The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body of about 32,000 European civil servants. The Commission is divided into departments known as Directorates-General (DGs) that can be likened to departments or ministries each headed by a Director-General who is responsible to a Commissioner.There is one member per member state, but members are bound by their oath of office to represent the general interest of the EU as a whole rather than their home state. The Commission President (currently Ursula von der Leyen) is proposed by the European Council (the 27 heads of state) and elected by the European Parliament. The Council of the European Union then nominates the other members of the Commission in agreement with the nominated President, and the 27 members as a team are then subject to a vote of approval by the European Parliament. The current Commission is the Von der Leyen Commission, which took office in December 2019, following the European Parliament elections in May of the same year.The governmental powers of the Commission have been such that some, including former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, have suggested changing its name to the "European Government", calling the present name of the Commission "ridiculous", likening it to a misnomer..
Tri-structural isotropic nuclear fuel (TRISO), commonly used in high-temperature reactors is known for its exceptional durability. However, during neutron irradiation in the reactor core, under both normal and accidental conditions, damage can occur to the TRISO particle’s coating layers. In the context of fuel quality classification, TRISO particles should be examined both before and after fuel irradiation. To examine the inner layers of the spherical TRISO fuel, particles should be polished in order to reveal their mid-plane. Polished samples can then be thoroughly analysed using various tools. Although the polishing procedure for TRISO particles is relatively straightforward, using unsuitable materials can mechanically damage the surface of the coating layers. This study offers a detailed step-by-step guide for polishing TRISO particles in both cold and hot laboratories.
Vehicles currently on the road are characterized by a growing level of automation. To improve safety standards and solve disputes on accident responsibilities, policy-makers have established sets of guidelines related to the monitoring of the automated vehicle (AV) behaviour, which requires logging and reporting of a set of data acquisitions, including environment perception and decision-making. Given the rising numbers of AVs, this paper provides a methodology to estimate the amount of data generated by logging and recording operations considering the following factors: AV adoption levels, sensing system architecture, decision-making pipelines, user familiarity with AVs, and point of data extraction along the vehicle sensing pipeline. The method is tested on a European scale, but can be replicated on broader scenarios. The results show the impossibility of uploading raw sensor output, due to the required bit-rate and storage memory, which are not sustainable by current infrastructure and technology. Upload of processed and annotated data in place of raw sensors output would downsize the volumes involved by several orders of magnitude, allowing for real time upload to the cloud. However, the lack of an annotation standard leads to greater uncertainty in the total volume of generated data, making cloud storage design more difficult for authorities. This demonstrates the stringent need for a data annotation standard to efficiently perform monitoring of AVs.
The EU fiscal framework represented by the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) has been an effective tool for improving average government budget balances. This paper studies how EU and national-level fiscal rules have determined the dynamics of general government budget balances during the last 30 years. The results suggest that the SGP has had, on average, a statistically significant positive effect on the development of general government budget balances, which remains robust when controlling for national fiscal rules and across multiple estimation approaches, indicating effects beyond domestic frameworks. The effects for national fiscal rules appear very heterogeneous and dependent on the specifics of the rules as well as the public sector level they apply to. The effectiveness of different forms of rules for various levels of government can differ significantly due to country-level institutional differences, but the results of the study can help policymakers in designing and implementing more efficient and better targeted fiscal rules.
The global shift toward renewable energy and circular economy models requires industrial systems that minimize waste and recover value across entire life cycles. This review synthesizes recent advances in by-product recovery technologies supporting renewable energy and circular industrial processes. Thermal, biological, chemical/electrochemical, and biotechnological routes are analyzed across battery and e-waste recycling, bioenergy, wastewater, and agri-food sectors, with emphasis on integration through Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), techno-economic analysis (TEA), and multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) coupled to process simulation, digital twins, and artificial intelligence tools. Policy and economic frameworks, including the European Green Deal and the Critical Raw Materials Act, are examined in relation to technology readiness and environmental performance. Hybrid recovery systems, such as pyro-hydro-bio configurations, enable higher resource efficiency and reduced environmental impact compared with stand-alone routes. Across all technologies, major hotspots include electricity demand, reagent use, gas handling, and concentrate management, while process integration, heat recovery, and realistic substitution credits significantly improve life cycle outcomes. Harmonized LCA-TEA-MCDA frameworks and digitalized optimization emerge as essential tools for scaling sustainable, resource-efficient, and low-impact industrial ecosystems consistent with circular economy and renewable energy objectives.
Why do some scientific fields benefit far more from AI than others? To answer this question, we study the diffusion and effects of AI across more than 170 scientific fields between 2005 and 2023, drawing on a dataset of over 80 million scientific publications, and assessing its contribution to knowledge creation using indicators of novelty and impact. We find that, on average, the use of AI is associated with more novel and highly cited research, and that these effects are strengthened with recent technological advances (namely, transformers and large language models). However, these benefits are far from uniform. The contribution of AI, especially in terms of novelty, intensifies with its penetration within a field, that is, the extent to which AI is widely adopted and embedded in research practices, and with the “roughness” of the underlying knowledge space, meaning the degree to which ideas are fragmented and combinatorially complex.
