A looming threat overshadows the extraordinary variety of life forms known as biodiversity – plants, animals and microorganisms that contribute to the delicate equilibrium of our planet.

From homeless, anonymous guy to TV star, at least for one day. Alexandre has appeared on French media , sitting on a bridge in Lyon, while inviting passers-by to give him money by scanning a QR Code with their smartphone .

Éric Lenoir  describes himself as a “punk gardener”.  Wherever he is called to work, he first takes the time for observation.

Maxime Lebigot is a nurse. Back in 2016, he and his wife Elodie had their first child . They were very happy, but when they moved to Laval, a town of some 50,000 inhabitants in north-western France, they soon realised that no doctor was available to take charge of him .

Calin lives in the Romanian city of Cluj. He suffers from melanoma and his mother died from colorectal cancer, aged 58. “It took two months just for a colonoscopy,” he recalls.

Batteries are unanimously seen as key drivers of the energy transition .

“Wood may be present in people’s life more than we think”, says Mariana Hassegawa, a researcher at the European Forest Institute . She is one of the authors of a case study on new wood-based products by the BioMonitor EU project.

“ At the end of last year, we were so overwhelmed that we had to start rejecting new membership demands .” Dirk Vansintjan is a board member of EcoPower , a Belgian renewable energy cooperative, founded in 1991.

In architecture, there are two kinds of sustainability: one simpler, smaller, and ethical in its relationship with the environment and with people; and another which is “fashionable”, used as a label in a speculative way, without an understanding of what it really means.

It is not uncommon for kidney transplants to fail. Once transplanted, the kidney must connect back with the blood supply to start working properly and be truly accepted by the body. Delays can cause complications.

Fourteen pairs of identical twins joined the EU funded medical project “ Fight-MG ”, to fight Myasthenia Gravis . This rare autoimmune disease leads to abnormal fatigability of various skeletal muscles.

Myasthenia Gravis (MG) is a rare auto-immune disease—whereby patients’ immune systems attack their own bodies— arising from a breakdown in communications between the nervous and muscular systems.

Collaboration between research groups is key in tackling rare diseases such as auto-immune disease Myasthenia Gravis (MG). Indeed, the rarity of the disease means that it can be difficult to collect enough samples of blood and tissues to perform quality research.

Viruses often get bad press. Likened to Trojan horses they are often associated with disease. But, i t is precisely because of their infectious nature that they can potentially be used as gene vectors - which are vehicles loaded with good copies of malfunctioning genes - and delivered to cells.

Brain diseases are particularly challenging to treat. Every substance that has to be delivered to the brain needs to overcome several obstacles, such as the blood-brain barrier—a system that prevents potentially dangerous substances, but also many drugs, to enter this organ—,to get to its target.

Anthropogenic emissions have, until now, been collected, but not harmonised . These consist, for example, of data of nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions, smog, methane, CO 2 and even pollen and dust produced, among others by heavy industry and power plants.

When it comes to the emergence of antimalarial drug resistance, it’s not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’.

Millions of people die each year of malaria – a disease transmitted by the Anopheles mosquito. There are major barriers in vaccine development as well as increased resistance to currently available therapies.

Almost every one of our cells has an entire copy of our genome. But only differing subsets of genes are active and expressed in any given cell. Epigenetics is the study of how the activity of our genes is controlled and regulated .

To prevent energy loss and improve the management of solar power plants scientists of the European research project MACC II in France are now developing a 5-day forecast to predict the movements of desert dust and thus will be able to inform power plant managers beforehand.