Scientific fraud has increased dramatically in recent times. The main reason has been the exponential increase of the number of researchers, that has greatly exceeded the increase in available resources. This has generated a situation of extreme competition that has dramatically increased the tendency to commit FFP acts. In comparison with the situation in the (distant) past, described in the accompanying contribution (Part I), in which scientific misconduct as a rule concerned research on themes of great significance, today the misconduct generally concerns petty fraudulent acts meant to give the fraudster personal advantages that are frequently illusory. Other factors, more technical in nature, are also having roles in today’s great increase of misconduct cases. Important among them are the ease with which they are now discovered thanks to impressive technological advances in their detection, and the appearance and rapid proliferation of open access predatory journals which do not follow the established peer review publication rules. Cases that deal with themes of great general significance do still occur, and some are examined in this article. At variance with those analysed in Part I they are now rapidly solved by the technical resources available today.

Developments in biology have raised important questions concerning the ethical basis on which these developments can be applied to human life and to the ecology of the world. This article explores these questions.

In every culture, man has used drugs to dispel anxiety, stimulate productivity, and to increase the feelings of joy and satisfaction. Drugs have also had an undeniable influence on art and culture. These substances become referred to as ‘drugs of abuse’ if their repeated consumption is triggered or induced by psychological or physical compulsion, often leading to conflict with society, either due to neglect of family or social duties, and also to criminal activities in order to obtain the materials. Drug abuse particularly affects young people and has become one of the most important and widely discussed issues in society. It is therefore an important task in medical science to find answers to how drugs exert their effect and what leads to addiction and permanent consumption.

During the Renaissance, the language of proportion became a unified theory capable of encompassing the understanding of the world within a coherent theological, philosophical and artistic framework. Music, with its harmonic paradigm, plays a key role in this construction. From the fifteenth century through to the end of the sixteenth century, architects and architectural theorists made reference, both in new treatises and commentaries to Vitruvius, to musical matters, transforming architecture into the summa of knowledge. The affinity to music was grounded on both a common mathematical and rhetoric gnosiology. Formerly conceived of as ideal, numbers became eloquent, reinforcing the quantitative paradigm of proportion with its qualitative one. The language of proportion as a compositional tool reveals the shift between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: while the Medieval tèchne based on modular thinking provides beauty and universal truth using the technique of repetition, the Humanist paradigm of variety produces pleasure and individual truth – a condition typical of the premodern.

Plankton are microscopic organisms living in the sea. They are responsible for more than half of the biological production of our planet. They also influence global climate, fisheries and pollution. Understanding the ever-changing distribution of plankton in the ocean is one of the grand challenges of science. The scope of the problem has been well documented in the 20th century, and new research tools should greatly accelerate progress in the 21st century. A particularly promising tool is mathematical simulation of the ecosystem, in which the demographics of plankton populations are derived from the growth and behaviour of individual organisms, each responding to its immediate environment. These use new computer codes, based on the Lagrangian Ensemble method, which are at the leading edge of complexity simulation. When integrated on massively parallel computers they can simulate the individual histories of millions of plankters for several decades. These ‘virtual plankton ecosystems’ help us to understand the complex processes responsible for the ever-changing patterns of planktonic life in the ocean.

The attitudes of the ancient Greeks towards their material culture—so far as we can discover from their writings—was rather different from that of most modern students of the remains of classical antiquity. The Greeks esteemed gold and silver vessels, while many archaeologists still believe that they preferred painted pottery. This reversal of classical values came about through the entry of Utopian ideals into the mainstream of classical scholarship in the 18th century. Laudable in themselves, these ideals have led to a serious misunderstanding of the role of ceramic in antiquity. Prices for painted pottery were extremely low and it can hardly have been the vehicle for what the Ancients would have considered to be ‘Art’. It is ironic that the classical tradition has been subverted by many of those charged with the scholarly interpretation of the classical past.

Bioethics has been stimulated by two happenings. Indignation provoked by the behaviour of Hitler's regime against the unfortunate deportees and the splendid progress of biology and medicine. One can distinguish two periods in the history of ethical committees. Firstly a period concerned only with local regional, hospital or university committees and a later period concerned with national committees (the first was created in France in 1983).

Three revolutions which pose important ethical questions have changed medicine in the last fifty years:

1. A therapeutic revolution with therapeutic trials (well organised trials on healthy volunteers, or comparative trials which are both morally necessary and necessarily immoral).

2. Organ transplantation with questions about the donor (dead or living) or the recipient who becomes a chimera.

3. Epidemiological enquiries with the difficult question of creating a register.

The biological revolution which came later has given man three masteries:

1. Developments in birth control, such as the RU of Baulieu, which can terminate pregnancy.

2. Artificial insemination ranging from treating male infertility to a matter of convenience.

3. In vitro fertilisation leads to the problem of what to do with supernumerary embryos.

Genetic developments lead to progress in predicting the predisposition to disease as well as the power to modify the inherited genetic makeup. The invention but not the discovery can be patented. Finally progress in knowledge of the nervous system leads to two important bioethical problems, psychopharmacology and nerve tissue grafts.

These difficult questions and the tensions that they have engendered have led ethical committees to formulate the following principles to guide their judgement:

1. The definition of a person at the very beginning of life, with the tendency to consider an embryo as a potential person.

2. Respect for knowledge depends on two precautions; confining some research to a small number of laboratories and having a moratorium on some new findings.

3. Eliminating the financial element from blood transfusions or organ donation.

4. The responsibility of the researcher who should deal with the ethical problems created by his or her research as it develops.

What is the role of the law in ethics? What legislation can be and what cannot be forecast? How can we develop the teaching of bioethics particularly in higher education, medicine and law? Can we start sufficiently early teaching morality in schools? How do we develop the necessary international arrangements? By increasing meetings? By creating a European bioethics committee? Finding an answer to these questions was the object of a meeting in Madrid in March 1992 of the chairmen of the national ethical committees of Europe.

This paper attempts to empirically test whether inter-party political differences impact public finances in Portugal differently. Focused on public debt and on government budget deficit, and using data since 1974 for several variables, this paper applies econometric modelling to show that inter-party differences have had, until now, no significant impacts on the public finances’ performance in Portugal. In this context, this paper aims at dispelling some myths regarding the ‘value’ of a policy process based on political intrigue, enmity and a discourse of confrontation around differentiated political parties’ merits in modern democracies.

In recent years, the notion of ‘excellence’ and its interconnectedness with research, development and innovations has become extremely popular across Europe. At regional and national as well as at the EU level, various initiatives have been taken to strengthen the science base, and to establish centres, or clusters of outstanding achievements. Researchers, universities, and funding agencies will have to work their way towards a culture of creativity, which needs a leap of faith based on the high-trust principles of governance and accountability, and which provides more space for risk-taking and thorough rethinking of common wisdom in order to achieve real breakthroughs at the frontiers of knowledge.

Rapid developments in neuroscience over the past four decades continue to receive wide media attention. Each new reported advance points to ever tightening links between mind and brain. For many centuries, what is today called ‘mind-talk’ was familiar as ‘soul-talk’. Since, for some, the possession of a soul is what makes us human, the challenges of cognitive neuroscience directly address this. This paper affords the non-specialist a brief overview of some of the scientific evidence pointing to the ever tightening of the mind-brain links and explores its wider implications for our understanding of human nature. In particular it brings together the findings from so-called bottom-up research, in which we observe changes in behaviour and cognition resulting from experimental interventions in neural processes, with top-down research where we track changes in neural substrates accompanying habitual modes of cognition or behaviour. Further reflection alerts one to how the dualist views widely held by New Agers, some humanists and many religious people, contrast with the views of academic philosophers, theologians and biblical scholars, who agree in emphasizing the unity of the person.

Over the last few years, the regulatory system for GM foods and crops in Europe has ground to a halt because of the difficulty in reaching agreement. Regulators, in struggling to overcome the distrust and suspicion that has greeted GM soya in particular, have introduced a new mantra: transparency, accountability and inclusivity. I argue in this paper that this mantra, although a considerable advance on what has gone before, will not solve all our problems; basically, because such procedures can only partially deal with the loss of trust and the climate of suspicion in which we now working. Some suggestions are made as to what we should do next.

This article aims at portraying the symbolic and material impact of cross-border and entrepreneurial EU-funded projects on the local public sphere of Evros, a Greek region bordering with Turkey. Often construed as ‘European policies’ at the local level, such projects reflect a complex interaction between the ‘European’, the ‘national’ and the ‘local’. In order to unravel the dynamics of such interaction, I focus on the case of local cultural associations. These associations stood as typical bearers of a romantic nationalist discourse; this local enactment of Greek nationalism was also related with specific forms of symbolic capital, through ostensibly ‘disinterested patriotic action’. The introduction of EU-funded projects in the local public sphere challenged such historically constructed practices. At the same time, these projects were mediated by the representatives of the Greek State and were locally appropriated as a reformulation of older national policies and funding channels. The article argues that the implementation of those projects brought about two significant changes in the local public sphere: the dissemination of cross-border policies throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and the growing importance of a new, market-oriented perception of public action, in local cultural associations.

This study examines whether the financial market development and integration have affected the current account balances in the European Union (EU) countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) during 1996–2015. First, the results suggest that the higher bank credit flows have resulted in the current account deficits especially after EU accession. The larger pool of bank lending flows due to the foreign mergers and acquisitions has helped finance domestic investment. This has led to the larger current account deficits. Second, the results indicate that the larger stock market size due to EU accession has caused current account surpluses rather than deficits. This contradicts the findings of previous studies, which find that higher financial market development leads to current account deficit. Finally, the result confirms that financial integration has facilitated higher current account deficits. The European Monetary Union has eliminated the regulatory restrictions on cross-border capital flows. The increase in foreign capital inflows has helped finance the growing local consumption and investment needs, which has made the CEE countries run the larger current account deficits.

By looking at three significant examples in analysis, geometry and dynamical systems, I propose the possibility of having two levels of realism in mathematics: the upper one, the one of entities; and a subordinated ground one, the one of objects. The upper level (entities) is more the one of ‘operations’, of mathematics in action, of the dynamics of mathematics, whereas the ground floor (objects) is more dedicated to culturally well-defined objects inherited from our perception of the physical or real world. I will show that the upper level is wider than the ground level, therefore foregrounding the possibility of having in mathematics entities without underlying objects. In the three examples treated in this article, this splitting of levels of reality is created directly by the willingness to preserve different symmetries, which take the form of identities or equivalences. Finally, it is proposed that mathematical Platonism is – in fine – a true branch of mathematics in order for mathematicians to avoid the temptation of falling into the Platonist alternative ‘everything is real’/‘nothing is real’.

This article offers an overview of cosmological evolution that aims to set in context some further articles in this issue’s Focus. It was originally delivered as the introduction to a session on ‘evolution and emergence’ held at the Liverpool Academia Europaea General Meeting of September 2008.

here is a long and beneficial tradition of international collaboration in science and technology. There are, however, trends working against collaboration, and tensions between (for example) collaboration and competition, and European integration and increasing emphasis on national competitiveness. It is therefore important to have a clear understanding of when and in what form international collaboration is desirable. This paper considers these issues, drawing lessons from CERN – the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. CERN, which pioneered European collaboration, is now becoming in a sense a world organization. Physicists from 47 countries will participate in experiments at CERN's next project, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is set to be the first megascience project constructed by a global partnership, driven ‘bottom up’ by the scientists involved. CERN's experience with the LHC could provide an excellent precedent for other projects.

Was there a Scientific Revolution at any time between 1550 and 1800? The question comes to asking whether ‘revolution’ is a good metaphor for the course of natural knowledge during early modern times. According to the findings presented here, the metaphor is useful, that is, productive of insights, if it is taken in analogy to a major political revolution. It then suggests a later onset, and a swifter career, for the Scientific Revolution than is usually prescribed, and reveals Newton not as its culmination but as its counterpoise. The analysis also discloses an unexpected analogy between the universities of the thirteenth century and the learned societies of the seventeenth.

One of the most frequently described cultural borders in European public discourse is that between Europe and Islam. Further to which, there are many concerns as to whether Islam can be integrated into Europe. This article argues that it is impossible to understand the real and imagined problems addressed in the ‘integration of Islam in Europe’ debate using the categories ‘Islam’ and ‘Europe’. The question of categories is addressed through Bourdieu’s critique of journalism’s influence on research, leading to questions about suitable criteria of demarcation and meaningful terminologies. The route goes via classical theorists of science, such as Carnap, Popper and Kuhn, to Ricoeur, Said and Connolly. Some segments of the modern genealogy of the category of Islam in European studies are also touched upon. The article ends with a call for unpopular categories as an escape from the popular and political frames of debate.

Science provides the best way of understanding the world. Public understanding of science is limited: science goes against common sense, the earth moves round the sun. Paranormal beliefs are all too common and they go completely against science, there is a mystical element in our brains. Unlike religion, science is universal and is almost entirely independent of the particular culture in which it is performed. It had is origin in ancient Greece. Whenever a new technology is introduced it is not for the scientists to take an ethical decision about how it should be used, but they must make public the implications.

More often than not, memory is taken to be the storehouse of past experiences situated in a local context. However, recent theories have moved the focus to the process of memory which, in any present moment, allows the past, collective or individual, to emerge as a construction that works as a strong driving force of identity formation. In this perspective the memory process selects features of the past and turns them into more or less coherent structures, which then will have to be checked out with others in order for them to exercise their role as valid interpretations of the past and building blocks of present and future identity. Memories are therefore dialogical phenomena shaped by discussion, or more broadly by exchanges in various media, concerning the selected features, their configuration and the identities they promote. Today, the globalized flows of migration open up a new set of problems for the understanding of memories and their functions. When migration becomes a dominant experience across the globe, the concepts of locality and of local experiences changes and raise a new question: can we imagine and attach any meaning to globalized memories? Today, a huge amount of literatures from all corners of the world takes issue with this question, the so-called literatures of migration, where the literary imagination suggests answers to the open question of what memory might mean in a globalized world. To address this question, the Greek-Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas’ novel The Slap (2008) and the Australian context will serve as my point of reference.