Connecting Science and Society

Across Europe, refugees and asylum seekers often find themselves in precarious situations, facing limited access to housing, employment, education, and legal protection. While government responses have frequently proved inadequate, grass-roots movements have emerged to fill the gaps. These citizen-led initiatives represent more than simple charity; they embody new forms of political engagement where refugees and volunteers work together across differences to create useful change.
This issue is particularly pressing in the Republic of Cyprus (RoC), where the island’s own history of division and displacement shapes contemporary responses to newcomers. Since 2015, the RoC has experienced a dramatic increase in refugee arrivals, making it the EU member state with the highest number of asylum applications per capita in 2021. Yet despite – or perhaps because of – this pressure, women in the Cypriot city of Paphos have created remarkable spaces of collaboration and mutual support.

Brain and mental disorders are conditions that disrupt how the brain works, affecting how people think, feel, or behave. The current insufficient approach to diagnosing these conditions has contributed to their massive global impact. By 2050, an estimated 4.9 billion people will suffer from neurodegenerative disorders and mental illnesses.
At Advanced Biosimulation Technologies LLC (USA), scientists and engineers led by Dr Roustem Miftahof and Dr Fred Makaroff have developed a groundbreaking platform designed to screen and detect early cognitive changes before symptoms appear.

Turbulence remains one of the most enigmatic and poorly understood phenomena in physics, despite being ubiquitous in nature and everyday life—from the experience of flying through turbulent air, to driving at high speed, to observing water swirling in a river. The challenge of understanding turbulence has captivated some of history’s greatest minds.
Albert Einstein (physicist): “A turbulent flow is a problem whose solution has always defied the greatest minds.”
Richard Feynman (physicist): “Turbulence is the most important unsolved problem of classical physics.”
What are the governing equations of turbulence? Dr Alex Fedoseyev is unravelling turbulence mysteries using the Alexeev Hydrodynamic Equations (AHE). The model he developed has enabled major advances in the prediction of turbulent flows and laid the foundation for practical turbulence management.

In early modern Europe, ancient Greek was far more than a scholarly pursuit. Intellectuals from many regions discovered that demonstrating resemblance of their native languages to Greek could elevate their cultural status, support claims of superiority over rival languages, and even advance religious and political causes. Sometimes called ‘Hellenising’, this phenomenon saw scholars from Italy to France, Germany, and the Netherlands, deliberately revealing —and often inventing— Greek features in their mother tongues.
Understanding how this worked requires examining specific cases where scholars used Greek to reshape their languages and advance their own agendas.

Dr Norio Mitsuhashi, former Professor of the Department of Radiation Oncology at Tokyo Women’s Medical University, leads revolutionary clinical research into optimising stereotactic body radiation therapy for lung cancer. Dr Mitsuhashi and his colleagues examine whether routinely available patient and tumour characteristics can predict respiratory tumour motion, a critical source of uncertainty in high precision radiotherapy. Their findings suggest that respiratory motion cannot be reliably inferred, and must instead be measured directly in every patient.

The mining industry plays a vital role in driving Mongolia’s economic growth and creating employment opportunities. However, in the Gobi Desert —one of the driest regions in Mongolia— water access, and community engagement remain critical challenges for the mining industry. In this region, water is a shared and scarce resource, relied upon by herders, towns, mining companies, wildlife, and fragile ecosystems alike.

A study by Dr Bolormaa Purevjav and her colleagues explored how a holistic approach which combines economic, social, and environmental principles called Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) can improve water sustainability in mining regions.

Quaternary ammonium compounds are a large class of compounds used as disinfectants in hospitals, restaurants, healthcare and animal care facilities, and are popular as household cleaners. With disease outbreaks increasing our fears about infections, the use of disinfectants has skyrocketed in recent years. Understandably, we all want to feel safe. However, as Professor Terry Hrubec from the Department of Biomedical Sciences of E. Via College of Osteopathic Medicine discovered, such products may be causing more harm than good.

A major new scientific resource has been produced with the support of the Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics. Edited by Profs Ariel Dinar and Robert Mendelsohn, The Handbook on Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation, and Mitigation in Agriculture (Edward Elgar Publishing, May 2026) integrates evidence from empirical studies across five continents, providing one of the clearest pictures to-date of how climate change is influencing agriculture.
The studies range from large-scale econometric analyses to micro-level surveys, covering Africa, Europe, the United States, Brazil, China, and Mediterranean countries. The result is a body of work revealing scientifically rigorous patterns that are highly relevant for policy and practice. The foreword from Wolf Prize Laureate David Zilberman highlights how the Handbook’s findings are thematically organized into climate impacts, adaptation, mitigation, and governance.

Pharmaceutical manufacturers face increasing pressure to reduce solvent use, energy consumption and waste. Mechanochemistry explores mechanical force rather than heat to drive chemical reactions in the absence of solvents, and offers a promising alternative.
At the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung in Germany, Dr Jan-Hendrik Schöbel and Dr Michael Felderhoff are exploring how large, industrial milling technologies can be adapted to produce high-value pharmaceutical co-crystals cleanly and efficiently. Their recent studies demonstrate that both drum mills and attritor mills, equipment long used in mining and materials processing, can be repurposed for greener production of ibuprofen:nicotinamide co-crystals.

This book explores the history of the area in Turkey where these two cities lie. Prof Richard Ludueña and his daughter visited Harran and Sanliurfa (formerly Edessa) in 2014. He found them fascinating and wanted to learn more about their histories, but found no book that focused on their history from the beginning to modern times. So, he decided to write one.
Harran still bears its ancient name, but Edessa has had a great variety of names and is now called Sanliurfa. Our story goes back long before the cities were founded, back to the late Neolithic site of Göbekli Tepe, where monuments have carvings consistent with a destructive comet.