Almost ten years after the first production of cold antimatter at CERN, the confinement of antihydrogen has recently been achieved for the first time. Several experiments installed at the Antiproton Decelerator intend to test the symmetry between matter and antimatter by means of trapped anti-atoms. In addition, in the coming years it is planned to study the effect of gravity on antiparticles for the first time. Meanwhile, evidence from the Large Hadron Collider hinting at a violation of charge–parity symmetry beyond the Standard Model of particle physics has yet to be confirmed. A violation of the discrete symmetries that describe the relation between matter and antimatter could explain the excess of ordinary matter in the Universe.

Analysing the images of the self and the enemy of the two main kinds of political language in the post-communist countries of East Central European, this Hungarian case study shows the shift from personal liberty to social protection, from liberal democracy to a mixture of oligarchic and ochlocratic phenomena, from constitutional revolution to a search for forging collective identity, from individual universal human-rights discourse to collectivist, including ethnicist, public speech, and from establishing the constitutional bases of the new democratic political system to different political hysterias. Its ultimate question is how to surpass political hysteria through research into the ways and means of processing collective traumas.

This article looks at the history of European culture from three angles, those of European uniqueness, European variety and European consciousness. The first section discusses the question of whether the fundamental unit of study, for cultural as well as economic historians, is not Eurasia. The second section is concerned with cultural divisions within Europe, with Europes in the plural. It asks whether it is more illuminating to distinguish two Europes (like Leopold von Ranke), or three (like Jenő Szűcs), or even five (like Hugo Hassinger), and examine both centripetal and centrifugal forces in early modern history. The final section deals with the history of the idea of Europe, or more exactly with the rise of consciousness of being European, as it is revealed in early modern histories, geographies, journals and newspapers.

Corruption is a phenomenon that affects societies. It lowers trust in public institutions, lowers trust among people, undermines economic development, undermines democracy, and has implications for political participation. This article contributes to current debates on the impact of corruption by looking at other possible consequences of corruption. Specifically, this article looks at the impact of the perception of corruption on the approval of public protest meetings and demonstrations because, if corruption leads to these non-institutionalized forms of political participation, this may lead to security problems or a direct outbreak of violence. This study analyses this relationship by using seven post-communist countries that have undergone specific developments in terms of corruption. These developments were largely due to large-scale privatizations, politicized state administration, and the linking of politicians to the private sector. This research was conducted with individual-level data. The module ‘The Role of Government V’ from the International Social Survey Programme was used. Descriptive charts have revealed that in six out of the seven countries, most respondents considered politicians to be very corrupt. Around 80% of respondents in all seven countries approve of the organization of public protest meetings. Around 70% of respondents in all seven countries approve of demonstrations. Regression analysis revealed that there is a relationship between the perception of corruption among politicians and the approval of protest activities. Specifically, the more politicians are corrupt, the more people approve of holding public protest meetings and demonstrations.

The ocean carbon cycle plays a twofold role in the context of climate change: (1) through carbon dioxide gas exchange with the atmosphere and carbon cycle climate feedbacks, the ocean regulates the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere and hence has a strong influence on the heat budget of the Earth; (2) the paleo-climatic marine sediment core record is largely based on biogenic matter fluxes from the ocean surface to the sea floor, which are part of the marine carbon cycle. The ocean is important for global carbon cycling, primarily due to three factors: (1) the ocean is a huge carbon reservoir with a relatively short turnover time; (2) carbon dioxide in sea water is effectively dissociated inorganically into other substances; (3) marine plankton is keeping the surface ocean carbon dioxide concentration at a lower level than would a lifeless ocean. On intermediate to long time scales, the ocean provides the most important sink for anthropogenic carbon dioxide. The marine uptake kinetics for carbon dioxide work on a longer time scale than current and projected emissions by humans.

Euroscepticism has become a stable component of the European Parliament. But is there one distinct Euroscepticism in the European Parliament or do various types exist there? Departing from the widely accepted definitions of hard and soft Euroscepticism, we analysed the behaviour of Eurosceptical groups in the European Parliament in order to assess how they differ. Using data from parliamentary questions, we argue that there are substantial differences between these two groups. This suggests that hard and soft Euroscepticisms do not represent different degrees of one phenomenon, but instead refer to two fundamentally different stances towards European integration.

This article attempts to identify and document social mobility barriers for Roma. We have identified two types of social mobility barriers: the cost of exit from the traditional Roma community, and the cost of entry into the mainstream society. Most of the existing policy and academic debate on the social and economic marginalisation of Roma has focused almost entirely on entry barriers. The main contribution of the current paper to the existing literature is to draw attention to exit barriers, which usually are neglected in the public debate and the academic literature. In the current paper we show that understanding both types of social mobility barriers for Roma is crucial for designing effective policy measures.

Most accounts of child language acquisition use as analytic tools adult-like syntactic categories and grammars with little concern for whether they are psychologically real for young children. However, when approached from a cognitive and functional theoretical perspective, recent research has demonstrated that children do not operate initially with such abstract linguistic entities, but instead on the basis of distributional learning and item-based, form-meaning constructions. Children construct more abstract, linguistic representations only gradually on the basis of the language they hear and use and they constrain these constructions to their appropriate ranges of use only gradually as well – again on the basis of linguistic experience in which frequency plays a key role. Results from empirical analyses of children’s early multiword utterances, the development of the transitive construction and certain types of errors are presented to illustrate this approach.

What happened 20 years ago in the region formerly ruled by a communist regime was a velvet revolution. And even if it was a revolution without bloodshed, it is a legitimate question to ask what was realized of the revolutionary motto: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité? Liberty is a bundle of rights, composed of at least three sets: (1) political rights; (2) rights of free entrepreneurship, free entry to the market; and (3) freedom of choice between alternative goods and services. There is great progress in achieving all three categories of liberty. As for egalitarian values, inequality rapidly increased, causing aversion against the new order in a large fraction of society. Fraternité, in other words solidarity, is a widely accepted value, but there are great difficulties in its implementation. Post-socialist countries inherited a premature welfare state. The majority of people would prefer universal social entitlements, while the necessary material resources are not sufficient for these ambitious goals. This paper concludes with a discussion of various policy options for easing the contradictions between conflicting and inconsistent objectives.

Data aggregations are an under-acknowledged site of social relations. The social and technical specifics of how data aggregate are arenas for rich debates about how knowledge ought to be produced, and who should produce it. Consumer goods such as fitness trackers create conditions where data scientists or professional researchers are no longer the only ones making decisions about how to aggregate data. Users of these products also rework their data to discover something medically significant to them. These practices call attention to a modality of ‘scaling up’ datasets about a single person that is different from, and until recently largely invisible to, clinical approaches to big data, which privilege the creation of a ‘bird’s eye’ view across as many people. Both technical questions how to build these aggregations, and social questions of who should be involved, betray broader epistemological issues about how new knowledge is created from electronic devices.

The essay first describes the Chinese intellectual condition in the age of globalization and the necessity of liberal arts or humanities education, and then deals with the function of humanities education in China’s institutions of higher learning with Tsinghua University as the particular case. Since current Chinese universities are divided into three types: (1) research universities; (2) teaching-research universities; and (3) teaching-oriented universities, liberal arts education always plays an important part in students’ comprehensive schooling although in most of the research universities priority is given to science and technology. As China has a long tradition of humanities education, even long before the establishment of those Western type universities, offering humanities education to all the university students as a major educational task has never changed. Even during the Cultural Revolution when all the universities stopped teaching and research work, students and faculty members were still educated with Mao’s instructions. Along with the rapid development of Chinese economy, traditional humanities are suffering more or less. But the author argues that no matter how rapidly the Chinese economy has been developing and how well Chinese people are pursuing the so-called Chinese Dream, it is necessary to pay attention to the humanities and to offer humanities education to young students. The author also offers his reconstruction of Neo-Confucianism as an alternative discourse to various postmodern discourses in the new framework of global culture.

This Plenary Lecture summarizes the seismicity of Mars recorded by the NASA InSight mission, which landed on Elysium Planitia on 26 August 2018. Equipped with a highly sensitive seismometer, the lander has been successfully recording the seismicity of Mars for over three years. Different types of marsquakes have been identified, including low-frequency events with mantle-going phases and shallow high-frequency events characterized by crustal propagation. More recently, a few meteoric impacts have also been identified. Over a thousand events have been recorded, with magnitudes reaching up to MW 4.7. Here we review the techniques used by the MarsQuake Service to locate and characterize marsquakes and the active crustal processes in different areas of the red planet, and we discuss the different types of marsquakes.

The paper presents a preliminary and partial analysis of the information collected in a comparative 12-country study of the adjustment of national employment and social-welfare policies to the increasing internationalisation of product and capital markets. After the postwar decades, when national governments were still able to control their economic boundaries, the first international challenge came in the form of the oil-price crisis of 1973/74, which confronted industrial economies with the double threat of cost-push inflation and demand-gap unemployment. It could be met if countries were able to achieve a form of ‘Keynesian agreement’ in which expansionary monetary and fiscal policies would defend employment while union wage restraint could be relied on to fight inflation. For this solution, ‘corporatist’ industrial-relations institutions were a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition. Since the second oil-price crisis of 1979–80 was met by restrictive monetary and expansionary fiscal policies in the United States, the steep increase of real interest rates in the international capital markets forced other central banks to raise interest rates accordingly. As a consequence, employment-creating investments could only be maintained if the share of profits in the national product was significantly increased. Under the pressure of rapidly rising unemployment, unions in most countries were forced to accept this massive redistribution from labour to capital. In the 1990s, finally, the international integration of product and capital markets has been constraining private sector employment as well as the financial viability of the welfare state. Now, however, institutional differences among different types of revenue systems, welfare states and employment systems – Scandinavian, Anglo-Saxon and Continental – are creating important differences in vulnerability that can no longer be met by standardised responses. This paper concludes with an examination of the specific problems faced by, and the solutions available to, the different countries included in the study.

The memory of classical empires has been prominent in both Chinese and European history but it has had a different imprint in each culture. The Han territories were periodically reunified in part and were more consistently ruled as unified empires from the 13th century onwards. In medieval Western Europe the Carolingian and the Holy Roman empires boasted of being renewals of the glorious ancient models but they developed in a different environment, were no longer built on the Roman scale, and only borrowed selectively from the Roman repertoire. In this essay we examine how differences in power relationships, fiscal regimes, and territoriality help explain both the peripheral impact of the classical model in the European context and the enhanced prospects for it in Chinese history from the 12th century onwards.

Symmetry and chemistry have been in a fruitful interplay, initially in spectroscopy and crystallography, lately in more traditional domains of chemistry, such as reactivity and conformational analysis. A simple phenomenological approach suffices to get an idea about the symmetries of molecules whereas group theoretical approach greatly facilitates the understanding of molecular vibrations, electronic structure, and the mechanism of chemical reactions. In our discussion, the multi-level relationship between symmetry and chemistry is demonstrated by a sampler of examples, including the variations of symmetry of free molecules and molecular packing in crystals. Symmetry considerations continue to assist chemistry in systematizing and interpreting observations and also in discovering new reactions, molecules, and other materials.

Along the West-Scandinavian coast, agrarian settlements, which are found along fjords and in valleys, are separated from each other and from the lands to the east by high mountains. Thus, seafaring was the main mode of communication from the Stone Age onwards. Unlike the coasts of Britain, Ireland and continental Europe, this 1000 km long coastline is littered with thousands of islands, islets and reefs, which create a protected coastal sailing route – the Norðvegr – from which the kingdom took its name. The author discusses this sailing-route's significance for the creation of the kingdom as well as for the Viking incursions in Britain, Ireland and the Continent c. 790–1050.

Massive government-financed rescue operations for banking and insurance industries in the United States and in Europe, seeking to contain the financial crisis that culminated in 2008, amounted to ‘the biggest, broadest and fastest government response in history.’1 This ‘great stabilisation,’ as The Economist called it, resulting in ‘quasi’ or ‘shadow nationalization,’2 cast doubt on the notion, fashionable at the height of the neoliberal wave, that the state was essentially on its way out, as many of its tasks and responsibilities were oozing steadily and irreversibly toward the market. The state and, by the same token, the political seemed back – with a vengeance, triggering solemn announcements of ‘the return of the state’ and ‘the end of the ideology of public powerlessness.’3 Observers concurred. ‘Free-market capitalism, globalization, and deregulation’ had been ‘rising across the globe for 30 years,’ yet that era now had ended: ‘Global economic and financial integration are reversing. The role of the state, together with financial and trade protectionism, is ascending.’4 Triggering a perceived ‘paradigm shift towards a more European, a more social state,’ even in the United States and in China, the crisis was seen to herald a move ‘back towards a mixed economy.’5 The question, meanwhile, remained: had the state indeed withdrawn as much during the neoliberal era as is often assumed?

The study of language acquisition during the first year of life is reviewed. We identified three areas that have contributed to our understanding of how the infant copes with linguistic signals to attain the most basic properties of its native language. Distributional properties present in the incoming utterances may allow infants to extract word candidates in the speech stream as shown in the impoverished conditions of artificial grammar studies. This procedure is important because it would work well for most natural languages. We also highlight another important mechanism that allows infants to induce structure from very scarce data. In fact, humans tend to project structural conjectures after being presented with only a few utterances. Finally, we illustrate constraints on processing that derive from perceptual and memory functions that arose much earlier during the evolutionary history of the species. We conclude that all of these machanisms are important for the infants to gain access to its native language.

The aim of the paper is to present the current trends in the migration flows of Central and Eastern-European (CEE) countries in the light of socio-economic transition and core-periphery relations. To view migration as a broader process of social and economic development, post-accession mobility information will be analysed within a multi-scalar approach, across time and space, considering first the migration pattern from the CEE countries towards other EU regions in general, and then with a special emphasis on Romania in the light of the 2007 EU enlargement process. The spatial variation of migration was investigated using Moran’s I and Gi* statistics, which is a useful tool for identification of spatial patterns. Alongside the analysis of migration processes between receiving and sending areas (core and periphery regions) the author will discuss how the position of the core and periphery could change, with economic development taking place in a number of periodic waves. Based on the transnationalism paradigm, the author will also highlight the impact of migrants’ changed mobility practices and behaviour on the locality of origin.

Science has undergone remarkable changes both in scale, organization and influence over the last half century. It has changed the way we live and is more essential than ever before. Although the scientific effort today is more international than it was 50 years ago, only a small part of the world is fully engaged in this process. It is of course impossible in a single article to provide an overall balanced account of these developments and this is not an attempt to do so. Instead, certain trends are illustrated here, based solely on the personal experiences of an individual who – during a long career in the Life Sciences, and through work in many international science organizations – has been a witness and played a role in some of the changes that have occurred, often influenced by major political events.