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We will see increasing inequality and serious health implications if we do not change our food systems, says Prof. Peter Jackson. Image credit - Peter Jackson
interview | coronavirus outbreak
04 May 2020

Q&A: Covid-19 pandemic highlights urgent need to change Europe’s food system

Europe urgently needs to make its food system more sustainable – or else face growing food insecurity and health impacts – and the coronavirus pandemic offers us an opportunity to push for change, according to Professor Peter Jackson.

Professor Cecilia Mascolo at the University of Cambridge, UK, hopes her coronavirus sounds app could provide the data needed to build a quick and cheap Covid-19 screening test in the future. Image credit - Salvatore Scellato
interview | health | coronavirus outbreak | ict | frontier research
30 April 2020

Q&A: The sound of your voice could help fight Covid-19

A recording of a cough, the noise of a person’s breathing or even the sound of their voice could be used to help diagnose patients with Covid-19 in the future, according to Professor Cecilia Mascolo, an expert in mobile health at data analysis at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Coronavirus lockdowns have caused air pollution to drop. Science is probing whether air pollution worsens the effects of coronavirus, with recent studies including in Italy suggesting there’s a link between polluted areas and higher fatality risk. Image credit - European Space Agency/ licenced under CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
interview | health | coronavirus outbreak
22 April 2020

Q&A: China and Europe likely to see different effect of coronavirus-related air pollution drop

In March, a study revealed that between 50,000 and 100,000 deaths could be avoided this year in China if air pollution stayed at the same level as during the coronavirus lockdown. While other parts of the world have also seen improvements in air quality, the impact in Europe is likely to be less dramatic than for China, according to Dr Kristin Aunan from the Centre for International Climate Research (CICERO) in Norway, who conducted the study.

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.

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