Highly selective U-bend fiber optic glucose sensor utilizing glucose oxidase (GOD) enzyme as a potential bioreceptor for visible and near-infrared regime operation

ABSTRACT On October 7, 2023, the attack orchestrated by Hamas against Israel and the subsequent wave of reactions within neo-Nazi accelerationist circles provide a privileged vantage point from which to examine the convergences, tensions, and limits of ideological proximity between the extreme right and Islamist movements. Drawing on a qualitative methodology based on the analysis of publications from Telegram channels and accelerationist websites, we propose a tripartite typology of reactions: an apologetic position asserting ideological and tactical convergence with Hamas; an opportunistic position that frames the episode as a temporary alliance grounded in the identification of a common enemy; and an absolutist position that rejects any rapprochement with radical Islam, despite the paradoxical appropriation of jihadist aesthetic codes. We argue that these dynamics reflect less a genuine form of cooperation than competitive logics among extremist social movements, in which the pursuit of symbolic power and identity differentiation prevails, shaped by the visibility regimes specific to digital platforms. These findings illuminate the contemporary ideological plasticity of extremist ecosystems and call for a reconsideration of how transversal extremist configurations are analyzed in an era marked by the global circulation of radical aesthetics.

ABSTRACT This study conceptualises the governance strategies of Xiaohongshu (RedNote), a Chinese e-commerce social media platform, as clustered governance: organising select creators into platform-managed, topic-based groups and providing exclusive support to curate content and incentivise competition. Drawing on ethnographic observation, interviews with influencers and industry stakeholders, and autoethnography, the research argues that clustered governance offers an illusion of community that collectively manages influencers, whose value is measured through obedience and alignment with platform directives. Xiaohongshu rewards influencers with manually assigned traffic, enacting curatorial power through a dual visibility regime of algorithmic and human curation. This visibility regime also signals an editorial turn in social media content curation. Through rule-based guidance, traffic allocation, and gamified management, influencer groups effectively shape content norms and labour practices, curtailing creator autonomy and creative agency under the guise of community participation and reward. Through the conceptualisation of clustered governance, this study offers a new lens to understand the enduring importance of human curation in platform governance, showing how group management advances the platform’s objectives and shapes influencers’ content creation and labour practices.

ABSTRACT This paper examines illicit domestic cannabis cultivation as a form of urban infrastructural adaptation and informal atmospheric regulation. It introduces the concept of domesticating agritech to describe how cultivation technologies are repurposed within ordinary dwellings to produce controlled microclimates for plant growth. Clandestine home cultivation involves covertly transforming residential space into climate-controlled agronomic infrastructure, integrating LED lighting, hydroponic systems, and automated environmental controls. Operating in legal gray zones, these practices bypass formal agricultural and planning regulations while reconfiguring housing as decentralized sites of production. The result is a distributed form of urban agronomy in which households actively modulate indoor climates to sustain illicit crops while minimizing detection. Engaging debates on urban informality and infrastructure, the paper shows how these practices reshape domestic space, intensify energy use, and complicate regimes of urban governance and regulatory visibility. It argues that illicit cultivation reveals a wider process through which atmospheric control is being internalized within the home, extending the infrastructuralization of climate into everyday urban life.

This article analyzes how queer art produces place within the in-between spaces of the city. It takes as its point of departure the argument that the gay body, when activated through artistic practices in public space, operates as a sensitive agent capable of challenging regimes of circulation, visibility, and urban memory. Drawing on a dialogue between performance studies, geographies of sexualities, and the political philosophy of aesthetics, the text examines how such interventions establish sensitive economies of the gaze, transforming functional displacements into aesthetic-political events and reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible in the city. The article argues that place does not precede the artwork but rather emerges from the sensitive exchange between art, body, and public, generating experiences that challenge normative protocols of appearance. It further contends that these practices produce non-monumental memories, capable of reinscribing dissident presences in territories conceived for transience. The conclusion suggests that queer art does not occupy the city but sensibly reprograms it, making the gay body a vector for the rewriting of the urban common.

Transference, a notion central to the field of psychoanalysis, is here displaced in order to think of urban experience as a sensitive field traversed by body, memory, and space. The essay approaches transference as a relational dynamic that becomes bodily actualized in contact with the city—not as an interpretive mechanism, but as a lived event. In dialogue with body studies, urban thought, contemporary artistic practices, and phenomenological approaches to experience, the text affirms the body as archive and method, a place where the city settles, insists, and reinscribes itself. The city is understood as an active field of forces in which historical and normative survivals emerge as atmospheres, frictions, and perceptual displacements. Public art and urban performance appear as operators that sustain this field, reorganizing regimes of visibility and presence. An analysis of actions by Desvio Coletivo demonstrates how the collective body produces a situated urban writing, articulating urban transference with the notion of urban corpography as a living script of experience in the city.

Purpose This paper aims to examine children’s and adolescents’ “Get Ready With Me” beauty videos on TikTok as a visibility-driven form of consumer socialization. Guided by four research questions, the authors analyze how promotional formats shape engagement, how performer profiles align with these formats, how adult participation structures brand display and which themes organize their narratives. They show how creators strategically perform authenticity within algorithmic visibility regimes, where metrics recalibrate the boundaries between play, labor and commerce in youth culture. Design/methodology/approach This study adopts a mixed-methods design integrating quantitative engagement analysis and qualitative interpretive inquiry. A corpus of 198 TikTok videos featuring children and adolescent creators was examined. Non-parametric statistical tests (Kolmogorov−Smirnov, Mann−Whitney U and Friedman) were used to identify engagement disparities between branded and organic content, while grounded theory techniques guided the thematic construction of emergent narrative and socio-cultural patterns. Findings The results indicate that authentic or non-sponsored content elicits higher engagement than overtly commercial posts, demonstrating the performative premium for authenticity within algorithmic economies. Four principal dynamics were identified: the aesthetic codification of selfhood through beauty routines; the normalization of aspirational labor among minors; the transformation of parental mediation into a participatory promotional practice; and the rearticulation of childhood as a commercially productive social identity. Originality/value This study identifies two mechanisms linking platform capitalism to youth beauty culture: a disclosure penalty, whereby overtly paid collaborations generate lower engagement than seemingly organic routines, and parental promotional mediation, where adult presence correlates with increased product display. These dynamics show how algorithmic visibility rewards commercially legible authenticity, positioning youth-branded participation within regulatory grey zones. The findings support child-centered platform governance and advertising frameworks that address not only explicit sponsorships but also routine-based, family-mediated, quasi-organic promotional practices.

Realizing high-quality-factor (high-Q) plasmonic resonances in the visible regime is critical for enhancing light-matter interactions and advancing biochemical sensing. However, traditional localized surface plasmon resonances (LSPRs) typically suffer from broad spectral linewidths due to severe radiative damping. In this work, we propose a simple two-dimensional symmetric gold nanohole-array metasurface that supports a symmetry-protected bound state in the continuum (SP-BIC) at normal incidence. By introducing extrinsic symmetry breaking via oblique incidence, this non-radiative dark state is successfully transformed into an observable high-Q quasi-BIC Fano resonance. Cartesian multipole decomposition reveals that this sharp mode (λ≈688 nm) is predominantly driven by a tightly confined Magnetic Dipole (MD) excitation, which drastically suppresses radiative leakage compared to the highly damped Electric Dipole (ED)-dominated LSPR. Consequently, the quasi-BIC mode exhibits an ultra-narrow spectral linewidth (FWHM≈17.4 nm). While its bulk sensitivity (236.9 nm/RIU) is slightly lower than that of the LSPR mode, the exceptionally sharp resonance yields a remarkably low Limit of Detection (LOD) of 7.35×10−3 RIU, achieving a nearly five-fold improvement over the traditional LSPR. Furthermore, the quasi-BIC mode maintains an outstanding Figure of Merit (FOM up to ∼19.7 RIU−1) across the entire sensing range. By eliminating the need for complex asymmetric nanofabrication, this robust angle-tuned design strategy provides a highly promising platform for the development of high-resolution, low-cost optical biosensors.

This work presents a detailed first-principles investigation of the cobalt-based half-Heusler alloy CoVAs. Structural optimizations confirm the α-type crystal structure with a ferromagnetic phase to be energetically stable. Electronic band structure and density of states (DOS) calculations affirm its half-metallic character, exhibiting a spin-polarized band gap of 1.09 eV. The magnetic moment aligns with the Slater-Pauling (SP) rule. Mechanical analysis indicates brittle and auxetic behaviour with high stiffness. Thermodynamic analysis across a range of temperatures and pressures highlights the alloy's resilience. Optical response reveals strong absorption in the visible and ultraviolet (UV) regimes along with pronounced dielectric and plasmonic features. Electronic transport analysis yields a significantly tunable thermo-electric figure of merit (ZT). Altogether, the results establish CoVAs as a promising multi-functional material suited for advanced technological applications.

This article reconceptualizes malāmat not as a marginal Sufi discipline but as a distinct ethical paradigm that redefines the relationship between selfhood, action, and moral legitimacy. Situating the discussion within late-modern conditions shaped by technological mediation, algorithmic evaluation, and regimes of visibility, it argues that ethical value has increasingly been externalized through performance, recognition, and quantifiable outputs. Against this background, malāmat is examined as an alternative ethical model grounded in inward vigilance, relational practice, and the deliberate concealment of virtue. Drawing on early Malāmatī texts—particularly al-Sulamī—and their later elaboration in Ibn Arabī, the study demonstrates that ethical subjectivity is constituted through continuous self-critique and responsibility before the Divine rather than through public validation. The argument is further developed through a comparative engagement with Aristotle, Kant, Kierkegaard, and MacIntyre. It shows that, unlike these frameworks, malāmat sustains ethical life as an ongoing tension rather than a state of equilibrium or a universalizable norm. The article also highlights the role of classical Turkish and Persian poetry—especially Fuzûlî, Nâbî, and Şeyh Gâlib—in articulating malāmat as a lived ethical sensibility. Ultimately, the study proposes malāmat as a critical counter-model to contemporary regimes of visibility, offering an ethics grounded in inwardness, concealment, and irreducible personal responsibility.

Hindi cinema and Hindi-language television have historically occupied a significant position within Indian media culture, shaping national imaginaries and circulating India’s cultural soft power through theatrical exhibition and broadcast television. Though it has been one of the most popular forms of Indian screen culture; Indian cinema in its entirety, has maintained a sustained global presence—from the international recognition of Bengali cinema through filmmakers such as Satyajit Ray, particularly with Pather Panchali (1955), to the contemporary global circulation of regionally rooted blockbusters such as RRR (Rajamouli, 2022) and Kantara (Shetty, 2022), signalling the continuing international prominence of Indian screen cultures across linguistic and industrial contexts. This paper examines how contemporary Hindi web series and OTT cinema reconfigure India’s long-standing soft power legacy by extending it into the domain of streaming diplomacy. While recent pan-Indian and transnational films—such as Baahubali (Rajamouli, 2015), RRR , and All We Imagine as Light (Kapadia, 2024) continue to play a significant role in reshaping India’s global cultural presence through theatrical circulation and international festival circuits, this study deliberately narrows its focus to Hindi screen culture . It argues that this transformation is marked by the adoption of technical, aesthetic, and narrative strategies aligned with western, platform-driven production cultures, while simultaneously revising earlier Hindi screen traditions grounded in popular aesthetics and cultural specificity. Rather than emerging solely from creative innovation, these shifts are shaped by the structural pressures of platform capitalism, algorithmic governance, and market-oriented regimes of global visibility that increasingly mediate how India is projected on international platforms. Through textual analysis of Call Me Bae (D’Cunha, 2024) and Ctrl (Motwane, 2024), the paper explores how selective Hindi-language OTT texts focus individuality, postfeminist subjectivities, and anxieties surrounding social media, artificial intelligence, and digitally mediated intimacy. These narratives mark a departure from the collectivist ethos, melodramatic modes, and culturally embedded formats historically associated with Hindi cinema and television, even as they retain recognisably ‘ desi ’ narrative frames to ensure local resonance. Hindi screen culture has long been approached through a critical lens, often characterised as ahistorical, escapist, excessively melodramatic, and shaped by fragmented modes of production. However, the emergence of streaming platforms has significantly reoriented this landscape. OTT ecosystems have enabled greater narrative risk, more coherent production logics, and the sustained exploration of niche themes that were previously marginal within mainstream Hindi cinema and television. Freed from the constraints of box-office imperatives and broadcast scheduling, Hindi web series and OTT films increasingly engage with globally resonant concerns—such as gender politics, digital labour, surveillance, and urban precarity—while remaining embedded in local cultural idioms. In this sense, streaming does not simply correct earlier limitations of Hindi screen culture; it reorganises its aesthetic and ideological priorities, allowing melodrama and spectacle to be reworked into longer, more reflexive, and internationally legible forms of storytelling. Situating these developments within the framework of streaming diplomacy, the paper argues that Hindi-language OTT content continues to generate media-driven soft power by enabling culturally specific stories to circulate globally through platform infrastructures. The international recognition of Delhi Crime (Mehta, 2019), which won the International Emmy Award in 2020, demonstrates how Hindi-centric narratives can achieve global legitimacy. Its circulation alongside globally successful platform originals such as Stranger Things (Duffer Brothers, 2016) and Dark (Odar and Friese, 2017–2020) enhances visibility while subtly regulating form and content through platform norms. The paper concludes that Hindi OTT cinema and web series constitute an ambivalent cultural space in which India’s soft power is amplified and new representational possibilities particularly around gender, individuality, and digital life emerge, even as creative practices remain shaped by platform imperatives and global market logics.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine gendered and intersectional patterns of visibility in all biographical entries featured on the Italian edition of Wikipedia Main Page (2014–2024). This paper addresses a major gap in Wikipedia research, as, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no prior work has analysed how front-page curation in the Italian edition allocates symbolic visibility across gender, nationality, ethnicity, language or occupation. Design/methodology/approach A decade-long data set of 4,310 front-page biographies was collected from arquivo.pt and daily captures, reconciled with Wikidata properties (gender, nationality, native language, ethnicity, religion, occupation and birth/death dates) and analysed using SQL queries, Universal Decimal Classification-based occupational aggregation and visual analytics. Findings The results of this study show extreme and persistent gender imbalance (86% men; 0.04% non-binary/trans), strong recency bias and a pronounced Euro–North American concentration. Women are underrepresented across all periods, countries and professions; gaps peak in the Middle Ages (7.84:1) and remain high in contemporary figures (5.74:1). Public-facing occupations dominate, particularly writers, footballers and politicians. Metadata incompleteness in ethnicity, language and religion restricts deeper intersectional examination. Research limitations/implications Incomplete sociocultural metadata constrain intersectional granularity; future work should improve Wikidata coverage and cross-edition comparisons. Practical implications Results inform editors, policymakers and Wikimedia initiatives seeking to rebalance gender and cultural representation on high-visibility interfaces. Social implications Front-page visibility shapes public perceptions of cultural importance; current patterns reinforce systemic inequalities and historical androcentrism. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first systematic, longitudinal, intersectional analysis of the Italian edition of Wikipedia Main Page. This paper conceptualises the Main Page as a socio-technical gatekeeping device and demonstrates how visibility regimes reproduce entrenched cultural and gendered hierarchies.

Abstract Revealing deep insides of light–matter interactions in two-dimensional transition-metal dichalcogenides under resonant excitation is essential for next-generation nanoscale optoelectronics, valley photonics, and polarisation-sensitive devices. Among these dichalcogenides, MoS 2 monolayer shows especially distinct vibrational and optical behaviour under resonant excitation. In this work, a comprehensive first-principle Density Functional Theory (DFT) investigation focusing resonant Raman response of a vacancy-induced MoS 2 monolayer √13 × √13R13.9° supercell with 37 atoms has been performed using Quantum Espresso software. The phonon modes and Raman spectra at commonly used lasers viz: 445, 488, 532, and 635 nm, that mimic real experimental conditions have been computed. This reveals strong excitation-energy dependent enhancement of specific phonon modes linked to excitonic transitions in the visible regime. Furthermore, the calculated Raman tensors under in-plane and out-of-plane polarized light show a pronounced anisotropic response, highlighting the selective activation and suppression of A 1g , E 2 g 1 , and zone-folded low-symmetry modes. This polarization dependence uncovers the interplay between lattice symmetry, excitonic resonance, and electron–phonon coupling in the supercell. This work demonstrates that resonant Raman spectroscopy of large MoS 2 supercells offers a powerful way to detect subtle structural effects such as long-wavelength distortions, twist-induced symmetry breaking, zone folding induced activation of normally inactive Raman or silent phonon modes and provide a deeper insight into defect like and long-wavelength phonon contributions. These findings open up new possibilities for designing polarization-sensitive and strain-adaptive two-dimensional photonic devices.

This article examines how corporate-sponsored queer visibility reshapes queer politics in London, UK. Drawing on discourse analysis of two advertising campaigns, Sensodyne's ‘Life's Too Short’ and Harrods' ‘Set Your Stage’, I show how racialised queer visibility is increasingly mobilised through market logics that link happiness, authenticity and anti-normativity to productivity and consumption. Rather than assimilating queer subjects through sameness or respectability, these campaigns celebrate queer difference. This marks a mutation of homonormativity, which I term extraordinary homonormativity, a formation in which queer anti-normative ideas are no longer positioned outside of homonormative inclusion but are valorised as a market asset. Ultimately, these regimes of corporate-sponsored visibility depoliticise queer struggles and detach them from broader movements: raising urgent questions about the political limits of visibility under neoliberalism.

This paper examines the evolving relationship between visual culture, image education, and post-digital innovation, situating these themes within the broader framework of contemporary educational theory and practice. Building on reflections developed through IMG Journal over its first five years, the contribution argues that visual culture has become a key epistemic domain for understanding how learning, knowledge construction, and subject formation are reshaped by digital and algorithmic environments. The article advances an epistemological redefinition of visual culture, understood not merely as the study of images, but as an inquiry into visuality, regimes of visibility, and the socio-technical conditions that organise seeing. Against this background, the paper identifies three interconnected trajectories for future pedagogical development: image ecologies, which frame visual environments as spaces requiring care, critical distance, and responsibility; immersive instructional design, which repositions immersive technologies as tools for meaningful and reflective learning rather than spectacular consumption; and computational aesthetics, which interrogate the impact of generative artificial intelligence on creativity, authorship, and learning. Through these perspectives, the contribution proposes a model of post-digital visual pedagogy that integrates critical awareness, creative practice, and ethical responsibility. The paper concludes by arguing that education must reclaim a generative and mediating role, enabling learners to navigate contemporary visual environments critically and to inhabit the tensions between human agency, technological systems, imagination, and power.

This paper reflects on the first ten issues of IMG Journal – International and Interdisciplinary Journal on Image, Imagery and Imagination as a coherent intellectual project that has progressively articulated a critical genealogy of the image as a form of knowledge, cultural mediation, and situated social practice. Rather than offering a merely chronological or thematic overview, the article adopts a dual analytical perspective: a Status Quaestionis, reconstructing the epistemological foundations and internal coherence of the journal through its editorials (2019–2024), and a Potentialitas, aimed at identifying the generative trajectories that this corpus prefigures for future research. The analysis highlights three interconnected directions that structure the journal’s evolving agenda: an ecological perspective on visuality, which frames images as epistemic and operative environments embedded in material, technical, and infrastructural conditions; a reformulation of educational and project-based devices, in which images function as cognitive, relational, and participatory environments within learning and design processes; and a critical reflection on computational aesthetics and artificial intelligence, addressing the transformation of authorship, creativity, and regimes of visibility in algorithmically mediated cultures. Through these axes, the paper argues that IMG Journal operates as an open theoretical laboratory, capable of crossing disciplinary boundaries while maintaining analytical rigour, and of translating critical genealogies into operative perspectives for research, education, and cultural practice.

We demonstrate that broadband Mueller-matrix polarimetric imaging in the mid-infrared reveals a previously unexplored polarization regime in which non-chiral, strongly scattering materials exhibit pronounced pseudo-circular dichroism (PCD). Using a single optical platform, a TiO2-dispersed PVC sheet was investigated over wavelengths from 532 nm to 3750 nm. In the visible regime, the Mueller matrix is dominated by depolarization and cannot be physically interpreted by conventional decomposition schemes. In the near-infrared, the Lu-Chipman decomposition becomes valid, and the response is governed by linear birefringence and dichroism. In contrast, in the mid-infrared region around 3750 nm, pronounced enhancement of the m14 and m41 elements is observed, indicating an asymmetric transmission between right- and left-circularly polarized light despite the absence of molecular chirality. To elucidate the physical origin of this PCD, we develop a physical model that incorporates molecular linear birefringence with weak linear dichroism and diffraction-induced linear diattenuation arising from flow-aligned TiO2 microstructures. The analytical expression reveals that PCD emerges only when finite birefringence, finite diattenuation anisotropy, and misalignment of their optical axes coexist. Numerical visualizations based directly on this expression reproduce the observed dependencies on retardation and relative axis angle. These results establish mid-infrared Mueller-matrix imaging as a distinct observation regime and identify PCD as what is believed to be a new contrast mechanism for probing structural anisotropy in non-chiral, strongly scattering materials.

ABSTRACT The internationalisation of higher education in Latin America has increasingly incorporated internationalisation-at-home initiatives, among which Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) has become central. Often framed as a democratising strategy for fostering intercultural competence, these initiatives operate within platform-mediated environments shaped by symbolic hierarchies, technological inequalities, and regimes of professional visibility. This article examines how whiteness – understood not as a phenotypic attribute but as an ethos of modernity and legitimation – is performed within digitally mediated intercultural encounters. The study analyses a tri-national COIL experience involving communication students from private universities in Peru, Mexico, and Colombia, conducted through the professional networking platform LinkedIn. Using a mixed-methods approach, the research combines survey data from 119 students with qualitative analysis of 15 group-based digital self-presentation artefacts. Findings indicate that technological capital functions as a key symbolic divider, privileging visibility linked to technical fluency and professional respectability. A dissonance emerges between students’ declared commitments to intercultural openness and their interactional practices, which remain limited and exhibition-oriented. Cultural difference is frequently articulated through depoliticised and affectively safe repertoires, notably gastronomy. The article argues that digital internationalisation reconfigures interculturality as a regulated and aspirational practice aligned with global professional norms.

Harnessing metasurface solar absorbers for high-efficiency solar absorption: Review of design, mechanisms, and challenges

ABSTRACT The synergy between metasurfaces and non‐volatile phase change materials (PCMs) has created many reconfigurable photonic devices for applications in optical memory, optical computing, and optical communications. But these advances have been limited to the infrared wavelengths due to the high loss of PCMs in the visible regime. Here, we demonstrate a nonvolatile visible metasurface that is electrically reconfigurable using wide bandgap PCM Sb 2 S 3 . Our device supports a resonant mode at 610 nm, a wavelength largely under‐explored for PCM‐based metasurfaces. By incorporating only a 20 nm thick layer of Sb 2 S 3 , we experimentally demonstrate a resonance tuning range of 16 nm. Reversible switching of the metasurface is accomplished in situ using a carefully engineered, ultrathin doped silicon micro‐heater. Our work paves the way for integrating PCMs into visible‐frequency systems, particularly for human‐centric applications such as augmented and virtual reality displays.