Materials used in medical implants such as pacemakers and insulin pumps can be hazardous to the body. The EU-funded BISON project seeks an alternative in self-assembling peptide building blocks. These biological electronics offer citizens safer implants that could be powered by the body itself.
In nature, bacteria take care of breaking down organic matter from plants and animals. This unique capacity is called anaerobic digestion and has the potential to revolutionise the way we produce energy. But it suffers from two major drawbacks, both of which the EU-funded DIET project set out to overcome.
Patients who've gone through chemotherapy know that as effective as it may be, it also causes a lot of damage to otherwise healthy cells. The EU-funded NANOCARGO project has pushed a solution forward for breast cancer that would avoid such damage. This breakthrough could benefit the many thousands upon thousands of women in Europe who undergo treatment for breast cancer every year.
Technology developed in an EU-funded project for high-energy physics experiments also has the potential to greatly enhance the sensitivity of PET scanners for medical imaging.
Scientists are currently working to develop next-generation computer systems which can process information quickly and flexibly but are also energy-efficient. The EU-funded SWING project also actively contributed to this goal. Their research has produced an innovative new method that could prove key to bringing these 'super computers' from the drawing board to reality.
Cutting-edge photolithography technology developed by an EU-funded consortium has enabled the launch of a new generation of high-performance smartphones featuring powerful and efficient 7nm-node mobile processors.
EU-funded researchers behind a breakthrough solar-energy technology have also laid the material foundations for a new generation of digital displays that could surpass latest-generation OLED screens in brightness, colour range and energy efficiency.
EU-funded researchers have developed an innovative and 'smart' prototype contrast mechanism for use in medical imaging that could provide doctors with important new insights to help diagnose injury and disease.
Industrial applications often call for surfaces designed to attract or repel water. EU-funded researchers are devising new methods to characterise and manufacture such surfaces and will make their findings public in a new Open Innovation Environment.
The maintenance of pipelines is constrained by their inaccessibility. An EU-funded project developed swarms of small autonomous remote-sensing agents that learn through experience to explore and map such networks. The technology could be adapted to a wide range of hard-to-access artificial and natural environments.
