Using behavioural support to encourage people with tuberculosis to give up smoking can help to reduce the burden of the disease in some South Asian countries worst affected by the disease.
Tuberculosis (TB) kills 3 000 people every day and over 1 000 people fall sick with TB each hour. One EU-supported project is finding and treating cases of TB in Nepal and Vietnam to try and accelerate progress towards eradication.
Reacting efficiently to natural disasters calls for extensive training, effective technologies and well-oiled strategies. The EU-funded DRIVER+ project provides just the means to these ends, due to its unique test bed and portfolio of solutions. Trials in four European countries already show much promise and will help contribute to ensuring citizens' safety.
Until electric cars and other energy-efficient innovations are practical and affordable to all, the internal combustion engine will continue to be widely used, with the consequent greenhouse gas emissions. To help reduce pollution levels, EU-funded researchers have developed new laser ignition techniques, which have the potential to make combustion engines far more energy-efficient.
People born with sex characteristics that fail to fit into the typical definitions of male or female often face a lifetime of marginalisation, discrimination and social exclusion. They are also often subjected to potentially harmful surgical procedures. But new EU-funded research aims to change this by providing policymakers with fact-based information about the intersex experience.
IT solutions/tools can make urban services more efficient, sustainable and user-friendly. The citizens from these areas would need to fully understand how these tools work, and what the benefits are to profit from them. An ambitious EU-funded project has sought to achieve this by developing citizen-focused tools and supporting the next generation of smart city innovators.
Studying neutron star systems could tell us a great deal about the universe. However, finding these distant objects and extracting data is a challenge. To address this, an EU-funded project has developed groundbreaking models based on gravitational waves, earning a researcher a prestigious award in the process.
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.
While information technologies have opened up new business opportunities, they have also left companies exposed to new threats. Smaller companies in particular are often ill-prepared to defend against cyberattacks. An EU-funded project has developed new tools to help businesses, and by extension citizens, protect themselves better and have made these available on an easy-to-use platform.
Short Bowel Syndrome is a medical disorder without a cure and with limited treatment options. But one EU-funded project aimed to change this by creating a functional small bowel using a patient’s own cells or tissue. The result has the potential to substantially improve the chances of survival and the standard of living for those suffering from the disorder.
