Magdalena Mittermeier, Christian M. Grams, Urs Beyerle
et al.
Omega-blocks can trigger spatially compounding heat-precipitation extremes with severe societal impacts, as seen in September 2023 when a heatwave over France coincided with devastating floods in the Iberian Peninsula and Greece. Although blocking in general has been linked to moist processes in upstream warm conveyor belts (WCBs), it has remained unexplored whether and how upstream WCB activity influences the evolution of omega-blocks and downstream flood-heat-flood impacts. Here, we show that already five days ahead, small differences in the upstream evolution - particularly in WCB outflow regions - distinguish cases that later produce extreme compound events over Europe from weaker ones, even though their large-scale anomalies initially appear similar. We illustrate the distinct evolution in remote locations by analyzing storylines simulated in a fully coupled climate model. Using ensemble boosting, we generate hundreds of physically plausible simulations of omega-prone situations. Lagrangian air parcel tracking reveals that variations in WCB outflow areas can explain differences in upstream precursors and downstream effects over Europe. Our results highlight ensemble boosting as a powerful approach to systematically track dynamical differences along model-based event storylines, important for understanding and anticipating compound extremes striking multiple regions simultaneously.
Nationality, lex patriae, continues to play a significant role as a connecting factor in resolving private-law relationships involving a foreign element, both in the context of conflict-of-law rules and in determining international jurisdiction. Although EU regulations and multilateral instruments adopted under the auspices of the Hague Conference on Private International Law have tended to move away from this criterion in favour of more factual connecting factors, its relevance remains preserved through its continued presence in domestic legislation and bilateral treaties. This article addresses the issue of nationality as a legal connecting factor and explores the question of whether the assumption, that an individual should, for the purposes of international private and procedural law, be considered exclusively a national of a single state, can be regarded as a generally applicable rule across the entire field and all norms of international private and procedural law.
Since the Russia–Ukraine war in February 2022, Europe has faced a significant humanitarian challenge, with approximately 6.3 million Ukrainian refugees seeking sanctuary abroad by the end of 2023. Poland has been a major host nation, registering about 1.4 million refugees under the Temporary Protection scheme by mid-2022. Despite efforts to integrate these refugees, challenges such as language barriers, legal complexities and housing persist. The Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) activities are needed; however, the gap exists in their offer. To address these challenges, the MHPSS Course was developed. This 15-day intensive training program aimed to equip professionals with the skills needed to support Ukrainian refugees’ mental health and psychosocial needs. The course included theoretical and practical components, fieldwork and evaluations, involving diverse experts and trainers. The MHPSS Course trained 23 participants, covering topics from humanitarian law to community-based interventions. 74% participants attended more than 80% of the course. The course facilitated networking among MHPSS practitioners in Poland, with participants engaging in ongoing professional collaboration through various platforms. The fieldwork topics encompassed a range of initiatives including legal aid, educational support, creative therapies and specialised mental health services for Ukrainian refugees in Poland. These efforts, led by various organisations, aimed to address the diverse needs of refugees through community-based interventions and targeted support programs. Despite recruitment challenges, the course’s comprehensive approach proved effective in enhancing local capacity for mental health support. The integration of cultural sensitivity and interdisciplinary perspectives enriched the learning experience. Ongoing support and monitoring are essential to sustain the momentum and impact of these efforts.
Kaatje Goossens, Pascal Borry, Tessa Marie Forehand
et al.
IntroductionWithin the Horizon Europe-funded AI-POD (AI-based tools for the Prediction of Obesity-related vascular Diseases) project, a clinical decision support system and citizen-facing mobile health application are being developed to enable personalized cardiovascular risk prediction in individuals living with obesity, through the integration of clinical, imaging, laboratory and lifestyle data. To inform the responsible development and implementation of these innovations, this study explored stakeholder perspectives on anticipated benefits, concerns, and challenges across four European countries.MethodsSemi-structured interviews were conducted with 21 stakeholders between February and July 2025. Participants represented diverse (professional) backgrounds including radiology (n = 5), artificial intelligence (n = 4), medical informatics and healthcare innovation (n = 2), dietetics (n = 2), endocrinology (n = 2), and general practice (n = 1). In addition, our sample included two patient representatives (n = 2), as well as individuals with expertise in social sciences and ethics (n = 1), law and policy (n = 1), and public health (n = 1). Most were based in Belgium (n = 16), with others from Austria (n = 3), the United Kingdom (n = 1), and Sweden (n = 1). Seven participants were affiliated with the AI-POD consortium, while 14 were external experts. All interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using inductive content analysis.ResultsParticipants identified several benefits of the AI-POD tools, including the integration of multimodal data, improved risk stratification, and enhanced patient engagement and health literacy. However, concerns were raised about potential anxiety stemming from risk scores, the reinforcement of weight stigma, limited evidence supporting personalized lifestyle recommendations, and equitable access to the tools. Key challenges included data heterogeneity, algorithmic bias, small sample sizes, and technological barriers such as device incompatibility and varying levels of digital literacy. Participants anticipated that implementation would be further complicated by difficulties in engaging patients and by healthcare professionals’ reluctance to adopt solutions that fall outside established guidelines.ConclusionWhile stakeholders acknowledged the promise of the AI-POD tools for advancing personalized cardiovascular risk prediction in individuals living with obesity, they also identified critical challenges related to equitable access, sustained user engagement, and effective integration into clinical practice. Addressing these challenges will be essential for the successful implementation, adoption, and uptake of the tools envisioned within the AI-POD project.
Road transport is responsible for about a quarter of Europe's greenhouse gas emissions, making its transformation a crucial part of Europe's overall decarbonization goals. Current European policies promote decarbonizing the transport sector and passenger car sales show an increased adoption of electric vehicles. Full electrification of land transport will significantly increase the average electricity demand but the use of smart charging and vehicle-to-grid could provide additional flexibility to balance wind and solar generation. In this study, we find cost-optimal transition pathways of the European land transport sector embedded in the sector-coupled open energy model PyPSA-Eur. We consider fossil-fueled, hydrogen-fueled, and electric cars using a 3-hour time resolution for a full year and covering 33 interconnected European countries. We analyze a transition path from 2025 to 2050 under different carbon budgets corresponding to a 1.7°C and 2°C temperature increase. Our results show that rapid electrification of road transport reduces the total system cost, even in the absence of climate targets. We see a clear preference for rapidly decommissioning internal combustion engine vehicles and using electric vehicles in all countries and under all carbon budgets. Allowing smart charging of electric vehicles decreases the total system cost by 1.6% because it reduces the need to install stationary batteries by almost 40%.
Lukas Franken, Elisabeth Zeyen, Orestis Angelidis
et al.
Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) can provide constant, reliable electricity and heat with minimal emissions, but high drilling costs and uncertain cost reductions leave their future unclear. We explore scenarios for the future adoption of EGS in a carbon-neutral, multi-sector European energy system. We find that in a net-zero system, heat (co-)generating EGS at current cost can support 20--30 GWth of capacity in Europe, primarily driven by district heating demands. When drilling costs decrease by approximately 60%, EGS becomes competitive in electricity markets, expanding its market opportunity by one order of magnitude. However, the spatially dispersed rollout of district heating contrasts with the confined overlap of high geological potential and low potential for other renewables, which conditions the competitiveness of electricity-generating EGS. This results in a challenge where the majority of EGS market potential depends on pan-European technology learning for cost reductions, emphasising coordination is crucial in stakeholders' efforts to reduce EGS cost.
Konstantin V. Getman, Oleg Kochukhov, Joe P. Ninan
et al.
We explore the empirical power-law relationship between X-ray luminosity (Lx) and total surface magnetic flux (Phi), established across solar magnetic elements, time- and disk-averaged emission from the Sun, older active stars, and pre-main-sequence (PMS) stars. Previous models of large PMS X-ray flares, lacking direct magnetic field measurements, showed discrepancies from this baseline law, which MHD simulations attribute to unusually strong magnetic fields during flares. To test this, we used nearly simultaneous Chandra X-ray and HET-HPF near-infrared observations of four young Orion stars, measuring surface magnetic fields during or just after powerful PMS X-ray flares. We also modeled these PMS X-ray flares, incorporating their measured magnetic field strengths. Our findings reveal magnetic field strengths at the stellar surface typical of non-flaring PMS stars, ruling out the need for abnormally strong fields during flares. Both PMS and solar flares deviate from the Lx-Phi law, with PMS flares exhibiting a more pronounced deviation, primarily due to their much larger active regions on the surface and larger flaring loop volumes above the surface compared to their solar counterparts. These deviations likely stem from the fact that powerful flares are driven by magnetic reconnection, while baseline X-ray emission may involve less efficient mechanisms like Alfven wave heating. Our results also indicate a preference for dipolar magnetic loops in PMS flares, consistent with Zeeman-Doppler imaging of fully convective stars. This requirement for giant dipolar loops aligns with MHD predictions of strong dipoles supported by polar magnetic surface active regions in fast-rotating, fully convective stars.
Florentin Millour, Guillaume Bourdarot, Jean-Baptiste Le Bouquin
et al.
We present in this proceeding the results of the test phase of the GRAVITY+ adaptive optics. This extreme AO will enable both high-dynamic range observations of faint companions (including exoplanets) thanks to a 40x40 sub-apertures wavefront control, and sensitive observations (including AGNs) thanks to the addition of a laser guide star to each UT of the VLT. This leap forward is made thanks to a mostly automated setup of the AO, including calibration of the NCPAs, that we tested in Europe on the UT+atmosphere simulator we built in Nice. We managed to reproduce in laboratory the expected performances of all the modes of the AO, including under non-optimal atmospheric or telescope alignment conditions, giving us the green light to proceed with the Assembly, Integration and Verification phase in Paranal.
The paper contemplates the importance of Leopold Heyrovský’s position as one of the most influential professors at Charles University in the late 1800s. His textbook, as the first Czech-language textbook of Roman law, was first published in a position to be able to set forth the thesaurus of the Czech private-law legal terminology which is still used today. In this context, the paper offers an overview of the preceding position of the Czech language in the legal system.
Rubén Ruiz-Torrubiano, Sebastian Knopp, Lukas Matthias Wolf
et al.
In modular educational systems, students are allowed to choose a part of their own curriculum themselves. This is typically done in the final class levels which lead to maturity for university access. The rationale behind letting students choose their courses themselves is to enhance self-responsibility, improve student motivation, and allow a focus on specific areas of interest. A central instrument for bringing these systems to fruition is the timetable. However, scheduling the timetable in such systems can be an extremely challenging and time-consuming task. In this study, we present a framework for classifying modular educational systems in Europe that reflects different degrees of freedom regarding student choices, and explore the consequences from the perspective of scheduling a timetable that satisfies all requirements from the organizational and the pedagogical perspective. For this purpose, we conducted interviews in Austria, Germany, Finland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg and apply the framework to these educational systems, finding that among them the Finnish system shows the highest degree of modularity. After analyzing the consequences of modularity from the scheduling perspective, we assess the necessity for automated scheduling methods, which are central for realizing the potential and many benefits of modular education in practice.
Outdoor air pollution is estimated to cause a huge number of premature deaths worldwide, it catalyses many diseases on a variety of time scales, and it has a detrimental effect on the environment. In light of these impacts it is necessary to obtain a better understanding of the dynamics and statistics of measured air pollution concentrations, including temporal fluctuations of observed concentrations and spatial heterogeneities. Here we present an extensive analysis for measured data from Europe. The observed probability density functions (PDFs) of air pollution concentrations depend very much on the spatial location and on the pollutant substance. We analyse a large number of time series data from 3544 different European monitoring sites and show that the PDFs of nitric oxide ($NO$), nitrogen dioxide ($NO_{2}$) and particulate matter ($PM_{10}$ and $PM_{2.5}$) concentrations generically exhibit heavy tails. These are asymptotically well approximated by $q$-exponential distributions with a given entropic index $q$ and width parameter $λ$. We observe that the power-law parameter $q$ and the width parameter $λ$ vary widely for the different spatial locations. We present the results of our data analysis in the form of a map that shows which parameters $q$ and $λ$ are most relevant in a given region. A variety of interesting spatial patterns is observed that correlate to properties of the geographical region. We also present results on typical time scales associated with the dynamical behaviour.
Intellectual property (IP) is the legal mechanism that transforms intangible instances into tradeable commodities. While creating the conditions for extraction of value and capital accumulation across all domains of economic and social life, IP law defines at the same time the boundaries of commodification by determining the scope of the public domain. Within this traditional framework, opponents of neo-liberal market expansionism have championed the role of IP doctrines and principles such as fair use, exceptions and limitations. However, new informational capitalism relies primarily on non-IP forms of appropriation and de facto control. To a large extent, commodification of intangibles and capital accumulation is no longer distressed by – and even benefits from – traditional public-domain-enhancing IP doctrines. This challenges traditional IP narratives and calls for a new foundation for a truly counter-hegemonic discourse in IP law.
The article aims to understand, analyze, and explain the evolution of the understanding of public administration from the perspectives of political science, management and law. The paper begins to study public administration from its classical type, where three perspectives of it are studied synthetically, as well as its potential as an independent administrative science. The article answers why and how the field is considered, even at the level of defining the concept of public administration and how it differs from management, law and political science. Additionally, the work demonstrates the visions expressed by such authors as Max Weber, Woodrow Wilson, Frank Goodnow, Leonard White, Herbert A. Simon, Luther Gulick and Dwight Waldo.
Political institutions and public administration (General), Public law
Lisa Koutsoviti Koumeri, Magali Legast, Yasaman Yousefi
et al.
Empirical evidence suggests that algorithmic decisions driven by Machine Learning (ML) techniques threaten to discriminate against legally protected groups or create new sources of unfairness. This work supports the contextual approach to fairness in EU non-discrimination legal framework and aims at assessing up to what point we can assure legal fairness through fairness metrics and under fairness constraints. For that, we analyze the legal notion of non-discrimination and differential treatment with the fairness definition Demographic Parity (DP) through Conditional Demographic Disparity (CDD). We train and compare different classifiers with fairness constraints to assess whether it is possible to reduce bias in the prediction while enabling the contextual approach to judicial interpretation practiced under EU non-discrimination laws. Our experimental results on three scenarios show that the in-processing bias mitigation algorithm leads to different performances in each of them. Our experiments and analysis suggest that AI-assisted decision-making can be fair from a legal perspective depending on the case at hand and the legal justification. These preliminary results encourage future work which will involve further case studies, metrics, and fairness notions.
Hydrogeodesy can benefit greatly from the use of Global Positioning System (GPS) displacements to analyse local changes in the hydrosphere, which the commonly used Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission is unable to provide due to coarse spatial resolution. Hydrosphere changes recorded by GPS are unfortunately hidden among the other signals to which the system is also sensitive so that the sensitivity of GPS to changes in the hydrosphere on temporal-scales from pluri-annual to decadal is questionable. We focus on hydrosphere signatures present on these long-term temporal-scales as observed by GPS through the vertical displacement time series (DTS) of 122 permanent stations over Europe and compare them to the DTS derived from GRACE for GPS locations. Our methodology is based on the weighted Savitzky-Golay (S-G) filter, an underestimated filter in the field of geodetic time series analysis. We show that the correspondence between GPS and GRACE on long-term temporal-scales is generally strong, but decreases for coastal regions and regions where the coarse gridding of GRACE does not capture local hydrosphere effects. Further, the negative correlation with El Niño Southern Oscillations (ENSO) is confirmed for Europe.
In fulfilling the European security commitment, the actors of the so-called "Intelligence Community" play a central role. They provide political and military decision-makers with important analyses and information. The Intelligence College in Europe (ICE) is the first entity to offer professional intelligence training as well as postgraduate level academic education in intelligence and security studies at a pan-European level. In developing its postgraduate provision, ICE has benefited from the experience of the German Master of Intelligence and Security Studies (MISS), which is a joint effort of the University of the Bundeswehr Munich and the Department of Intelligence at the Federal University of Administrative Sciences in Berlin. As a main contribution of this paper, the module Counterterrorism (adapted from the MISS) is examined in more detail as a case study of how postgraduate modules can be modified to speak to a pan-European audience of intelligence professionals.
Population decline is projected to become widespread in Europe, with the continental population set to reverse its longstanding trajectory of growth within the next five years. This represents unfamiliar demographic territory. Despite this, literature on decline remains sparse and our understanding porous. Particular epistemological deficiencies stem from a lack of both cross-national and temporal analyses of population decline. This study seeks to address these gapsthrough the novel application of sequence and cluster analysis techniques to examine variations in population decline trajectories since 2000 in 696 sub-national areas across 33 European territories. The methodology allows for a holistic understanding of decline trajectories capturing differences in the ordering, timing, magnitude and spatial structure of population decline. We identify a typology of population decline distinguishing seven distinct pathways to depopulation and chart their geographies. Results revealed differentiated pathways of depopulation in continental sub-regions, with consistent and rapid declines in the east, persistent but moderate declines in central Europe, accelerating declines in the south and decelerating population declines in the west. Results also revealed differentiated patterns of depopulation across the rural-urban continuum, with urban and populous areas experiencing deceleration in population decline, while population decline accelerates or stabilises in rural areas. Small and mid-sized areas displayed heterogeneous depopulation trajectories, highlighting the importance of local contextual factors in influencing trajectories of population decline.
With the urgent need to implement the EU countries pledges and to monitor the effectiveness of Green Deal plan, Monitoring Reporting and Verification tools are needed to track how emissions are changing for all the sectors. Current official inventories only provide annual estimates of national CO$_2$ emissions with a lag of 1+ year which do not capture the variations of emissions due to recent shocks including COVID lockdowns and economic rebounds, war in Ukraine. Here we present a near-real-time country-level dataset of daily fossil fuel and cement emissions from January 2019 through December 2021 for 27 EU countries and UK, which called Carbon Monitor Europe. The data are calculated separately for six sectors: power, industry, ground transportation, domestic aviation, international aviation and residential. Daily CO$_2$ emissions are estimated from a large set of activity data compiled from different sources. The goal of this dataset is to improve the timeliness and temporal resolution of emissions for European countries, to inform the public and decision makers about current emissions changes in Europe.
The engagement of conservative, populist governments with constitutional reform and constitution-making is perceived as a significant threat to the rule of law and democracy within the European Union. Constitutionalists often assume a relation of mutual exclusion between populism and constitutionalism. In contrast, I argue that while populism ought to be understood as a rejection of liberal constitutionalism, it equally constitutes a competing political force regarding the definition of constitutional democracy. The article first discusses populist constitutionalism in the context of the two, main modern constitutional traditions: the modernist and the revolutionary ones. Second, I discuss the populist critique of liberal constitutionalism, with a central focus on the recent cases of right-wing populism in power in East-Central Europe. Four dimensions are prominent: (i) popular sovereignty as the key justificatory claim of populism; (ii) majority rule as the main populist mode of government; (iii) instrumentalism as the legal–practical approach of populists; and (iv) legal resentment as the populists’ main attitude toward public law. In conclusion, I argue that while the populist critique of liberal constitutionalism provides significant insights into structural problems of liberal democracy, populist constitutionalism ultimately fails to live up to its own democratic promise.