edited by Dorin Poenaru (Horia Hulubei National Institute of Nuclear Physics & Engineering, Bucharest, Romania) & Sabin Stoica (Horia Hulubei National Institute of Nuclear Physics & Engineering, Bucharest, Romania)

The interest in understanding the physical world that we live in, the origin of its formation and evolution, is reflected in the world-wide activities in Europe, the USA and Japan to set up powerful research facilities providing beams of radioactive nuclei of various kinds, and beams of extremely large energies. At the same time, complex and large detector arrays with improved technical capabilities are built either around these facilities or independently (dedicated to cosmic rays). Recently, spectacular progress has been made in superheavy nuclei, cold binary and ternary fission, nuclear shell structure and nuclear astrophysics, to mention only a few directions. The energy spectrum of cosmic rays exceeds the upper limits provided by artificial accelerators. An international collaboration has committed itself to the installation of an extremely large area detector array, AUGER, in order to study the highest particle energies in the Universe.

• Developments in Fission, Fusion, Cluster Radioactivity and the Extension of the Periodic System of Elements (W Greiner)
• Discovering Superheavy Elements (G Münzenberg)
• New Data on the Fragment Angular Momentum in Spontaneous Fission of ²⁵²Cf (G M Ter-Akopian et al.)
• The Origin of Cosmic Rays (A W Wolfendale & A D Erlykin)
• Ten Years of Heidelberg–Moscow Experiment — A Fresh Look (H V Klapdor-Kleingrothaus)
• Nuclear Structure Near the Neutron Drip-Line and R-Process Nucleosynthesis (K L Kratz et al.)
• Nuclear Astrophysics with Radioactive Beams (L Trache et al.)
• The ATLAS Experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (P Jenni)
• Killing-Yano Tensors on Manifolds Admitting “Hidden” Symmetries (M Vi(inescu)
• Current Status of High Ion Physics (H Stöcker et al.)
• Special Aspects of the Baryonic Flow in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions (M Petrovici)
• Few-Cluster Description of Neutron-Halo Nuclei (R G Lovas et al.)
• Lifetime Measurements in the Picosecond Range: Achievements and Perspectives (R Krücken)
• Collisions of Cold Electrons with Cooled Ions in Crying (R Schuch et al.)
• and other papers