Villanova University

All Quiet on the Luxury Front: How and When Sustainability Labels Influence Purchase Behavior

ABSTRACT As luxury brands launch sustainability initiatives and products, they face significant challenges, including the need to effectively communicate their practices to consumers. The current research draws on semiotics theory to explore how and when distinct types of sustain...

Membrane behavior and diffusion in bentonite for different anions

Bentonite clay is widely used in engineered barriers, such as geosynthetic clay liners (GCLs), to safely contain wastes and chemicals. In addition to low hydraulic conductivity and diffusion coefficients, bentonite has been shown to exhibit membrane behavior (anion restriction) w...

Strategic Audit Redesign in the GenAI and Agentic AI Era: Safeguarding Talent and Elevating Professional Judgment

The rapid integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and emerging agentic AI systems is reshaping the audit profession, with significant implications for workforce development, audit methodologies, and human–AI collaboration. Although public narratives often depict...

Antimicrobial effectiveness within a new paradigm of infrastructure

Antimicrobials form the backbone of modern medicine and represent a foundational pillar of economic productivity. Overuse and misuse have led to a rising trend of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), depleting the efficacy of existing antimicrobials, necessitating conservation through...

Beyond Entropy: Organization as the Preservation of Structural Identity

This work introduces a framework in which organization is defined as the degree to which identity-defining relationships among system states are preserved under transformation or perturbation. Existing descriptors such as energy, entropy, mutual information, and divergence measur...

Phosphonium-based disinfectants are as effective as best-in-class quaternary ammonium compounds in the eradication of established biofilms in antibiotic-resistant bacteria

ABSTRACT Disinfectants play a crucial role in infection prevention and control, acting as our first line of defense against pathogenic bacteria. Despite biofilms being a major contributor to recalcitrant infections, the development of novel disinfectants often focuses on bacteria...