Infertility affects 10–15% of couples at the age of conception. Mounting evidence supports that not only are paternal factors crucial during fertilization, but also for embryogenesis. This review aims to provide some clues about the contribution of male factors to reproductive success and live birth, as such contributions can be as important as that of the female. Semen is composed of two fractions: sperm and seminal plasma. Regarding the former, the integrity of sperm components (i.e., centrioles, DNA integrity and methylation, histone-to-protamine ration, specific proteins, etc.) has been proven to be essential for some of the events occurring upon engulfment of the spermatozoon into the oocyte cytoplasm. The metabolic status of sperm also seems to shape their potential fertilizing capacity. Furthermore, seminal plasma appears to modulate the female reproductive tract, and has been suggested to support embryo implantation. In spite of the aforementioned, it remains largely unaddressed how paternal factors interact with maternal ones, and whether the latter may mask the former. While assisted reproductive techniques (ART) are useful to rescue infertility, a better understanding about the contribution of semen to fertilization, embryo development and implantation can increase the efficiency of these techniques, and address further the causes of total fertilization failure, implantation deficiency and recurrent miscarriage.

This study investigates the reflections on the trio of exchange rate, nominal interest rate and inflation, on Turkey’s Real Gross Domestic Product (RGDP). In the analysis using annual time series data covering the years 1985–2020 obtained from the Turkish Statistical Institute, the Vector Autoregression (VAR) and Nonlinear Autoregressive Distribution Lag (NARDL) models are used with restricted variables. The existence of cointegration also encourages the application of the Vector Error Correction (VECM) model to examine the causal relationships between these variables. Nonlinear ARDL test results and other tests reveal some long-term effects. Research results show that inflation-based growth does not occur in the short term and negatively affects growth in the long term. Due to Turkey’s significant current account deficit and heavy reliance on imported energy and inputs, currency devaluation is ineffective in boosting exports, highlighting the challenges of promoting export growth under these economic conditions. Moreover, it turns out that policies that reduce interest rates, as well as the depreciation of the Turkish lira against the exchange rate due to inflation, harm the economy in general. These effects serve as a crucial wake-up call for proponents of the export-led growth model.

This article presents the critical importance of technological progress in strengthening Ukraine’s national security. It examines the intersection of technology, economic growth, and societal wellbeing, highlighting the role of innovation and investment in this context. The main objective is to analyse how technological modernization and a shift towards an innovative economic model can strengthen national security. The study uses a mixed-methods approach, combining qualitative and quantitative analyses, historical, and comparative methods to evaluate the impact of factors such as governance, economic systems, and emerging threats, including extremism, on national security. This multifaceted strategy offers a comprehensive understanding of internal and external influences on security dynamics. The findings suggest that national resilience against security threats is dependent on technological innovation. Additionally, it is important to effectively address non-conventional threats and adapt to global trends. This article argues that national security in the modern era is multifaceted and requires a comprehensive strategy that integrates technological innovation with economic and social policies. It suggests that a proactive approach towards innovation and investment can significantly contribute to safeguarding national interests in a rapidly changing global landscape.

The last 15 years have witnessed a wave of nostalgia for the recent past in Greece. This nostalgia is boosted by social media, especially Facebook, and revolves around the rising counsumer standards that the country experiences in the first three decades after its entry in the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1981. Drawing on media material and surveys, this article discusses this phenomenon, focusing on whether this nostalgia represents a cultural response to Europe and Europanization. Through a historically empathetic analysis, the article argues that this critique focuses on participation in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), a choice that Greek society largely sees as harmful. In this vein, the drachma, Greece’s currency until 2002, is viewed nostalgically and identified with prosperity.

To honour the memory of Albert Bandura and David Magnusson, a few years after their deaths, the current status and perspectives of research on Personality is addressed. There is a growing demand for psychological knowledge to enable our societies to value their human capital. To this end, contemporary research on Personality moves beyond traditional rivalries among competing theories and addresses the whole personality by focusing on the unique properties that account for humans as agentic and moral beings, and for the social conditions that enable us to unveil and nurture the best of our humanity.

We have increasingly sophisticated ways of acquiring and communicating knowledge, yet, paradoxically, we are currently facing an unprecedented global ignorance crisis that affects our personal and societal well-being, as well as the stability of our democracies. There are two key triggers to this crisis, i.e. two crucial obstacles to learning: first, the widespread sharing of disinformation, which, in conjunction with an overly trusting audience, contributes to widely spread false beliefs, and correspondingly reckless political and social behaviour. At the same time, though, and at least as critical, is the prevalence of knowledge resistance and distrust in expertise. What we need to solve this high-stakes puzzle is a social epistemological framework that is able to explain the complex mechanisms underlying these surprising and unprecedented epistemic phenomena. This article will aim to sketch the contours of such a framework.

Exploring the fundamental constituents of the matter around us and in the Universe, as well as their interactions, is among the premier goals of physics. Investigating ultrarelativistic collisions in particle accelerators has delivered answers to these questions many times in the past decades. In this article we focus on the research aimed at recreating the matter that filled the Universe in the first microsecond after the Big Bang – but this time in collisions of heavy ions. In particular, we discuss the technique called femtoscopy, which provides us with a tool to understand the space–time structure of particle creation in heavy-ion collisions. We use Lévy-stable distributions to investigate this structure and explore its dependence on particle momentum and collision energy.

In this article, I provide a brief account of my first decade of involvement in European science policy, of what I believe are the key structural issues in that landscape, and where I propose possible adjustments to address these issues.

Truth is a property of our statements and of our thoughts, but also what these aim at, and a norm for our thinking in general. But how to understand this normative tie between belief and truth? Norms by themselves seem unable to motivate or to guide us. These difficulties are stated, and the answer given is that the norm of belief is actually knowledge, which explains why we value it, and how it can also be a value.

This article compares two different ways in which German industries, during the half century before 1914, managed to integrate useful results from scientific research: At the time, on the one hand there was single-firm-based industrial research, and on the other the cooperation of science, business, and government in the Emperor William Society for the Advancement of Sciences (1911) out of which, after the Second World War, the Max Planck Society emerged. On this basis, the article discusses similarities and tensions between capitalism and the sciences which, in spite of some structural similarities, follow different logics.

The goal of a fifth EU freedom – the ‘freedom of knowledge’ – emerged from working towards a unified European research area, expanding upon the four basic freedoms of the Single Market. This additional freedom is not yet guaranteed and so this task should be taken up anew. Here, I support this goal by explicating the meaning of the ‘fifth freedom’, then justifying its importance via four arguments concerning scientific progress, freedom of research, the economic and technological progress of societies, and the democratic ideals of the European project. To end the main article, I then argue that this freedom should be viewed as a right. In the supplementary material, I present problems that arise in the administration, funding, and organization of science within the EU to demonstrate that the fifth freedom is still a long way from being a reality. The evidence includes cases of national rules and practices that reduce or block the mobility of EU researchers and weaken collaboration and progress. For each type of problem, I present specific policy proposals for advancing the fifth freedom goal. The proposals are directed at academic administrations, funding agencies, and political actors at the regional, national, and European levels.

Motivated by the insights of Karen Horney into submissive and compliant personalities, this study delves into the perpetual vulnerability, fear of helplessness, and isolation portrayed in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man through the lens of psychoneurosis theory. Individuals with obsessive appeasement tendencies experience excessive dependency and restlessness, reinforcing their feelings of helplessness and often resulting in manipulative attachments to powerful figures and self-defeating behaviours. Neurosis amplifies these maladaptive responses, intensifying anxiety stemming from individual, familial, social, or religious fears, thereby significantly impacting social functioning. This study aims to analyse the submissive personality of Mary Dedalus in Joyce’s novel from the three distinct perspectives of need for approval, sense of unsupportedness, and fear of the church. An in-depth exploration of these aspects not only enriches our comprehension of Joyce’s work but also offers valuable insights into the portrayal of neurosis and its impact on human behaviour within a competitive societal framework.

This article reflects on whether and how European communities’ cultural frameworks of seasons are coming to poorly correspond to the climatic conditions they experience, and the implications for how Europe adapts to climatic (and social and environmental) change. It starts from a colder- and drier-than-normal autumn and winter (2023/2024) in Bergen, Norway, and a local researcher’s investigation into why these climatically anomalous seasons were being culturally celebrated as ‘seasonal weather’. He compares studies into the Bergen population’s cultural expectations for weather conditions in each of the four seasons, with the statistical climatic record, and reveals a mismatch. He argues that the four-season framework prominent in Europe poorly describes or anticipates meteorology in Bergen, and that other frameworks could fit better. The article argues that seasonal frameworks continuously evolve with interlinked environmental and social change – from drivers such as climate change, landscape modification, social evolution, and globalization – so that seasonal mismatches are as much about how societies culturally re-conceive of seasons as about physical climate change for instance. This is important because the way European societies divide the year by seasonal expectations affects how they relate to the meteorological conditions they come to face each season.