Although the representation of women in science and research has improved significantly over the past few years, women are still far from enjoying the same presence and visibility as their male colleagues. This article depicts the current situation by providing recent data, and it explains why more efforts are still needed. It introduces key concepts that are important for a better understanding of the situation of women in science. Some special attention is given to the particular state of affairs of female scientists in the former communist countries. Finally, the article introduces networking activities as a key tool for strengthening women’s position in the world of science and research. It presents the main findings of a recent study on women’s engagement in international research networks, which proved to have tangible positive career implications for the researchers involved. Thus, the article calls for further efforts to encourage female scientists, both senior and junior, to actively engage in research networking activities in order to shape their profiles, strengthen their position and contribute their expertise to international research.

This paper examines the potential impact of East–West migration of talent on the innovative capital and hence the long-run growth prospects in Eastern sending countries. Complementing previous studies, we examine the impact of high-skill migration not only on the formation of human capital, but also consider migration’s impact on knowledge capital in the sending countries. In line with previous studies, we find that, in the short- to medium-term, high-skill migration strictly reduces national innovative capital and hence increases the gap between East and West. However, these effects might be mitigated by factors such as reinforced education of workers, productive investment of remittances, return migration and increased knowledge transfer. Given that the emigration of highly skilled labour affects human capital differently than it does knowledge capital, differentiated policies are required for human capital and knowledge capital in order to efficiently address the adverse impact of the most talented and highly skilled workers.

General figures indicate stark differences between both cross-country and cross-party groups in MEPs’ activity. Our attempt to explain this variation accounts for five variables (plus age for control): (1) the background of the MEPs, (2) their political experience, (3) belonging to a European party group, (4) the duration of their mandate, and (5) their status (i.e. elected versus appointed). Using statistical techniques and original data, we focus on the representatives coming from the most recent EU member state (i.e. Romania) as activity differences are most likely to occur at their level. Results indicate that, in essence, the socialization with the EP workings (duration of term in office) considerably shapes newcomers’ performance.

The end of Putin’s presidency – or at least what one could regard as the end of his presidency – was marked by several major riots between ethnic Russians and people from the Caucasus of various ethnic and religious backgrounds. ‘Caucasians’ are usually seen as awry by the majority of Russians. Chechens are often singled out as the symbol of all the negative effects that the presence of ‘Caucasians’ and, in fact, all minorities, brings with it: domination of the market, crime, and changes in the demographic/cultural balance of the country. In more general terms, ‘Caucasians,’ especially Chechens, have coalesced in the minds of many Russians as responsible for all the ills of the post-Soviet era and which have continued through Putin’s tenure. There is increasing social as well as regional division. In fact, the gap between prosperous Moscow and a few other big cities and the small towns and cities and rural areas of the Russian heartland continues to be quite wide. All of this social and social/regional tension has manifested itself not so much in social/class animus, as was the case at the beginning of the 20th century, but in increasing ethnic tension. This has led to several major ethnic riots in the last years of Putin’s tenure, with those in Kondopoga, a small city in Karelia in the northern part of European Russia, as the best known. These riots, in which hundreds of people were involved, left several dead, and many injured. They received much coverage in the Russian press and stuck in the mind of the public as few events in recent Russian history have done. While, in themselves, the Kondopoga events have not led to any major upheaval, their occurrence indicates the serious tension in Russian society, which plays an important role in the case of major crises. The Kondopoga violence also indicates that Russia has the same problems as most countries of the West, which recently have experienced changes in demographic and social/cultural composition due to waves of immigrants, mostly from non-European countries.

At the turn of the 20th century, intellectuals and artists in Belgium and the Netherlands were keen to define their respective national identities. One of the most striking ways of doing this was based on a paradox: in both Belgium and the Netherlands the idea came into being that their national distinctiveness actually lay in their being international. What set the Belgians, living in the heart of Europe, apart from the French or the Germans, so the thinking went, was precisely the fact that they were able to understand both the French and the Germans. And what made the Dutch different from the inhabitants of the major powers, it was emphasised, was the fact that they were attentive to the general interest, and not just their own national interest. This article focuses on the history of this remarkable ‘international patriotism’.

Interdisciplinary research is becoming more frequent because many contemporary issues can only be successfully addressed by integrating different perspectives. One general feature of the various scientific fields is peer review, i.e. the assessment and improvement of submissions to journals, conferences and workshops. Whilst there exist guidelines for the peer review of mono-disciplinary articles and empirical studies of how interdisciplinary research proposals are assessed, there is still a need for a summary of issues specific to the peer review of interdisciplinary research papers. This article provides an overview of relevant questions such as whether reviewers are competent to assess interdisciplinary papers even if unfamiliar with all the involved fields. We discuss the assessment of the interdisciplinarity, soundness, novelty, influence and general interest of interdisciplinary manuscripts. Further issues include the appropriateness of interdisciplinary submissions for journals, keeping the vocabulary of new interdisciplinary fields understandable to the reader and balancing the references across various fields. Constructive interdisciplinary reviewers are likely to be just as open-minded as interdisciplinary scientists and should be rewarded more than they currently are.

Strong evidence in the field of neuroscience now makes it possible to claim, with minimal reservation, that E. T. A. Hoffmann’s literary imagination was enriched by synaesthesia. E. T. A. Hoffmann is recognised as a remarkable polymath. A writer of fiction, bibliophile, composer and music critic, he not only understood Romantic sensibility but also involved himself in contemporary scientific debates on the nature of sound and perception, and was familiar with the acoustic theories of Ritter and Schubert’s work on magnetism and electrical energy. Hoffmann’s distinctive creativity was formed and informed by his diverse abilities and interests, and by his auditory sensibility and kinaesthetic appreciation of music. We postulate that the multi-sensory nature of Hoffmann’s work is evidence of creative synaesthesia, a phenomenon that occurs when a neurophysiological sensation perceived in the brain stimulates a different sense or senses and, as a result, produces a creative outcome. Taking as our example his intensely musical story Ritter Gluck, published in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung of February 1809, we examine Hoffmann’s complex and idiosyncratic use of metaphor and structure in the scientific context of his own time and continent, and in the context of 21st century scientific understandings of brain science.

We are a sensorium commune, sensuous beings who perceive through many diverse senses at once.1

We compare G7 life expectancies with the existential conditions from 1870 to date, using the real annual outputs of goods and services per capita as a measure of existential conditions. Wars destroy analytic relations, but life insurers eliminate catastrophic losses, and the outputs have an envelope representing the undisturbed existential condition. Both evolutions are S-functions with the same growth parameter of 62 years. Its length bridging three generations and its constancy over two orders of magnitude in output implies biologic pace control. For the first time it is seen that the mean life expectancy precedes the existential condition by a constant 59 years and approaches asymptotically an age of 118. This precedence and the ratio of 2 follow quantitatively from life’s integration over the existential condition. On the conditions of stable environment and openness to new knowledge, the industrial evolution will continue as a stable predictable process, immune to world wars and financial breakdowns.