Declining numbers of Atlantic wild salmon stocks have mystified scientists for the past 20 years. A recent European Union (EU)-funded research project has produced some surprising results. SALSEA-MERGE, the European strand of the SALSEA project, has made a vital contribution towards discovering why numbers of wild salmon are in decline and dying at sea.
If Europe is to achieve its energy efficiency targets for 2020 and 2050, one vital step would be to modify the continent’s vast stock of buildings to make them much more energy efficient than their original designers could ever have contemplated. This important advance, however, brings potential problems.
Policymakers and planners trying to solve the complex problems often resort to modelling software - programs that attempt to predict and even simulate the likely results of policy initiatives. While such software has been around for years, it tends to be sector-specific, focused for example on climate science, energy economics or agriculture. To date, providing useful modelling based on data from multiple areas of environmental activity has remained limited.
Counterfeit electronic components are a growing problem for the electronics industry, often resulting in failures, product recalls and serious safety issues. They also cost industry billions of euros each year. The EU-funded ChipCheck project has developed a new inspection system to establish in under a second whether electronic components are legitimate or counterfeit – helping to eliminate costly product recalls and protecting consumers. The result could be commercially available in under a year.
The EU-funded project BRIDGE has developed a software package to help emergency workers efficiently respond to disasters, save more lives and protect infrastructure.
European scientists have developed a revolutionary new ultrasound device capable of identifying patients at imminent risk of a heart attack or stroke. The technique, which is the subject of a patent application, was developed by the SUMMIT project, which is supported by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI).
One of the biggest EU-funded initiatives, the Human Brain Project (HBP), today announced the beneficiaries of its €8.3 million competitive call for new partners. 32 organisations from 13 countries – Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland and the UK – will join the partnership. This represents a 40% increase in the number of partners in the HBP consortium.
Medical implants have helped save or improve countless lives. From heart valves and artificial joints, to bone plates and stents for blood vessels, these biomedical implants have revolutionised medical care in recent years.
The development of an advanced pan-European raw material database is helping mining companies identify untapped sources, thus reducing our reliance on imports. In addition, new cleaner processing technologies promise to make Europe’s mining industries more competitive, creating jobs.
Premature newborn babies frequently suffer from difficulties in breathing during their first weeks of life, a condition known as respiratory distress syndrome. In such cases, they are normally given oxygen therapy with the aid of an airway pressure machine or a ventilator.
Professor Tom Sorell (University of Warwick) and Professor Heather Draper (University of Birmingham) have developped an ethical framework for companion robotics in the context of the ACCOMPANY project. In this blog post Professor Sorell explains what ethical questions the framework strives to answer.
The classical notion of trajectory in physics has its foundation in common sense: the position and the velocity of an object can be predicted by computations and measured at a given time. As opposed to the classical universe, the behaviour of elementary particles is elusive. Only the probabilities of physical events can be predicted. These probabilities are sums of all possible trajectories of the quantum system from the initial to the final state.
The demand for urban freight delivery is increasing across Europe. Despite the widespread focus on reducing CO2 emissions in cities and adopting more sustainable modes of transportation, this need continues to be met through the use of traditional delivery vans and trucks, which adds to existing congestion and pollution in urban centres.
In 2012, IBBL (Integrated BioBank of Luxembourg) participated in a European Seventh Framework (FP7) programme that aims to sustain access to tissue samples that were exposed to radioactivity. IBBL scientists assessed the robustness and reproducibility of laboratory methods that were proposed by the programme’s consortium.
New ways of transmitting information over the Internet are appearing constantly: computers are becoming more powerful, mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are widely used, and other objects – vehicles, building automation systems and factory equipment, for example – are also hooked up to the Internet.
The aim of energy harvesting is to scavenge energy from the environment in order to power electrical devices, such as sensors placed at remote locations without external power supply. Targeted sensor applications include meteorological, geophysical and engineering monitoring instruments but also future medical devices operating inside the human body when electrical energy can be extracted from a surrounding flow – air, water, or even blood.
The EUBORDERSCAPES is a European research project co-financed by the EU’s 7th Framework Programme. Launched in June 2012, the project tracks and interprets conceptual change in the study of borders. The central objective is to analyse the evolving concept of borders in relation to fundamental social, economic, cultural and geopolitical transformations that have taken place in the past decades. The major research task lies in understanding the complex construction of borders and their impacts in Europe.
EpiPGX is a FP7-funded project that brings together clinical researchers, geneticists and computational biologists from leading centres across Europe to link genomics and treatment outcomes for patients suffering from epileptic seizures.
EU Member States have the obligation to collect and treat domestic and industrial wastewater from urban areas under the Urban Wastewater Directive. This mandatory treatment is very costly, thus it is important to re-use the by-products thereby.
DECIDE stands for “Diagnostic Enhancement of Confidence by an International Distributed Environment”. This FP7 project brought together 13 partners from five European countries, with the Italian GARR Institute as leading partner. Its aim was to develop and launch an e-service that allows the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.
