Scientists are usually quietly busy behind the scenes, changing our world completely but sometimes I think they should be more in the limelight as true heroes. I have often thought of them as the unseen rock stars of society. With this in mind, it was a pleasure for this issue, to talk to Professor Kenneth Chien, cofounder of Moderna, because the work he and scientists like him have done and continue to do, can and does save millions of lives. The pandemic put such work at the forefront of our minds for the worth that it has.
What strikes me about science, especially medical science, is how so much of it is about exploring into the complete unknown with an idea and a hope. There is still so much to learn about how we function and how our bodies work, as well as how nature can help us if we understand her. Revealing new truths usually requires gritty perseverance, when looking for a novel solution to a problem.
It’s also true that as technology becomes more advanced, the possibilities for improved therapies and treatments grow exponentially. For example, nanotechnology shows us how it will one day be possible to target cancers and other diseases with armies of robots so small, that their precision with treatment will be pinpoint. This can mean accuracy of drug delivery will be better, side effects will be diminished and crude, invasive surgery may be a thing of the past.
As a seasoned editor and journalist, Richard Forsyth has been reporting on numerous aspects of European scientific research for over 10 years.
He has written for many titles including ERCIM’s publication, CSP Today, Sustainable Development magazine, eStrategies magazine and remains a prevalent contributor to the UK business press. He also works in Public Relations for businesses to help them communicate their services effectively to industry and consumers.
Around the world, scientists in their labs today are working tirelessly to find ways to counter all the major diseases. Future generations may look back at today’s killers like heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s, feeling safer in the knowledge that the science that developed in our time, has made them consigned to history.
Hope you enjoy the issue.
Richard Forsyth Editor
EU Research takes a closer look at the latest news and technical breakthroughs from across the European research landscape.
Researchers in the InActioN project are using DNA-based nanomaterials to precisely control the spacing of functional molecules and investigate cellular activation mechanisms within the immune system, as Professor Maartje Bastings explains.
We spoke to Dr Francesca Rapino about her research into the cellular origin of cancer stem cells and its wider implications for the diagnosis of cancer.
We spoke to Dr Guilhem Chaubet , Lorenzo Turelli and Ilias Koutsopetras about the work of the TACT project in training the next generation of scientists and helping to develop effective, targeted cancer treatments.
We spoke to Professors Vessela Kristensen, Arnoldo Frigessi, Gunhild M. Mælandsmo and Kjetil Tasken about the RESCUER project’s work in using computers to search for improved treatments for breast cancer.
Dr. Massimo Sartori is head of the INTERACT project, which aims to close the knowledge gap between the interaction of the nervous and musculoskeletal systems and promote the development of new human-machine interfaces.
One of the most exciting branches of research in medical technology has to be the conception of micrometre machines and nanobots, miniature devices that can navigate our bodies from the inside. Whilst they are not in the clinical phase yet, they likely will be in the future. By Richard Forsyth.
We spoke to Dr Jaume Piera and Ángela Justamante about the work of the Cos4Cloud project in developing technological services designed to enhance citizen science observatories.
With funding from the Volkswagen Foundation, Professor Christof Mauch and several colleagues at LMU Munich are developing a masters programme to support the ongoing development of the environmental humanities field.
Around 2.1 billion people across the world lack access to safe water. The PANIWATER project is developing new technologies to remove dangerous contaminants from water, as Dr Fabio Ugolini explains.
We spoke to Professor Jack Middelburg , Professor Stefan Schouten and Dr Anna von der Heydt about the research they are conducting within the Netherlands Earth System Science Centre.
Dr Brett Kagan, Chief Scientific Officer at Cortical Labs, in a peerreviewed article in the journal Neuron, claimed to have created the first sentient lab-grown brain in a petri dish. His research team had taught it how to play the arcade game, Pong and next, they intend to get it drunk. By Richard Forsyth.
Controlling the physics of Materials interfaces is a significant challenge. Researchers in the Dandelion project are developing methods to predict the electronic properties of functional interfaces, as Professor Silvana Botti explains.
Lene Krøl Andersen, Gudmund Høst and Abdulrahman Azab are working to bring the vision of the European Open Science Cloud closer to reality in the Nordic and Baltic countries.
A variety of skills are required to develop realistic virtual characters, a topic at the heart of Yiorgos Chrysanthou, Nuria Pelechano, Nefeli Andreou and Rafael Blanco’s work in the CLIPE project.
Higher Education Institutions need to demonstrate their wider social relevance. We spoke to Professor Mike S. Schäfer and Dr Daniel Vogler about their research into the way HEIs communicate with the broader public.
The GoTriple discovery platform platform is designed to help researchers access publications, data, researcher profiles and projects of interest, and build relationships with their peers, as Sona Arasteh explains.
What is the effect of shortterm imprisonment on criminal behaviour? Does it lead to reduced rates of re-offending? These questions are at the core of Professor Hilde Wermink’s research.
We spoke to Dr Christophe Aucher about the LISA project’s work in developing lithium-sulfur batteries, which could represent an attractive and more cost-effective alternative to lithium-ion.
Highly sophisticated instruments will be required for the space missions of tomorrow. Dr Raphael Garcia and his colleagues in the PIONEERS project are working to develop the next generation of seismic instruments.
Researchers in the Shade project are developing statistical techniques to analyse how gravitational waves have propagated, which could lead to deeper insights into the nature of dark energy, as Dr Tessa Baker explains.
Researchers in the BiD4BESt network are using a variety of methods to learn more about the evolution of supermassive blackholes, as Professor Francesco Shankar explains.
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The European Commission has today appointed five eminent scientists and scholars as new members of the governing body of the European Research Council (ERC), the Scientific Council. They are appointed for an initial period of four years and will replace members, whose second term of office expired or will expire. The new members will take office on 1 January 2023.
The new members are Professor Harriet Bulkeley, Durham University, Professor of Geography whose research focussed on environmental governance and the politics of climate change, energy and sustainable cities. Professor Thomas Henzinger, Institute of Science and Technology, ISTA, Austria, Professor of Computer and Communication Sciences, researcher, and Founding President of ISTA. Professor Leszek Kaczmarek, Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Professor of Neurobiology who researched the brain-mind connection. Professor Luke O’Neill, Trinity College, Dublin, Professor of Biochemistry, founder of the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute (TBSI), and leading immunologist. Professor Björn Ottersten, University of Luxembourg, Professor and Founding Director of Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust. His research is focused on security, trust, reliable wireless communications, and statistical signal processing.
Mariya Gabriel, Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, said: “The ERC Scientific Council is composed of outstanding European scientists and scholars who oversee Europe’s premier frontier research funding organisation. To name just one recent example of its success - three of this year’s Nobel Prize laureates have received substantial funding for their research from the European Research Council. Today, I am delighted to give a warm welcome to the five new members who bring to the ERC Scientific Council exceptional scientific expertise, which will complement that of the sitting members. I also want to thank the eminent members whose second term of office expired or will expire at the end of this year for their important contribution to the ERC Scientific Council’s work.”
Professor Maria Leptin, President of the ERC, said: “We very much look forward to working with the new members who come from diverse backgrounds in science and scholarship. This breadth is essential as the ERC’s independent governing body represents the entire scientific community in Europe. With these appointments, the quality and continuity of the Scientific Council is upheld, thanks to the work of the identification committee that was tasked with finding these new members.”
By the same Commission Decision, the term of office of five current members of the ERC Scientific Council is renewed:
Professor Geneviève Almouzni, Professor Ben Feringa, Professor Mercedes Garcia-Arenal, Professor Eystein Jansen, and Professor Jesper Qualmann Svejstrup
The new members have been selected by an independent Identification Committee, composed of six distinguished scientists appointed by the European Commission and chaired by Prof. Carl-Henrik Heldin. The selection process involved consultations with the scientific community.
The ERC Scientific Council, composed of 22 distinguished researchers representing the European scientific community, is the independent governing body of the ERC. Its main role is setting the ERC strategy and selecting the peer review evaluators. It is chaired by ERC President Maria Leptin since November 2021.
Introducing the new members Harriet Bulkeley gained her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1999 where she subsequently held a Junior Research Fellowship and Leverhulme Research Fellowship before joining Durham University in 2003 where she was appointed as full professor in 2010. Since 2018 she has held a joint appointment with Utrecht University.
Her research focuses on the politics and practices of environmental governance, with particular focus on climate change. Her first book (with Michele Betsill) pioneered the field of cities and climate change and her research continues to examine the role of cities and other non-state actors in governing climate change. She has also written extensively on the politics of energy transitions, smart cities, urban sustainability, biodiversity and nature-based solutions, publishing 15 books and edited collections and over 70 papers. She has been included in the Highly Cited Researchers list of the top 1% of researchers internationally four times since 2016.
Alongside her academic research, Prof. Bulkeley works closely to enable the translation of research for policy and has provided expert advice and undertaken commissioned research for the UK Government, European Commission, NGOs, UN-Habitat, the OECD and the World Bank. In 2014, she was awarded the King Carl XVI Gustaf’s Professorship in Environmental Science and a Visiting Professorship at Lund University, Sweden and in 2018 was granted the Back Award by the Royal Geographical Society in recognition of the policy impact of her work on climate change. In 2019, she was elected as a Fellow of the UK Academy of the Social Sciences and as a Fellow of the British Academy. She has served as a member of ERC Advance Grants Panel SH2 and in 2020/21 was Chair of the SH7 panel.
Prof. Bulkeley most recently worked with EU Research with her Research Innovation Action NATURVATION which appeared in the Autumn 2020 edition.
Tom Henzinger is Professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), where he was the founding president from 2009 until 2022. He holds a Dipl.-Ing. degree in Computer Science from Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, an M.S. degree in Computer and
Five new members have been appointed to serve until 2027 on the European Research Council, the Scientific Council
Information Sciences from the University of Delaware, a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University (1991), and Dr.h.c. degrees from Fourier University in Grenoble, France, and from Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. He was Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, USA.He was also Director at the Max-Planck Institute for Computer Science in Saarbrucken, Germany, and Professor of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. His research focuses on the theory of software systems, especially models, algorithms, and tools for the design and verification of reliable software systems. His HyTech tool was the first model checker for mixed discretecontinuous systems. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Academia Europaea, the German Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, the ACM, and the IEEE. He has received the Robin Milner Award of the Royal Society, the EATCS Award of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science, and the Wittgenstein Award of the Austrian Science Fund.
Leszek Kaczmarek is professor of neurobiology at the Nencki Institute, Warsaw, Poland. His carried postdoctoral studies in Philadelphia, USA and then was visiting professor in the University of Catania, Italy, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, University of California, Los Angeles, USA, and Institute of Photonic Sciences, ICFO, Castelldefels, Spain. Since 1986, his laboratory has been investigating brain-mind connection at all the levels of brain organisation from molecular to cellular to network to behavior in health and disease. Most of the work involves experimental animal models, however joint studies with clinicians on human neuropsychiatric disorders have also been pursued. The current major focus is on extracellular enzyme, matrix metalloproteinase, MMP-9, which his laboratory documented to play paramount role in neuronal/synaptic plasticity and then in learning and memory, development of epilepsy, schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorders and alcohol addiction.
Prof. Kaczmarek has also been very active in professional scientific organisations, serving on governing bodies of International Society for Neurochemistry, International Brain Research Organization, European Molecular Biology Organization, European Molecular Biology Conference (currently as the president), National Science Center (Polish research grant agency), Polish Academy of Sciences, Polish-US Fulbright Commission. At the European Research Council, he served seven times in evaluation panels, recently chairing the LS5 Neuroscience and Neural Disorders Consolidator grant panel. He has been engaged in multiple outreaching activities promoting science into society and he co-authored a biology textbook at middle school level.
Prof. Kaczmarek is a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, European Molecular Biology Organization and Academia Europaea. He has been awarded several prestigious research grants and recognitions including the Foundation for Polish Science (FNP) award for his research on inducible gene expression in the brain. The FNP award is the highest recognition in Polish science. He is currently Full Professor at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland.
Luke O’Neill is Professor of Biochemistry in the School of Biochemistry and Immunology, Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He is a world expert on innate immunity and inflammation. He is listed by Thompson Reuters/ Clarivates in the top 1% of immunologists in the world, based on citations per paper. Profe. O’Neill is co-founder of Sitryx, which aims to develop new medicines for inflammatory diseases. Another company he co-founded, Inflazome was recently acquired by Roche.
He has won many awards for his research including the Royal Dublin Society / Irish Times Boyle Medal for scientific excellence, the Royal Irish Academy Gold Medal for Life Sciences, the European Federation of Immunology Societies Medal, and the Landsteiner Award from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy, EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organisation) and a Fellow of the Royal Society.
He also has a passion for communicating science to the public. He has a weekly radio slot on Irish radio and has published several popular science books, most recently ‘Never Mind the B#ll*cks Here’s the Science’, which won the 2020 Irish non-fiction book of the year, and ‘Keep Calm and Trust the Science – an extraordinary year in the life of an immunologist’, which was his diary during the COVID19 pandemic.
Björn Ottersten is Professor at University of Luxembourg. He is founding Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust at the University of Luxembourg. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, USA. Prof. Ottersten has held research positions at Linköping University, Sweden, Stanford University, USA, and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. During 1996/97 he was Director of Research at ArrayComm Inc, San Jose, USA, a start-up company based on Ottersten’s patented technology introducing antenna arrays in wireless communication systems to improve coverage, capacity, and reliability of mobile communication systems. In 1991, he was appointed Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, where he was head of the department for Signals, Sensors, and Systems and later dean of the School of Electrical Engineering.
Prof. Ottersten has been Digital Champion of Luxembourg, acting as an adviser to the European Commission, member of the governing board of the Swedish Research Council, and is currently serving on the governing board of the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research. He serves, and has served, as member of several international scientific advisory boards as well as editorial boards of scientific journals. He was a member of the board of governors of IEEE Signal Processing Society and acts on the board of directors of the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP), the two main international scientific organizations in his field.
Prof. Ottersten is the recipient of two ERC Advanced Grants and two ERC Proof-ofConcept Grants. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and EURASIP. His research has been recognised by numerous awards including the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award.
The study will look at whether ketamine and therapy package reduces harmful drinking.
Researchers in Greater Manchester UK, are hoping a controversial new treatment which includes the use of the animal sedative ketamine could help people overcome severe alcoholism. It comes after initial trials of the drug combined with psychological therapies helped patients stay completely sober, with 86% abstaining from drinking in the six month follow up. Researchers are also studying how ketamine, along with MDMA and psilocybin – the active ingredient of magic mushrooms – could help people with depression and PTSD. So far medics say the experimental treatment is safe and tolerable in heavy drinkers. Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Trust and Mersey Care NHS Trust are among several organisations recruiting for the next phase in the trials which will start mid-way through 2023.
Trial lead Professor Celia Morgan, said: “More than two million UK adults have serious alcohol problems, yet only one in five of those get treatment. “Three out of four people who quit alcohol will be back drinking heavily after a year. “Alcohol-related harm is estimated to cost the NHS around £3.5 billion each year, and wider UK society around £40 billion. “Alcohol problems affect not only the individual but families, friends and communities, and related deaths have increased still further since the pandemic.
Morgan stressed the drug alone was not thought to help people with alcohol problems, adding that the trial would be carried out
in safe, carefully controlled conditions alongside therapy. Mitul Mehta, a professor of neuroimaging and psychopharmacology at King’s College London, who is not involved in the research, welcomed the trial. “The earlier trial warrants this larger investigation. We also need a push to better understand the mechanisms of the treatment effect so that patients most likely to respond can be selected and appropriately monitored,” he said. “By carefully examining the mechanisms we can also learn about the most effective ways to refine treatment in the future.”
Antarctica’s Ecosystem Biodiversity: Up to 97% of Antarctica’s biodiversity might go extinct by the year 2100.
A new study reveals that only US$23 million annually would be required to put ten crucial initiatives into action that would lessen threats to Antarctica’s biodiversity. Up to 84% of the terrestrial bird, animal, and plant groups would gain from this very tiny sum. Numerous microorganisms, tough invertebrates, two flowering plants, hardy moss and lichens, two flowering plants, and hundreds of thousands of nesting seabirds, including the Emperor and Adélie penguins, make up the species.
Antarctica’s ice-free regions are anticipated to grow as global warming becomes worse, drastically altering the wildlife environment. Additionally, it is projected that the vegetation and animals of Antarctica
would suffer as extreme weather events like heatwaves increase in frequency. 29 specialists in Antarctic biodiversity, conservation, logistics, tourism, and policy were consulted for our study. The specialists predicted how the animals of Antarctica would react to potential threats.
If present conservation efforts continue on their current course, the populations of 97% of Antarctic terrestrial species and breeding seabirds might potentially drop between now and 2100. 37% of the species populations would, at best, decline. By 2100, 65% of the plants and animals on the continent are expected to disappear. The Emperor penguin is the most endangered species in Antarctica because it breeds on ice. The emperor penguin is the only species in our analysis that, in the worst-case scenario, face extinction by 2100.
In short, scientists warn that other Antarctic specialties like the nematode worm Scottnema lindsayae are also predicted to suffer adverse effects from climate change. The species is threatened as soil moisture rises due to warming and ice melt since it thrives in extremely dry soils. Meanwhile, a combination of local, national, and international conservation initiatives are required since Antarctica is under increasing strain from both climate change and human activity. It is an unbelievable bargain to spend only US$23 million a year to protect Antarctica’s wildlife and ecosystems, scientists argue.
A fossilised skull of the ancient wombat is estimated to be 80,000 years old.
Palaeontologists have found Australia’s true giant wombat. Diprotodon is an extinct megafauna species that is often referred to as Australia’s ‘giant wombat’. While Diprotodon were definitely giant, being the largest marsupials of all time, the car-sized animals were only distantly related to wombats. They were actually in a completely different family. Now Griffith University researchers have shed light on a large species that does belong to the same family as modern wombats.
The fossil skull of the animal was found in a cave in Rockhampton, Queensland. The remains are estimated to be around 80,000 years old. The species is described in a paper published in Papers in Paleontology. “The extinct megafauna of Australia never ceases to amaze and intrigue not just Australians, but people all over the world,” says lead author, Associate Professor Julien Louys. from Griffith. “Although one of the most charismatic of the giant mammals to go extinct, Diprotodon is commonly referred to as a ‘giant wombat’. But this is incorrect as Diprotodon belongs to an entirely different family – equivalent to saying a hippo is just a giant pig,” Louys explains.
But Louys explains that Ramsayia magna, which lived in Australia during the late Pleistocene (about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago) was a true giant wombat. “There were however, true giant wombats,” Louys says. “These have traditionally been poorly known, but the discovery of the most complete skull of one of these giants, Ramsayia, has provided us with an opportunity to reconstruct what this creature looked like, where and when it lived, and how the evolution of giant wombats took place in Australia.” While the skull and jaw bones of R. magna were found in the early 2000s, it was only later analysis that it was confirmed to be a specimen from a previously described, but very poorly understood, species.
Extinct giant wombats from the Vombatidae family are rarer than fossil diptrotodontids. But the new analysis sheds some light
on what Ramsayia was like. The study also gives an insight into broader giant wombat evolution, though the reason Ramsayia went extinct is still a mystery.
“In this paper, we show that all true giant wombats evolved large body sizes first, then individually became quite specialised to eat different types of grasses. We also dated this species as being about 80,000 years old. This is the first date for this species and is much earlier than human arrival in Australia, although we still don’t know exactly when or why this species became extinct.”
The UK finance minister, Jeremy Hunt, has said that the economic crisis will not harm ambitious plans for research spending, much to the relief of researchers. Universities and scientists were concerned that the government might use funds promised for science to plug the multibillion-pound black hole in the country’s finances caused by interest-rate rises that resulted from budgeting decisions made by the previous prime minister, Liz Truss.
During he Autumn Statement Mr Hunt, the chancellor of the Exchequer, told parliament that he would protect the entire UK research budget because cutting it would be a “profound mistake”. He added that the government will invest £20 billion (US$24 billion) per year in science by the 2024–25 financial year — a commitment made by the government of former prime minister Boris Johnson that was left hanging in the balance when he resigned in July. Truss remained tight-lipped on science spending during her 44-day leadership.
Anne Johnson, president of the Academy of Medical Sciences in London, welcomed the decision in “challenging economic times”. But she warned that there could still be problems ahead for research. “Inflation will continue to put pressure on budgets in real terms, and we must protect collaborations between UK researchers and partners globally.” Geneticist Paul Nurse, who runs the Francis Crick Institute in London, said that the announcement was “very good, particularly in the present circumstances”.
The UK economy was plunged into turmoil in September when Truss and the then chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, announced a raft of controversial financial policies, which included tax cuts for the country’s highest earners. The falling value of the pound, combined with soaring inflation and energy prices, left scientists concerned
about the rising costs of running laboratories. Rishi Sunak, who served as chancellor in Johnson’s government, replaced Truss as prime minister in October. Until today, it was not clear what this change in leadership meant for the future of science spending.
The 2024–25 commitment reaffirmed by Hunt is one milestone in an earlier pledge to spend 2.4% of gross domestic product on research and development by 2027. But, according to the UK Office for National Statistics — a non-ministerial government body — the government has already met this target. This is mainly because of changes in the way that research and development spending is calculated, rather than any cash boost.
Although UK researchers have welcomed the clarity on spending, it is not clear who in Sunak’s government has ultimate responsibility for science. In October, Truss’s government announced that Nusrat Ghani would hold the post of science minister. Sunak has reaffirmed her post, but apparently also reappointed George Freeman — who quit the role earlier this year as part of a bid to force then-prime minister Johnson to resign. The website for the government department that oversees science spending, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), lists both Freeman and Ghani as “minister of state”, with Ghani also listed as “minister for science and investment security”. A spokesperson for BEIS could not say who has overall responsibility for science, stating that the ministerial portfolios “are not formally confirmed”.
All though this news was welcomed, UK scientists still fear they will be locked out of €100 billion EU research programme. Some British researchers who had secured Horizon Europe funding have already been told that their grants will be cancelled.
Scientists relieved about decision to reaffirm previous spending commitments.The world-first scheme will protect European industries from being undercut by polluting competitors, but angers emerging economies.
After all-night negotiations, the European Union struck a political deal on Tuesday to impose a carbon tax on imports of polluting goods such as steel and cement, a world-first scheme aiming to support European industries as they decarbonise. Negotiators from EU countries and the European Parliament reached a deal at around 5am in Brussels, on the law to impose CO2 emissions costs on imports of iron and steel, cement, fertilisers, aluminium and electricity.
Companies importing those goods into the EU will be required to buy certificates to cover their embedded CO2 emissions. The scheme is designed to apply the same CO2 cost to overseas firms and domestic EU industries – the latter of which are already required to buy permits from the EU carbon market when they pollute. Mohammed Chahim, European Parliament’s lead negotiator on the law, said the border tariff would be crucial to EU efforts to fight climate change. “It is one of the only mechanisms we have to incentivise our trading partners to decarbonise their manufacturing industry,” Chahim said.
The stated aim of the levy is to prevent European industry from being undercut by cheaper goods made in countries with weaker environmental rules. It will also apply to imported hydrogen, which was not in the original EU proposal but which EU lawmakers pushed for in
the negotiations. Some details on the law will be determined later this week in related negotiations on a reform of the EU carbon market. It will apply from 1 October 2023 but with a transition period where the importers have to report but not are not yet taxed.
Currently, the EU gives domestic industry free CO2 permits to shield them from foreign competition, but plans to phase out those free permits when the carbon border tariff is phased in, to comply with World Trade Organisation rules. How quickly that phase-in happens will be decided in the carbon market talks. Brussels has said countries could be exempted if they have equivalent climate change policies to the EU, and suggested the United States could dodge the levy on this basis. The proposals will affect the EU’s neighbours in Eastern Europe and North Africa the most. Ukraine and Turkey are drawing up carbon pricing mechanisms to avoid being taxed.
Emerging economies have criticised the concept. Last April, China, India Brazil and South Africa jointly “expressed grave concern” about the “trade barriers”. They said it was “discriminatory and against the principles of equity and [common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities]” – a UN term meaning that developed countries, which are historically responsible for causing the climate crisis, should do more to address it than developing ones.
First calls for proposals under the Horizon Europe Work Programme for 2023-2024 opened as of 7 December.
On the 7th December, EU opened for the first calls for proposals under the New Work Programme. At the same time, the Union invited potential applicants to Horizon Europe Information Days between 6 December 2022 and 16 February 2023. The infomration days offers prospective applicants and other stakeholders of EU research and innovation the opportunity of asking questions about main funding instruments and the processes of Horizon Europe.
Horizon Europe, with a budget of over €95 billion, is the European Union’s ambitious research and innovation programme running until 2027 with rolling calls for proposals. Reaching key climate action objectives, finding innovative solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate change is the main focus areas of the programme to which 42% of the total budget have been assigned. A large part of the budget has been earmarked for biodiversity. Hereafter, the programme will support the EU digital transition, including the development of core digital technologies and practical integration, while nearly €970 million will be invested to help speed up the clean energy transition, and increase Europe’s energy independence from unreliable suppliers and volatile fossil fuels.
The programme has attained a very broad scope as it also covers support to Ukraine – targeting reinforcing the access of researchers from Ukraine to European research infrastructures, and supporting the climate-neutral reconstruction of several Ukrainian cities – and actions to support and strengthen international initiatives in renewable energies, food systems, global health and environmental observations. The Horizon Europe Work
Programme, attributed a budget of around €13,5 billion, is a part of the Horizon Europe Programme – a programme for research and innovation, implemented between 2021-27, awarding research an innovation grants to eligible companies.
The Horizon Europe includes 5 mission areas – a) cancer, b) adaptation to climate change, c) healthy oceans, seas, coastal- and inland waters, d) climate-neutral and smart cities & e) soil health and food – all aiming at tackling areas that challenge our world today. The missions operate under a few actions such as research projects, policy measures and legislative initiatives – thus aiming to reach actual goals that are otherwise unreachable on the individual level.
A team of researchers from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), NASA and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) have discovered web-like plasma structures in the Sun’s middle corona. The researchers describe their innovative new observation method, imaging the middled corona in ultraviolet (UV) wavelength, in a new study published in Nature Astronomy. The findings could lead to a better understanding of the solar wind’s origins and its interactions with the rest of the solar system.
Since 1995, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has observed the Sun’s corona with the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) stationed aboard the NASA and European Space Agency Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft to monitor space weather that could affect the Earth. But LASCO has a gap in observations that obscures our view of the middle solar corona, where the solar wind originates.
“We’ve known since the 1950s about the outflow of the solar wind. As the solar wind evolves, it can drive space weather and affect things like power grids, satellites and astronauts,” said SwRI Principal Scientist Dr. Dan Seaton, one of the authors of the study. “The origins of the solar wind itself and its structure remain somewhat mysterious. While we have a basic understanding of
processes, we haven’t had observations like these before, so we had to work with a gap in information.”
To find new ways to observe the Sun’s corona, Seaton suggested pointing a different instrument, the Solar Ultraviolet Imager (SUVI) on NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES), at either side of the Sun instead of directly at it and making UV observations for a month. What Seaton and his colleagues saw were elongated, web-like plasma structures in the Sun’s middle corona. Interactions within these structures release stored magnetic energy propelling particles into space.
Seaton believes these observations could lead to more comprehensive insights and even more exciting discoveries from missions like PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere), an SwRI-led NASA mission that will image how the Sun’s outer corona becomes the solar wind.
“Now that we can image the Sun’s middle corona, we can connect what PUNCH sees back to its origins and have a more complete view of how the solar wind interacts with the rest of the solar system,” Seaton said. “Prior to these observations, very few people believed you could observe the middle corona to these distances in UV. These studies have opened up a whole new approach to observing the corona on a large scale.”
Researchers have discovered web-like plasma structures in the Sun’s middle corona.A new study by researchers from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), NASA and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) describes the observation of web-like plasma structures in the Sun’s middle corona, which could lead to a better understanding of the solar wind and its interactions with the rest of the solar system. Courtesy of SwRI/NOAA
The study, published in Environmental Science & Technology, indicated that large numbers of microplastics in Auckland’s air are of extremely small sizes, raising concerns about the potential for particles to be inhaled and accumulate in the human body. Researchers around the world are likely to have dramatically undercounted airborne microplastics, says lead author Dr Joel Rindelaub, of the School of Chemical Sciences at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland.
The levels found in Auckland’s air were many times higher than recorded in London, Hamburg and Paris in recent years because scientists in the new study used sophisticated chemical methods to find and analyse particles as small as 0.01 of a millimetre. The mean (average) number of airborne microplastics detected in a square metre in a day was 4,885. That compares with 771 in London (reported in a study published in 2020), 275 in Hamburg (2019) and 110 in Paris (2016). “Future work needs to quantify exactly how much plastic we are breathing in,” says Dr Rindelaub. “It’s becoming more and more clear that this is an important route of exposure.”
The study is the first to calculate the total mass of microplastics in a city’s air. Waves breaking in the Hauraki Gulf may play a key role in Auckland’s problem by transmitting water-borne microplastics into the air. That effect seemed to be at work when Rindelaub and his colleagues, including PhD student Wenxia Fan and Professor Jennifer Salmond, recorded increased numbers after winds from the gulf picked up speed, likely leading to bigger waves and more transmission.
The paper’s introduction says: “Over the last 70 years, 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic have been produced globally. Only nine percent have been recycled, with the rest either incinerated or released into the environment.” Fibres dispersed by washing synthetic clothes, fragments shed by car tyres and washed by rain into the ocean, and bottles floating down rivers are just some of the ways plastic is added to the environment. Weathering and aging breaks plastic down into ever smaller particles. The experiment was carried out over nine weeks during September, October and November in 2020.
mechanisms
The primary advantage of using DNA as a material platform is that the molecular interactions are coded by a base pairing, with the result that all the particles are automatically perfect clones of one another. This means that the particles are uniform, there is no heterogeneity, which differentiates DNA from other platforms. “Heterogeneity can be a problem with other material classes,” explains Professor Maartje Bastings, head of the Programmable Biomaterials Laboratory (PBL) at EPFL in Lausanne. As the Principal Investigator of the EU-funded InActioN project, Professor Bastings is now using DNA-based nanomaterials to investigate
DNA-based nanomaterials to investigate cellular
the immune system, as Professor Maartje Bastings explains.
activation of cells that belong to the immune system,” she outlines.
This project builds on Professor Bastings earlier work to control the stability of DNA materials in the biological context. Naturally, DNA is found only in a cell nucleus, and cells have mechanisms in place to destroy what they see as foreign DNA when it is found outside the nucleus. “These destructive forces are inherently present in cells and cellular environments to prevent a potential infection. We have to face these hurdles if we want to use the advantages of DNA as a material platform,” says Professor Bastings. In her earlier research Professor Bastings
Schematic representation of how the differential organisation of similar building blocks may result in cellular activation or not, depending on the correct presentation of interacting molecules to their specific counterparts inside a cell.
synthetic DNA particles so that they have a protective coating,” she explains. “With these discoveries, we are now able to use these DNA-based materials to engineer spatially and geometrically controlled biomaterials.”
The project’s research involves manipulating and folding DNA into new geometries, then exploring the impact of this on controlled cellular uptake and subsequent immune cell activation. Professor Bastings draws a parallel with the assembly of lego bricks. “You can’t change the shape of a lego brick. In our project, the lego brick is the DNA, and there are some parameters that are not changeable. The width of the DNA helix is 2 nanometres for example, and there are 10 nucleotides
Using DNA as a synthetic material offers the unique opportunity to precisely control the spacing of functional molecules like proteins or antibodies, which can help researchers gain a deeper understanding of cellular function and communication at the bio-interface. Researchers in the InActioN project are using
activation
within
per turn,” she says. While these parameters cannot be changed it is possible to rearrange synthetic DNA in other ways, although there are certain rules that need to be followed. “You have to use all of the bricks – the DNA – but you get to use them in quite a free way,” continues Professor Bastings. “If you give the same batch of bricks to 10 different people, you’ll get different designs and geometries, but the content is the same.”
Researchers are now able to design a set of bricks that come together into a particle with a certain geometry and mechanical profile, which enables Professor Bastings and her colleagues to control the spacing of functional molecules that can be incorporated via specific interaction with the DNA bricks. Each of the final molecules is still the same, but the location and structural flexibility of the active group can be systematically changed. “We are looking at whether the spacing and flexibility of these molecules, introduced by using DNA, can be used as a regulatory metric of cell activation,” outlines Professor Bastings. The location of the molecules and the ligands depends on the immune signalling pathway
lies in not damaging the DNA during that process, and we are exploring ways to do it.”
This research could encourage a shift of approach in materials engineering, with Professor Bastings aiming to show that the geometry and flexibility of a material at the nanoscale can have a significant impact on the selective interaction between materials and cells. Uniform, precisely engineered materials could in future be used to provoke a specific immune response, depending on the specific circumstances, while Professor Bastings believes the project’s work also holds wider relevance. “Our findings are relevant for all ligand-receptor interactions. This opens up a whole new platform of material design for nano-therapeutics,” she says. These signalling pathways can be finely activated or inhibited by materials, which could also lead to deeper insights into how cell signalling works. “We can look from a biophysical and structural mechanics viewpoint at how viruses or cancer cells evade certain signalling pathways,” outlines Professor Bastings.
Intracellular Action of DNA-based Nano-materials
The breakthrough of this ERC proposal is to use geometry of nanomaterials as sole parameter to organize intracellular immunological checkpoints into active or inhibitive state. Based on a geometric rearrangement of identical building blocks, we provoke immune activation or inhibition exclusively by variation in spatial organization of proteins. The same material can thus be agonist and antagonist depending on the organization of molecular components. Hereby, we demonstrate that a precise control over geometry can define the potency of immunomodulating materials, pioneering geometry-based immune-engineering.
ERC, Starting Grant € 1 499 755
• Hugo Rodriguez Franco
• Pauline Hendrickx
• Dr. Marianna Koga
• Dr. Jorieke Weiden
Contact Details
Project Coordinator, Prof. Maartje M.C. Bastings
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) Institute of Materials (IMX)
Programmable Biomaterials Laboratory (PBL)
EPFL - STI - IMX - PBL Station 12 CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland T: +41 21 69 32669
that researchers want to activate; Professor Bastings has selected two pathways at two different organelles in a cell. “One pathway happens in the endosome (TLR9), another takes place in the cytoplasm (cGAS-STING). The TLR9 pathway is a pro-inflammatory activation cascade,” she explains.
A paper has been published in which Professor Bastings and her colleagues have shown the critical role of geometry and negative influence of flexibility on the spatial positioning of ligands within this TLR9 pathway, and shown that precisely engineered nanomaterials can be highly effective tools in immune stimulation and cellular communication. The cGAS-STING pathway is proving more challenging, with researchers working on how to get the material into the cytoplasm, which lies at the centre of a cell. “The challenge is to find ways of getting these materials to the right place while keeping all the bricks at the right predesigned position,” says Professor Bastings. It’s more difficult to get into the cytoplasm than the endosome, and Professor Bastings says there are still more hurdles to overcome in this part of her research. “With the cytoplasm, the nanomaterials have to escape the endosome,” she explains. “The challenge
A virus might evade immune signalling pathways by presenting their active molecules in a different spacing or pattern for example, and the project’s research could play a role in uncovering these kinds of fundamental biology insights. The more immediate priority however is to investigate questions around the delivery of these materials, the organellespecific stability, and the proof-of-concept of spatially and geometrically controlled engineering. “We are making progress in this respect. On the way, however, we may find something that could really revolutionise diagnostics, in which case we will look into more translational activities, which would require further funding,” says Professor Bastings. “We can see that our method is working, so there will certainly be follow-up work in the future.”
The primary focus in the project has been on cellular interactions within the immune system, yet Professor Bastings says the relevance of their research is not limited solely to this context. Spatially-controlled, DNAbased materials could also be applied in other scenarios, believes Professor Bastings. “We can adopt the same approach to any situation where there are interactions between two (or more) molecules,” she says.
E: maartje.bastings@epfl.ch W: pbl.epfl.ch W: https://bastingslab.com
Comberlato et al NanoLetters (2022) Koga et al Biomacromolecules (2022)
Prof. Maartje M.C. Bastings
Prof. Maartje Bastings is the head of the Programmable Biomaterials Laboratory at EPFL in Lausanne. She specializes in the design of DNA-based supramolecular materials to explore the importance of structural mechanics and precise control of valency and patterns on directional interactions and self-assembly.
We are looking at whether the spacing of these molecules, introduced by using DNA, is a regulatory metric of cell activation.
A certain proportion of cells in a tumour are cancer stem cells (CSCs), which aren’t eradicated by chemotherapy or radiotherapy and so remain in the body even after a course of treatment has finished. While a patient may be considered to be tumour-free after treatment, they still have a very small population of cells that do not divide normally and can cause health problems later on. “When treatment is removed, those cells are able to re-grow a new tumour and cause metastasis,” explains Dr Francesca Rapino, Research Associate at the FNRS and Welbio researcher at the University of Liege. As the Principal Investigator of the tRNAtoGO project, Dr Rapino is investigating how these CSCs are formed, focusing on the role of tRNAs, molecules which play an important role in the production of proteins. “tRNAs are secreted in the blood. They are very abundant in cells in general, and extremely abundant in cancer,” she outlines.
“tRNA actors” heterogeneity: a new identifier of cancer stem cells
The TRNAtoGo project is funded under the European Research Council Starting Grant agreement number 948170.
Project Coordinator, Dr Rapino Francesca, PhD GIGA-Stem Cell Laboratory of Cancer Stemness T: +32 4 366 25 48
E: Francesca.Rapino@uliege.be
W: https://cordis.europa.eu/ project/id/948170
W: www.uliege.be
Dr Francesca Rapino, PhD is an Associate Professor at FRS-FNRS and WelBio researcher at the University of Liege, and Head of the lab of Cancer stemness. She is interested in understanding how tRNA heterogeneity affects the establishment of pathological phenotypes. In particular, she aims to identify the background context to oncogenic transformation.
RNAtoGO experimental approach
Cancer stem cells
The process by which some stem cells become CSCs is unclear, a topic at the core of the project. The working hypothesis is that certain sub-groups of tRNAs effectively prime cells to transform into CSCs when a genetic mutation is present, now Dr Rapino and her colleagues in the lab are looking to gain deeper insights. “We are using genetically modified mouse models to isolate and characterize the healthy and cancerous stem cells in the intestine,” she says. When researchers have the populations of healthy stem cells and CSCs, they can then profile them using sequencing techniques. “We use proteomics to see the proteins, RNA-seq for the RNAs, as well as other techniques like Ribo-seq and transcriptome RNA sequencing to focus on specific changes in translation dynamics,” continues Dr Rapino. “We’re looking at the different actors involved in translation, such as the ribosome and tRNAs. From this we generate algorithms to essentially highlight the actors involved, we’re using bioinformatics techniques in the project.”
Researchers are also using machine learning techniques to try and identify the tRNAs that make the difference between the situation of a healthy stem cell and a CSC. This only produces a prediction however, so Dr Rapino is also using gene-editing techniques like CrisprCas9 to build a fuller picture. “We pull out these tRNAs that we predict to be important for the transformation of healthy stem cells
into CSCs. We then investigate whether a healthy stem cell can survive without this specific tRNA, and if the CSC cannot. We aim to identify a group of tRNA genes that are not essential for healthy stem cells, but then become extremely important for CSCs,” she explains. This research could hold important implications for the way cancer is diagnosed, opening up the possibility of a blood test. “Cancers produce a lot of proteins and tRNAs. There are so many of these tRNAs that at some points they enter the blood,” says Dr Rapino.
A test capable of detecting tRNAs known to be important in CSCs could help diagnose cancer earlier and improve the prospects of treating it effectively. This is a topic Dr Rapino is exploring in her research. “We are developing tools to detect specific signatures of tRNAs, first in cells and then in the blood of mice,” she outlines. Alongside this more diagnostic dimension of research, Dr Rapino also plans to continue investigating the nature of CSCs over the remainder of the project’s funding term. “We’ve profiled stem cells and CSCs. We’ve also built the first version of this bioinformatic pipeline and have the first results from our functional screen,” she continues. “We will validate those tRNAs that come out from our screen in mouse models. We will generate new mouse models that do not have those tRNAs, to see how a tumour progresses – we want to see how cell translation is changed when you don’t have specific tRNAs.”
Cancer stem cells may remain in an individual’s body even after they have been successfully treated, and the presence of these cells can then lead to the formation of a new tumour. We spoke to Dr Francesca Rapino about her research into the cellular origin of cancer stem cells and its wider implications for the diagnosis of cancer.
There are 11 PhD students working in the TACT project, investigating different questions related to the development of targeted anti-cancer therapies. We spoke to two PhD students at the University of Strasbourg, Lorenzo Turelli and Ilias Koutsopetras, about their research and its importance to the wider goal of developing more targeted anti-cancer therapies.
EU Researcher: What is the main focus in your research?
Ilias Koutsopetras: I am looking at the use of multi-component reactions for the conjugation of antibodies, where we add several small-molecule reactants to an antibody to produce a final antibody conjugate with precise modification sites.
EUR: Are you able to modify particular sites within the antibody for connection to a linker?
IK: One of the biggest challenges we face in developing antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) is to identify which regions of an antibody we modify for connection to a chemical linker. We have made good progress in this.
EUR: How did you identify those regions?
IK: We tried out a lot of different conditions and conducted many optimisation trials, then we sent our conjugated antibodies to our analytical collaborators – the Cianferani lab, another member of our consortium in this project. They use a technique called native MS (Mass Spectrometry) to determine the conversion and average degree of conjugation of our antibodies – i.e. the number of sites modified by our multicomponent reaction. Then we move on to LCMS techniques to determine precisely the identity of these conjugation sites, using a technique called peptide mapping.
EUR: Did these results from the LCMS help guide your research?
IK: The results from the LCMS tell us in which regions of the antibody we had the conjugation. If we find specific sites of conjugation from our experiments, then we try to reproduce it and see if our method provides a repeatable result.
The nature of the conjugation site is important as it can have an impact on the
Keywords:Multicomponent reactions, bioconjugation
Keywords: Linker synthesis, antibody-drug-conjugates
conjugated antibody’s behaviour in vivo: conjugation in the region responsible for antigen recognition – called the paratope –can lead to diminished affinity, making the antibody less able to recognize and bind its target antigen.
EUR: What is the role of a linker in an antibody-drug conjugate?
Lorenzo Turelli: A linker is an essential component of an ADC connecting the monoclonal antibody to a cytotoxic drug. Linkers are mainly divided in two categories: cleavable and non-cleavable. We are mostly interested in cleavable linkers: motifs whose cleavage can be operated by enzymes or chemically (acidic pH, reductive conditions, etc.), as this will dictate how and when the drug will be released.
EUR: What are the main challenges in developing linkers?
LT: For cleavable linkers, the main challenge is to design a system whose cleavage takes place in the tumoral cell to avoid toxicity.
EUR: Is this an issue you’re addressing in your research?
LT: I aim to develop new types of acidcleavable linkers responsive in a very narrow pH range: stable in plasma, but rapidly cleaved in the more acidic environment of tumoral cells (pH around 5).
Once such selectivity is proved, we attach to the linker a cytotoxic drug and eventually we put in place the bioconjugation to the monoclonal antibody.
EUR: What results have you gained so far?
LT: We have recently developed a new type of acid cleavable linker which proved to be specifically cleaved in a tumoral cell, but stable in plasma. We then attached to it an highly potent drug called MMAF, prior to connecting it through a mAb by means of a specific reaction (CuAAC). This work has been recently published
EUR: Have you been able to test this?
LT: We tested this novel ADC in vitro, on a cancer cell type. After we got some good results in vitro, we then moved to an in vivo test and compared it with a commercially available ADC called Kadcyla.
We found that our new ADC was highly effective, highly potent, leading to full tumour regression within 23 days.
A lot of attention in research is focused on the development of antibody-drug conjugates, in which a cytotoxic drug is connected to an antibody via a chemical linker, as a means of treating different types of cancer. Based at the University of Strasbourg, Dr Guilhem Chaubet is coordinator of the TACT project, an EU-backed initiative which brings together both academic and commercial partners. “We’re exploring new possibilities in anti-cancer therapies,” he outlines. There are 11 PhD students in TACT, working on research projects addressing different topics around the development of new anti-cancer therapies. “Some of the projects in TACT are about investigating the influence of a linker on the overall potency of an antibody-drug conjugate, others are looking at the use of nanoparticles,” continues Dr Chaubet. “Researchers are also working with mass spectrometry, which is a sophisticated analytical method used to study antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs).”
The wider goal in the project is to develop effective, targeted anti-cancer therapies, which involves several different strands of research. As head of the BioFunctional Chemistry group at the University of Strasbourg, Dr Chaubet is deeply interested in a strategy called bioconjugation. “This is a strategy for grafting a cytotoxic drug onto an antibody in a specific manner at a specific site. Antibodies are massive molecules, they’re gigantic compared with the cytotoxic drugs that we’re trying to attach to them,” he says. There are a number of complex challenges to deal with in this research. “The molecules are
too small to be seen by the naked eye, so it’s really hard to precisely control where we’re going to put our molecule, the specific site on the antibody,” explains Dr Chaubet. “It’s also quite complicated to control the amount of cytotoxic drugs that we’re going to graft onto the antibody.”
These are issues that Dr Chaubet and his colleagues are working to address in the laboratory, alongside investigating other aspects of the project’s overall agenda, such as the development of chemical linkers to connect the cytotoxic drug to an antibody in a covalent manner. These linkers have a strong influence on the therapeutic potency of an ADC. “The linker can balance the hydrophobicity of the cytotoxic drug. Essentially proteins are very polar – they really like water as a solvent. However, the cytotoxic drugs are not that polar, so they don’t really
do well in water,” says Dr Chaubet. “If you start putting a lot of cytotoxic drugs onto your antibody, you’re affecting the solubility of your antibody. This causes heavily loaded antibodies to precipitate, so they’re no longer soluble in water. By using specific linkers, you can effectively balance this to make heavilyloaded conjugates more soluble.”
The majority of these linkers are cleavable, so they will get cleaved under certain conditions, such as a change in pH. This point holds wider interest because of the way that ADCs work in vivo. “They’re injected in vivo and they circulate in the body, via the bloodstream. Near a tumour, some of the ADC will escape the bloodstream and bind to this tumour, because the antibody we’re using can selectively recognise certain proteins called antigens, which may be present on the surface of certain cancer cells,” explains
Dr
Antibody-drug conjugates are a class of drugs that can be targeted specifically at cancer cells, so reducing the side-effects of treatment. We spoke to Dr Guilhem Chaubet , Lorenzo Turelli and Ilias Koutsopetras about the work of the TACT project in training the next generation of scientists and helping to develop effective, targeted cancer treatments.
Chaubet. When an ADC gets in contact with the antigen, the whole complex is internalised into a cell, sometimes into highly acidic locations rich in enzymes, conditions which Dr Chaubet is using to help target therapies more effectively. “We can put linkers into our ADCs that are highly sensitive to acidic pH. So when this ADC ends up in a cellular compartment with very low pH, then our linker gets cleaved and the drug is released,” he outlines. This occurs inside the cell, which is key to the therapeutic activity and potency of an ADC. The aim is to deliver a cytotoxic drug just to cancer cells and not to healthy cells, which represents a significant improvement on conventional chemotherapies. “In chemotherapy a really cytotoxic drug is
testing of new treatments. The students themselves are conducting complex indepth research during their PhD studies, yet alongside the scientific training they also learn some softer skills in TACT. “Training is provided on things like legal affairs, entrepreneurship and how to write grant proposals and presentations,” says Dr Chaubet. This is part of the wider goal of training the next generation of scientific leaders and equipping them with the skills they will need for their future careers, both scientific and non-scientific. “Some of the students may want to go into industry while others may want to stay in academia. We sit down with the students every few months and have a chat about what they want to do in the future,” continues Dr Chaubet.
Targeted Anti-Cancer Therapies
Project Objectives
TACT is a European Training Networks funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Skłodowska Curie Action Grant Agreement No 859458. TACT brings together six academic and three industrial European institutions in a research consortium dedicated to the training of eleven PhD students on the development of next-generation treatments against cancer.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Skłodowska Curie Action Grant Agreement No 859458.
Project Partners
• University of Strasbourg (coordinator) and CNRS – France
• Queen’s University Belfast, University College London and Almac Discovery – U. K.
• Wageningen University & Research – the Netherlands
• Technical University of Munich and Heidelberg Pharma – Germany
• SpiroChem AG – Switzerland
Contact Details
used to kill cancer cells, but because it’s not targeted, some of this cytotoxic drug can also reach healthy cells, especially the cells that replicate and multiply a lot,” he explains. These cytotoxic drugs cannot kill cells when they are grafted onto an antibody. “The only way they can kill a cell is if they are released from the antibody,” continues Dr Chaubet. “This is the importance of the linker, to make sure that these drugs get detached – or cleaved – from the antibody only once they have entered a cancer cell. Otherwise you start having the same side-effects as we observe with chemotherapy.”
The TACT project overall includes research into a wide variety of topics related to ADCs, including not just the development of the
The training can then be adapted to reflect the students’ priorities, for example by helping them build contacts in industry and present their research at meetings. Communication skills are very important in this context, a topic which is being addressed within TACT. “We’re trying to help the students to develop their communication skills,” says Dr Chaubet. A lot of effort is also being devoted to communicating the project’s work to the broadest possible audience, the majority of whom are likely to not have a scientific background; Dr Chaubet says two main activities have been identified.
“The first is with an illustrator who is putting a kind of graphic novel together to communicate our work and our results,” he outlines. “With this graphic novel we’re trying to give a fairly general picture of what cancer really is. The
Project Coordinator, Dr Guilhem Chaubet
BIOFUNCTIONAL CHEMISTRY Faculty of Pharmacy 74 route du Rhin 67401 Illkirch cedex E: chaubet@unistra.fr : @EtnTact : @BFC_UMR7199 W: http://www.biofunctional.eu/ W: https://tact-etn.eu/
Dr Guilhem Chaubet is a researcher in the Pharmacy Faculty at the University of Strasbourg. His research interests include the development of new tools for the bioconjugation of tyrosine residues, and the application of multi-component reactions to the site-specific bioconjugation of native proteins.
We can put linkers into our ADCs that are highly sensitive to acidic pH. So when this ADC ends up in a cellular compartment with very low pH, then our linker gets cleaved and the drug is released.Dr Guilhem Chaubet
There are many sub-types
The majority of breast cancer cases are of the estrogen receptor positive (ER+) type, fuelled by the hormone estrogen which attaches to cells via receptors, leading to the activation of signalling pathways and changes within cells. This type of breast cancer is fairly well understood, says Professor Vessela Kristensen, Head of the Cancer Genome Variation Research Group at Oslo University Hospital. “There is the hormone, the receptor and the signalling pathways. We know what the receptor does to de-regulate signalling and to make the cell abnormal,” she outlines. There is no such clear modus operandi with the estrogen receptor negative (ER-) type however, in which cells don’t have an estrogen receptor, so these two types of breast cancer are treated differently. “With the ER+ type, there are several ways to block estrogen receptor signalling, for example by reducing the production of estrogen. There are also some homologues of the estrogen receptor
that can fool cells and block estrogen receptor signalling,” says Professor Kristensen. “It’s more complicated with the ER- cases, because we don’t know what to block.”
This is one of the issues Professor Kristensen and her colleagues in the RESCUER project are working to address. The project consortium brings together researchers from a wide variety of disciplines, spanning basic science and more translational fields, with the goal of developing more effective methods of treating breast cancer, building on data from clinical trials. “We have a large number of clinical collaborators who are key members in the project, creating the design of clinical trials,” says Professor Kristensen. These partners manage the collected biomaterial and have performed different types of molecular analysis on tumour samples, work which Professor Kristensen says has generated
large volumes of data from clinical biobanks. “We recently gathered for our Consortium meeting at Erlangen University Hospital, where Professor Peter Fasching and his team run a biobank of 65000 patients with close to 1 million biological specimens. We have isolated DNA from tumours, conducted nextgeneration sequencing, and also isolated tissue slices from the tumour. Together with other consortium members, the group of Diether Lambrechts in Leuven, they have also worked on spatial transcriptomics, isolating RNA from the tumour, and done single RNA sequencing,” she explains. “Our goal is to synthesise the information in this data, and to identify what signatures are particularly important in terms of an individual’s response to treatment.”
The next step is to develop mechanistic mathematical models, based on the molecular data available in the biobank, which can then be used to test
different treatments lead to improved outcomes. The idea is to essentially make a computer-based copy – or digital twin – of the main characteristics of an individual tumour, then researchers can test out different treatments. “This is a way of searching for the optimal personalized treatment,” says Professor Arnoldo Frigessi, leader of the Oslo Center for Biostatistics and Epidemiology and work package 4 in RESCUER. In some cases, tumours may be resistant to certain types of treatment, another topic of interest in the project. To identify treatment options for tumours that have developed resistance, the researchers use patient-derived xenografts (PDXs) where the patient tumour tissue continues to grow in mice. “The PDXs help to keep a tumour alive a little bit longer than it otherwise would be. If you already know that this tumour has been resistant in the patient, you can use a PDX to try to find out why it has been resistant,” outlines Gunhild Mælandsmo, who leads this work at Oslo University Hospital (OUH). “We also experiment with explant cultures. With explant cultures we take cells or tissue from the tumour and keep it alive in a petri dish. The
and/or by testing combinations in the cancer drug sensitivity screening,” explains Professor Kjetil Tasken, leader of the Institute for Cancer Research at OUH and the work package.
This is part of the project’s work in providing clear and relevant information to clinicians, which can then inform and guide decisions on treatment. Clinicians typically draw on their own knowledge and experience when deciding on the right course of treatment for a patient, and the RESCUER tools are designed to add to that, keeping the needs of clinicians at the forefront. “The project is led by clinicians and is for clinicians,” stresses Professor Kristensen. Technology can help doctors identify possible treatment options, but Professor Kristensen is clear that the ultimate decision will always lie with clinicians. “The clinician has a connection with the patient, an awareness of their personality, their overall health profile or characteristics, and they can judge whether they will tolerate a particular treatment,” she says. “We’re not trying to replace that clinical expertise. However, with breast cancer, and for other forms of cancers and some rare diseases, there is the potential to develop new combinatorial treatments.”
RESistance Under Combinatorial Treatment in ER+ and ER- Breast Cancer
The objective of RESCUER is to develop a new approach and identify mechanisms of resistance at systems level, exploring how the treatment is affected by patient- and tumour-specific conditions. The project will integrate longitudinal multidimensional data from ongoing clinical trials and novel systems approaches, which combine subcellular/cellular and organ-level in silico models to discover molecular signatures of resistance and predict patient response to combinatorial therapies. This new knowledge will be used to identify already approved drugs with a high curative potential of new personalised drug combinations.
The RESCUER project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant agreement No. 847912.
Project Partners
https://www.rescuer.uio.no/the-team/partners/
Contact Details
Project Coordinator, Professor Vessela Kristensen, University of Oslo, Institute for Clinical Medicine, Kirkeveien 166, Laboratoriebygget, 0450 Oslo T: +4792068432
E: v.n.kristensen@medisin.uio.no W: https://www.rescuer.uio.no/
Atezolizumab plus anthracycline-based chemotherapy in metastatic triple-negative breast cancer: the randomized, double-blind phase 2b ALICE trial - Nature Medicine.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-02126-1
tumour is not sustained by a living organism like a mouse but by artificial matrices, which are constantly improving. This allows us to spare animals,” adds Professor Kristensen. Researchers in the project are also developing organoids, which involves essentially taking the tissue then allowing single cells to grow back and self-organise, opening-up the possibility of looking at smaller structures. The wider aim in this research is to help clinicians assess what course of treatment is most likely to be effective for a particular patient. “There are very clear treatment guidelines for most breast cancer patients, and in the majority of cases this works very well. There are however still patients that clinicians don’t know exactly how to treat,” says Professor Kristensen. This is an issue at the heart of the RESCUER project, with work package 10 in the project dedicated to large-scale drug screening, which could ultimately lead to the discovery of effective new drug combinations. “This could be achieved by testing single drugs, and also by using AI-approaches to predict synergies
A large amount of information has already been generated and collected in RESCUER, with researchers from a wide variety of disciplines, including bioinformatics, mathematics, pathology and surgery, all contributing to the project’s overall agenda. There is a risk of over-loading clinicians with too much information, so Professor Kristensen says it’s important to identify what information is the most relevant. “One of the goals in the project is to prioritise effectively and to identify those parameters that will be most likely to help doctors,” she outlines. The project is still at a relatively early stage, and while research has been disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, Professor Kristensen says progress is being made. “We have had four consortium meetings so far and work packages are becoming well integrated, all enjoying great communication science and social-wise. We also hold regular zoom meetings which are well attended, and we’ve already had a couple of papers published,” she says.
Vessela N. Kristensen is Director of Research and Head of Research and Development at the Department of Medical Genetics, OUS and Professor at the Medical Faculty of the University in Oslo (UiO). Previously she worked at the Department of Clinical Molecu§§lar Biology and Lab science (EpiGen), Akershus university hospital, and Group Leader at the Department of Genetics, IKF, Det Norske Radiumhospital. She is currently visiting professor at Princeton University, and has served as Professor II at the Centre for Integrative Genetics, University of Life Sciences, assistant professor at the Advanced Technology Center at NCI, NIH, Bethesda as well as the Berzelius Laboratory at Karolinska Institute.
With the ER+ type of breast cancer, there are several ways to block estrogen receptor signalling, for example by reducing the production of estrogen. It’s more complicated with the ER- cases because we don’t know what to block.Prof. Vessela Kristensen
Millions of people are affected by debilitating neurological injuries such as stroke or spinal cord injuries. Recovery from these conditions is a challenging and often, suboptimal process. Dr. Massimo Sartori and his lab are working on improving neurorehabilitation by merging digital multi-scale models of the neuromuscular system with electrical stimulation of the spinal cord and wearable robotic exoskeletons. They are working on two major pillars: fundamental science and applied science. At the core of the first pillar is understanding the neuromechanics of movement which means understanding how the nervous system controls the muscular system to generate movement. “We apply advanced techniques for measuring information from the body. We measure bioelectrical signals and create what we call digital twins or digital copies of a person consisting of digital copies of neurons in the spinal cord and digital copies of muscles. Everything we learn from these digital twins we use it for developing what we call humanrobot interface.” explains Dr. Sartori. The second pillar, applied science, refers to connecting the human body with assistive robots-wearable technologies that aim to improve the way the body moves after a brain injury such as a stroke. “We try to interface wearable robots with the nervous system of stroke patients so
that the exoskeleton can effectively become a natural extension of the body. As soon as the patient doesn’t have enough strength to make a specific movement, the exoskeleton can activate itself and help the patient to complete the movement,” says Dr. Sartori.
The project INTERACT is essentially about these two goals. First, the researchers aim to build detailed digital twins of stroke patients
the spinal cord’s ventral horn. As alpha-motor neurons branch out from the spinal cord, they physically connect to skeletal muscle. Therefore, there is a one-to-one relationship between the activity in the neurons and the muscle fiber. This synaptic connection makes it possible to use the information gained via high-density electromyography to decode the firing of alpha motor neurons. “The next question is how does
and understand how muscles, bones, and neurons in the spinal cord interact with each other. Second, they plan to use these digital twins to understand how exoskeletons and neurostimulators such as spinal cord stimulation techniques contribute to altering the functions of neurons and muscles.
The researchers are using a technique called high-density electromyography which records electrical signals from muscle fibers that are directly innervated by alpha-motor neurons in
this neural activity affect the activity of the musculoskeletal system? The next step is to build muscle models and feed them this neural information, which in turn will simulate how these muscles would generate force. If we have models of all the muscles then we can estimate the force that makes a specific joint move. This force can be measured externally, and it is a way of validating our method. ” explains Dr. Sartori. These muscle models can be used to restore
neural excitability and estimate the degree of
Dr. Massimo Sartori is a Professor at the Department of Biomechanical Engineering in the faculty of Engineering Technology at the University of Twente. He is the head of the ERC Project INTERACT which aims to close the knowledge gap between the interaction of the nervous and musculoskeletal systems and promote the development of new human-machine interfaces.
We try to interface wearable robots with the nervous system of stroke patients so that the exoskeleton can effectively become a natural extension of the body. As soon as the patient doesn’t have enough strength to make a specific movement, the exoskeleton can activate itself and help the patient to complete the movement.
muscle paresis as a consequence of neurological injury. “We use spinal cord electrical stimulation to fine-tune the stimulation parameters until our model tells us that the excitability has been restored and the movement is smooth. We use our models as a magnifier to look and understand what the stimulation is doing to the body. By estimating how much force the muscle can produce we also know how much force the exoskeleton should give to make a full movement. This compensates for the lack of force in a very precise way, because for the first time, we now have a direct estimate of how much force these patients can generate.” explains Dr. Sartori.
The researchers hope that by assisting the patient as needed they will regain control of their own body and induce positive neuroplastic changes that might lead to improved recovery. “The problem with current rehabilitation robotics is that the patients are passive, so it is the robot that is driving the patient. We want to get rid of these paradigms, and we want to go into a paradigm where the patient is in charge and the exoskeleton only provides the assistance needed to execute a specific task. Otherwise, you will not have positive neuroplastic changes in the neuromuscular system.” concludes Dr. Sartori.
What has been achieved so far? The researchers have managed to create digital copies of alpha motor neurons of healthy subjects, and to prove that these digital copies fire just like their biological counterpart. They also developed digital copies of skeletal muscle for which they can estimate the force that the muscle generates and its stiffness. Third, they managed to develop real-time digital twins that operate in real-time and by connecting them to stroke patients they showed that they can be
used to control an exoskeleton. The patients managed to regain control of their knees and ankles from a seated position with the support of the exoskeleton. Lastly, they managed to have the exoskeleton support locomotion in healthy subjects. Lastly, the team proved the possibility of interfacing with alpha motor neurons in spinal cord injury patients receiving transpinal electrical stimulation. Results showed the neural interface was sensitive enough to capture subtle neuronal changes induced by the administered spinal stimulation, thereby opening the avenue to the development of closed-loop neuro-modulation technologies.
Dr. Sartori believes that the implications of this project are numerous. The technologies that are being developed can be used to improve neuroprosthesis, robotic prostheses, and bionic limbs, they can be used to preserve the integrity of tissue, and to keep tissues healthy as we age. They can shed the light on how the nervous system controls the musculoskeletal system in healthy subjects, as well as how this communication gets disrupted. Anything that affects movement can be addressed by the knowledge generated by this project whether it’s spinal cord injury, Parkinson’s disease, cerebral palsy, stroke, multiple sclerosis, or congenital conditions such as Duchenne type of muscular dystrophy. “Through these models, we are extracting a lot of information from the body. We are extracting cellular information from the body and the moment that you have information, then you can carry out predictions. You can use data science and artificial intelligence to predict and diagnose the likelihood of injury or likelihood of recovery. So, you can really start and think about biomarkers of recovery and biomarkers of injury.” concludes Dr. Sartori.
Modelling the neuromusculoskeletal system across spatiotemporal scales for a new paradigm of human-machine motor interaction
The EU-funded ERC project INTERACT creates multi-scale models of human–machine interaction for novel closed-loop control paradigms. INTERACT uses recording and numerical modelling to decode the cellular activity of motor neurons in the spinal cord at a high resolution, aiming to demonstrate how motor dysfunction is repaired by inducing changes in neuromuscular targets. Learning to control the stimuli that govern neuromuscular function will enable machines to co-adapt with the human body and will promote the development of man–machine interfaces from neuroprostheses to robotic limbs and exosuits.
This work was financially supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program as part of the ERC Starting Grant
INTERACT (Grant No. 803035)
Professor Massimo Sartori
Professor and Chair of Neuromechanical Engineering University of Twente Faculty of Engineering Technology Horst Complex W106 P.O. Box 217 7500 AE Enschede The Netherlands T: +31 534891441 E: m.sartori@utwente.nl W: https://people.utwente.nl/m.sartori
Massimo Sartori is Professor and Chair of Neuromechanical Engineering at the University of Twente (Faculty of Engineering Technology, Department of Biomechanical Engineering) where he directs the Neuromechanical Modelling & Engineering Lab. His research focuses on understanding the interplay between the nervous system and the musculoskeletal system, both in healthy and impaired individuals for the development of human-robot interfaces for restoring movement.
Revealing the hidden health of the human body, in the darkness and delicate environment of living organs has been a continual challenge for physicians. Further still, being capable of treating fluctuating or evolving health conditions in real-time in difficult-to-reach places has become a holy grail for healthcare. This is where the emerging science of micrometre and nano robotics could revolutionise how we monitor and treat patients in the future.
There are various scales of small in this world of tiny machines. For clarification, micrometre robots are usually around 1-2 micrometres but rarely are below 300 nanometres. Nanobots are even harder to imagine, they are robots at minuscule scales of 1-100 nanometres in size. A nanometre is one billionth of a metre. For perspective, the limits your naked eye can see is about the width of a human hair, and a nanometre is 1000 times smaller than that. A virus cell for comparison can be about 20-400 nanometres and a chromosome is about 100 nanometres. Anything this small can pass through bodies with ease.
Such devices can potentially monitor human health from the inside whilst also delivering treatments or carrying drugs to difficult recesses, or tumours, inside a person.
Whilst tests with such miniature marvels have been carried out in animal trials, there are safety, technical and regulatory challenges to overcome before being used in clinical applications. The impact on humans has not been thoroughly assessed yet. However, the advantages foreseen by using these tiny, often biological, machines mean it may well be only a matter of time till we see them become a solution in healthcare.
There are many challenges to creating these minuscule robots. For example, they must not affect the human body adversely, which means the materials they are made of must be compatible with our insides. For example, nanobots can be made of materials like DNA, proteins and iron. Manufacturing and programming them requires thinking differently from the usual ways we devise and construct machines. On the larger scale of the micro machines, there are some ways to top-down design and manufacture. For example, advancements in 3D printers mean it is now possible to fabricate micro-robots, but for the really minuscule devices, nature needs to lend her supportive hand and her age-old know-how during the build process. An understanding of biology is key to building these unusual devices as nature itself can manufacture them from the bottom-up. Nanobots can be built via molecular selfassembly, essentially building themselves with the right stimulus and encoding.
‘To
Making these infinitesimal devices move is the next major challenge. Again, one way is to take a steer from nature, like utilising the propelling tails of certain bacteria, or growing built-in chemical engines. Another way is to externally guide them, using magnetic fields to move them around.
Peer Ficher and Ambarish Ghosh, working at Harvard University, created a glass propeller 1-2 micrometres long that could be activated with a magnetic field. Under an electron microscope, it looked like a crude corkscrew. It could be steered through liquid with adjustments to the magnetic field. In 2018, Ficher conducted an experiment where the micro propellers were guided several centimetres to the retina in a pig’s eye in vitro, demonstrating how these devices can travel through living tissue.
There are many different approaches. A science team from Purdue University in Indiana, US, developed tiny robots a few widths of a human hair in size, relatively large compared to the nanoscale, that could do backflips and travel across the colon of a mouse. Colons are considered difficult terrain for delivering drugs. The project was promising because it showed that direct delivery was possible to the affected part, thus allowing to avert adverse side effects like hair loss and stomach bleeding. This was the first demonstration, in 2021, of a micro-bot basically tumbling down a biological system in vivo. It was controlled externally via a magnetic field and observed with ultrasound.
At this stage of research and development in the emerging science, there are all kinds of variations to technique and robot design, and whilst some are crafted and some are born from nature, there is one branch referred to as biohybrids, which even fuses microscopic organisms and cells, such as bacteria and sperm, with robotic parts and in turn creates nanoparticle swarms of these hybrid components.
It’s an area of research that needs a high degree of very specialist knowledge and equipment, as just to see the devices requires a specialist laboratory. No matter, several research teams around the world are making giant strides in this field.
In July 2022 a research team led by Inserm researcher Gaëtan Bellot at the Structural Biology Centre (Inserm/CNRS/Université de Montpellier) announced they had built a nano-robot from DNA to explore cell processes. They used what they called the DNA origami method which enables the self-assembly of 3D nanostructures in a predefined form using the DNA molecule as construction material. The researchers designed a nano-robot composed of three DNA origami structures. Of nanometric dimensions, it is compatible with the size of a human cell. It made it possible for the first time to apply and control
One of the most exciting branches of research in medical technology has to be the conception of micrometre machines and nanobots, miniature devices that can navigate our bodies from the inside. These tiny robots typically enter the body through a syringe to monitor health or deliver treatment with pinpoint accuracy. Whilst they are not in the clinical phase yet, they likely will be in the future.
a force with a resolution of 1 piconewton, namely one trillionth of a Newton – with 1 Newton corresponding to the force of a finger clicking on a pen. This is the first time that a human-made, self-assembled DNA-based object could apply force with this accuracy.
A more unusual way to help navigate nanobots to a precise bodily location for treatment is with a laser beam. Dr Xianchuang Zheng and his research team, of the Institute of Nanophotonics at Jinan University, created microscopic robots made from white blood cells called neutrophils. They were named neurobots and could be remotely activated by light and guided to the target position via a planned route to treat life-threatening illnesses.
Another tiny machine reliant on lasers looks like it might be more at home in rock pools, as this very sci-fi-looking microbot closely resembles a crab in appearance. A study published in May 2022 in Science Robots, revealed the tiny crustacean mimicking robots as 0.5 millimetres wide with eight little legs, and a pair of tiny pincers. They can fit through the eye of a needle and for manoeuvrability, they can bend, twist, turn and jump with the help of a laser for guidance. This tiny device starts off in flat 2-D but the heat of the laser makes them pop up into 3D, like a child’s pop-up book, and it’s that repeated motion as it heats up and quickly cools which also gives it its method of moving. The applications in the medical world for such a device could be to clear clogged arteries or stop internal bleeding, for example.
Making these infinitesimal devices move is the next major challenge. Again, one way is to take a steer from nature, like utilising the propelling tails of certain bacteria, or growing built-in chemical engines. Another way is to externally guide them, using magnetic fields to move them around.
The applications for medical nanobots could be far-reaching. Nanobots can check environments in the body and monitor changes at a molecular level, diagnosing diseases and assessing someone’s condition, but more than this their highest value has to be their amazing potential for pinpoint, targeted delivery of treatments inside the body, which is highly advantageous for instance, when dealing with cancers. Attacking tumours with nanotech is becoming one of the key research areas with this type of innovation.
Researchers at Polytechnique Montréal, Université de Montréal and McGill University created nanorobotic devices made up of 100 million flagellated bacteria that could self-propel whilst loaded with drugs. Testing the swarm on mice, a synthesised chain of magnetic nanoparticles enabled the drug delivery bots to move in the direction of a magnetic field controlled by a computer. The bacteria penetrated deep into the tumour to inject the drug with great success.
Bionaut Labs Inc. in Los Angeles is also developing tiny robots, it calls
bionauts, less than a millimetre long, to be injected into human tissue and guided to parts of the body magnetically. They were perceived as a viable way to deliver chemotherapy or other drugs to tackle cancers in the brain, which is a delicate target and considered high-risk in surgery with conventional methods, however, the nanorobot transport device they developed can be used anywhere in the body. Operators control the robots from outside the body and when they reach their target, they discharge the drugs. After the drugs are delivered, the nanorobots are guided back to the point of insertion and can be extracted.
There was an approach with a similar aim, by scientists at Arizona State University working with the National Centre for Nanoscience and Technology (NCNST) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. They published their research on mammals in the Journal Nature Biotechnology, where they successfully programmed nanorobots to shrink tumours by cutting off their blood supply.
Cancer treatments currently can have painful and damaging side effects. Chemotherapies hit healthy cells whilst attacking tumours and many tumours are hard to reach, even when they are located. Cancer cells can be elusive when attempting to rid them by conventional methods, but nanobots would always be able to find them and work on their eradication without spill-over or provoking adverse side effects for a patient, in theory.
The potential to target a wide number of serious diseases with this unique level of accuracy is already producing some spectacular headlines in the scientific press.
In September 2022, researchers published their findings in Nature Materials where they announced they had completely eradicated a deadly pneumonia infection (Pseudomonas aeruginosa) from the lungs of two-dozen mice by injecting swarms of bacteria battling micro-robots directly into the animals’ windpipes. The robots directly targeted the infection with a 100% success rate. This could have profound implications if the same results can be produced with human trials and they could be useful for other medical issues like stomach and blood infections.
Co-author of the study, Dr Victor Nizet, a professor at the University of California San Diego remarked: “Based on these mouse data, we see that the microrobots could potentially improve antibiotic penetration to kill bacterial pathogens and save more patients’ lives.”
After the drugs are delivered the mouse’s immune cells mop up the microbots, which are made of natural materials such as a biodegradable polymer.
The team will be trialling the robots on larger animals as the next step toward human trials.
Medical microbots could potentially deal with the exacting needs of a patient in real-time, reacting to requirements inside the body exactly when needed. They have the potential for all kinds of healthcare tasks, such as tracking diabetes, healing wounds,
monitoring blood for clots, removing plaque from arteries, removing toxins, or perhaps acting as a scaffolding for rebuilding tissue or nerves, and the list goes on.
These micro and nano machines can carry cargo including drugs or living cells, and they have the advantage that they would not risk infection as with invasive operations. Before these marvels of science are a realistic option for widespread adoption by healthcare institutions, there is a substantial road of development ahead. From the feasibility side, these technologies need to be low-cost and scalable. With the rate of progress in this branch of science, it is likely we will one day have the option of this kind of nano-scale therapy and the hope is it may provide a far better solution for healthcare needs than some traditional treatments and surgeries.
Cancer treatments currently can have painful and damaging side effects. Chemotherapies hit healthy cells whilst attacking tumours and many tumours are hard to reach, even when they are located. Cancer cells can be elusive when attempting to rid them by conventional methods, but nanobots would always be able to find them and work on their eradication without spill-over or provoking adverse side effects for a patient, in theory.
A number of citizen science observatories have been established over recent years, through which people can share photos, environmental measurements and other data relevant to scientific research. This is highly valuable to scientific experts, giving researchers access to far more data than they could gather on their own, now the team behind the Cos4Cloud project are working to enhance the technologies used in citizen science. “There are nine citizen observatories participating in the project.
One of them is iSpot, a citizen science platform that gathers biodiversity data, mainly photos. Another is called CanAirIO, a do-it-yourself initiative which focuses on monitoring air quality,” outlines Ángela Justamante, communication technician at CREAF, a research centre in Barcelona, one of the partners in the Cos4Cloud project.
The project’s agenda centres around using a co-design methodology to develop thirteen technological services to improve citizen science technologies. “We’ve created services external to the observatories so that any citizen observatory can use the one it needs,” says Dr Jaume Piera, researcher and the coordinator of the project at the ICM-CSIC, based also in Barcelona. Dr Piera is also research associate at CREAF and the coordinator of the European projects Minke and ANERIS and the citizen observatory MINKA.
These services have been co-designed with the citizen science community to address its needs, with the aim of increasing both the quantity and quality of observations. One of these services is Cos4Bio, developed by Bineo Consulting in the Cos4Cloud framework, which is designed to bring biodiversity observations held at observatories like iSpot or Artportalen together into a single location. This makes it much easier for experts to access data that may be of interest to them, for example recent images of frogs. “The system connects to the different citizen
observatories, therefore, an expert, by learning or by experience, can download the pictures that have been identified as frogs from all of them directly in Cos4Bio, rather than going to each citizen observatory one by one. The expert has also a new interface, and can validate all the frogs in the pictures, then the system returns that classification to the different citizen observatories,” continues Dr Piera. “This is mutually beneficial. It is much easier for the experts to download all the relevant data.”
Another example of a Cos4Cloud service is MOBIS, which enables app developers to
create integrative citizen science apps to allow users to report environmental information as well as biodiversity observations, specially designed for collecting data from DIY devices in a single application. This way, a user can report environmental and biodiversity observations in one place. For example, a developer or a researcher interested in measuring water quality and getting airquality readings for their work would be able to build an app to collect this data instead of using several apps. MOBIS has been developed by DDQ.
Apart from co-designing the services, Cos4Cloud has also organised a series of testing activities for the citizen science community to directly use the services in real-world scenarios. For example, Cos4Cloud recently organised an event to test FASTCATEdge, a service to build a do-it-yourself camera trap that records videos and pictures of wildlife activity, and FASTCAT-Cloud, a website service to upload and analyse nature videos and pictures coming from camera traps, with participants from the Catalan FELIS group, a project coordinated by the Catalan Institute of Natural History that uses camera traps to monitor Catalan mammals, focusing on the wildcat (Felis silvestris). The aim was to address FELIS group’s uncovered needs when using a camera trap. FASTCAT-Edge and FASTCATCloud have been developed by DynAikon.
“Moreover, Cos4Cloud’s partner in Greece, The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA), has also done an excellent job in integrating some of the citizen observatories that participate in Cos4Cloud into the Greek schools practice. They have also introduced some of the services in the training of school teachers and educational activities in the schools,” mentions Dr. Piera. For example, NKUA organised a workshop to show teachers the potential of using ‘MECODA’, an online tool to analyse and view citizen science data, for students to analyse the data they collect with the citizen science platforms and introduce them to some statistical concepts. To showcase its potential they used the OdourCollect data in Greece and practised with these data by answering some questions such as: which categories of odours are the most prevalent in Greece (urban, agriculture, wastewater, etc.); the most common hedonic tone in each region, etc.
The thirteen services that Cos4Cloud has developed will be available in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), connecting these services with a wider, pan-European infrastructure.
“Cos4Cloud being part of the EOSC will consolidate and clearly locate the role of citizen science in the EOSC ecosystem,” highlights Dr. Piera. This means that the citizen science data, services, and tools will be together with other scientific data and tools, which have been made available to the scientific community. This way, citizen science data can gain robustness and trust in the eyes of the academic and political fields.
communications materials to explain the services, the links to access the services and case studies the project has developed, as well as policy briefings, educational resources, best practices guidelines, handbooks, videos and all the materials and knowledge related to Cos4Cloud. The aim is that the citizen science community can take advantage of this knowledge and materials after the project reaches its conclusion.
All the materials Cos4Cloud has developed will be available in the Cos4Cloud Toolbox and Evidence Hub hosted in the OpenLearn Create (OLC), developed by The Open University in the Cos4Cloud project framework. These include the
Alongside creating these technologies, Dr Piera and his colleagues are looking into the idea of essentially merging different observatories, part of the goal of creating a more inclusive means of collaboration between scientists and wider society. “There’s an exchange of knowledge with citizen observatories. Some people can provide expertise in terms of identifying species, while others may have a deep understanding of a specific project and the local peculiarities,” he outlines. “It may be that someone is an expert on birds, but it is the people who live in a particular area who know where you are most likely to find rare species.”
This helps to widen participation in science, giving people the opportunity to not just collect data, but also to create projects on the topics that matter to local communities. A group of people may want to monitor the health of their local woodland for example, in which case they
There’s an exchange of knowledge with citizen observatories. Some people can provide expertise in terms of identifying species, while others may have a deep understanding of local conditions of the ecosystems, and other contribute with data analysis.BioMARató 2021, Bioblitz organised by Cos4Cloud. Els ponts de Rosamar (Catalonia). Credit Xavier Salvador ICMCSIC researcher. Cos4Cloud workshop innovative tools to introduce citizen science into schools, Ktima Syngrou park (Athens) Credit Ángela Justamante.
can gather data and submit it for analysis via a citizen observatory. “An individual or group can provide that data, then an expert can conduct ecological analysis,” says Dr Piera. This again is a win-win situation, giving experts access to more data, while also engaging the wider public and encouraging an interest in science. “Maybe a teacher is interested in exploring a particular area with their students, and is looking to create a school project. Usually, a teacher won’t be able to identify everything, but they can collect a lot of information and enlist the help of experts. The students are also often very proud that experts are identifying species from their observations,” continues Dr Piera. “In the past it was often thought that only academics could address research questions. Now we are widening participation through very powerful technologies. This is the philosophy of the new citizen science platform MINKA. We have developed it from the EMBIBOS research group at the ICM-CSIC and will integrate some of the services Cos4Cloud has created, among others, Pl@ntNet-API”
One of the citizen observatories involved in the project, CanAirIO, has already played a major role in highlighting air quality issues in the Colombian capital Bogota. While many people alleged that public transport in the city was responsible for a lot of pollution, the city council claimed the situation wasn’t as bad as claimed. “The council put in expensive instrumentation at certain stations, and these instruments showed levels of air pollution were not particularly high,” says Dr Piera. However, by enabling citizens to make air quality measurements using the low-cost CanAirIO device, Dr Piera says the observatory helped provide a more detailed picture. “When people started building their own devices which they could take with them on public transport they were able to demonstrate that particle levels were very high in some areas that hadn’t previously been monitored,” he explains. “This prompted efforts to identify
areas where air quality was a major problem. This was because of people bringing data to the council showing that air quality was not as good as had been thought.”
Citizen observatories as a research infrastructure
Citizen observatories are relatively inexpensive in comparison to other major research infrastructures, and Dr Piera believes that funding them over the longer term would bring significant benefits to wider society. “These infrastructures are close to society, and at the same time citizen observatories also provide a lot of information that could be useful in terms of environmental management and biodiversity monitoring,” he points out. This information provides a strong evidence base that can then inform decisions on policy around environmental challenges, which are set to grow ever more pressing. “We will need to address a lot of socio-ecological problems in future due to the impact of climate change, and we will need this kind of information,” says Dr Piera.
Co-designed citizen observatories for the EOS-Cloud
Cos4Cloud is a project to boost citizen science technologies by developing thirteen services to increase the quantity and quality of biodiversity and environmental observations. Cos4Cloud has made these services available in the new European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), a virtual space aimed at the European scientific community, so anyone interested can use them.
This Project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no 863463.
Project Partners
https://cos4cloud-eosc.eu/the-project/team/
Contact Details
Jaume Piera H2020 Cos4cloud and H2020 MINKE coordinator Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM-CSIC) Passeig Marítim Barceloneta 37-39 Barcelona 08003 W: www.icm.csic.es
Jaume Piera is an engineer, biologist, and doctor in environmental sciences. He carries out his research at the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM-CSIC) and is an associate researcher at CREAF. Currently, his research activity is focused on monitoring systems based on citizen science. He coordinates the European Horizon 2020 projects Cos4Cloud and MINKE and the citizen science platform MINKA and participates in the MONOCLE, ARSINOE and ECS projects.
Ángela Justamante is a biologist, specialized in scientific communication. She works at the communication department of CREAF and is part of the Cos4Cloud communication team in Cos4Cloud, together with Sonia Liñán (ICM-CSIC). Ángela also has experience in the biomedical research, consultancy and scientific publishing sectors.
The Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC) is a leading centre for the study of the environmental humanities, a field that brings together elements of several disciplines. With funding from the Volkswagen Foundation, Prof. Dr. Christof Mauch and several colleagues at LMU Munich are now developing a masters programme to support the ongoing development of the field.
The environmental humanities has gained prominence as a field of research in recent years, with scholars bridging several different disciplines to bring a new perspective to environmental issues. As Director of the RCC, Professor Christof Mauch is now working with colleagues to put the study of the environmental humanities on a more stable footing and help strengthen the field in Germany. “In Germany there has been a lot of research in the fields of environmental science and environmental engineering, in applied science and technology, but not so much on the humanities,” he outlines. This is a gap that Mauch and his colleagues at the RCC are working to fill by developing a masters programme through a project funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. “The RCC has been a centre for advanced study in the environmental humanities over the last 13 years. The VW grant is now helping us to anchor this research in the university through a state-of-the art graduate programme,” he says.
A major aim in environmental humanities research is to develop a deeper understanding of our relationship with the natural world and how that relationship has changed over time. One part of this is resource exploitation and sustainability concerns, while the field also touches on a wide variety of other issues. “It’s also about topics like transformations of landscapes, natural disasters, our awareness of political engagement, and our understanding of the environmental situation that we are facing,” says Mauch. The environmental humanities as a field is largely about concepts
and ideas, and while empirical information is important, in the main research is not datadriven. “The environmental humanities is predominantly a qualitative field,” explains Dr Anna Antonova, one of the two Directors of Environmental Humanities Development at the RCC. “We collect data in the sense that we work in the field, we go out and speak to people and conduct interviews. In general, the field is interested in asking questions about topics like values, responsibility and justice.”
planet as a whole. A disease can be carried in a plane to pretty much every point on the globe,” outlines Mauch. “There is this commonality, so you cannot view issues in isolation from each other, which is something we’re very aware of as humanities scholars.”
The aim now is to develop a masters programme in the environmental humanities at LMU Munich. The programme will be open to students with a BA degree across a broad variety of different disciplines, with Dr
The Rachel Carson Centre has been a centre for advanced study in the environmental humanities over the last 13 years. The Volkswagen grant is now helping us to anchor this research in the university through the establishment of a new graduate programme and a variety of international events.
This discussion is heavily influenced by nonwestern perspectives and criticisms, reflecting the uneven impact of the environmental crisis on different parts of the world. The masters programme at the RCC will include a wide variety of different perspectives, building on the centre’s history of inviting and hosting researchers from all over the world. “The masters programme grew out of this international focus, so we are exposed to these different perspectives at the RCC,” outlines Dr Antonova. Ultimately we all share the same planet, and issues in one part of the world can soon affect another, as illustrated by the Covid-19 pandemic. “One of the concepts that we work with is planetary health. This is about the connection between the health of individuals and societies, and the health of the
Antonova saying the key criteria is an interest in environmental issues. “We will accept students with a background in the humanities, social sciences or natural sciences, as long as they can demonstrate that they have an interest in the environment. We test this through an essay which applicants submit as part of their application,” she outlines. While some areas of research are quite narrowly focused, the masters programme is designed to encourage students to think differently and develop a broad understanding of the environment.
“We believe that people who understand the mechanisms of nature, and understand the mechanisms of different disciplines and methodologies, are better communicators on environmental issues,” says Mauch.
This is partly about reflecting on the environmental situation that we are in today. The strength of the humanities is in identifying the range of problems, and therefore the need for a range of solutions. “We aim to prepare students to take on these environmental challenges in a number of different ways,” outlines Dr Antonova. One of these challenges is climate change, and this is often the topic that stimulates an interest in the environmental humanities, yet this is not the sole focus of research at the RCC. “The environmental humanities is quite a broad field, we are also interested in other issues beyond climate change and the different ways that the environment is changing. For example, over the last 150 years we’ve lost more than 50 percent of the top soil on the globe, which is having an impact on crop yields,” says Professor Mauch. “Climate change is one topic that we study, but we are also interested in other issues that cannot necessarily be explained in terms of the impact of human activities and global warming.”
The public debate on these topics can be quite negative in tone, with many people daunted by the scale of the environmental issues that we all face. While giving a broad picture of environmental issues, Professor Mauch says they also encourage students to be hopeful and try to find solutions, in part by reflecting on the progress that has been made. “It’s important to collect stories about where we were in the past, to find reasons for hope,” he outlines. For example, as recently as the ‘70s the idea of generating energy from wind was widely dismissed as unrealistic, and now it
supplies a significant proportion of our power, demonstrating that change is possible. “Looking back over longer timespans shows us that we’ve achieved something. These are small stories rather than one big story,” continues Mauch. “We want our students to be aware of environmental problems, and to be alert and open to what a better world might look like. In order to do that students need to have a broad understanding of some very different disciplines.”
There are regular events, lectures, conferences, workshops, film discussions and seminars on environmental topics at the RCC. The RCC has organized a couple of international conferences and environmental humanities summits that brought environmental leaders from Europe and beyond to Munich as part of the VW grant scheme. “We try to learn from each other and we hope to cooperate across institutional and national borders,” says Mauch. It’s not only academics who have taken part in events at the RCC but also practitioners, including politicians, city planners, and heads of NGOs, which Professor Mauch says is mutually beneficial. “We learn a lot from the experts that we invite to the RCC. It’s a mutual learning process,” he stresses. Most of the events and seminars are also open to the public, part of an effort to reach people beyond the University. “The VW grant is not just about developing the Masters programme. As part of the grant we are creating outreach educational platforms,” continues Professor Mauch. “The grant was awarded under the University of the Future Funding line, which involves the university putting environmental and social topics at the core of its overall agenda.”
The aim of this project is to institutionalize the Environmental Humanities (EH) at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) Munich. Funding from the VolkswagenStiftung will be used to establish a state-of the-art MA program in Environment and Society, to establish a Chair in EH, to design and use innovative teaching tools, field seminars, digital multimedia presentations and exhibitions, and to share knowledge with other EH initiatives from around the globe.
Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.
Contact
Prof. Dr. Christof Mauch
Director
Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society
Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität München Leopoldstrasse 11A 80802 München
Germany
T: +089-2180-72352 (Office Manager) E: mauch@lmu.de
W: https://www.carsoncenter.unimuenchen.de/outreach/third-partyprojects/strengthening_envhum/index.html
Prof. Dr. Christof Mauch is Director of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society and Chair in American Cultural History at LMU Munich. He is an Honorary Professor at the Center for Ecological History of Renmin University in China and a past President of the European Society for Environmental History. Dr. Anna S. Antonova is director of environmental humanities development at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. She studies social and environmental change in the contemporary European context and examines the relationship between societal transformations and environmental governance in the EU.
Around 2.1 billion people across the world lack access to safe water, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), and the problem is particularly acute in India. The PANIWATER project is developing new technologies to remove dangerous contaminants from both wastewater and drinking water, as Dr Fabio Ugolini explains.
A significant proportion of the Indian population still lacks access to safe drinking water, while potentially hazardous contaminants are present in wastewater effluents across the world, representing a major threat to public health. Researchers in the PANIWATER project, an initiative bringing together partners from across Europe and India, are working to develop technologies to remove these contaminants from both drinking water and wastewater in periurban and rural areas across India. “There are six technologies under development in the project. Three are for the treatment of wastewater, and three are for the treatment of drinking water,” says Dr Fabio Ugolini, a project manager at Innova, one of the partners in the PANIWATER consortium. These technologies are all designed to remove contaminants from water, with five of the six using advanced oxidation processes in their function. “With advanced oxidation processes chemical or physical agents are used to generate hydroxyl radical species. These hydroxyl radical species are very powerful oxidants, and they can destroy contaminants,” he explains.
These technologies are designed to remove both known contaminants and contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) from wastewater and drinking water, such as certain pharmaceuticals, hormones and antibiotic resistant bacteria and genes. These CECs have typically not yet been included in water quality guidelines, as their impact on health and the environment is not fully understood, yet Dr Ugolini says that ideally they should not be present in water. “Under the precautionary principle, as we don’t know exactly how they may affect health, these CECs should not be in water,” he outlines. These CECs are mostly the result of human activities and are typically present in trace amounts in drinking water, or in water discharged into the environment following primary and secondary treatment. “In primary wastewater treatment, all the solids from the water are removed. Then in secondary treatment, most dissolved contaminants are broken down,” he says. “At this level wastewater is generally considered
to be legally safe for discharge into groundwater or to be used for irrigation, but an extra step can be added, which is tertiary treatment.”
This is what the wastewater technologies under development in the project are designed for, with researchers using advanced oxidation processes to eliminate trace amounts of different contaminants. The three drinking water technologies work on a different basis. “They work on raw water – essentially rainwater, ground water or surface water – which comes from an unimproved source prone to contamination,” explains Dr Ugolini. An unimproved source doesn’t have any sort of protection in place, which can leave the water vulnerable to contamination, an issue that the drinking water technologies are designed to address. “These technologies are focused specifically on the removal of biological contamination, which is an issue that can cause a lot of trouble in low-income countries,” he continues. “The transparent jerrycan being developed in the project removes only biological contaminants. If bacteria and
parasites are present in the water, then the transparent jerrycan is able to reduce their active concentration to a level that is considered safe by WHO standards.”
The transparent jerrycan uses sunlight to disinfect water, making it safe to drink. Jerrycans are commonly used by people across India to transfer their stored water, which is one of the reasons why Dr Ugolini and his colleagues in the project identified this as an important area of research.
“We decided to go with a solution that people are familiar with, but we have engineered it in such a way that we can exploit solar disinfection,” he outlines. The transparent jerrycan is intended for use at the community level, and he says a lot of effort is being devoted to encouraging people to use it. “You need to work with the communities first, to explain why they need to change the way that they’ve been using or accessing their water, and you have to gain their trust. You have to essentially trigger a behavioural change,” he continues. “We work with organisations in India that are already present in rural communities through other development or education projects, so that they can first of all recruit the participants.”
A further strand of the project centres around developing wastewater treatment technologies, where cost and efficacy are generally the most prominent considerations in deciding whether to adopt the technology.
One technology under development is a multi-functional reactor, which is designed to work in combination with both centralised and de-centralised wastewater treatment plants. “These reactors can be applied to essentially any wastewater treatment plant facility,” says Dr Ugolini. These reactors can be added to the wastewater treatment train to improve the quality of water before it is discharged; the technology has already been validated in Italy, and he says its effectiveness will be assessed in field trials in India. “The scientific parameter is essentially water quality measurements after treatment in real conditions. We want to check the output of the technologies and the quality of the water that comes out – does this meet WHO standards for wastewater discharge and reuse?” he outlines. “If we are able to reduce the levels of any contaminant below what is expected, then it’s considered a success.”
There are no clear guidelines for what are considered to be safe levels of CECs, so the
PANIWATER is validating six protypes for wastewater and drinking water treatment, which can remove Contaminants of Emerging Concern (CECs). The goal is to increase the availability of safe drinking water to the minimum level recommended by the WHO (at least 7.5 L/person/day) in target communities in India, and to produce at least 10000L /day, of irrigation-grade water from wastewater.
PANIWATER has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement number 820718, and is jointly funded by the European Commission and the Department of Science and Technology of India (DST).
Project Partners http://www.paniwater.eu/about-us/
Contact Details
Dr. Fabio Ugolini Ph.D Communication, Dissemination and Exploitation Manager
INNOVA Srl
Via Giacomo Peroni, 386 00131 Rome - Italy
T: +39 06 40040358
E: f.ugolini@innova-eu.net W: www.paniwater.eu
Project coordinator (EU): Prof. Kevin McGuigan, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. E: kmcguigan@rcsi.ie
Project coordinator (IN): Prof. Rita Dhodapkar, CSIR-National Environmental Engineering Research Institute.
E: rs_Dhodapkar@neeri.res.in
aim here will be to measure the reduction rate rather than relate it to a specific set of standards. The other five technologies will also be trialled at sites across India; with the transparent jerrycan, this will include not just measurements of water quality, but also other parameters. “We’re also going to measure adherence to the programme by the people recruited in the field trials,” says Dr Ugolini. Researchers are also looking at proxy parameters that can indicate whether the technology is having a positive impact on quality of life, such as the incidence of disease. “Diarrhea is pretty strongly associated with low-quality
a thorough understanding of the political context, resource constraints, social fabric, gender issues, economic and environmental vulnerabilities, and of the people´s own needs and desires. Our Indian partners have implemented a multi-stakeholder engagement approach, which includes extensive dialogue with the community leaders and the institutions, focus groups, workshops, activities with schools and a radio program” says Dr Ugolini. “It is not sufficient to simply handover a few flyers about the project without building trust and awareness in the community for whom the project is meant.”
With advanced oxidation processes chemical or physical agents are used to generate hydroxyl radical species. These hydroxyl radical species are very powerful oxidants, and they can destroy contaminants.
Dr. Fabio Ugolini holds a Ph.D in natural sciences, focusing on drinking water microbiology. He works in several Horizon projects as Communication, Dissemination and Exploitation Manager, as well as Coordinator. He is a hopeful environmentalist and a strong supporter of scientific communication.
water, so that would be the primary proxy indicator,” he continues. “Improvements in quality of life are normally assessed through questionnaires. However, certain biases may arise when we do that, as there is a tendency among the people being interviewed to try and please the interviewer.”
This issue is being considered within PANIWATER, with two of the consortium partners conducting social science research, part of the project’s work in engaging with local communities. The project’s Indian partners have carried out several different initiatives, aiming to communicate the benefits of these technologies and encourage people to accept them. “Our Indian partners have engaged extensively with community leaders. They have held a lot of meetings and talked to a lot of people, they’ve also set up a radio programme in order to reach out to the community,” he says. “We need to integrate social and cultural factors in our approach to promote the sustained uptake of new water technologies. Community outreach requires
The wider aim here is to encourage the adoption of these technologies. Once they have been applied, and their impact is clearer, they could then be produced in greater volumes. “The two technologies that are closest to wider adoption are the multi-functional reactor for wastewater treatment and the transparent jerrycan. We have identified an Indian manufacturer that can produce the jerrycans to the required specifications,” he outlines. Once the field trials have concluded and the effectiveness of the transparent jerrycan is clearer, then the manufacturer can look to take further steps. “They can then produce more of these jerrycans and put in place a distribution system,” continues Dr Ugolini. “We can look to take a more or less similar path with the other technologies. We need to locate an Indian stakeholder that can manufacture and distribute the technologies, then we would look towards transferring all the information and intellectual property rights to our partners in India.”
Jack Middelburg is a Professor of Geochemistry at the University of Utrecht.
EU Researcher: What are your main research interests?
Professor Middelburg: My research is at the interface of biology, geochemistry and palaeoclimate science. A lot of climate research is about the short-term, in NESSC we deliberately focus on the longer-term response.
EUR: Does this involve looking at the historical record?
Professor Middelburg: Yes. So in NESSC we aim to integrate the geological record, the historical and instrumental records. NESSC researchers have been using a type of organism called foraminifera, which produce very tiny shells.
Foraminifera are essentially one of the best recorders of past ocean chemistry which we have as scientists. Inferring past climate conditions implies understanding the biological processes that govern shell chemistry of these organisms.
EUR: Will this research help provide an insight into the likely nature of climate change in future? Whether it will be incremental or more dramatic?
Professor Middelburg: We look at the non-linear responses of the climate system, the tipping points. We investigate how warm it will be in the future, and whether the road towards warming will be bumpy or smooth.
Stefan Schouten is a Research Scientist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ).
EUR: What materials are you looking at in your research?
Professor Schouten: We’re essentially looking at fossil molecules, marine material that’s been buried for hundreds of thousands - even millions - of years. We’re trying to detect and retrieve natural compounds made by a host of different microbes from the ocean floor. We analyse them in the lab and investigate the circumstances under which these microbes lived.
We’re focused on the Phanerozoic period, which is the window within which our techniques are effective. The last 500 million years or so is quite a good period for us to apply our proxy techniques to reconstruct the past climate.
EUR: Is one of these techniques the stable carbon isotopic fractionation associated with photosynthesis?
Professor Schouten: Yes. This tool has been commonly used over the past 30 years or so, but we’ve looked at a specific molecule called phytane – part of chlorophyll – which was far more ubiquitous and had a far longer history than those previously used.
EUR: Is the CO 2 concentration related to the stable isotopic carbon fractionation?
Professor Schouten: There are two stable isotopes of carbon – 12C and 13C. It’s welldocumented that if phytoplankton fixates CO2, they not only accumulate 12C, but also the heavier one, 13C, simply because it’s there.
But they slightly dislike it. If the CO2 concentration drops, they are effectively forced to fixate more 13C, even though they don’t like it.
Anna von der Heydt is an Associate Professor at the University of Utrecht, with interests in marine and atmospheric research, and physical oceanography.
EUR: What are your main lines of research?
Dr von der Heydt: One is the evolution of climate sensitivity, which tells us how much warming (global mean temperature) we expect after doubling the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. There are many feedbacks involved in the climate sensitivity, which can change their strength over time. I am interested in how different these feedbacks were at certain times in the past, when the climate was warmer.
EUR: Is one of the periods you’re looking at the mid-Pliocene? Can you draw certain parallels with the climate then and the climate today?
Dr von der Heydt: In the Pliocene the CO2 concentration was more or less like it is now, yet it was considerably warmer than today. We have performed quite a few model simulations of the climate in the Pliocene epoch, and we can explain lots of warming and regional changes. However, it turns out that for many specific things, what we see in the Pliocene is not only due to the CO2 concentration and the fact that the climate is equilibrated, but also to different land-sea distributions and vegetation and boundary conditions.
EUR: Have you also looked at other periods?
Dr von der Heydt: We’ve also been looking at the Eocene-Oligocene transition within NESSC, which occurred around 35 million years ago. Before that time, it was very warm on earth. At some point the Antarctic continent became glaciated, which was a huge transition.
We have simulated a lot of different versions of the climate before that transition, and studied them on the Antarctic continent.
The Netherlands Earth System Science Centre (NESSC) brings together scientists from a variety of disciplines. We spoke to Professor Jack Middelburg , Professor Stefan Schouten and Dr Anna von der Heydt about the research they are conducting within NESSC, and its importance to our understanding of the climate system.Lakes, rivers and ponds in the East Siberian Arctic form an ideal landscape for the production of methane gas. Photos: Joshua Dean
Jack Middelburg
Centre (NESSC),
The likely future evolution of our climate is the subject of a great deal of research, with scientists seeking to build a deeper understanding of the global climate system which can then inform the development of more detailed projections. The Netherlands Earth System Science Centre (NESSC), a programme bringing together experts from several Dutch institutions to conduct research into climate change, is making an important contribution in this respect. The centre brings together researchers from a wide range of disciplines to address these questions, including maths, earth sciences and microbiology. Research in NESSC is organised around five main themes, the first three of which are related to how much carbon we will have in the atmosphere in future. NESSC aims to learn how hot our planet will be in future, and how fast the rate of temperature increase will be. Will there be warnings of future change? Are there certain tipping points which will shift the climate system into a different phase?
Research in NESSC is primarily focused on investigating how the climate is likely to change over longer timescales, looking ahead to improve models of the climate in 2050, 2100, or even further into the future. While there is a general consensus that the Earth is getting warmer, uncertainty remains over the relationship between the level of CO2 emissions and the likely extent of temperature change in future. “How warm will the world be in future, given a certain amount of CO2 emissions? If CO2 emissions double, will it lead to a warming by 1.5 degrees?” asks Jack Middelburg, Professor of Geochemistry at the University of Utrecht and the Scientific Director of NESSC. This is a challenging question, as processes occurring on multiple different timescales are involved. “There are
processes like cloud formation, which occur on really short timescales. There are also processes on intermediate timescales, like the inclusion of more CO2 in the atmosphere,” explains Middelburg. “There are also very long-term feedbacks, such as changes in the weathering of rocks and changes in the carbonate system of the oceans.”
palaeoclimate research community, and Middelburg says their work is an important part of NESSCs overall agenda. “We try to combine the modern, instrumental records with the historical records, the geological records. Essentially we use the response of the Earth system to carbon perturbations in the past to get an integrated view of what
The research undertaken within NESSC relates to many different timescales, as assessing the long-term effects of anthropogenic CO2 increase on global warming and sea level is a complex task.
This underlines the importance of bringing together researchers from different disciplines, who can bring their own expertise to bear on the topic and help build a more detailed picture of the climate system. “We have established a community of Dutch scientists in NESSC, who are working on all the aspects of climate change,” says Middelburg. For example the Netherlands has a very strong
we can expect in future,” he explains. “We can learn from the past record that a carbon perturbation not only causes temperature rises, but also other changes, such as ocean acidification and rising sea levels.”
Around 45 percent of the CO2 which we emit as humans stays in the atmosphere, while the rest is equally divided between terrestrial and ocean uptake, leading to the acidification of the oceans. A lot of Middelburg’s research within NESSC over the last couple of years has centred on the buffering system of the oceans, a kind of resilience mechanism that limits the extent of change caused by CO2 uptake. “CO2 is a reactive gas, it reacts with water. If 20 CO2 molecules enter the ocean, the majority
are
Essentially we use the response of the Earth system to carbon perturbations in the past to get an integrated view of what we can expect in the future.Weathered rocks in the Namib desert. Photo: Robin van der Ploeg.
The Earth is getting warmer, but how much warmer will our planet be in the future given a certain level of CO2 emissions? We spoke to Professor
about the work of the Netherlands Earth System Science
an inter-disciplinary research programme which aims to shed new light on the global climate system.
How much warmer will the Earth become in our future?Hunting for methane producing bacteria: measurements in the field. Photo: Michiel in ‘t Zandt
transformed into anions – negatively charged ions – and cannot escape any more. The number of CO2 molecules that are transformed into anions depends on the buffering capacity,” he explains. In his research, Middelburg has been investigating how the buffering system of the oceans works. “At what timescale does it occur? How does it affect the production of calcium carbonate? Can we show that calcium carbonate is dissolving because of the CO2 entering the ocean? How much calcium carbonate dissolution can we see? These are the types of questions I have been addressing in NESSC,” he says.
A further major topic of investigation in NESSC is the concept of tipping points, a threshold beyond which there is a general, often abrupt shift in the climate system. Changes to the North Atlantic circulation and the impact of permafrost thawing are two issues of concern with respect to tipping points in the global climate system. “There are quite a few people working on permafrost thawing and methane release in NESSC. There are feedbacks that are happening on a monthly, seasonal timescale, as well as feedbacks which are happening on longer timescales,” says Middelburg. The wider aim in this research is to quantify climate sensitivity, to essentially understand how much warming can be expected for a certain amount of CO2 emissions. “We have to distinguish between climate sensitivity - which is on the shorter term - and the longer term, which we call earth system sensitivity. This is when you really take the long-term feedbacks into account,”
How will the oceans of our earth look like in the (far) future? Will climate change worsen forest fires or sea level change? These and many other topics related to our changing climate are addressed in the diverse set of teaching materials of Tipping Point Ahead – the educational outreach program of NESSC that aims to inspire and engage students in secondary education.
Tipping Point Ahead offers a range of different educational materials. In crisp, informative clips young climate researchers enthusiastically tell about their research and what inspired them to become a scientist. The website also hosts
continues Middelburg. “At what timescale should we take into account which feedbacks? Which feedbacks are important?”
This research can then inform the development of long-term climate models. This focus on the longer-term timescales is well-aligned with the research interests of several groups in the Netherlands, not only in palaeoclimateology, but also anaerobic microbiology, ice dynamics and non-linear processes. “There are people in NESSC looking at questions about the climate from a variety of different perspectives,” stresses Middelburg. NESSC itself is nearing the end of its funding term, but with climate change an ever more pressing concern, Middelburg says this research will continue into the future, with scientists exploring various different possibilities. “Some of us are working on a more youth-inspired initiative, while there is another funding stream in the Netherlands focused more on climate solutions, so CO2 removal technologies,” he outlines. “Some people are thinking about the financial consequences of climate change, while others are exploring links to the social and economic sciences.”
Netherlands Earth System Science Centre
At NESSC a diverse group of renowned scientists with backgrounds in physics, earth sciences, ecology and mathematics investigate diverse aspects of the climate system, such as the Earth’s climate sensitivity to CO2, methane emissions, and climate tipping points. By combining the knowledge of different disciplines we aim to improve our understanding of climate change and to enhance future climate projections.
NESSC is funded by a Gravitation grant from the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, which supports excellent research. The programme has received further funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie, grant agreement No 847504.
NESSC is a virtual research centre comprising experts from the NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, Radboud University Nijmegen, Utrecht University, VU University Amsterdam and Wageningen University.
Contact Details
NESSC Office
Utrecht University, Faculty of Geosciences
Vening Meineszgebouw A Princetonlaan 8a 3584 CB UTRECHT The Netherlands T: +31 30 254 5169 E: info@nessc.nl W: https://www.nessc.nl
a growing selection of teaching materials, from extensive teaching modules to a still growing number of ClimateSnacks: brief assignments that introduce a facet of climate change in an original way!
Visit our website to learn more about our movie clips or teaching materials!
E: redactie@tippingpointahead.nl
W: www.tippingpointahead.nl
Dr. Anna von der Heydt is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research (IMAU), Utrecht University.
Prof. dr. ir. Stefan Schouten is Research Scientist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) and professor of organic geochemistry at Utrecht University.
A scientific story in October 2022 left a lot of people speechless. Dr Brett Kagan, Chief Scientific Officer at Cortical Labs, in a peer-reviewed article in the journal Neuron, claimed to have created the first sentient lab-grown brain in a petri dish. His research team had taught it how to play the arcade game, Pong and next, they intend to get it drunk.
By Richard ForsythHelping disembodied neurons to play a video game and get drunk may seem like a comedy science fiction plot, but the ground-breaking research by Cortical Labs has profound implications for our understanding of the brain, AI and for the future of healthcare.
The Australian-led team mounted neurons on multi-electrode arrays to read the activity. The neurons were cultivated in a nutrient-rich solution and grown across a silicon chip with pins in it, that send electrical impulses into the neural lattice, as well as receive impulses back.
For the first time, some 800,000 brain cells were stimulated in a structured way with the singular goal, to play the 1970’s tennis-like arcade game, Pong.
Kagan said: “In the past, models of the brain have been developed according to how computer scientists think the brain might work… That is usually based on our current understanding of information technology, such as silicon computing… But in truth, we don’t really understand how the brain works.”
To fathom the mysterious workings of brain matter, they had to let its nature reveal itself by giving it something to react to, to provoke its awareness of a real-time changing situation. What better context for this than a simple arcade game?
Growing brain tissue on electrodes is not new but the breakaway from convention in this study was in the feedback loop.
In the experiment, mouse cells from embryonic brains and human cells from stem cells were grown on top of the microelectrode arrays which could both stimulate them and read activity from them.
Electrodes on the left for example, highlighted for the brain matter, which side the ball was on in the game of Pong, and distance from the paddle was shown by the frequency of signals. Feedback from the electrode taught DishBrain how it could return the ball by making the cells act as if they were themselves, the paddle. The cell cultures controlled the paddle to return the ball, essentially, via sensing. Hitting the ball gave it a predictable response, missing gave it random chaos. It preferred the former and this led to learning to move the paddle to hit the ball. This was a mini-brain in action and startlingly, it was labcreated biological intelligence.
The great benefit of building structures of brains in this way means scientists can experiment on real brain function, as opposed to analogous models like a computer.
“We’ve never before been able to see how the cells act in a virtual environment,” said Kagan. “We managed to build a closed-loop environment that can read what’s happening in the cells, stimulate them with meaningful information and then change the cells in an interactive way so they can actually alter each other.”
The research seemed to confirm that these cells were trying to minimise the unpredictability in their environment. Kagan was excited by the revelation that DishBrain did not behave like silicon-based systems.
“When we presented structured information to disembodied neurons, we saw they changed their activity in a way that is very consistent with them actually behaving as a dynamic system… For example, the neurons’ ability to change and adapt their activity as a result of experience increases over time, consistent with what we see with the cells’ learning rate.”
“In the past, models of the brain have been developed according to how computer scientists think the brain might work… That is usually based on our current understanding of information technology, such as silicon computing… But in truth, we don’t really understand how the brain works.”
You could say, DishBrain essentially understood and responded to the game presented to it. Cortical Labs call their modern-day Frankenstein of technology and neural matter a bIOS (biological intelligent operating system). In the era of AI, the research team have an advantage, working with organic matter this way. Whilst AI teams around the world try to emulate nature and mimic the mastery in processes that define smart behaviour, working with self-programming neurons, gives the team a head start in developing an intelligence, and the learning occurred fast. In their written summary, they reported there was ‘apparent learning within five minutes of real-time gameplay’. Frequently, after a successful hit, the paddle would position to where the ball would eventually end up on the return. The data showed that the experimental cultures improved their performance by reducing how often they missed the initial serve and they learned to sustain longer rallies.
“We have shown we can interact with living biological neurons in such a way that compels them to modify their activity, leading to something that resembles intelligence,” said Dr Kagan.
In the article in Neuron, they state: “We show that supplying unpredictable sensory input following an ‘undesirable’ outcome and providing predictable input following a ‘desirable’ one significantly shapes the behaviour of neural cultures in real time”.
It is particularly remarkable because the self-organising cultures learned to make their world predictable without some of the mechanisms for learning that we might assume are necessary for brains.
“The beautiful and pioneering aspect of this work rests on equipping the neurons with sensations — the feedback — and crucially the ability to act on their world,” says co-author Professor Karl Friston, a theoretical neuroscientist at UCL, London.
“Remarkably, the cultures learned how to make their world more predictable by acting upon it. This is remarkable because you cannot teach this kind of self-organisation; simply because — unlike a pet — these mini-brains have no sense of reward and punishment,” he stated.
It was concluded by the team that DishBrain ‘demonstrated that a single layer of in vitro cortical neurons can self-organise activity to display intelligent and sentient behaviour when embodied in a simulated game-world’.
It was a first and made for bewildering headlines for all the major news broadcasters around the world.
“This new capacity to teach cell cultures to perform a task in which they exhibit sentience – by controlling the paddle to return the ball via sensing – opens up new discovery possibilities which will have farreaching consequences for technology, health, and society,” said Dr Adeel Razi, Director of Monash University’s Computational & Systems Neuroscience Laboratory.
“We know our brains have the evolutionary advantage of being tuned over hundreds of millions of years for survival. Now, it seems we have in our grasp where we can harness this incredibly powerful and cheap biological intelligence.”
“We know our brains have the evolutionary advantage of being tuned over hundreds of millions of years for survival. Now, it seems we have in our grasp where we can harness this incredibly powerful and cheap biological intelligence.”Dishbrain visualisation video screengrab. © Cortical Labs Cortical Labs Chief Scientific Officer, Dr Brett J. Kagan (seated), and Chief Executive Officer, Dr Hon Weng (standing), conducting cell work on multielectrode arrays in a biosafety hood httpsbit.ly3SLgbAy © Cortical Labs.
So, what next? With a ‘sentient’ creation in their hands, it’s time to get it drunk. Kagan and his team want to understand how alcohol affects DishBrain. As Kagan puts it: “We’re trying to create a dose response curve with ethanol – basically get them ‘drunk’ and see if they play the game more poorly, just as when people drink.”
This experiment points to the great potential in healthcare and pharma for such a lab-grown brain-on-a-chip. It has implications for being able to experiment more freely on living / reacting brain matter, providing a fast track for new treatments as well as being a more palatable alternative to animal testing.
Experiments can be carried out on how the brain might respond to medical drugs and perhaps gene therapies. There will no longer be a need to create ‘digital twins’ for testing therapeutic interventions. It provides a way to experiment on neuronal elements efficiently, with high accuracy and without some of the moral dilemmas and technical complexities researchers can face.
“DishBrain offers a simpler approach to test how the brain works and gain insights into debilitating conditions such as epilepsy and dementia,” explained Dr Hon Weng Chong, Chief Executive Officer of Cortical Labs.
Whilst the research is incredibly exciting there are some important facts that need to be understood before we get carried away into
the realms of science fiction. DishBrain is not equivalent to a human brain, it has a similar number of neurons to a bumblebee, with close to a million – a human has 100 billion neurons in comparison. It’s true, you don’t need a degree to play Pong. Nor, should the term ‘sentient’ be mixed up with the concept of consciousness. Kagan was referring to ‘sentient’ by its strictest definition, and whilst it can respond intelligently to the environment presented to it, it would not be aware in its broader context. This is the activation of a sensory interchange, which a lot can be learned from. If anything, the research might stir up arguments around definitions of life and intelligence and indeed, that provocative word, sentient.
What is clear, is that there is an enormous road of potential to travel ahead. What is really edifying in this work by Kagan and his team is that it marks the beginning of essentially a new branch of science and biological chips. The start-up isn’t being greedy either, with a desire for collaboration with other scientific teams in order to expand and scale this kind of research. For themselves, their stated aim is to create machines that possess biological intelligence. That’s quite a goal but by enabling brain matter on a chip to learn how to be a competent game player, they have proved it is closer than we could have imagined. https://corticallabs.com/
“DishBrain offers a simpler approach to test how the brain works and gain insights into debilitating conditions such as epilepsy and dementia.”Image showing ‘DishBrain’ at work. © Cortical Labs Dendritic Network Scanning Electron Microscope image of a neural culture that has been growing for more than six months on a high-density multielectrode array. A few neural cells grow around the periphery. © Cortical Labs
The ability to control the flow of electrons is central to the functionality of electronic devices, from transistors, to solar cells, to light-emitting diodes. In a solar cell for example light energy is converted in an electron-hole pair, which then needs to be separated – eg by an interface - to prevent recombination. “If there is an electric field or a specific alignment of the energy levels at the interface, charge carriers with opposite sign will be driven apart, generating an electric current,” explains Silvana Botti, Professor of Physics at the University of Jena. The ability to manipulate and shape potential gradients at the interface opens up the unique possibility to control electrons and develop new technology. Much remains to be learned about the physics of interfaces however, a topic at the heart of Professor Botti’s work as the leader of the Dandelion project, in which she is developing methods to predict the electronic properties of different functional interfaces. “The idea came about because we have been working for some years on the establishment of a new theory to accurately predict the electronic energy levels at an interface,” she outlines.
There is a transfer of electrons from within the two materials when the system is put in contact, leading to an alignment of the energy levels between them, the result of which is impossible to predict with simple empirical rules and difficult to calculate from first principles. The existing methods for predicting energy levels in a single material are largely based on density-functional theory, yet material junctions present a more complex challenge. “When we try to predict what happens at a complex materials interface the calculations are much more involved, because simulating the interface or making a model for it requires many more atoms. We cannot so easily use the translational symmetry as we can in a perfect crystal, when we have a simple unit that is repeated periodically,”
says Professor Botti. It is possible to perform these heavier calculations for functional interfaces if there is sufficient computing power, yet Professor Botti says that if one resorts to using ‘cheaper’ approximations they are not completely sound. “Many simple approximations that are used for bulk crystals no longer work effectively when it comes to describing an interface,” she explains.
A number of methods are available to obtain accurate band alignments at interfaces, but the most accurate ones are too expensive to be used in high-throughput calculations. At the same time, the simplest approximations of density functional theory are efficient enough for large scale calculations but give poor band alignments. “The problem is that we want to both describe realistic interfaceswith unit cells large enough to accommodate inhomogeneities, defects, doping - and also to do calculations for as many interfaces as possible, covering a variety of different types,” explains Professor Botti. “This includes for example 2D heterostructures, interfaces between a topological material and a trivial semiconductor, or electrical junctions between a metal and a semiconductor.”
The aim is to strike a balance between the accuracy of the calculations and the efficiency with which they can be performed, and progress has been made in this respect. Researchers in Professor Botti’s group have developed two different density functionals in the framework of density functional theory, which can be used in describing band energy diagrams across interfaces. “Electrons are quantum objects that interact with other electrons and the positive nuclei through the Coulomb interaction. At an interface it is particularly important to capture how the neighbouring electron cloud screen charges of the nuclei,” she says. In the Dandelion project, Professor Botti and her colleagues are building further on these foundations to develop effective quantum many-body methods of calculating the properties of electrons at interfaces. “We have developed specific functionals for density-functional theory, approximations that we can use to get accurate descriptions of energy band alignment at any type of interface. So we can look at how the energy levels change going from one material to another and at charge dynamics at the interface,” she continues.
Materials interfaces play an important role in electronic devices, from solar cells to transistors, yet controlling their physics is a significant challenge. Researchers in the Dandelion project are developing methods to predict the electronic properties of functional interfaces, as Professor Silvana Botti explains.
This can provide an insight into excitation processes involving electrons, essentially defining where they want to go and how they will move within a material. The properties of an inhomogenous material may vary in different regions, which typically has a negative impact on charge transport within a device. “Describing the effects of structural and chemical disorder at interfaces is the next task on our to-do list,” outlines Professor Botti.
The aim in this research is to find interfaces with the ideal characteristics for new technology. A large number of calculations on different types of interfaces are being performed in the project and the resulting data will then be brought together in an open-access materials database, providing an invaluable resource to interested parties. “When we have enough data, we can ask artificial intelligence to go through this data, extract some important features and try to build with them predictive models. So if we want a specific functionality at the interface, maybe it will be possible to identify what structural/chemical characteristics we will need at the interface,” explains Professor Botti. The database itself will be part of the NOMAD repository, with Professor Botti working to deliver it by the conclusion of the project. “We are collecting calculations on interfaces, while we are also developing machine-learning models to predict the properties of even more interfaces,” she continues. “We want to have predictive calculations of the electronic properties of as many interfaces as possible, so that machine learning can be trained to find the proverbial needle in the haystack.”
This could then help guide the future development of interfaces. There is not enough experimental data available to train a machine-learning model however, so Professor Botti says theoretical data is required. “We have already seen for crystalline materials that if we have enough data, then the machine is going to discover unexpected things. This is a very active area of research, with some very big projects working on data infrastructure initiatives. I am involved in the FAIRmat consortium, an initiative supported by Germany’s National Research Data Initiative (NFDI),” she explains.
Researchers in Dandelion are still making calculations and putting together the
Upper panel: Atomic model of an interface between silicon (blue) and silicon oxide (oxygen in red). Lower panel: Band diagram showing the density of available energy levels (lDOS) for electrons along the axis perpendicular to the interface. Blue: No levels available. Yellow: Max density of states.
database, with thousands of calculations required to train a neural network. “We expect to identify tens of candidate interfaces, for which we will perform more advanced calculations, which we will then pass on to our experimental collaborators. Our objective is to promote sustainable research, as we can save time and money by guiding our experimental colleagues towards the most promising systems,”says Professor Botti.
The idea here is to make the search for innovation and progress more efficient, and open up new possibilities in the design of interfaces. “Instead of always using the same materials because we know how to control them, and trying to make relatively small changes to make improvements, we could really find new solutions,” outlines Professor Botti.
The project’s research is not targeted at one single application, with Professor Botti adopting a general perspective rather than focusing more narrowly on a specific area, although she is very much aware of the wider picture. There is a lot of interest in improving solar cells so that thinner material layers are capable of absorbing more of the available light, for which Professor Botti says effective interfaces will be required. “Instead of only having one active interface you will have several. In this way you can have interfaces in successive layers, absorb light of different frequencies and so cover more of the solar spectrum,” she outlines. With more interfaces there are more things to control, yet this also provides a route to improved solar cell efficiency, underlining the wider relevance of the project’s research. “One can think about properties that we may like to have at the interface, and then go and search for interfaces that fit with those expectations,” says Professor Botti.
Developing an e-lab for interfaces on demand - dandelion
Interfaces are at the heart of electronic devices, from transistors, to sensors, to lasers. However, a deep theoretical understanding and reliable mastery of the physics of interfaces has not yet been achieved.
Professor Botti and her colleagues have taken up this challenge and are working on enabling predictive highthroughput calculations of the spectral and transport properties of a variety of functional interfaces.
Dandelion is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, through the programme Momentum - Funding for Recently Tenured Professors.
Contact Details
Project Coordinator, Prof. Dr. Silvana Botti
Institute for Solid State Theory and Optics Friedrich Schiller University Jena Max-Wien-Platz 1 07743 Jena T: +49-(0)3641-947150 E: sylvia.hennig@uni-jena.de W: http://www.ico.uni-jena.de
After receiving her PhD in Physics in 2002 from the University of Pavia, Italy, Silvana Botti was Marie-Curie Fellow at the Ecole Polytechnique, Paris-Saclay University, where she was appointed CNRS Research Scientist in 2004. In 2008 she moved to the University of Lyon, before joining the Friedrich-Schiller University Jena as full professor in 2014. Her research activities focus on computational materials design, as well as on the development and application of many-body treatments for theoretical spectroscopy.
The vision behind the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is to create an open space or platform where researchers across the continent can freely share data and access resources, which will open up science and bring significant benefits to wider society. Sharing data across borders can help medical researchers gain deeper insights into the root causes of different diseases for example. “If you could share data across borders you could collect data on many more patients and get more detailed results, as well as results on rare diseases,” points out Dr
This is a regionally-based initiative, with the project bringing together partners from five Nordic and three Baltic countries, and NeIC is playing a key role in enabling regional collaboration. The countries represented in the project share many cultural and historical similarities, providing strong foundations for collaboration. “This has been a joint venture from the very beginning,” stresses Krøl Andersen. The project partners are working together on different aspects of the project’s agenda, including identifying where specific
competencies are located in the Nordic and Baltic countries and enhancing the visibility of service providers. “This is about creating a window on European infrastructure services. This can lead to collaboration not only between researchers in the same discipline, but also across disciplines,” says Krøl Andersen. “One good example in EOSC-Nordic is the adoption of an infrastructure toolbox from the lifesciences by the climate research community in the Nordic countries. EOSC is also about sharing tools and algorithms across disciplines.”
data is FAIR this will be very easy, and it won’t be necessary for researchers to take several days to look for a hard disc or memory stick.”
The aim now is to promote the ideals of open science and develop recommendations on how researchers can be encouraged to share their data in a way that meets the FAIR principles. A lot of attention is focused on finding ways to incentivise researchers to share their data. “This is about rewarding and encouraging openness. In future it may be that researchers would get credit not only for publishing results as articles, and getting lots of citations, but also that their datasets would get citations,” says Dr Høst.
By encouraging the wider adoption of FAIR principles, the project aims to help enhance the transparency of scientific procedures and the reproduceability of results, which Dr Høst says is central to the open science movement. “The wider ambition is to create an environment or space where other scientists, through the description of an experiment and the results, will be able to take the data and then try to reproduce the results,” he outlines. “This is not really possible at the moment.”
The ambition is to create an environment or space where other scientists, through the description of an experiment and the results, will be able to take the data and try to reproduce the results.
The central topic in EOSC is enabling datasharing between researchers, and it’s important here to ensure that data meets the FAIR principles (that data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable). The Research Data Alliance and the GoFAIR organisation develops standards on how to make data FAIR, and researchers, data owners and data repositories have some clear guidelines to follow. “It’s about making a structured meta-data about your data. Meta data describes what the raw data is about,” explains Abdulrahman Azab, a Senior Adviser to the NeIC Executive team. Evaluation tools are also available for repositories, a topic that Azab and his colleagues in the project are addressing.
“For example, we have developed a protocol that can evaluate the FAIRness of your repository. Are the data records in your repository FAIR? To what extent are they FAIR?” he outlines. “The answer to this isn’t a simple yes or no, but evaluation tools are available, and certain organizations like CoreTrustSeal, which is supported by the FAIRsFAIR community, provide certification for repositories that meet FAIR standards.”
This concept is fairly well-known, yet not all scientists take great care to ensure that their data meets the FAIR principles. The priority for most scientists is typically to pursue their own research interests rather than ensure their data is accessible to others who may be interested. “The majority of researchers don’t really put a lot of emphasis on making their data FAIR. In some cases, they store their data on laptops and on local discs,” outlines Azab. This makes it difficult for other scientists to then follow up on their results and maybe use them in their own work. “When you publish an article and put forward arguments, you should be able to answer questions from colleagues who contact you and also provide access to the data. This doesn’t always happen however,” acknowledges Azab. “When the
A greater degree of data-sharing and opennness would also release the societal value of scientific research, spurring innovation and accelerating technological progress. There are several steps to take before this wider vision can be realised, and Krøl Andersen says the project is making an important contribution in this respect. “We need to improve data accessibility, to share tools, and to build competence across the whole of Europe,” she says. This involves a lot of stakeholders, with the project working to put in place strong foundations to support open science into the future. “We are working with policy-makers, researchers and archiveholders, as well as librarians, universities and infrastructure providers, among others. We have a lot of stakeholders that need to understand the same language and to collaborate,” continues Krøl Andersen. “The Nordic-Baltic region is a wonderful testbed for showcasing and pilot cross-country data sharing solutions (among many other issues). Based on the regional governance structure (i.e. the Nordic Council of Ministers), and its interlinked institution of Nordforsk & NeIC; the NordicBaltic regional infrastructural developments are paving the way for European as well as global scalability across all stakeholders.”
EOSC-Nordic aims to facilitate the coordination of EOSC relevant initiatives within the Nordic and Baltic countries and exploit synergies to achieve greater harmonisation at policy and service provisioning across these countries, in compliance with EOSC agreed standards and practices. By doing so, the project seeks to establish the Nordic and Baltic countries as frontrunners in the take-up of the EOSC concept, principles and approach. EOSCNordic brings together a strong consortium of 24 partners including e-Infrastructure providers, research performing organisations and expert networks.
The EOSC-Nordic project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 857652.
https://www.eosc-nordic.eu/eosc-nordic-partners/
Lene Krøl Andersen, Ph.D., eMBA International Liaison, Computerome Project Manager, EOSC-Nordic
Chair of Technical Advisory Board, DiSSCo Technical University of Denmark Produktionstorvet
Building 426, 1 floor, room 122 2800 Kongens Lyngby T: +45 4119 0910 E: lka@dtu.dk W: www.eosc-nordic.eu
Lene Krøl Andersen is International Liaison at Computerome, The National LifeScience Supercomputing Center in Denmark and the EOSC-Nordic Project Manager. She holds a PhD in agronomy, and an MBA degree.
Abdulrahman Azab is a senior adviser in the NeIC management office. He previously worked in senior positions in both the academic and commercial sectors. Abdulrahman is an HPC environment specialist at the EuroHPCLUMI User Support Team (LUST).
The market for augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies continues to grow, with people across the world playing games that bridge the real and virtual worlds, a trend which demands the development of sophisticated and realistic virtual characters. There are also many applications in education, architecture, medicine and engineering that require immersive collaborative VR experiences populated with virtual characters. This issue lies at the heart of the EU-funded CLIPE project, an initiative bringing together academic and commercial partners from across Europe to provide training to early stage researchers (ESRs). “We´re creating the technology to generate digital characters. We’re trying to make them more realistic and to improve the way that they interact with humans,” says Nuria Pelechano, an Associate Professor at UPC in Barcelona, a member of the CLIPE team. The primary focus here is on the behaviour and animation of the virtual characters, rather than their visual appearance. “We’re interested in developing virtual characters that can populate virtual environments or move around us, within an environment populated by physical agents, in a way that is as human-like as possible,” explains Professor Pelechano.
Making the characters behave in a more realistic way is central to establishing trust between a human and a virtual character. If virtual characters don’t have naturallooking facial expressions then a human might struggle to trust them, which hinders interaction. “Then it’s hard work to establish communication between a physical agent
and a virtual character,” points out Professor Pelechano. Making these characters more realistic is a correspondingly important aim in the project. “We develop algorithms, evaluate them, and identify what is missing – we look at what works and what doesn’t. Then we can go back and improve the algorithm,” says Yiorgos Chrysanthou, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Cyprus, coordinator of CLIPE. “We are working to improve the animations of different characters, when immersed in virtual reality worlds. It may be that there are trade-offs, where we have to assess what’s more important in terms of the realism of the virtual character and interactivity, for example between how much to use pre-captured movements or computer generated ones.”
with a large number of humans, how can you do that more easily so that you don’t need to spend lots of time minutely specifying each person and each aspect of their behaviour? So we are also looking at procedural authoring of crowds for example,” he says. “The state-ofthe-art in virtual humans is quite advanced, but this is one of the areas that could be improved further.”
A major challenge here is that the behaviour of a group of individuals can be difficult to simulate. While somebody may have left their home with a clear agenda, those plans are subject to change at any point. “An individual might meet somebody in the street and start
the way that they interact with humans.
The ideal scenario would of course be to fix all of the different aspects at the same time, but typically there are trade-offs involved and decisions have to be made. Rather than simply deciding what specific features to focus on, Professor Chrysanthou says perceptual data is used to identify priorities. “It might be that we particularly want to get the facial expressions right,” he outlines. Beyond making the virtual characters look more realistic and conveying facial expressions and emotions, Professor Chrysanthou and his colleagues in the project also work on the ease of defining certain things. “For example if you want to populate a large environment
talking about the major topic of the day, or maybe they’ve forgotten something at home, and decide to turn around abruptly. That kind of behaviour can be difficult to incorporate in a virtual crowd,” explains Professor Pelechano. The movement of a crowd also varies according to the situation, an issue which Professor Pelechano is taking into account in her research. “We have sophisticated methods to learn about the movement of a crowd and to copy it,” she says. “A crowd on a busy subway station for example doesn’t behave in the same way as a crowd in a shopping centre, or a crowd in a pub. We can try to build stronger foundations so that we can then extrapolate to different situations.”
This would make it much easier to populate an environment with virtual characters,
We’re developing the technology, the digital characters. We’re trying to make them more realistic and to improve
A variety of skills are required to develop realistic virtual characters. The aim of theCLIPE project
is totrain
thenext generation of researchers in virtual humans and make more realistic virtual characters
that arecapable of interacting naturally with humans, as Yiorgos Chrysanthou, Nuria Pelechano, Nefeli Andreou and Rafael Blanco explain. Procedural characters interacting with the environment. Work of ESR 3, Rafael Andrés Blanco Guerra (UPC). Social activity which took place in Saint Malo, during the 2nd training workshop in Rennes, France. Photo of the ESRs’ presentations, during the 3rd training workshop in Barcelona, Spain.
giving the appearance of a real crowd without the need to laboriously create each individual within it. This would benefit many different application domains, helping accelerate development. “It would help the game industry, the movie industry as well as simulation and training industries,” says Professor Pelechano. This would also make virtual characters more accessible to people who maybe don’t have a technical background or limitless resources to spend on animation.
“We are trying to combine different techniques that can make the process of populating a different environment easier for the general public,” continues Professor Pelechano. “This is also important with the concept of the metaverse. People are working to create normal surroundings for the metaverse, like cities, houses and environmental features, but you will also want to see people in there.”
The ESRs in the project gain a grounding in a wide range of different techniques, equipping them with the skills required to develop realistic virtual characters, for which demand is growing. There are several industrial partners involved in the project, testament to wider interest. “There is the special-effects industry for movies, the games industry and also the online retail industry, where there is interest in using virtual characters for trying on clothes.
In that latter case, appearance might be more important than behaviour,” outlines Professor Pelechano. There are 15 ESRs in CLIPE working on different research projects, around the core aim of improving the simulation and animation of virtual characters. “The focus is on enhancing the realism of virtual characters in urban, populated environments,” says Professor Pelechano. “The project is not about
building one specific application or developing a specific research idea. Rather it’s about training researchers, who could be leaders in the industry in the future.”
This is not just about technical knowledge, but also ‘soft’ skills like grant writing. The aim is to equip the students with the broad range of skills they will need to keep pushing forward development as their careers progress. “We aim to help prepare students for their future careers, whether that’s in academia or industry,” says Professor Pelechano. With many of the students entering the final year of their PhDs, Professor Chrysanthou hopes to see many more research papers published over the coming years, which could then lead on to commercial development. “It may be that some of the ideas have a lot of commercial potential. We’re also going to hold some further training workshops,” he continues.
Indicative
The primary objective of CLIPE is to train a generation of innovators and researchers in the field of virtual characters simulation and animation. Advances in technology are pushing towards making virtual worlds a daily experience. Whilst virtual characters are an important component of these worlds, bringing them to life and giving them interaction and communication abilities requires highly specialized programming combined with artistic skills, and considerable investments. The research objective of CLIPE is to design the next-generation of VR-ready characters that are more controllable and behave and interact more naturally.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 860768.
• University of Cyprus • Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya • INRIA • University College London • Trinity College Dublin • Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems • KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm • Ecole Polytechnique • Silversky3d.
Industrial partners: • Treedy’s SPRL • British Broadcasting Corporation • Amazon.com • Golaem • Ubisoft
Contact Details
Yiorgos Chrysanthou
T: +357 99 582812
E: y.chrysanthou@gmail.com
Nuria Pelechano
E: npelechano@cs.upc.edu
Marios Kyriakou
E: mkyriakou@gmail.com
Olia Tsivitanidou
E: olia@grantxpert.eu
W: https://www.clipe-itn.eu/
There are fifteen ESRs studying for a PhD in the CLIPE project, involving research into several different issues around the simulation and animation of virtual characters. We spoke to two ESRs, Nefeli Andreou and Rafael Blanco, about their projects and their plans for the future
EU Researcher: What is the main focus of your research?
Nefeli Andreou: My particular focus is to take the 3-D motion capture data acquired by us or other research groups, and try to build generic models of human motion. As a second step, we aim to edit the generated motions. So it’s not only about learning patterns from the capture data, but also modifying aspects of the data, such as their style or expression.
EUR: How do you use the motion capture data?
NA: In skeletal animation, we transform the raw data (markers on the body) obtained from the motion capture system, into joint rotations and displacement in space. The features are then used as input to our deep learning models. We have several ways of parametrizing 3D joint rotations. And recent works shows that this choice is indeed impactful on the performance. In our recent work, we conducted experiments to examine the performance of these representations and proposed a novel formulation based on dual quaternions which is better suited for a deep learning framework.
EUR: What is the result of that in terms of the simulation and animation of a virtual character?
NA: I presented my work at a training workshop in Barcelona recently, where I was able to chat with most other ESRs and network with speakers from industry and academia. In the future, I would like to work somewhere in the intersection between computer graphics and computer vision.
EUR: What is the main focus of your research?
Rafael Blanco: I am trying to build a process for crowd simulation. We want to link a city and an agent using an agenda. I aim to provide an agenda for individual agents, then the group of agents creates the crowd. Building an agenda is essentially like scheduling the activities that the agent will have during the day.
EUR: What tools are you using in your research?
RB: The software I was previously using is very similar to that used in Pokemon Go, but this is designed for exterior of a simulation, while I am interested in working with the interior. So in the end I had to create an implementation from scratch
There are several improvements that can be made, for instance adding several different semantic places, like offices and other locations in a city. I am working towards this.
Nefeli Andreou is a PhD student at the University of Cyprus. She holds an MSc in Data Science and a BSc in Mathematics.
Rafael Blanco is a PhD student at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. His research interests include procedural modeling and authoring tools
Nuria Pelechano is an Associate Professor at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. Her research interests include simulation and animation of virtual characters and crowds for VR.
Yiorgos Chrysanthou is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Cyprus, where he heads the Computer Graphics lab.
NA: It’s less jittery and more stable. We also found that our models converged faster, so we would get a stable motion with less training time.
EUR: Have you had the opportunity to travel and spend time at other institutions during the project?
NA: Yes, and it’s really been a great experience to be able to interact with different partners, as each of them offers a different perspective. I spent some time at the Max Planck Institute of Intelligent Systems last year where I got a different viewpoint, from the computer vision aspect. Currently I’m in Paris at the Ecole Polytechnique, where I’m looking into more creative ways to control the motion.
EUR: Have you also been able to collaborate with other ESRs in CLIPE and attend events?
EUR: And the behaviour of the agents varies in these different locations?
RB: An important point in my research is that I am helping the agents learn about how they should behave inside certain objects. For example in some fast food restaurants you go to a panel and ask for your order, while in other restaurants you first wait for a staff member to arrive and tell you where your table is.
EUR: What do you hope will be the outcome of your research?
RB: I aim to develop a tool for procedurally generating crowds in a city, which until now has been difficult. This tool will open up the possibility for people like artists and designers to use this procedural generation to populate interactive environments.
Universities and other Higher Education Institutions are devoting an increasing amount of resources to communication as they seek to highlight their achievements, attract students and demonstrate their wider relevance in today’s knowledge economy. We spoke to Professor Mike S. Schäfer and Dr Daniel Vogler about their research into the way HEIs communicate with the broader public.
Many universities and higher education institutions (HEIs) have professionalised their external communications over recent years, investing in resources and hiring personnel to manage their public and media relations. This is about both communicating research findings and also improving the reputation of the institution, which in the longer term will help them attract more students and resources. “Universities typically perceive themselves to be in competition with other universities, other educational institutions,” says Mike Schäfer, Professor of Science Communication at the University of Zurich. There is however a tension between these two separate aspects of public communication. “There’s a clear incentive for universities to present themselves as positively as possible in public, but that can be a different goal than communicating the best available knowledge,” adds Doctor Daniel Vogler, deputy director of the Research Center for the Public Sphere & Society at the University of Zurich. “Another tension is that at the same time as universities are professionalising their external communications, scientific
journalism - and journalism in general - is in crisis. There are fewer resources in journalism today, especially in specialist desks like science, limiting the ability of conventional media outlets to critically assess university media releases”
As the Principal Investigators of an SNSFfunded research project, Schäfer, Vogler and their team, are exploring these tensions and how the way universities communicate with the broader public is changing. The specific focus in the project is on Swiss HEIs. “For a small country, Switzerland has a broad variety of HEIs. We have a number of globally high-ranking research universities and federally-funded technical universities (ETHs), with a national, international and regional scope. We also have a range of universities of applied sciences and arts, as well as colleges of education,” says Professor Schäfer. This broad variety makes Switzerland an ideal setting for the project, in which he and his colleagues are looking at all 42 of the country’s HEIs. “We do cross-sectional,
contemporary mappings of different aspects of university communications, while we also do ‘deep dives’ on specific universities,” Schäfer outlines. “In this mapping work we conduct surveys, looking at university communicators, leadership and councils. We’re trying to find out how these 42 different institutions view university communication; how important is it? What aims should it pursue?”
The results of this cross-cutting survey are then being used to put the 42 institutions into six different clusters, which are also based on certain organisational key indicators, such as the size of the institution, the type and the number of students. For example, they have identified the ‘well-resourced competitors’ among Swiss HEIs which communicate to the public extensively, strategically and professionally, such as the ETH Zurich or the University of Berne, or the ‘focused strategists’ that communicate strategically but pick specific topics to do so. In turn, they found five ‘minimalist’ HEIs which do not communicate to the public much, and when they do, they don’t do it in a very
strategic way. The researchers then took typical examples from each of the clusters and now look at them qualitatively, which is the ‘deep dive’ aspect of the project’s work. “We talk to between 6-10 people at each institution. We collect documents, and we try to reconstruct the development of their external communications over the last 15-20 years,” explains Professor Schäfer. This period has been marked by the ongoing development of social media, which is an important consideration in the team’s research. “How does social media communication and news media coverage of these 42 institutions look today?” Schäfer says. “We are also looking at how they communicated in the past. For example, we are looking at news media coverage over the past 20 years for selected institutions typical of certain categories. From that we will then try to identify the challenges these institutions face, and potentially to develop recommendations on how to improve communications.”
A key first step is to investigate how these institutions communicate today and the strategies they use. All of the 42 institutions have a social media presence, using some, and almost always several, of the more commonly-used platforms. Daniel Vogler says these accounts are used to communicate
on different topics and at varying levels of intensity. “The research universities emphasise the quality of their research more, whereas universities of applied sciences tend to focus more extensively on student life and teaching,” he outlines. For example, ETH Zurich is one of the most prestigious institutions in Switzerland, ranked eighth in the 2022 QS World University rankings. The ETH Zurich uses social media to attract the best and brightest minds from across the
An institution needs to communicate to an international audience in order to maintain its status as a leading university in global rankings, which requires resources and investment in communication. This involves communicating about both major events, like a significant breakthrough in research or a member of the university receiving an academic prize, and also more everyday occurrences that can open up a window onto life at the institution
world, including students and academic staff. “They have both German and English language social media channels. They explicitly try to communicate to students and researchers abroad, and to try to attract them to Zurich. Some of the smaller Swiss universities also do this, but to a lesser degree,” continues Doctor Vogler. “Larger universities often have a more international outlook, which often means that they invest more in communication. They want to ensure they are visible internationally, because they are competing with international institutions.”
and the people and communities that work there. “Public relations offices are often highly professionalized nowadays. They communicate continuously, via different channels, to different target groups, about research findings, events, or interesting aspects of university life,” says Professor Schäfer. Communication is seen as an increasingly important function within universities, which Professor Schäfer says is having an impact on structures. “The heads of communication increasingly take part in leadership meetings, where their voices are often highly valued. However, the nature of the role has
There’s a clear incentive for universities to present themselves as positively as possible, but that’s a different goal to communicating the available knowledge.
changed,” he outlines. “We are investigating the extent to which communications departments focus on communicating scientific findings, vis-a-vis improving the image and reputation of an institution. Has there been an increased focus on the latter and an alignment with the organization’s strategic goals over recent years?”
A lot of progress has been made on the empirical part of this research. Surveys have been conducted on the 42 universities, while the team is working on the ‘deep dive’ aspect of the project’s overall agenda. “We are in the process of doing qualitative, indepth interviews, and document analysis on selected universities, looking to reconstruct the development of their communications over time. We’ve done some social media and news media analysis, and we are in the process of doing the longitudinal analysis, looking at the long-term changes over time,” Schäfer says. This research could prove highly relevant to communications specialists in universities, helping guide public relations officers on how they can communicate effectively to specific audiences, which is central to their image and public standing. The majority of Swiss universities and HEIs are publicly funded, so Professor Schäfer says they need to highlight their achievements and importance to wider society in order to retain public and political support. “What politicians think about these
institutions is important. And we know from previous studies that many politicians’ and stakeholders’ perceptions of universities are based on news media coverage,” he continues.
A good standing in both the news media and social media is correspondingly important for universities, with Professor Schäfer looking at how different institutions approach public communications and the emphasis they place on it. While much of this work is still ongoing, the research team has already published several research papers, which provide a picture of how institutions of different sizes and specialisms are represented in the media. “We have several different types of universities in Switzerland, and they communicate in different ways,” he says. Analysis has revealed that one particular cluster of institutions – called the Praised Researchers by the project team – received a large amount of positive coverage, in part due to their sophisticated and extensive public relations efforts, underlining the wider importance of effective communication. “Global University rankings are based on different criteria, including measures of the reputation of universities as assessed by surveys of stakeholders. The views of these stakeholders are influenced by public presentations and news media coverage,” continues Professor Schäfer.
C3H is the first research project in Switzerland devoted to tracking and comparing nation-wide developments in the external communication of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Its aim is two-fold. The project will a) investigate the content, strategies and audiences of HEIs’ communication in Switzerland and the organizational structure in which it is embedded and b) explore the external perception of HEIs through Swiss news and social media during the past 20 years.
Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, 2019-2022
Project Partners Research Center for the Public Sphere & Society, University of Zurich
Contact Details
Prof. Dr. Mike S. Schäfer
Professor of Science Communication Dept. of Communication & Media Research
@ University of Zurich
T: +41 (0)44 635 20 80
E: m.schaefer@ikmz.uzh.ch Tw: @mss7676 W: https://c3h.ch/en/ W: www.ikmz.uzh.ch/en/research/divisions/ science-crisis-and-risk-communication.html
Mike S. Schäfer
Professor
Science Communication
the Department of Communication and Media Research
Director of the Center for Higher Education & Science Studies (CHESS) at the University of Zurich. He is Co-Founder of the „Science Barometer Switzerland“ and has published widely on science communication and climate change communication.
Daniel Vogler is the Deputy Director of the Research Center for the Public Sphere and Society (fög) at the University of Zurich. His research focuses on public relations, journalism, and online communication.
The TRIPLE project brings together 21 European scientific organisations to build the multilingual GoTriple discovery platform for the social sciences and humanities. GoTriple has been designed to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration, to help users explore, find, access and (re)use research data and publications, as well as researcher profiles and projects, and to promote cultural diversity in Europe as Suzanne Dumouchel explains.
The use and re-use of research (data) in social sciences and humanities is often hindered by language and disciplinary boundaries, leading to a degree of fragmentation that can limit opportunities to cooperate and share findings.
This is an issue the TRIPLE project is working to solve. “The GoTriple discovery platform functions like a search engine, but is specifically designed to help social science and humanities (SSH) researchers gain opportunities for cooperation, and at making SSH research outputs accessible in various languages. These resources will be available to anyone who wants to access them, thus widening access to knowledge across civil society and, likewise, extending the influence and impact SHH research has,” explains Suzanne Dumouchel, scientific coordinator of the TRIPLE project. For example, if a researcher enters ‘populism’ into the platform, GoTriple will search for it not only in English, but also several other languages. “At the moment, GoTriple covers 10 languages, and by the end of the project, it will have 11. So essentially each document in the database that has a connection with a keyword – no matter what language – is shown to you,” says Dumouchel.
Not only does this give researchers a more detailed overview of what papers have already been published in a specific area, but by giving access to these resources to citizens, policy makers, the media and enterprises as well, GoTriple will increase the economic and societal impact of SSH resources.
Creating the multilingual vocabulary and the keyword normalization are crucial tasks for the project. The data and publications in the platform have been gathered from various different aggregators, then the whole team (about 90 people) works to enrich it with meta-data. “This is a kind of normalisation process, but for keywords. So take the term structuralism for example - if I were to create a multilingual bibliography for it, I’d have to find the equivalent for that term in several languages - and in the context of the subdiscipline part of the SSH domain,” she outlines. “GoTriple saves me that work by automatically translating my search query and displaying publications and data in all languages available
in the multilingual vocabulary created for the platform. Moreover, the discovery platform can suggest to me some researchers or projects that are linked to my research in order to better connect my work with other initiatives in Europe. By doing so, it increases the innovative potential of my research as well as the visibility of what has already been done.”
The initial design of the platform was based on interviews with researchers, with the aim of creating something that was beneficial for everyone in the SSH domain. In the spirit of the co-design principles at the core of GoTriple, five innovative tools have been included to help researchers work more efficiently and effectively, one of which is an annotation tool called Pundit. “This allows you to annotate online documents. You can use it as a browser extension, so you can open PDF documents in your browser and then annotate them. If two researchers are working on an article together, they can share their annotations via Pundit,” says Dumouchel. GoTriple also hosts a crowdfunding service, which Dumouchel says is designed to support innovative research ideas and help create societal awareness for SSH research. “It can be hard for independent researchers with unconventional ideas to gain initial funding. The crowdfunding channel gives researchers the freedom to be creative in their projects,” she explains.
The paramount consideration in TRIPLE is the
needs of platform users, who have been involved in every stage of development, from analysis to tool testing and evaluation. A wide user base will help to strengthen ties between research, industry and wider society, which is one of the key aims in the development of the platform. “One of the targets of the project is to help researchers get in touch with other stakeholders, such as small and medium enterprises (SMEs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and journalists, as well as librarians and scientific organisations. The platform will bring significant benefits to these stakeholders,” stresses Dumouchel. By improving the access to open content and resources and facilitating collaborations across disciplinary and language boundaries GoTriple will act as a window to European research, highlighting cultural and linguistic diversity. At the same time it will also contribute to the wider goals of establishing an open science environment. “Bringing science out into the open and making research findings more widely available is an issue at the very core of GoTriple, which is part of the wider European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) initiative aimed to enable these activities for all scientific disciplines,” says Dumouchel.
A further innovative feature on the platform is the recommender system, which points researchers towards publications that may be of interest, making it easier to engage with people
in other projects. “The system - and indeed the platform in general - provides access not only to the documents people have written, but also to the people themselves and the projects they’re working on,” says Dumouchel. “As a matter of fact, one of GoTriple’s core features is the option to register and create a public profile displaying expertise, interest in collaboration and articles written and claimed by the user. GoTriple has been created to work as a single multilingual access point where users can find and share SSH ressources and a space where the SSH community can assemble and work together.“ Additional innovative services like visualisation tools, a crowdfunding channel and an annotation tool top off the platform’s design. “For example, GoTriple allows people to create a knowledge map that is essentially a topical overview of keywords and publications related to a search query.”
GoTriple will not just benefit SSH researchers, but also scientists in a wide range of other disciplines, giving their findings added context and widening the range of potential future collaborations. For example, providing a single access point to SSH resources can help molecular dynamics and climate researchers model the societal and cultural impact of their work: “With SSH resources and feedback, researchers can add depth to their findings and build a deeper understanding of the topic at hand. This demonstrates the benefits of interdisciplinary investigation and also encourages further work that crosses established disciplinary boundaries,” continues Dumouchel.
While the TRIPLE project itself is set to conclude in 2023, the GoTriple platform will persist as
a dedicated service of the OPERAS research infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication, and Dumouchel says it will have the support required to secure its long-term future as a tool to support SSH research. “Thanks to OPERAS, it will have support and a governance structure, and can be more seamlessly connected to other services in the OPERAS service portfolio. GoTriple is part of a bigger research infrastructure, that is very well-connected throughout Europe and beyond,” she continues.
The project is reaching the later stages of its funding term, with work on the platform currently still ongoing. Many of the features have been implemented, and while there are still some relatively minor tweaks to be made, Dumouchel is confident that the platform will be fully functional in the near future. “The heaviest updates and features have been implemented. GoTriple has already been released as a Beta version, and we expect that the platform will be production-ready in the beginning of 2023,” she says. The platform will play a central role in enabling interdisciplinary collaboration, which is crucial in the context of today’s research landscape. “We live in a world where research is more and more connected. Our platform reflects that by enabling interdisciplinary research to a level that has not been reached before,” outlines Dumouchel.
Pull quote: GoTriple is a multilingual discovery platform for researchers and the public to access and share social sciences and humanities resources. We aim to increase the impact of research by encouraging non-academics and citizens to use the platform and its innovative features and enabling collaboration among a worldwide SSH community.
Transforming Research through Innovative Practices for Linked interdisciplinary Exploration
The TRIPLE project develops the innovative multilingual and multicultural discovery service GoTriple for the social sciences and humanities (SSH). GoTriple is a service of the OPERAS Research Infrastructure. It increases the impact of science in societies and contributes to solve societal challenges by linking scientific outputs in the SSH domain. The platform provides a single access point that allows to explore, find, access and reuse materials such as literature, data, projects and researcher profiles at European scale.
TRIPLE has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation action funding scheme INFRAEOSC-02-2019 „Prototyping new innovative services“ (grant agreement #863420).
Project Partners
https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/863420
Contact Details
Suzanne Dumouchel Scientific Coordinator of TRIPLE Co-cordinator of OPERAS Campus Condorcet
Bâtiment Recherche Nord 14 cour des Humanités 93322 Aubervilliers T: +33 1 88 12 01 04
E: suzanne.dumouchel@huma-num.fr W: project.gotriple.eu W: gotriple.eu
Suzanne Dumouchel, PhD in French literature, is a research engineer at the CNRS. She leads the European project TRIPLE. She is co-coordinator of the European research infrastructure OPERAS, dedicated to Open Access scholarly communication in the field of SSH and since 2021 she is part of the EOSC board of directors.
A significant proportion of the prison population in the Netherlands has been sentenced to less than a year behind bars. While these short-term prison sentences are fairly common in various sentencing contexts, little is known about the effects of imprisonment on the individual concerned and its impact on the subsequent trajectory of their lives, a topic Hilde Wermink, Associate Professor of Criminology at Leiden University, is exploring in a project funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). “I focus on the impact of short-term prison sentences on rates of repeat offending, on recidivism,” she outlines. This has been a prominent topic in the criminology field for many decades, yet it has proved difficult to assess the impact of short-term imprisonment on recidivism rates in comparison to non-custodial sanctions like community service. “There have been many studies, but they have tended to be based on using methods like regression-based analysis or matching studies, and few of these studies
meet the mark of scientific rigor that would justify drawing substantive conclusions regarding the effects of imprisonment,” says Professor Wermink.
By using new methods to analyse a dataset with information on more than a million cases, Professor Wermink aims to shed new light on the impact of short-term prison sentences. The dataset itself holds information on individuals sentenced to prison terms of less than a year in 2012, as well as on those who received a non-custodial sanction. “We have data on individuals with their full criminal history, as well as data about their criminal activity after 2012. We can then study the effects of this custodial sanction,” explains Professor Wermink. The project team brings together researchers from several different disciplines, including economics, sociology and criminology, with Professor Wermink seeking to gain deeper insights from the data.
“We are looking to see whether we can use an instrument called judge IV (instrumental variable). We are using data from the Ministry of Justice, which are linked to information on the judges that imposed these sentences,” she continues.
The project team are using econometric models to probe deeper into this data and assess the impact of short-term prison sentences on recidivism rates. Part of the justification for imposing short-term prison sentences is their supposed deterrent effect, yet Professor Wermink says the evidence shows that they actually promote rather than deter recidivism, with more repeat offending among this group than those who received non-custodial sanctions. “Our study showed that short-term imprisonment leads to increased re-offending rates when we look at a follow-up period of five years. We find that not only for adults, but also for juveniles,” she outlines. This is the case both for repeat offenders, who had previously
Short-term prison sentences are commonly imposed for certain types of crimes, while other offenders may receive a non-custodial sanction like community service. What is the effect of short-term imprisonment on criminal behaviour? Does it lead to reduced rates of re-offending? These questions are at the core of Professor Hilde Wermink’s research.
served time in prison, and also people experiencing incarceration for the first time. “We found that short-term imprisonment had criminogenic effects on both groups,” says Professor Wermink.
A further topic of interest in the project is the financial cost of imposing short-term prison sanctions, which is ultimately borne by tax-payers. Researchers have found that Dutch society as a whole pays somewhere in the region of 400 million euros each year for retribution, the punishment part of a prison sentence, without considering its impact in terms of reducing crime. “We want to really get across how much we pay as a society for imposing these custodial sanctions,” says Professor Wermink. Non-custodial sanctions may be more effective in terms of reducing recidivism, while they are also less expensive. “We consistently find that shortterm imprisonment has these criminogenic effects when comparing people who received a short-term prison sentence with those who haven’t spent time in a detention facility, and received a non-custodial sanction,” continues Professor Wermink.
number of short-term prisoners at the final sentencing stage. This is important to take into account because pre-trial detention is often imposed in various sentencing contexts, but is also often overlooked in the discussion about the use of imprisonment.”
The project will play an important role in this respect, providing a deeper picture of the consequences of serving a prison sentence. The appropriate punishment for crimes is a matter of great public interest in the Netherlands, and Professor Wermink aims to help inform the wider debate. “I always aim to reach a wider audience, including not just people who work in the criminal justice field, but the general public as a whole,” she says. While it may be thought that a more draconian sentencing policy will lead to reductions in crime, the overall picture tends to be more complex, and it’s important to consider the wider consequences. “We may have certain ideas about how the world works, but they don’t always match the reality. We aim to inform the public about the
Our study showed that short-term imprisonment leads to increased re-offending rates when we look at a follow-up period of five years. We find that not only for adults, but also for juveniles.
This is an important consideration for prosecutors and judges charged with determining the appropriate sentence for a specific offence. While a prison sentence may be the only possible option in some cases, Professor Wermink believes judges should be wary of imposing short-term custodial sentences, particularly considering their criminogenic effects. “Imprisonment is often perceived as society’s last resort in reaction to crime. The widespread use of shortterm custodial sanctions however seriously questions the validity of this perception and provides room to consider non-custodial alternatives to imprisonment. To reduce criminal justice expenditures and to prevent future crimes, non-custodial sanctions could more frequently be preferred over custodial ones,” she says.
It’s also important to consider the pre-trial stage, as in the Netherlands many defendants are detained before their trial, then once convicted they are often sentenced to time served. “This is a mechanism that leads to very short-term prison sentences,” continues Professor Wermink. “So, reducing the number of pre-trial detainees may also reduce the
consequences of imposing short-term prison sentences,” stresses Professor Wermink. This research is still in progress (see Research Links in right panel), with Professor Wermink and her colleagues looking to publish some more of their results, while also exploring other avenues of investigation. An important goal is to look more at heterogeneity in the effects of short-term prison sentences. “Are the effects different for different sub-populations? It may be that a short-term prison sanction reduces recidivism for some sub-populations, while for others it may not,” outlines Professor Wermink. Researchers also plan to delve deeper into the data to look at topics around the social integration of people who have been released from prison after serving a short sentence compared to the social integration after non-custodial sanctions. “We know that a regular and legitimate source of income or work can reduce recidivism rates, but we don’t really know about the effects of short-term prison sanctions on things like labour market outcomes and health. That’s something I plan to explore in the future,” says Professor Wermink.
Life after release: understanding effects of imprisonment on the further life-course
Imprisonment is typically the most severe sentence that can be imposed. Nevertheless, it is unknown whether sentencing goals are achieved through imprisonment. This study examines whether imprisonment works to reduce re-offending, for whom it works, and how consequences can be understood. This knowledge is necessary for more effective correctional intervention.
We gratefully acknowledge funding from the Gratama-foundation and The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (451-17-018). We further thank the Research and Documentation Centre of the Dutch Ministry of Justice and the Dutch Public Prosecutors Office for facilitating access to the data and for providing advice on their use.
• Prof. dr. mr. Arjan Blokland (NSCR /Leiden University) • Prof. dr. Robert Apel (Rutgers University)
• Dr. Jim Been (Leiden University) • Prof. mr. dr. Pauline Schuyt (Leiden University) • Prof. dr. Frank Weerman (Erasmus School of Law) • Dr. Gijs Weijters (WODC/ Ministry of Justice) • Suzan Verweij – PhD student (WODC/ Ministry of Justice) • Gwendolyn Koops-Geuze – PhD student (Erasmus School of Law)
Dr. Hilde Wermink .PhD, Dean Law Faculty Associate Professor Criminology Institute for Criminal Law & Criminology
Kamerlingh Onnes Gebouw Kamer B3.30 Steenschuur 25, 2311 ES Leiden, NL
T: +31 (0)71 527 7417
E: h.t.wermink@law.leidenuniv.nl
W: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/ staffmembers/hilde-wermink
Research Links:
Study on effects of short-term imprisonment on recidivism: https://tijdschriften.boomcriminologie.nl/ tijdschrift/tijdschriftcriminologie/2022/2/ TvC_0165-182X_2022_064_002_001.pdf
Study on effects of community service on recidivism among juveniles: https://journals.sagepub.com/ doi/10.1177/15412040221133094
Study on labor market outcomes: https://journals.sagepub.com/ doi/10.1177/00111287211007732
Dr. Hilde Wermink .PhD
Hilde Wermink is Associate Professor of Criminology at the Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology at Leiden University, where she also holds the position of dean of the PhD students. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Sociology and a master’s degree in Sociology and Social Research from Utrecht University.
Recent years have seen rapid growth in the number of electric vehicles on Europe’s roads, yet the lithium-ion batteries currently used in them have some significant limitations. We spoke to Dr Christophe Aucher about the LISA project’s work in developing lithium-sulfur batteries, which could represent an attractive and more cost-effective alternative to lithium-ion.
The electric vehicles currently on the road typically use lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, yet this technology has some significant limitations from the perspective of European industry, in terms of both performance and logistical considerations. The critical raw materials are not easily available on the continent, so manufacturers are highly dependent on external suppliers. “Li-ion batteries are not a European technology. We have to buy in materials like lithium, cobalt and nickel from outside,” says Dr Christophe Aucher, an energy storage specialist based at the Leitat Technological Centre in Barcelona. As the technical coordinator of the LISA project, Dr Aucher is working to develop lithium-sulfur (LiS) batteries, which could represent an attractive alternative to Li-ion. “We are aiming to make LiS cells at a commercially relevant level, and with better performance than Li-ion. Beyond
that, we want to demonstrate that they are ready to use,” he outlines.
This approach involves using sulfur as an active material, which is abundantly available as a bi-product from the oil and chemical industries. In theory, LiS batteries should have a higher specific energy than Li-ion batteries, yet in practice there are still some hurdles to overcome before they can be more widely applied. “We are not at a high level of manufacturing LiS batteries in Europe compared to Li-ion. We haven’t yet demonstrated effective technology at a high level of production,” acknowledges Dr Aucher. This is one of the issues the project is working to address, with researchers in LISA working to develop different components for LiS batteries, explore means of manufacturing them more efficiently and ultimately bring
them closer to the market. “The big limitation for LiS is the number of charge-discharge cycles. The more charge-discharge cycles we can do, the more possible applications for LiS batteries we can look into,” says Dr Aucher.
There have been a number of pilot studies over the last decade into using LiS batteries in certain types of autonomous drones and satellites, yet the aim in the project is to bring them closer to use in electric vehicles and other more everyday applications. It is possible to increase the number of chargedischarge cycles of LiS batteries and extend their effective life, but this will reduce their energy density. “Li-ion batteries have an energy density of somewhere between 250300 watt-hours per kilogram (Wh/kg). We can achieve superior energy density about 400 Wh/kg but the number of cycles is lower,” explains Dr Aucher. The key is to achieve high volumetric energy density while also
increasing the number of charge-discharge cycles. “We’re using a process called coextrusion for making the active material of the cathode. This allows us to reach a high volumetric energy density for LiS batteries,” says Dr Aucher.
This is a central issue in the battery industry, with researchers seeking to store as much energy as possible within a specific cell volume while also reducing their overall weight. One of the LISA partners is also developing a solvent-free method to make dry film electrodes, which Dr Aucher says is another important dimension of the project’s research. “Here we are replacing the traditional methods with aqueous or dry film cathode processing. We are no longer using solvents, which are toxic and can be difficult to recycle. We have demonstrated this in the project,” he outlines. The ability to recycle lithium from the battery is a prominent consideration; a LiS battery does not include much valuable material, so the priority is to recover the lithium. “The anode is pure lithium. One of our partners has demonstrated that more than 90 percent of the lithium in this technology can be retrieved,” says Dr Aucher.
The project’s overall agenda including not just developing components and preparing the electronics, but also evaluating the safety of LiS batteries. This is a critical issue in terms
Fig2: Scheme of Lithium-sulfur cell charge and discharge mechanism.
ion batteries relatively mature in comparison to LiS, more resources are typically devoted to their development in Europe, but Dr Aucher hopes to encourage further investment in LiS. “It’s really difficult to produce Li-ion batteries in Europe at the same level as they do in China, and as cost-effectively,” he says. “A potential solution to this is to propose an alternative like LiS. At the moment LiS batteries in Europe are at around Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 4, while some of the components are at a higher level. The idea is to work towards new batteries that could be a game-changer in the future.”
Lithium sulphur for SAfe road electrification
There is a need for new batteries that enable EVs with higher driving range, higher safety, and faster charging at lower cost. Lithium sulfur is a promising alternative to Li-ion, free of cobalt and nickel, with higher theoretical capacity, and energy. LISA is incorporating manufacturability concepts and new materials, components, cells transferable to other lithium-anode based technologies.
These projects have received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreements Nº 814471.
These results reflect the author’s view and the Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.
Project Partners
https://www.lisaproject.eu/lisa-partners/
Contact Details
Project Coordinator, Christophe Aucher, PhD Area Manager Energy Storage Area Energy & Engineering Department
T: +(+34) 93 788 23 00 Ext. 2444 E: caucher@leitat.org W: http://www.lisaproject.eu W: www.leitat.org
of their potential wider adoption in electric vehicles. “We need to pilot the technology, to make it charge and discharge in a proper way, and to improve safety,” says Dr Aucher. While the technology is not yet fully mature, Dr Aucher says a great deal of progress has been made over the course of the project. “The feasibility of producing the components has been demonstrated, including the cathode, separator and the solid-state electrolytes. We have already fulfilled some of our objectives in the project, and some of the electronics are available,” he outlines. “We have also demonstrated this technology at relevant dimensions, beyond the laboratory scale.”
A number of the techniques and components developed in the project can also be applied on Li-ion batteries, including the extrusion of the active material, the dry film cathode manufacturing and the pulsed laser deposition (PLD) techniques for solid state, non-flammable electrolytes. With Li-
This research represents an important contribution to the wider goal of building manufacturing capability in Europe, and potentially paving the way for further development. In terms of LiS batteries, it remains difficult to manufacture them at commercial scale, in large part because of market realities. “In theory LiS batteries would be a game-changer, but huge investments are required to develop something that is useable and ready for the market,” acknowledges Dr Aucher. With demand for batteries likely to increase in future, Dr Aucher believes that the technology holds great potential, for example in aerospace or even in flying taxis, an idea which has been mooted as a way of addressing urban transport issues. “In future batteries will be needed much more widely, and LiS could be an attractive option,” he says. “What we lack currently is a company to commercialise it, which would require a lot of investment.”
Christophe Aucher has 15 years background in Energy Storage. He is leading the Energy Storage team that is currently involved in research and industrial projects for electrical mobility, stationary, printed electronic and batteries recycling.
We are aiming to make lithium-sulfur cells at a commercially relevant level, and with better performance than lithium-ion. Beyond that, we want to demonstrate that they are ready to use.
The next generation of space missions will require highly sophisticated and sensitive seismometers to fulfil their science objectives, with several space agencies looking to investigate the interior structure of planets and asteroids. As a researcher at ISAESUPAERO in Toulouse, Dr Raphael Garcia is part of the PIONEERS project, an initiative working to develop new instruments for space missions. “We are developing two models in the project. One is the Compact Model, which relies on existing technology but requires a qualification for space use. Another is the High-Performance Model, which is a new sensing concept for a seismometer. This relies on optical interferometry and fiber-optic gyroscopes,” he outlines.
The Compact Model is designed for application on small bodies, such as asteroids, while the High-Performance Model is intended for gathering seismic information on planets, in particular the Moon and Mars. This work builds on earlier planetary seismology research. “We know that there are quakes on the Moon for example, as some seismic work was done on the Apollo missions,” continues Dr Garcia. “We are not sure about the small bodies. However, we do know that there are high temperature changes on the surface of these bodies, and these will cause small cracks that can be considered as micro-seismicity.”
The aim now in the project is to develop more sensitive and less noisy instruments, capable of detecting the propagation of seismic waves on different bodies in the solar system. In the case of the Moon, the instrument needs to have extremely low noise in order to be able to monitor very small variations. “This is because moonquakes are typically small and the noise – such as the background vibrations of the Moon – is low. So we need to design instruments to measure such very low signals,” explains Dr Garcia. “We are developing a high-performance system that is much more sensitive than conventional seismometers.”
These instruments under development in the PIONEERS project are designed to provide rotational data in addition to the translational data, which can open up new insights into the
Planetary vibrations and rotations targeted by PIONEERS instruments for internal structure imaging.
structure of planets and asteroids. With records of both the translations and rotations generated by seismic waves, researchers can look to separate different types of waves and gain more information about their source. “These kinds of developments are ongoing for Earth’s seismology and demonstrate the interest of such concepts,
but neither has been studied for bodies in the solar system. However, we do now have a much deeper understanding of the seismic measurements on Mars thanks to the performance of NASA’s InSight mission,” says Dr Garcia.
A seismometer called SEIS was placed on the surface of the red planet as part of the InSight mission, providing data on seismic activity. There remains much to learn about the interior of Mars however, with Dr Garcia and his colleagues working to develop instruments that can provide a clearer picture. “The main source of noise on Mars is the atmosphere which generates ground rotations. Current sensors are not able to differentiate between ground rotations and ground translations,” he outlines. “One application of rotation measurements would be to essentially de-noise the Mars data from the atmospheric perturbation coming from the surface. This would be possible with the our High-Performance Model.”
Different internal models of jupiter icy moons that may be decipher through the deployment of seismometers on their surface.
Further applications of the project’s instruments are envisaged, with the Compact Model targeting asteroid-sized bodies like Phobos, a relatively large moon of Mars which is on a collision course with the red planet. This model should be at a relatively high Technology
Readiness Level (TRL) by the end of the project, bringing it closer to practical application. “When deployed on the surface, one objective for the model is to monitor the rebound on landing,” says Dr Garcia. “With these rebounds we can monitor the mechanical response of the ground. Once landed, we can monitor the cracks in the asteroid and try to image the asteroid’s internal structure.”
The rotation sensors can also record more subtle changes, providing an insight into mass distribution inside an asteroid. This is particularly relevant for binary systems such
identified as potential locations for this work, as Dr Garcia explains. “They have vacuum chambers that are isolated from ground vibrations, which is the kind of test facility that we need,” he outlines. “We have collaborated with external partners to test this high-performance instrument.”
The High-Performance Model should be at a TRL of between 3/4 by the end of the project, nearing validation in the laboratory, with the main objective of applying it eventually on the Moon. Missions to the Moon are planned for the coming years, and Dr Garcia says data about its interior structure and meteoroid
Moonquakes are typically small and the background seismic noise is low. So we need to design instruments to measure very low signals. We are developing a highperformance system that is much more sensitive than conventional seismometers.
as the asteroid Didymos and its moonlet Dimorphos, which was successfully targeted by NASA’s recent DART mission. “Rotation dynamics are strongly influenced by the mass distribution inside the asteroid. This is relevant for imaging the internal structure and understanding the mechanical properties of the asteroid,” says Dr Garcia. It may be necessary in future to deflect objects on a collision course with our own planet, underlining the wider importance of this research. “We are exploring different ideas on how we can improve the instruments,” continues Dr Garcia.
The PIONEERS instruments also need to be validated, which is done through land-based experiments in the project. This validation process is extremely complex, in particular for the HighPerformance Model. “This is because the noise levels are so low that there are very few places on Earth with comparable levels,” says Dr Garcia. The facilities of the European teams working on the VIRGO gravitational wave detector have been
impact rates will be highly valuable. Alongside developing and validating the instruments, researchers are also developing tools to analyse the data they generate. “One work package in the project is dedicated to scientific analysis, including data analysis methods and field experiments. The other work packages are focused on building and validating the instruments,” continues Dr Garcia.
Planetary Instruments based on Optical technologies for an iNnovative European Exploration using Rotational Seismology
The H2020 project PIONEERS aims at developing the next generation of planetary seismometers sensing both translation and rotations of the ground. By changing the technology in direction of optical interferometry, the project target both a prototype of a high performance instrument for the Moon and a qualification model of a compact instrument for asteroids.
The PIONEERS project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 821881.
• Institut Supérieur l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace (ISAE-SUPAERO, Toulouse)
• Exail (formerly iXblue) (Saint Germain en laye)
• Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP, CNRS, Université Paris cité – Paris)
• Eidgenoessische Technische Hochschule Zuerich (ETH, Zürich)
• Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen(LMU, Muenchen)
• Koninklijke Sterrenwacht Van Belgie (ORB, Brussel)
Project Coordinator, Professor Raphael F. Garcia ISAE-SUPAERO / DEOS / SSPA 10, ave E. Belin, 31400 Toulouse, France Office room 07.155 T: +33 561338114 E: raphael.garcia@isae.fr W: https://h2020-pioneers.eu/ W: https://www.webofscience.com/wos/ author/record/B-2612-2012
Dr Raphael F. Garcia is Professor at Aeronautics and Space Institute (ISAESUPAERO). He conducts research on internal structure of Moon and Mars relying on seismological data sets, and develops new sensing methods based on solid/atmosphere couplings. He provided estimates of lunar core radius, and demonstrated that seismic waves can be sensed by drag variations of low orbit satellites and by pressure sensors on board stratospheric balloons.
Gravitational waves were directly detected for the first time in 2015, and since then nearly 100 further events have been detected. Researchers in the Shade project are now developing statistical techniques to analyse how these waves have propagated, work which could lead to deeper insights into the nature of dark energy, as Dr Tessa Baker explains.
The existence of gravitational waves was predicted by Albert Einstein soon after the publication of his general theory of relativity in 1915, but it wasn’t until 100 years later that they were first directly observed in practice. The fundamental object in the theory of relativity is spacetime, which isn’t static, but rather behaves more like a fluid or material. “You can stretch it, you can squeeze it. If you think of it as being like a fluid, it can carry oscillations, which is what gravitational waves are,” explains Dr Tessa Baker, a reader in Cosmology at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). Modern day detectors are now capable of detecting these tiny vibrations in spacetime. “If a gravitational wave passes through the earth, and through a detector, it microscopically changes the effective length of one of the detector’s arms,” outlines Dr Baker. “The detectors are so sensitive they can detect that relative difference, and that’s a sign that a gravitational wave has passed through.”
in which case you get a kind of two-channel detection,” she outlines. “Those kinds of events are really special.”
The event detected in 2017 was one such example, providing cosmologists with two sources of information. With data on both gravitational waves and the electromagnetic counterpart, Dr Baker says it’s possible to both work out the properties of the source and also gain deeper cosmological insights. “That’s why those events are really important. However, they’re also really rare,” she acknowledges. This is an issue central to the Shade project, with Dr Baker and her colleagues developing techniques to get interesting science out of data on gravitational waves, even without the electromagnetic counterpart. “It had been thought that we could just use these special events, which are called standard sirens, and that there would be enough of them for our purposes. However, we also want to exploit the rest of our gravitational wave detections,”
We can detect gravitational wave events, while for some special events there is also basically an accompanying flash of light in the sky called an electromagnetic counterpart, in which case you get a kind of two-channel detection.
As the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded Shade project, Dr Baker is developing methods to interpret data on gravitational waves, which could lead to fresh insights into cosmology, the laws of gravity and the nature of dark energy. The key sources of observed data on gravitational waves are the LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA detectors. “These detectors typically have observing runs of about a year, then they’re turned off for engineering work. There have been three observing runs so far, so we’ve got three data sets,” says Dr Baker. So far 91 gravitational wave events have been detected, including the first collision of two neutron stars in 2017, an event which Dr Baker says provided some additional information. “We can detect gravitational wave events, while for some special events there is also basically an accompanying flash of light in the sky called an electromagnetic counterpart,
she says. “The bulk of our data relates to events with just a gravitational wave.”
A technique called dark sirens is being developed in the project to make better use of this data. When a gravitational wave is detected, researchers get a very loose idea of which part of the sky it’s come from. “Gravitational wave events originate inside galaxies. So you know that that gravitational wave you’ve detected must have happened in one of the thousands of galaxies that are in the right part of the sky, you just don’t know which one,” explains Dr Baker. “This uncertainty means the results from any single gravitational wave detection are very weak, but one can combine them for better results. Though the 91 events in hand at present is a relatively small number in statistical terms, this will change as more gravitational wave detections are made. This is the statistical dimension of the Shade project.”
The wider aim is to use this data from distant gravitational wave sources to learn more about dark energy, the nature of which is one of the most prominent unresolved questions in cosmology. The expansion rate of the universe is accelerating, and the underlying reason why is still not clear. “Dark energy is a kind of placeholder name given to whatever it is that is causing the expansion of the universe to speed up,” says Dr Baker. One of the most popular theories to explain this acceleration is that we might have misunderstood the laws of gravity, that describe the universe on the very largest
scales, something that Dr Baker is exploring in her research. “I’m using this statistical-host identification technique to constrain parameters in dark energy models that can then tell us what gravity looks like,” she explains. “Does gravity look like our standard theory, as predicted by Einstein? Or does gravity look more exotic?”
There are a number of competing theories in this area, with the ^CDM (Lambda Cold Dark Matter) model - of a universe filled with cold dark matter and a constant vacuum energy - viewed as the default for constraining cosmological gravity. The ^CDM model seems to explain all the existing data very effectively, so any new, more sophisticated model is likely to take elements of it. “A new model would certainly have to at least reproduce a lot of the properties of the ^CDM model, at least in the regimes that we’ve probed experimentally to this point,” says Dr Baker. Gravitational waves are the ideal testing ground for new dark energy models, believes Dr Baker. “It’s a completely different regime and it hadn’t been accessed until seven years ago. So we can hope that in this new regime of actual gravitational
physics, we might see something that hasn’t been seen by earlier electromagnetic telescopes,” she continues. “We’re waiting for LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA’s next observing run, which will probably find at least another 100 gravitational wave events.”
The next generation of gravitational wave detectors are likely to detect even more of these events, which will help inform the development of more detailed models. At this stage however, the priority for Dr Baker and her team is to build their pipeline and code ready for the next LIGO-Virgo-KARGA observing run, currently expected to begin in March 2023. “We’ll be at the forefront of analysing that new data as it comes in. We hope to use our techniques to provide the best constraintsto date - on some of these dark energy models. We can use all the available data, as opposed to just one standard siren event,” she outlines. This is an exciting period in gravitational wave research, with the detection of more events set to open up new possibilities. “There are a lot of first time discoveries to be made over the next 5-10 years,” says Dr Baker.
The SHADE project develops the theoretical and numerical tools to test the fundamental nature of gravity using gravitational wave data. It implements new statistical techniques to avoid reliance on rare electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave events. Thus, SHADE aims to unlock the full potential of gravitational wave observations as a new probe of cosmology.
Project Funding
Funded by an ERC Starting Grant SHADE Royal Society University Research Fellowship, grant number URF\R1\180009.
• LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA
• LISA
• LSST-DESC
Contact Details Project Coordinator, Tessa Baker G. O. Jones Building Room 515 T: +44 0207 882 5867 E: t.baker@qmul.ac.uk W: http://www.tessabaker.space : @Tessa_M_Baker
Tessa Baker is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Reader in Cosmology at Queen Mary University of London. Her research centres on testing new ideas about gravity and dark energy, with gravitational waves and cosmological large-scale structure. She plays an active role in the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA and LISA gravitational wave detectors, and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
Supermassive black holes have a mass somewhere in the region of millions or billions times that of the sun, and many questions remain about how they formed and subsequently evolved. Researchers in the BiD4BESt network are using a variety of methods to learn more about the evolution of supermassive blackholes, as Professor Francesco Shankar explains.
The relationship between supermassive black holes and their host galaxies, and how that relationship has evolved across cosmic time, is the subject of intense debate in the astrophysics field. Supermassive black holes are typically found at the centre of galaxies and have a mass in the region of millions or billions times that of the sun, now researchers in the BiD4BESt project aim to learn more about how these objects formed and subsequently evolved. “We have brought together the best modellers and observers in Europe in the project, who work intensively on this topic. By joining forces, our aim is to answer questions around the formation and evolution of supermassive black holes, which are some of the most pressing questions in astronomy,” says Professor Francesco Shankar, the coordinator of the project. A black hole doesn’t emit light, in fact it absorbs it, yet Professor Shankar says it is still possible to detect evidence of their existence. “Matter will form a structure before it actually falls into a black hole because of the conservation of angular momentum. This structure has the shape of a disc, it’s called an accretion disc,” he outlines.
Friction among the particles in the accretion disc generates heat, leading to the emission of energy from the disc. This creates a highly luminous region called an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN), which provides evidence of the presence of a supermassive black hole. “The existence of an AGN should tell us that there is an underlying supermassive black hole,” says Professor Shankar. There are 13 early stage researchers (ESRs) in the project who are investigating different questions around how these supermassive blackholes formed and subsequently evolved, from their infancy, to adolescence, through to adulthood. “The infancy of many of these supermassive black holes was in the very distant past - their mass today is an indicator of that. Adolescence is the period when the black hole started growing very fast, for which a lot of gas was required,” continues Professor Shankar. “Models also suggest that while growing up
at the centre of their galaxies, supermassive black holes possibly had a lot of kinetic and thermal energy that could have had profound consequences on the surrounding galaxy, allegedly contributing to the halting of the star formation in the host galaxy.”
Researchers in the project are using data from a variety of state-of-the-art facilities, including both ground-based telescopes and space missions, to investigate how these black holes started interacting with galaxies. The data from these observations is multi-wavelength in nature, spanning the
red and far infra-red, Professor Shankar and his colleagues hope to build a fuller picture of how AGN have evolved over time. “It’s like putting together a puzzle. If you want to get the full picture, you need all the different pieces,” he outlines.
The data gathered from ground-based facilities is an important part of this, with techniques like adaptive optics used to account for the distorting effect of the earth’s atmosphere on light. This is not an issue with space-based telescopes, yet black holes are often shrouded by dust,
The infancy of many of these supermassive black holes was in the very distant past – their mass today is an indicator of that. Adolescence is the period when the black hole started growing very fast, for which a lot of gas was required.
whole electromagnetic spectrum. “When a black hole is ‘naked’ – so essentially when you cannot really see the AGN – it’s very difficult to observe, unless you can determine its position and mass by dynamical measurements. Otherwise we rely on when these black holes are active as AGN. When they are active, they radiate energy at all wavelengths within the electromagnetic spectrum,” explains Professor Shankar. By bringing together data from a variety of different wavelengths, including x-rays, infra-
a factor which must also be taken into consideration. “Stars like our own sun tend to emit light in the optical and the UV range, depending on their mass. This is especially the case in their early stages, when they are bright and young stars,” says Professor Shankar. When a galaxy is dust-enshrouded, light in the UV and optical range is absorbed by the intervening material, then usually re-emitted in the infra-red. In addition, X-rays most probably originating from the very inner regions
around the central supermassive black hole, can also more efficiently be transmitted through thick layers of dust. “Infrared, X-rays, and even radio wavelengths, can all be used to probe the presence of AGN buried in dust-enshrouded galaxies, thus enriching our knowledge on supermassive black hole evolution in the early stages of galaxy formation, and more generally pushing the detection of AGN, and thus supermassive black holes, into the realm of the early Universe,” continues Professor Shankar. “We use x-rays and infra-red telescopes in order to build a fuller picture, as the AGN itself will emit in x-rays and the infra-red as well.”
A further source of data is numerical simulations, which complements the astronomical images from telescopes. This data then needs to be processed in order to gain deeper insights into the behaviour of different variables. “We use different statistical techniques for this task, while we also make intensive use of machine learning in the project. One of the most popular ways in which machine learning is used in this field – especially regarding astronomical images – is to try and train a machine on images from numerical simulations,” outlines Professor Shankar. The processes leading to these numerical simulations are already known, which provides a good opportunity
for researchers to train machine learning tools. “We know the full history of a specific galaxy or AGN in a numerical simulation. For example, if it merged with another galaxy in the past, then we we would know it from the simulation,” explains Professor Shankar. “This merger might have left a clear signature in the morphology of the galaxy. It might also have destabilised the gas inside the galaxy.”
This is a topic that researchers are exploring in BiD4BESt, with ESRs working to train neural networks to recognise merger signatures in images taken from numerical simulations. These machines could then be used on images of real galaxies, to detect how many have signatures indicating merger activity,
The overall objective of the BiD4BEST project is to train doctoral researchers in one of the most crucial open question in astrophysics, namely that of how supermassive black holes formed and their impact on the evolution of galaxies. This study is structured as four distinct scientific Work Packages, with the ambition that these researchers will acquire outstanding academic expertise and master state-of-the-art datascience tools in machine/deep learning and statistical analysis, as well as deep knowledge of the theoretical framework.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 860744.
Project Partners
https://www.bid4best.org/consortium/
Contact Details
Project coordinator
Professor Francesco Shankar Professor of Astrophysics, School of Physics & Astronomy, University of Southampton B46, West Highfield Campus, University Road, SO17 1BJ
T: +02380 593172 (int 23172) E: f.shankar@soton.ac.uk W: https://www.bid4best.org/ : @BiD4BEStITN
as well as in investigating other questions. “We can try to find a connection between AGN activity and mergers for example. This is one of the clearest examples of how we use different types of datasets and statistical tools – in this specific case neural networks –to try and pin down the processes that shaped galaxies and black holes in the past,” says Professor Shankar. The main scientific aim in the project is to investigate the different phases of the co-evolution of supermassive blackholes and their host galaxies, starting from the initial stages when they started growing within dust-enshrouded galaxies.
“We are investigating the idea that these supermassive blackholes may have been formed by many stellar black holes combining together,” outlines Professor Shankar.
given mass, then a drop, then it picks up again at another specific mass,” he says. ”This will be important to make solid predictions for future deep space missions hunting for the origin of supermassive black holes.”
A number of important results on black hole evolution have been gained during the project, while at the same time this research has also opened up new questions. New collaborations among the partners in BiD4BESt have been established, which will open up further training opportunities for the ESRs, an important aspect of the project. “ We provide scientific training in areas like machine learning to the students, while we also have connections with industry,” outlines Professor Shankar.
Professor Francesco Shankar is the BiD4BESt ITN Consortium project coordinator. He is Professor of Astrophysics and the CHEP professional development lead, University of Southampton. He is a fellow of The Alan Turing Institute, The Higher Education Academy and The Royal Astronomical Society.
“ESRs in BiD4BEST are exploring a number of relevant aspects of the supermassive black hole and galaxy co-evolution from both the observational and theoretical side. Just to give a few highlights, ESRs are busy: 1) in extracting empirical evidence for the supermassive black hole “feedback” effects on their host galaxies by detecting signature of their powerful winds directly triggered by the central active galactic nuclei, 2) in building full cosmological models of supermassive black hole evolution inclusive of obscuration, number of mergers, evolution of their “spin”, 3) in estimating their gas accretion rates through cosmic time and across different environments, and many more…”.
This project has provided for the first time to our knowledge an estimate of the full determination of the black hole demography, Professor Shankar says. A very promising route to the formation of supermassive black holes has been identified in the project, which Professor Shankar says can give a full determination of black hole demography. “Our results suggest that there is a high peak of black holes of a
The ESRs have had the opportunity to undertake secondments with the project’s industrial partners, part of preparing them for their future careers, whether in academia or industry. “The students were able to use their mathematical and statistical skills to help companies solve some of the problems they face,” continues Professor Shankar. “In the project we aim to both provide scientific training to the ESRs, and also to show how these techniques and skills can be used outside academia.”
