Shrimps and lobsters are among the most popular crustaceans. However, the shell waste produced by the seafood industry is a growing problem , with significant environmental and health hazards.

Increasingly, many of the plastic products we use every day are no longer based on petroleum raw material . Instead, they are made from biomass such as starch, sugar, corn and other sources that also happen to be food products.

Nobody knows the underlying biological mechanisms of the European eels migration . Thanks to an EU-funded research project called eeliad , now about toreach completion, biologists have revealed some of its secrets, including a better understanding of its biology and migration route.

Katrin Lenz, an expert from the Department Life Cycle Engineering at the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics  (IBP), Germany, shares her view with youris.

The building sector has become much greener. To get such credentials it has adopted methods borrowed from other industries, such as life cycle analysis ( LCA ), which looks at the environmental impact of a building at every stage from its creation to its decommissioning.

Scientists, monument preservationists and craftsmen aim at ensuring conservation of the region’s architectural heritage also by optimising energy efficiency.

Non-ferrous metals are increasingly in demand because of the electronics industry. "They are used in LED’s, computers, smartphones; this is a much bigger business now," says Kate Hornsby , Waste in Social Environment manager at the Technical University Aachen , Germany.

Not all countries are equal in the face of floods. To provide support for the variety of scenarios encountered, the RAMWASS research project developed a tool for gauging and managing the dangers of floods in specific river zones.

Sacha Schlobinski looks to the future when working at his day job as CEO of Cismet. This software company, based in Saarbrücken, Germany, takes the lead role in the information communication technology part of SUDPLAN .

One way communication does not work. No better proof is that previous attempts to increase public awareness of healthily eating have failed. Despite numerous campaigns, no significant change occurred in patterns of food purchase and consumption.

Staying healthy requires constantly stimulating the immune system. Ingesting non-digestible fibres such as polysaccharides is thought to help. Yet companies including such ingredients in their food products cannot claim that they boost the immune system.

“The key factors we are interested in are food choice and physical activity ,” Wolfgang Ahrens, an epidemiologist from the University of Bremen , Germany tells youris.com.

The black hole at the centre of the galaxy, formally known as Sagittarius A* , fascinates scientists. By mid-2013 a gas cloud is expected to pass in its vicinity at a distance of only 36 light-hours (equivalent to 40.

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 .

A new Directive, dubbed the energy performance of buildings Directive (EPBD), brings the new concept of net -zero energy buildings (NZEB) meaning buildings with a zero energy balance that have a better level of energy performance than the standard energy efficiency requirements in current building codes.

Chances of survival of prostate cancer depend strongly on the stage at which the disease is diagnosed. Now scientists have developed new methods relying on an electronic nose and optoacoustics to improve the diagnosis techniques and avoid fatal treatment delays.

New air pollutant emission targets have just been introduced in the EU. Chance of meeting these new targets has recently been tremendously improved by considerable progress on how emissions from different sources are measured and estimated.

The process was developed by the Water Research Institute (WRI) of the Italian National Research Council and tested and scaled-up as part the EU-funded Innowatech project We know that biological processes offer the cheapest way to treat industrial wastewater.

Going from modern energy efficient houses to historic buildings must have been a big leap for you.

The discovery of planets in a habitable zone rises the hope that astronomers could soon answer the question of whether we are alone in the universe.