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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.

Placing heat tolerant corals in reefs won’t save them indefinitely but only buy us more time, says Dr James Guest. Image credit - Dr James Guest
interview | frontier research | environment
16 December 2019

Matchmaking corals from different colonies could reduce bleaching events

Breeding together corals that have naturally high heat tolerance and planting them on coral reefs could increase the reefs’ resilience to climate change and reduce the impact of bleaching events, according to Dr James Guest, a coral reef ecologist from Newcastle University, UK. He is studying this ‘assisted evolution’ approach to coral conservation and examining the risks associated with it.

Sir Peter was one of three winners of this year's Nobel prize in physiology or medicine. Image credit - Courtesy of Ludwig Cancer Research
interview | health | frontier research
02 December 2019

Nobel prize winner: Oxygen regulation discoveries are starting to lead to new anaemia, cancer drugs

Drugs that activate or block the body’s oxygen-sensing machinery to treat conditions such as anaemia in patients with chronic kidney disease and cancer are being made possible because we now understand the way that cells respond to oxygen deprivation, according to Sir Peter Ratcliffe, one of three winners of this year’s Nobel prize in physiology or medicine.

One of the main goals of exoplanet research is to work out the frequency of potentially habitable planets, according to Dr Gillon. Image credit - ©ULiège / JLWertz
interview | space | frontier research
04 November 2019

'We've found dozens of potentially habitable planets - now we need to study them in detail'

From the first discoveries of planets beyond our solar system in the 1990s, we now know of thousands of alien worlds, some of which could even be habitable to life as we know it. Now we need to detect more of these exoplanets and study them in detail, says astronomer Dr Michaël Gillon from the University of Liège in Belgium, who was involved in one of the most important exoplanet discoveries to date.

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