The food industry will face significant challenges in the future. However, an EU-funded project has created an international research network capable of confronting environmental threats as well as consumer demand for traceable, ethical ingredients.
With some 210 million buildings in Europe, most of them energy inefficient, the scope for sustainability gains is huge. How would Europe deal with the cost of all those renovations? An EU-funded pilot scheme that already involves 65 banks is proposing incentivised mortgages as a way to leverage the necessary funds, fast.
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.
An EU-funded project has pioneered new techniques to detect and share information about infectious disease outbreaks. These methods will be used in the future to improve public health responses to pandemics. Already, some of the tools devised in the project are being further developed to specifically tackle the spread of COVID-19.
Plug-and-play smart cities? An open source platform jointly developed by Japanese and EU-funded researchers is facilitating the deployment of smart city technologies in urban centres worldwide to tackle urban challenges ranging from air quality and energy use to traffic congestion and infrastructure upkeep.
The intensification of human-driven activity in space over the past 60 years has led to a proliferation of debris orbiting the Earth. An EU-funded project is pioneering new technology that can clean up this problematic space junk.
An EU-funded project has been making a name for itself with its unique insights into political propaganda and misinformation on social media. The work of this project proves helpful at a time when our societies truly need it most. This is because disinformation keeps spreading online and is threatening the very foundations of our democracies.
Until recently, there was no treatment specific to alpha-mannosidosis, one of the many rare diseases that jointly affect some 30 million citizens in Europe alone. Today, there is as EU-funded research developed enzyme-replacement therapy to stop the illness in its tracks, and this medicine is on the market.
EU-funded researchers are using innovative genomic and microfluidic technologies to identify useful enzymes in nature which could reduce the need for toxic chemicals, save energy, and boost the overall sustainability of a range of industries, from agriculture to pharmaceuticals.
Enzymes could make many chemical conversions more efficient, more sustainable and more affordable - and marine microbes produce an abundant variety of these biological catalysts, say EU-funded researchers who set out to find new ones for use in industry. A vast collection, new knowledge, four patents and a start-up are the result.
