The discoveries of the first planets around a pulsar and around a star similar to our Sun have opened, after centuries of speculation, a new era in astronomy. The quest for other worlds has become reality. In this paper, the motivations for this search are presented. A comparative review is made of different techniques for their detection, with special attention paid to the planet parameters that can be derived from each method. The first discoveries and their astrophysical consequences are analysed. New questions and future projects beyond these first discoveries are reviewed, with special attention given to the search for life in extrasolar planetary systems. Finally, worldwide activities and the role of Europe are described.

Divided, sometimes antagonistic, communities in officially unified nations seem to be the rule in Europe. In some cases, they conjure up the most painful memories of actual civil-war events, but usually they constitute the common experience of most Europeans, who lived through different kinds of war, revolutions, counter-revolutions, coups d’état, dictatorships, totalitarian systems, regime changes, territorial losses, ethnic cleansings, and exchanges of population. In spite of major breakthroughs, we find all over Europe that the experiences and humiliations of previous generations have remained mainly unspoken and unelaborated at both individual and community levels. Dangerous as they are, such narratives and undigested traumas necessarily call for well-advised, learned and thoughtful acts of overwriting and reworking. A broadly based, well-founded, historical, multi- and interdisciplinary research project for the comparison of the various modes of trauma management in the different countries and regions of Europe can open up new perspectives and provide essential tools for working out individual and collective traumatic historical experiences. Its main question is how different communities were able to process their collective traumatic historical experiences, and what can be learned from the outcomes of these processes. The project will compare the common and different characteristics of the various regimes of memory and patterns of consolidation.

This contribution gives in its first part an overview on factors of the decay and death of whole languages, focusing on dependency relations between these factors. They are organised along the following dimensions: socio-political, socio-economic, sociocultural, socio-psychological, and linguistic dimensions. The order of these dimensions partially represents a causal chain from left to right, but with many feedback relations. The second part of this article deals with early (socio-)linguistic indicators of language decay and discusses in this respect massive and asymmetric borrowing from the dominant into the recessive language, the loss of productivity of word formation patterns in the latter (illustrated from Breton), changes in name-giving (doubtful), shift of ‘foreign accent’ from the dominant to the recessive language, borrowing of morphological and syntactic patterns (inconclusive).

Since October 2000, mass graves from the Civil War and Franco's dictatorship have become the most visible issue of the process of recovery of historical memory in Spain, as a metaphor for digging up the traumatic past. This paper offers a historical reading of this process, pointing out the importance of recovering the buried bodies to give them a worthy burial, to restore their memory, and to allow families to complete their mourning. Mass graves have been the subject of different interventions: they have been located, marked and dignified, in some cases opened and the human remains exhumed. The graves, previously symbols of silence and oblivion are now sites of mourning and memory. In addition, many forgotten memories have been recovered. The victims of the war and the dictatorship have returned to the heart of the public debate, although not without controversy.

Media, education and democracy are inseparably connected, as an educated citizenship is fundamental to the proper working of democracy. The mass media have a demonstrated and vital capacity to educate, especially beyond the parameters of formal education. The nature of such education is both civic and social, deliberate and unintentional. Vigilance is required to separate education from persuasion, information from propaganda. Given the centrality of media to democracy, not only do the media have an obligation to educate the citizenship, but the universities need to educate the citizenship about the media. Without such education, democracy itself is threatened.

The breakup of the Soviet Union in the 1990s opened the gates of immigration to Israel and to the West. The wave of immigration to Israel also included criminal elements who wanted to evade the rule of law in their countries. The arrival of these people to Israel aroused my interest in the historical causes of corruption in Russia, forms of corrupt behaviour by state employees, and the processes of development and creation of criminal organizations in Russia.

The future is notoriously difficult to predict, but it can be invented. One option would be to develop a strategy directed towards sustainable consumption because, while the patterns of consumption of food, energy and materials, including water, differ greatly in various parts of the world, if business continues as usual, rates of consumption threaten to become a serious source of conflict. Among the challenges of the new century are a better understanding of what is meant by the transition towards sustainable consumption and how science and technology could be used to improve the efficiency with which resources are utilized, new products and processes invented, and the environmental cost of modern lifestyles best evaluated. Efforts to influence the phenomenon of over-consumption in nations that are more developed economically, and address under-consumption in nations that are less developed, are not topics that can be resolved by scientists and technologists alone. Interdisciplinary studies have become increasingly important to elucidate best methods of production, benefits, threats and consumer behaviour. Implementation of new remedies from science and technology, however, requires dialogue with the public on a case-by-case basis and should begin at the earliest stages of innovation. Sustainable consumption as a strategy lies at the heart of sustainable development; it provides the basis of social equity currently undermined by the rich–poor divide and a route to conflict avoidance.

Research with human embryonic stem cells (HESC) is very much disputed from an ethical point of view as it requires the destruction of the embryo to derive the stem cells. The legal situation in Europe is heterogeneous. This article gives an overview of the current debate on this topic by outlining the international regulations and the national legislation in the European Union. It is shown that the different legal positions are like an in vivo experiment for contrasting solutions. Furthermore, the legal situation in Germany is examined in more detail and with it the effectiveness and the constitutionality of the requirements.

If information enters memory under the influence of a memory-enhancing substance, for about 16 hours thereafter the recollection of that information is no better than if it had been acquired without any treatment. Later tests of retention, however, performed one or more days, or even weeks, after the experience, show a drug-induced improvement of memory. Memory-enhancing compounds thus appear to facilitate the formation of the long-term memory trace. On the assumption that differences between treated and untreated animals emerge from that moment on when memory is based on the products of the processes modulated by the drugs, it can be postulated that long-term memory comes into play after about 16–20 hours.

In the Hohenheim tree-ring laboratory, two long tree-ring chronologies have been built, spanning the past 11 600 years. This is the world's longest continuous tree-ring calendar. It has become the backbone of the calibration of the radiocarbon time scale, offering absolute and accurate dates for archaeology, vegetation history and paleoclimate studies. 14C analyses of the tree-ring chronologies provide insight into the process controlling the production of cosmogenic nuclides, i.e. mainly the geomagnetic dipole moment and solar variability. They also set geochemical constraints to variations in the carbon cycle during a major climatic excursion.

This paper analyses the e-voting experience of the local elections undertaken by Osh city Council in 2016. The process was introduced to ensure fair and democratic elections in Kyrgyzstan after continuous and repeated violent political uprising. The e-system, based on biometrics registration, biometric identification of voters and automated vote counting, was designed to help to avoid the most common election frauds: vote buying, carousel voting and group/family voting. The case study, mainly based on interviews, illustrates the adaptation and modernization of strategies to resist and cheat within the e-voting system. The analysis outlines three widely practised cheating strategies: procedural violations, such as avoiding cross-checking of manual and automated counting and allowing voting without biometrical identification; transformation of bribery into ‘vote auctioning’; and strengthening of kinship-based/regional support and tribal/regional identity under conditions of e-voting.

This article was inspired by Atkinson and Brandolini’s work on the economic middle classes and deals with the evolution of the income share of the middle class compared with that of the extreme classes in the EU-15 (the EU’s first 15 member states) over the last two decades. Our research draws on the paradox of the EU officially assuming dominant ideas about rising inequalities and the squeezing of middle-class income produced by globalization and technological change while at the same time producing and disseminating empirical evidence contrary to this view. We first synthesize this evidence, also contributing some additional analyses of Eurostat data, confirming that the income share of the middle class has not changed in the past two decades, as could be expected from the invariance in income inequality. We finally put forward some considerations about the theoretical implications of these empirical results and the interaction between ideas and empirical evidence in political societies and organizations.

The writing of literary history, generally speaking, is a matter of selecting and organizing literary works according to aesthetic judgement and historical values. If one writes the literary history of a foreign culture, however, at least if one wants to include samples of literary works, one must contend with the issue of translation, not only in the sense of having to choose which source texts to translate but also in that of choosing among existing translations or of translating oneself. The dual role of a historian and a translator is a challenging and complicated balancing act, as proven in the case of H.A. Giles (1845–1935), whose 1901A History of Chinese Literature is the first Chinese literary history ever written in English. As one of the then leading sinologists in Europe, Giles had contributed tremendously to the dissemination of Chinese literature by way of smooth translations that appealed to his English readers, but which also formed an obstacle for the reader’s proper understanding of the history of Chinese literature. The evidence for this comes from his misguided take on the dual aspects of visibility and invisibility of the translator’s identity in writing about a foreign literature.

The economic crisis in Greece, and the reaction to it by key European institutions, gives scholars a unique opportunity to test the instrumentalist model for explaining the dynamics of political identity. This study seeks to do that, marshalling both quantitative and qualitative indicators of European identity in Greece, and examining how this identity has changed over the past decade under conditions of crisis and external pressure. Do Greeks now self-identify less as European than they used to because the utility of such an identity has diminished? The evidence presented in this analysis suggests that that is the case.

Half a century after its end, the Second World War is still an object of enormous public interest. This essay tries to indicate in which respects the present style of commemorating it differs from the ways that former generations shaped the memories they wished to preserve of the historical events that were then thought relevant.

Using the most recent wave of European Values Survey (EVS) data, this study explores the correlates of generalized trust by comparing Turkish and Greek communities living on the island of Cyprus. The results suggest that, besides confidence in institutions, there are different determinants of trust for each Cypriot community. In comparing Greek and Turkish Cypriots, the results suggest that being married, being older, having an urban residence, being in better health, and participating more in voluntary organizations are correlated with higher levels of generalized trust among Turkish Cypriots, whereas Greek Cypriots who are natives and who have more life satisfaction have higher levels of generalized trust. This study makes a significant contribution by being the first empirical study to test generalized trust among both communities living in the island of Cyprus.

The beginning of the Anthropocene has been inconclusively debated. Usually, its starting point is linked to the moment in which some measurable human physical impact, such as global carbon dioxide emissions, increased in an unprecedented manner. However, to grasp the fact that mankind became at some point the major change agent of the earth system it is important to identify how and when humans began to perceive their role as that of an active creator, capable of dominating and changing nature. Although no monocausal explanation exists, I argue that the invention of linear perspective in fifteenth-century Renaissance Italy was a major trigger. Linear perspective changed the way humans saw and interpreted the world around them. It fostered an anthropocentric worldview that placed humans in control of their physical environment, allowed the advancement of scientific methods and the ultimate disenchantment of the physical world. Linear perspective marks the beginning of the ‘Anthroposeen’ without which the Anthropocene would not have manifested itself in the accelerated way it has. This holds important lessons. It reminds us that to understand the nature of the Anthropocene, we have to understand the parameters that made us think, see and ultimately act the way we do.

The leading question raised by the rhetoricians of classical antiquity was how to speak with maximum persuasive force. You must find the means, they answered, to enable your readers to see what you are arguing. This initially gave rise to a preoccupation with visual metaphors and other so-called figures of speech. Much later, with the development of the printed book, this also led to the practice of inserting actual figures into books to provide visual summaries of their arguments. Here, one pioneer was Thomas Hobbes, and this article offers an interpretation of the frontispieces he included in his two main works of political philosophy, De cive and Leviathan. The moral Hobbes aims to convey is that we have no alternative but to submit to the protecting power of the sovereign state if we wish to live in security and peace.

This study investigates the impact of financial depth and capital market development on the growth of European nations. Financial depth is important if the benefits of financial integration are to be realized. In fact, financial depth is a channel that promotes growth and risk sharing and curbs macroeconomic volatility. Panel data of 17 European nations from 1970 to 2013 were taken and results were obtained through the Pool Mean Group Estimation technique. Our results show that, for European nations, financial depth and stock market development contributed to long-term growth. However, the contribution of financial depth outweighs that of stock market development. Moreover, it was observed that in the case of Hungary and Ireland, capital market development and financial depth contributed to short-term growth. Trade openness was found to be significant for growth in the cases of Austria and Finland while financial depth and trade openness were found to be significant for Germany and Switzerland. In conclusion, in the short-run, financial depth contributed more to growth than stock market development. Therefore, the role of financial depth in enhancing growth can be said to be more persistent than that of stock market development.

Digital transformation has become a prevalent feature of the twenty-first century, extending from business to all aspects of social life. Public administration has also been affected by this trend. However, no country undergoing a transition economy has been capable of matching the level of digitalization reached by developed nations. The study aims to evaluate the digital transformations of public administration in transition economies and assess their impact on indicators of population well-being, standard of living, and governance efficacy. The research methodology utilizes various methods, including comparison, grouping, correlation, regression, and cluster analysis, to evaluate the efficacy of digital transformations in public administration within transitioning economies. This article evaluates the extent of digital transformations in public administration and uncovers their favourable progress in countries with transitional economies from 2010 to 2020. An insignificant direct relationship (determination coefficient R2 ≍ 0.15) has been demonstrated between E-Government Development and Index GDP (Gross Domestic Product) per capita. However, a positive, strong connection between E-Government Development and the Government Effectiveness Index has been found. Countries with transitional economies were categorized into four clusters based on the degree of digitalization in their public administration. Results showed that there were no noteworthy gaps between the clusters, as most of the examined countries had comparable levels of development, experience and abilities in the digitalization of public administration.