Can there be a silver lining to a pandemic? Lockdown, a common response to COVID-19 by governments across the world, dramatically changed peoples’ lives by confining their movement to their homes. It thus also changed our transportation and consumption patterns, leading to huge reductions in emissions.1 Images snapped by NASA and the European Space Agency showing clouds of nitrogen dioxide disappe

A growing global wave of climate change litigation is led by minors, relying on their human rights, as well as those of future generations against governments and their failure to take action on climate change. Such litigation is emerging also before the Court of Justice of the European Union, where the ambitiousness of the EU’s climate change policies, embodied in the 2030 Climate and Energy Poli

The genus Amorphophallus is an economically important taxon that is abundant in Old World tropical forests (Asia, Oceania and Africa). It includes many species that are used with increasing frequency as a source of food and pharmaceutical products worldwide. Amorphophallus konjac is an important economic crop and has been used widely in China and Japan for commercial konjac glucomannan (KGM) produ

Two series of samples collected for isolation of dictyostelid cellular slime molds (dictyostelids) in Madagascar yielded a relatively large number of isolates of Polysphondylium. Most of these turned out to be species new to science that show varying degrees of clustering from unclustered to coremiform as well as an ability to migrate. Migratory ability (phototaxis) is a common feature of species

The phylogenetic position of the Afro-Asian genus Sphaerocoma is investigated using DNA sequences from plastid rps16 and ndhF, as well as from nuclear ITS and RPB2. Seven accessions of Sphaerocoma, representing all three currently recognized taxa, are analyzed along with sequences from genera that have been found to be closely related to Sphaerocoma in broader studies of Caryophyllaceae. The Afro-

In the wake of crises and “enlargement fatigue”, EU politics deprioritized enlargement. Recently, however, the Commission motioned a reinvigorated enlargement prospect for the Western Balkans, identifying Serbia and Montenegro as the front runners. This paper advises that in going forward, the EU should also look back at its five decades of enlargement. The article focuses on environmental protect

In this paper we study a variation of the random k-SAT problem, called polarized random k-SAT. In this model there is a polarization parameter p, and in half of the clauses each variable occurs negated with probability p and pure otherwise, while in the other half the probabilities are interchanged. For p=1/2 we get the classical random k-SAT model, and at the other extreme we have the fully polar

Judicial dialogue, as enabled through preliminary reference, is a fundamental component of the EU judicial system. It allows the national courts to ask the Court of Justice (ECJ) questions of interpretation and validity of EU acts, thereby helping secure the coherence of EU law, as well as it safeguards judicial protection, especially for individual applicants who otherwise enjoy limited access to

Given a fixed small graph H and a larger graph G, an H-factor is a collection of vertex-disjoint subgraphs H′⊂G, each isomorphic to H, that cover the vertices of G. If G is the complete graph Kn equipped with independent U(0,1) edge weights, what is the lowest total weight of an H-factor? This problem has previously been considered for e.g. H=K2. We show that if H contains a cycle, then the minimu

This paper sheds light on the existence of a differential deterrence regime in EU law, depending on whether the State or the firm is the addressee of a legal obligation. To that end, we review two areas of EU law – environmental law and competition law. Both disciplines employ fines to deter the State and the firm respectively from violating their specific duties under the Treaty: the ‘duty to tra

The current European situation is marked by an ongoing migration crisis. On a daily basis we are informed of the ever-increasing number of migrants trying to reach Europe’s border – too often with fatal results. The European Court ofJustice, once described as “tucked away in the fairyland Duchy ofLuxembourg”, is today faced with difficult legal questions concerning EU asylum law – the present case