It’s not always easy to see the wood from trees when dealing with complex challenges in energy policy. However, Europe is increasingly finding in its forests a significant source of renewable energy that could help the region move away from fossil fuel dependency.

Fittingly, for an author who argues that connectivity is the key driver of growth in the modern age, Parag Khanna seems to have ties all over the world, and roots in many of the largest urban centres. ...

If aliens were to examine a human, they would think we were just slavish organisms designed to feed microbes and carry them around. Our bodies contain ten times more bacteria than cells , and there are an estimated 3.

It's a brand new sector: the first steps date back to 2012. Today energy crowdfunding is a way of financing solar panel or wind turbine projects.

Traditionally our electricity grids were designed to move power from large nuclear and fossil fuel power plants to consumers, but renewable energy will see changes to allow smaller power generation from wind and solar to be hooked up to the grid.

Global changes, such as climate warming and stratospheric ozone depletion, are increasingly noticeable. Therefore, there is a need for scientists to have reliable information about atmospheric and stratospheric processes .

Atlantic Bluefin Tuna is a much sought after delicacy. Due to huge fishing pressure, tuna stocks have decreased dramatically . There are now signs of recovery, according to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas .

We age in two ways. There is the ageing we count by clock and calendar. And then there is biological ageing. The latter is written into our genes. But, it is also influenced by our lifestyle and history.

Millions of people undergo surgery each year. Many of them suffer from moderate to severe pain afterwards. This post-operative pain may impede recovery or even lead on into chronic pain .

About 20 million Europeans are subject to food allergies. Now scientists are looking at these allergies in new ways. It involves the food industry in its work and pays special attention to the link between early diets and allergy in later life .

Statistically, drinking water in Europe is the safest in the world. But according to the World Health Organisation every year more than 300.000 Europeans are falling ill due to contaminated tab water. ...

New advances related to new uses of imaging technologies could help scientists uncover the brain’s mysteries.

Holstein cattle - the black-and-white dairy cows you might see in a child’s picture book - have been bred in northern Europe for hundreds of years.

With a drop of blood and some laboratory analyses, doctors have been able to tell patients whether they suffer from diabetes or some sort of cancer.

After personalised medicine, we are entering the era of personalised nutrition. But this approach requires testing before being applicable. This is what a new EU-funded research project, called food4me , is attempting to do.

Urban mining is increasingly being taken seriously by industry because it gives access to materials—such as expensive metals used in electronics—that are buried in waste tips and landfills.

What happens to research findings once the researchers have gone away? A web site run from the University of Stuttgart in Germany offers scientists an opportunity to bring their own data from completed research project on environmental and health risks and contribute to an Integrated Environmental Health Impact Assessment System, dubbed IEHIAS .

Twenty five years ago, the German chemist Michael Braungart developed a new approach to recycling, now called "Cradle to Cradle" or "C2C" after the book, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, which he and the American architect William McDonough published in 2002.

Silver has been used as biocide for medical purposes since the 1930s. Today nanometric size silver particles are used to prevent unpleasant odour caused by bacteria in sport shirts or socks .

Gold nanoparticles ( AuNPs ) present the many advantages of displaying relative biocompatibility, high light absorption and strong optical scattering properties. They are therefore good candidates to be used as probes for cancer imaging .