The end of the Cold War marked a major break for migration policies in Europe. Defensive projections and visions of migration came to the fore in a European Union whose integration and openness toward the internal border-free single market went hand-in-hand with joint isolation of a ‘Fortress Europe’ vis-à-vis undesirable and, especially illegal, in-migration from outside its borders. As long as a negative coalition against unwelcome immigration prevails instead of a European migration concept, Europe itself contributes to the illegalization of immigration and to the persistence of the enemy image of ‘illegal immigration’. Against a background of widespread and confused fears of migration pressure from outside Europe, three issues have to be promoted by clear political direction with long-term perspectives: (1) a further normalization in dealing with migration and integration; (2) the acceptance and understanding of the feasibility of these central issues of social life in an immigration country, but also (3) the pragmatic acceptance of the limits of migration control in view of the often underestimated autonomous dynamics of migration and integration processes. This combines perspectives of researching migration and integration as well as the shaping of policies.

The environment has many of the properties that economists associate with the concept of a public good. It has long been realized that, if left to itself, the market economy is likely to lead to an undersupply of public goods and, in the environmental area, to an insufficient use of resources to preserve environmental quality. Economics research in this area has concentrated on three central issues. First, exactly why is it that a market economy fails to allocate resources efficiently in the presence of environmental public goods or externalities? Second, how can one assess the economic value of environmental goods? Third, what kinds of policy are best suited for the protection of the environment, e.g. should one rely on tax and price incentives or on quantitative regulations? This article discusses these questions and also describes the evolution of the economic perspective on the environment, from a concern with local problems to focus on international and global issues of environmental pollution.

Is moral judgement a mere product of Darwinian evolution, similar to sexual behaviour and social exchanges, or is it a specific human privilege, as is the case for complex languages and mathematics? The answer is that it is both. Moral behaviour is the consequence of social practices useful to the group that mankind inherited from animal ancestors and which human culture has transformed into a discursive, and genuinely human, philosophical construct. These two sides of moral judgement affect the way we feel about our own existence as animals and the way we treat animals.

During the second half of the 19th century, the psychology of language was invented as a discipline for the sole purpose of explaining the evolution of spoken language. These efforts culminated in Wilhelm Wundt's monumental Die Sprache of 1900, which outlined the psychological mechanisms involved in producing utterances and considered how these mechanisms could have evolved. Wundt assumes that articulatory movements were originally rather arbitrary concomitants of larger, meaningful expressive bodily gestures. The sounds such articulations happened to produce slowly acquired the meaning of the gesture as a whole, ultimately making the gesture superfluous. Over a century later, gestural theories of language origins still abound. I argue that such theories are unlikely and wasteful, given the biological, neurological and genetic evidence.

Employing methods extracted from the literature, in combination with data on the Dutch economy, we assess the impact of immigration on the labour market and the public sector in the Netherlands. Additional labour supply due to immigration will have only a limited positive effect on the total income of natives, though redistribution between native groups is relatively large. The long run fiscal impact of immigrants will only be positive if their labour market performance at least equals that of natives. We conclude that selective labour immigration may contribute to the economic well-being of the host country. However, large-scale immigration of labour is not considered to be effective in alleviating the financial burden of ageing in the Netherlands.

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (1853–1926) was famous for the Cryogenic Laboratory he built up at Leiden University. Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (1853–1928), Professor of theoretical physics at the same university and Onnes' closest colleague, left Leiden in 1912. According to Lorentz's daughter, this move had been initiated by a ‘trick’ Onnes had played on her father a few years earlier. Lorentz had been given two small laboratories for his personal use, but within a short time, according to Lorentz' daughter, Onnes just pinched those rooms and added them to his big laboratory. How did Kamerlingh Onnes and Lorentz get along together, and what really happened in the ‘case of the stolen rooms’?

A consideration of medieval astronomy and the views of the philosopher William of Occam leads to a consideration of the ambiguities in the application of the principle of Occam's razor as it applies to problems in science, including the constants applicable to Einstein's Theory of General Relativity and cosmology. The principle can both be used to eliminate unnecessary irrelevancies, but also to constrain the development of imaginative theories.

Human language is qualitatively different from animal communication systems in at least two separate ways. Human languages contain tens of thousands of arbitrary learned symbols (mainly words). No other animal communication system involves learning the component symbolic elements afresh in each individual's lifetime, and certainly not in such vast numbers. Human language also has complex compositional syntax. The meanings of our sentences are composed from the meanings of the constituent parts (e.g. the words). This is obvious to us, but no other animal communication system (with honeybees as an odd but distracting exception) puts messages together in this way. A recent theoretical claim that the sole distinguishing feature of human language is recursion is discussed, and related to these features of learned symbols and compositional syntax. It is argued that recursive thought could have existed in prelinguistic hominids, and that the key step to language was the innovative disposition to learn massive numbers of arbitrary symbols

Research is considered as a major component of innovation and a key to the development of modern societies. However, fundamental research, which essentially aims at improving our understanding of Nature, is often questioned about its specific role. In this paper, arguments of ‘general interests’ in support of fundamental research are presented to contribute to the science-policy debate. Beyond a notable return on investment, now acknowledged by most economists, a number of positive societal impacts of fundamental research can be underlined. Fundamental research helps society as a whole, as well as individual firms, to keep options, possible scenarios and choices open (e.g. in relation with sustainable development), to maintain a good capability for top-level scientific expertise, to develop conditions favourable to scientific and technological breakthroughs, to ensure training at the highest possible level and also to guarantee access to, and free circulation of, the most valuable information. Finally, fundamental research may contribute to a better structural link between science and society.

It is a recurrent theme in sociolinguistics that besides fully documenting endangered languages, it is important to ensure somehow that they will continue to be used. The basic trope is that of ‘language death’, analogous to the extinction of species. But the analogy fails: languages do not die, although their users may abandon them, usually in favour of a more widely spoken language. Nor does linguistic diversity increase cultural diversity — or the equal treatment of language groups mitigate inequality between and within groups. In addition, promoting minority, local and immigrant languages, which are all too often ill-equipped for modern life, actually strengthens the position of the dominant language as the only common language of communication: the more languages are spoken, the sooner English will take over. This process can be seen at work both in post-Apartheid South Africa and in the European Union as it undergoes enlargement.

2004 is an Olympic year, so it is worth directing some attention to the ‘inventors’ of the Olympic Games, the ancient Greeks who, in the early eighth century BC, according to at least one tradition, founded the Olympic Games in the precinct of Zeus, an area on the Peloponnese not far from the later city of Elis. The ‘inventor’ of the new Olympic Games in 1896, the French Baron, Pierre de Coubertin, drew at least part of his inspiration from the ancient predecessors. What was the status of the ancient Olympics in the world of sports in the Greco-Roman period; what sort of sport was practised in Olympia? Who were the participating athletes and, above all, why did they practice their sports and why did they participate in the Olympics? Was it the case that it was a gentlemanly amateur activity and that commercialism in sport is just a modern deviation?

Planet Earth is unique in our solar system as an abode of life. In contrast to its planetary neighbours, the presence of liquid water, a benign atmospheric environment, a solid surface and an internal structure providing a protective magnetic field make it a suitable habitat for man. While natural forces have shaped the Earth over millennia, man through his technological prowess may become a threat to this oasis of life in the solar system.

The Olympic Games are an invention of the ancient Greeks. They were held in Olympia in a quadrennial rhythm, without interruption for ca. 1200 years. Compared with the modern Olympics, the ancient programme was small: running events (over several distances), the pentathlon, and the so-called ‘heavy’ events: wrestling, boxing and pankration. Various equestrian events (with and without chariots) completed the programme. This programme is discussed with the athletes, their social background and ideology. Although in ancient Olympia a wreath of olive-leaves – a forerunner of our modern gold medal – was the first and only prize, there was no amateurism in Greek athletics. Olympic athletes happily participated in highly rewarding money games both before and after the Olympics. Money was not despised; abuse of money, in the form of Wine, Women and Song was criticized, but some athletes, then as now, were unable to resist the temptations of life.

Noam Chomsky is an enigma. To many, he is — and has been for 50 years — the most prominent and courageous academic opponent of his country's militarist ambitions around the globe. Yet among those who admire him on that score, few find it easy to relate to his seemingly obscure theories about language. The academic community acclaims Chomsky as the principal inspiration behind the so-called ‘cognitive revolution’ in psychology and related sciences — an intellectual development reflecting corporate pressures and initially sponsored by the United States military. This article investigates the paradoxical relationship between Chomsky's political activism and his science.

Gunpowder was developed in the 13th century, as a result of the discovery of how to purify saltpetre. This led to the isolation of amyl nitrite, which turned out to be an effective treatment for angina pectoris. Nitroglycerine is not only a high explosive but also effective in treating angina. The search for an understanding of how it works in the body has led to the astonishing discovery that nitric oxide gas is actually produced in the body and is involved in the control of a number of important functions, including blood pressure.

The obesity epidemic is now widely recognized as a major threat to health in many different countries. Some surgical therapies for obesity are efficacious and indicate that signals from the gastrointestinal tract are capable of exerting beneficial long-term effects on food intake and body weight. The development of non-surgical therapies targeting this system depends on understanding how food, and the absence of food, in the gastrointestinal tract signals to those parts of the brain that regulate feeding behaviour. What can be called gastrointestinal surveillance systems include both nervous pathways linking the gut and brain, and some gut hormones. Nutrient sensing mechanisms within the gastrointestinal tract determine the release of satiety hormones such as cholecystokinin (CCK), or appetite stimulating hormones such as ghrelin, and offer potential therapeutic targets. It seems that CCK and ghrelin both act on the vagus nerve that links the gut to the brain. Examples of interactions between different factors regulating this pathway are discussed. It is argued that sufficient is now known to indicate that this signalling system can provide new targets for the treatment of obesity.

My aim is to show how the principal notions of cognitive linguistics, namely metaphor and metonymy are helpful in the analysis of the ancient Indian poetical text, the Rigveda. Their use enables us to reconstruct aspects of thinking of the Rigvedic poets and to explain some obscure metaphors. The basic way of conceptualization of desire in the Rigveda is presented.

Roman ludi circenses are well known, especially chariot-racing, which was extremely popular during the Roman Empire. In many aspects, this competition even foreshadows modern sport seen as show business (the Circus Maximus could accommodate about 150,000 spectators). One could not say the same thing about the athletic exercises of Roman citizens: the common view is that Romans had a negative attitude towards athletics, which were not regarded as useful and were sometimes considered as scandalous. But Roman citizens did, in fact, practise much sport, for instance in the Campus Martius in Rome, and in the palaestrae of public baths. They were particularly fond of ball-games and of swimming in very large cold pools.

Coubertin's contribution to the revival of the Olympic Games and the widespread opinion that the modern Games were ‘a French invention’ should be placed in their broad historical context. There are several arguments for and against the assumption that he was the founder, or ‘father’, of the modern Olympics and the Olympic movement. The historical development of the Olympic ideas since the time of Humanism will be discussed, along with the Renaissance and the various attempts to organize Olympic Games before 1896, with a further emphasis on the importance of Neo-Humanism and classical scholarship in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, in order better to understand ancient Greek athletics. Finally Pierre de Coubertin's concept of the Olympic Games and the contributions of the young Greek nation for the rebirth of the famous ancient games after the War of Independence will be analysed.