents of customer mistreatment.
Urbanisation is a globally increasing phenomenon with diverse impacts on biodiversity. Interest in how urbanisation affects raptors is growing because, as top predators, they can be used as bioindicators for ecosystem functioning and sentinels for environmental change. However, a comprehensive synthesis detailing the global-scale impact of urban-related sensory and risk factors on nocturnal raptors (i.e. owls) is lacking. In this review, we examined the literature to identify such factors and to outline their association with behavioural and ecological traits of owls living in urban environments. Overall, we show that several urban-related sensory and risk factors affect owls, with vehicle collisions on roads being the most widely documented across species. Conversely, sensory pollution remains poorly investigated, which is surprising given that nocturnal and acoustic hunters, such as owls, might be severely impacted by artificial light at night (ALAN) and anthropogenic noise. We also highlight a research gap on this topic from the global south, where urbanisation is rapidly increasing. Importantly, we show that roads and sensory pollutants are associated in contrasting ways with many owl behavioural and ecological traits, such as hunting and habitat use. We argue that the interplay among roads, noise and ALAN influences how owls’ prey species use roads, which may turn areas near roads into ecological traps. The severity of their impacts may depend on the intensity and type of anthropogenic noise and artificial lights along roads. Further research in this direction will have important implications for the conservation of owls in urban environments.
The Greek peninsula lies at the intersection of major atmospheric circulation systems, making it a key location for reconstructing past climate variability in the Eastern Mediterranean. In this study, we present a new high-resolution multi-proxy speleothem record from Hermes Cave, located on the shoulder of the Corinth Rift in southern Greece. Stalagmite ZCG1 grew during two distinct intervals (similar to 123-98 ka and similar to 36-7 ka), separated by a pronounced hiatus of similar to 62 ka. We combined 230Th/U dating, stable isotope (delta O-18, delta C-13) analyses and trace-element (Sr/Ca) ratios to reconstruct climatic and hydrologic changes from the latter part of the Last Interglacial through to the Holocene. The early part of the record documents humid conditions followed by a long-term trend towards higher delta O-18 and delta C-13 values, pointing to progressive aridification that culminated in growth cessation near 98 ka. Growth resumed during MIS 3 under initially dry conditions that gradually became wetter towards the Holocene, with millennial-scale variability coinciding with Heinrich events and the Last Glacial Maximum. The Holocene section of the record documents a sustained humid phase, with several distinct episodes of reduced effective moisture, most notably during the 8.2 ka event. Comparison with marine sediment cores from the Gulf of Corinth highlights a strong coupling between regional hydroclimate, vegetation cover, and sediment flux into the marine environment. This study demonstrates that stalagmites from Hermes Cave provide a robust terrestrial complement to offshore records, offering critical insights into the timing, mechanisms and regional expression of Late Quaternary climate variability in the Eastern Mediterranean. (c) 2026 The Author(s). Journal of Quaternary Science Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
