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Submarine channels are key features for the transport of flow and nutrients into deep water. Previous studies of their morphology and channel evolution have treated these systems as abiotic, and therefore assume that physical processes are solely responsible for morphological development. Here, a unique dataset is uti-lised that includes spatial measurements around a channel bend that hosts active sediment gravity flows. The data include flow velocity and density, alongside bed grain size and channel- floor benthic macrofauna. Analysis of these parameters demonstrate that while physical processes control the broadest scale variations in sedimentation around and across the channel, benthic biology plays a criti-cal role in stabilising sediment and trapping fines. This leads to much broader mixed grain sizes than would be expected from purely abiotic sedimentation, and the maintenance of sediment beds in positions where all the sediment should be actively migrating. Given that previous work has also shown that submarine channels can be biological hotspots, then the present study suggests that benthic biology probably plays a key role in channel morphology and evolution, and that these need to be considered both in the modern and when considering examples preserved in the rock record.

The African Light Source (AfLS) project is now almost eight years old. This article assesses the history, current context and future of the project. There is by now considerable momentum in building the user community, including deep training, facilitating access to current facilities, growing the scientific output, scientific networks and growing the local laboratory-scale research infrastructure. The Conceptual Design Report for the AfLS is in its final editing stages. This document specifies the socio-economic and scientific rationales and the technical aspects amongst others. The AfLS is supported by many national and Pan-African scientific professional bodies and voluntary associates across many scientific disciplines, and there are stakeholders throughout the continent and beyond. The current roadmap phases have expanded to include national and Pan-African level conversations with policy makers through new Strategic Task Force groups. The document summarizes this progress and discusses the future of the project.

In this article, I discuss the various contributions to this volume. Vigh’s (2009) notion of social navigation allowed me to bring together the ways in which the various contributors capture the discursive and practical agency displayed by the studied social actors in each site. Even though most of the researchers draw on the concept of ‘agency’, as introduced by Ahearn (2001), in order to analyse their data, some of them invoke varied definitions to capture different forms of agency: individual but also collective. The methodological decisions made by most of the contributors prove that qualitative procedures and methods continue to be those most suitable for capturing the complexities around what counts as ‘agentive actions and agentive discourses’ in the various contexts studied. It is only by interacting with the participants of our research and spending time with them during our fieldwork that we can make sense of the life stories they recount and the decisions they make under the particular circumstances in which they (try to) live.

The ‘Dona’ field is located in the shallow offshore Coastal Swamp depobelt, western Niger Delta. The field contains multiple, stacked shallow-marine reservoir intervals of Miocene to early Pliocene age in the Agbada Formation. The area surrounding the field is characterised by a series of synthetic, listric normal faults that strike north-northwest to south-southeast and dip southwest. These faults show stratigraphic thickening in their hangingwalls, indicating growth, and are associated with the development of rollover anticlines, which define the trap configuration of the ‘Dona’ field. Spatio-temporal variations in stratigraphic expansion indicate that growth faulting started in more landward (northeasterly) locations and migrated progressively basinward (southwestward). These variations are consistent with growth faulting due to gravity-induced shale diapirism, potentially driven by overall progradation of the Niger Delta. Core and wireline-logs from a representative reservoir interval contain a facies assemblage and stratigraphic architecture developed under a mixed-influence depositional process regime, which was dominated by wave processes but influenced by tidal processes. Wave-dominated shoreface deposits occur in a series of coarsening- and shallowing-upward parasequences that are laterally continuous over the reservoir but are locally erosionally truncated by fining-upward tidal channel-fill deposits. The mixed-influence process regime may reflect spatial variations in the dominance of wave, tide and fluvial processes, as in the modern Niger Delta, and/or temporal variations between a regressive, wave-dominated regime and a transgressive, tide-dominated regime. Sedimentological heterogeneities are present across a range of scales, and their distribution reflects the mixed-influence depositional process regime.

As dialogue agents become increasingly human-like in their performance, it is imperative that we develop effective ways to describe their behaviour in high-level terms without falling into the trap of anthropomorphism. In this paper, we foreground the concept of role-play. Casting dialogue agent behaviour in terms of role-play allows us to draw on familiar folk psychological terms, without ascribing human characteristics to language models they in fact lack. Two important cases of dialogue agent behaviour are addressed this way, namely (apparent) deception and (apparent) self-awareness.

In shallow water off the coast of West Sussex in England lies the wreck of a French built, English warship, lost in 1706. The remains represent a hybrid of French construction and armament with English organisation and adaption. This paper brings the site’s investigations up to date, discussing new records relating to the structure and internal layout of the main site, as well as the discovery of several new areas, rich in guns and other artefacts.

Abstract Ukraine is currently experiencing the largest human displacement crisis in the world. However, armed conflict that started in 2014 had already displaced nearly 1.8 million people in Ukraine, resulting in the largest internally displaced population in Europe. Although ethnically and culturally similar to the local population, Ukrainian Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) encounter severe economic, housing, and social challenges, as well as residual trauma from violence. In this study we examine the extent to which the subjective well-being (SWB) of IDPs differs from locals who were not displaced. We explore whether the difference in subjective well-being between IDPs and locals is due to economic hardship, inadequate housing, and/or weak social support. Using a unique survey conducted in 2018 and OLS regression methods, we find a sizable gap in SWB between IDPs and locals. The gap shrinks after accounting for economic and housing status, and support from local networks. Measures of loss in housing and social networks additionally account for the gap. However, none of the factors we measure can account for the difference between locals and IDPs who reported only leaving due to violence, pointing to the enduring impact of trauma on SWB.