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Interview

Jan Wörner says that discovery is in humans' DNA. Image credit - ESA/Sabine Grothues, licenced under CC BY-SA 3.0
interview | space
10 April 2020

Q&A: Human spaceflight is a risk worth taking, says ESA head

Human spaceflight is dangerous, but worth the risk, according to Jan Wörner, the Director General of the European Space Agency (ESA). But even so, there are limits – like Mars. Robots, as proxies for human exploration, can take on dangerous missions by travelling to places astronauts are not yet capable of reaching, but they can never replace what we learn from putting women and men in space, according Wörner.

Habitat loss such as forest clearing or mining operations can increase the chance of a disease jumping from animals to humans, says Prof. Koopmans. Image credit - M.P.G. Koopmans, Erasmus MC 2020
coronavirus outbreak | interview | health
02 April 2020

Q&A: We have to rethink disease detection to get ahead of the outbreak after coronavirus

We know that outbreaks like coronavirus will become more common in the future and tackling them is the Apollo programme of our time, according to Professor Marion Koopmans, head of the viroscience department at Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. 

According to Prof. Bekeredjian-Ding, an approved mRNA coronavirus vaccine would be easier and faster to produce and thus deploy worldwide than a conventional vaccine. Image credit - Unsplash/Liliya Lisa
coronavirus outbreak | interview | health
01 April 2020

Five things you need to know about: mRNA vaccines

The race for a vaccine against the novel coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2, is on, with 54 different vaccines under development, two of which are already being tested in humans, according to the World Health Organization. And among the different candidates is a new player on the scene – mRNA vaccines.

Dimitra Stefoudi says that researchers should look into how to monitor traffic in space and use data to assess potential threats. Image credit - Dimitra Stefoudi
interview | space | industry
02 March 2020

Q&A: ‘We need to improve how we keep track of objects in space’

We need to improve how we keep track of objects in space and predict where they will go in order to avoid collisions in Earth’s increasingly crowded orbit, according to Dimitra Stefoudi, a space law researcher from Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Just being able to give a name to a rare disease is a major step forward for both patients and families, says Dr Lucia Monaco. Image credit - Dr Lucia Monaco
interview | health
28 February 2020

Q&A: ‘We can diagnose more than 4,000 rare diseases but there’s still a long way to go’

Patients with rare diseases often suffer a long and lonely path as they struggle to find out what the cause of their debilitating symptoms are, but recent advances in diagnostics are helping to give them new hope of identifying their illness, and perhaps even finding a treatment, according to Dr Lucia Monaco of Italy's Fondazione Telethon and chair of the International Rare Diseases Research Consortium (IRDiRC).

Dr. Roth studies the evolution of male pregnancy in syngnathids. Image credit - Sabrina Koehler
interview | environment | frontier research
24 February 2020

Q&A: The curious case of male pregnancy in seahorses and pipefishes

Male seahorses not only become pregnant and give birth, but do so in ways that take different forms, which make them unique research subjects to understand the evolution of pregnancy, according to Dr Olivia Roth from the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel (GEOMAR) in Germany.

Assessing the health of an entire ocean is an 'extraordinarily ambitious agenda', says Prof. J Murray Roberts. Image credit - Hannah Roberts
interview | environment
06 February 2020

Q&A: To protect the Atlantic, we first need to understand it

The Atlantic Ocean is under threat from fishing, fossil fuel extraction and deep-sea mining, and the onus should be on these industries to prove that their exploitation is sustainable rather than requiring scientists to come up with reasons to protect it, says Professor J Murray Roberts, a marine biologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

Cities need to set the rules of the game when it comes to innovative mobility services such as e-scooters and shared bikes, says Karen Vancluysen. Image credit - Polis network
interview | transport
03 February 2020

Q&A: ‘Cities need to roll out carrots and sticks to solve the last-mile problem’

How people and deliveries get to their final destination is currently making urban environments harder places to live, and cities need to solve this ‘last mile problem’ by using a combination of ‘carrot and stick’ measures, according to Karen Vancluysen, secretary general of Polis, a network of European cities and regions working on sustainable innovative transport solutions.

Glaciers are typically found close to where people live and changes can directly affect people's lives, says Prof. Kääb. Image credit - Andreas Kääb
interview | environment | frontier research
06 January 2020

'Most ice on Earth is very close to melting conditions'

We need to understand how glaciers are shrinking in order to better adapt to climate change impacts such as changes to water supply, landslides and avalanches, says Professor Andreas Kääb, a glacier expert from the University of Oslo in Norway. 

Gene editing researchers should act responsibly and not be driven by fame or patents, says Prof. Christiane Woopen. Image credit - Reiner Zensen
interview | health
17 December 2019

We need to talk about CRISPR

We need an active public debate on the ethics of gene editing technology to realise its potential and prevent it being used in nefarious ways, for example by the military and amateur scientists, and to take cultural differences into account, according to Professor Christiane Woopen, executive director of the Centre for Ethics, Rights, Economics and Social Sciences of Health (CERES) at Germany’s University of Cologne.

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