Reproducibility is fundamental to the scientific method. After reading a paper describing research findings, a scientist should be able to repeat the experiment and obtain the same results. Yet an alarming number--perhaps as high as 90 percent--of published biomedical research papers face challenges in independent replication. Such issues range from honest mistakes to outright fraud. The scope of this crisis, however, underscores deeper systemic issues within the scientific community: its culture, incentives, and institutions.

In Unreliable, the distinguished scientist Csaba Szabo examines the causes and consequences of the reproducibility crisis in biomedical research, showing why the factors that encourage misconduct stem from flaws in real-world science. There are many culprits, including commonplace research methods and dubious statistical techniques. Academic career incentives, hypercompetition for grant funding, and a bias toward publishing positive results have exacerbated the problem. Deliberate data manipulation and fabricated findings churned out by paper mills are disturbingly common. Academic institutions and publishers, for their part, have perpetuated a culture of impunity.

Szabo explores how these failures have hindered scientific progress and impeded the development of new treatments, and he introduces readers to the science sleuths who tirelessly uncover misconduct. He proposes comprehensive reforms, from scientific training to the grant system through the publication process, to address the root causes of the crisis. Written in clear language and leavened with a keen sense of irony, Unreliable is an essential account of the reproducibility crisis that gives readers an inside look at how science is actually done.

Reproducibility is fundamental to the scientific method. After reading a paper describing research findings, a scientist should be able to repeat the experiment and obtain the same results. Yet an alarming number--perhaps as high as 90 percent--of published biomedical research papers face challenges in independent replication. Such issues range from honest mistakes to outright fraud. The scope of this crisis, however, underscores deeper systemic issues within the scientific community: its culture, incentives, and institutions.

In Unreliable, the distinguished scientist Csaba Szabo examines the causes and consequences of the reproducibility crisis in biomedical research, showing why the factors that encourage misconduct stem from flaws in real-world science. There are many culprits, including commonplace research methods and dubious statistical techniques. Academic career incentives, hypercompetition for grant funding, and a bias toward publishing positive results have exacerbated the problem. Deliberate data manipulation and fabricated findings churned out by paper mills are disturbingly common. Academic institutions and publishers, for their part, have perpetuated a culture of impunity.

Szabo explores how these failures have hindered scientific progress and impeded the development of new treatments, and he introduces readers to the science sleuths who tirelessly uncover misconduct. He proposes comprehensive reforms, from scientific training to the grant system through the publication process, to address the root causes of the crisis. Written in clear language and leavened with a keen sense of irony, Unreliable is an essential account of the reproducibility crisis that gives readers an inside look at how science is actually done.

Andras Bodor and the history of classical studies in Transylvania in the 20th century is the first comprehensive work focusing on the life of a classicist from Transylvania, presenting in detail the life and academic heritage of Andras Bodor (1915-1999). Based on 1348 newly identified letters, 209 photographs (including 25 portraits), Andras Bodor's complete bibliography and his unpublished memoir from 1915-1959, the work offers also the first publication of Bodor's academic correspondence (107 letters) and also extracts from his unpublished journal. Based on a large number of unpublished documents and the major works of Bodor, the book tries to reconstruct the life and academic heritage of a classicist from the periphery of Europe, a region that changed so many times over the long course of the 20th century. Andras Bodor appears as a student torn between theology and classical studies, a Transylvanian Hungarian who ended up at Oxford, a lecturer at the Hungarian University of Cluj, a researcher who had the idea of establishing a new school of classics, marginalised and compromising, a quiet teacher of the newly established Babes-Bolyai University and also a senior professor engaged in education policy. The personality and work of Bodor is presented through the short history of classics in Transylvania, Romania, reflecting on the European and global changes of the discipline.

Poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP), also termed poly (ADP-ribose) synthetase (PARS) is a nuclear enzyme with a wide range of functions, including regulation of DNA repair, cell differentiation, and gene expression. More than a decade after the identification of PARP-like enzymatic activities in mammalian cells, a novel role was proposed for this enzyme, mediating a suicidal mechanism triggered by DNA strand breakage. This hypothesis has since become a controversial centerpiece of the PARP field, with many experimental systems both confirming and extending the PARP suicide theory.

Theoretical and practical implications of the PARP suicide pathway were not extensively exploited until the 1990s. Researchers, for example, discovered a variety of findings; among them, that nitric oxide can activate a pathway leading to cell death (Neuronal cell death and pancreatic cell death), and that peroxynitrite, a reactive oxidant species produced from the reaction of nitric oxide and superoxide free radicals, is an endogenously produced trigger of DNA single strand breakage and PARP activation.

Featuring contributions from researchers in the diverse fields of neuroinjury, myocardial injury, diabetes, shock, and inflammation, this text examines the current status of the field of PARP and cell death. Cell Death: The Role of PARP also explores PARP and apoptosis, PARP and DNA repair, as well as PARP and regulation of gene expression. Separate chapters focus on developments in the areas of pharmacological inhibition of PARP and on novel ways of measuring PARP activation. Furthermore, the emerging field of PARP isoforms is addressed.

While tremendous progress has been made in the area of PARP and cell death, many controversies need to be clarified, and recent discoveries and observations require further development. Cell Death: The Role of PARP not only presents a state-of-the-art overview of the field, but serves as a catalyst for further research in this area.

This book is the first comprehensive work focusing on lived ancient religious communication in Roman Dacia. Testing for the first time the 'Lived Ancient Religion' approach in terms of a peripheral province from the Danubian area, this work looks at the role of 'sacralised' spaces, known commonly as sanctuaries in the religious communication of the province. The author analyses the role of space sacralisation, religious appropriation, embodiment and the social impact of religious communication in urban contexts (Apulum), military contexts (Porolissum and Mehadia), and numerous examples from rural (non-urban) environments (Ampelum, Germisara, Ad Mediam, and many others). The book concentrates not only on the creation and maintenance of sacralised spaces in public and secondary locations, but also on their role at the micro-level of objects, semi-micro level of spaces (settlements), and the macro-level of the province and the Danubian region as a whole. Innovatively as regards provincial archaeological research, this book emphasises the spatial aspects of lived ancient religion by analysing for the first time the sanctuaries as spaces of religious communication in Dacia. The work also contains a significant chapter on the so-called 'small-group' religions (the Bacchic, Mithraic and Dolichenian groups of the province), which are approached for the first time in detail. The study also gives the first comprehensive list of archaeologicallyepigraphically- attested, and presumed sacralised spaces within Dacia.