Concrete is the most widely used man-made material on Earth, with an annual consumption of around 10 billion m³. Moreover, CO2 emissions from its fabrication account for around 5% of worldwide anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The ECO-BINDER project promises to greatly reduce this carbon footprint, and in the process transform the concrete and building industries.…

A long-endurance drone was recently tested as part of a response to simulated threats and risks. The team reported that the overall performance and advanced imaging system of the craft – which can fly for over 20 hours non-stop – provided very high resolution images capable of identifying and precisely locating threats and risks. In…

Drones generally get a bad press but there’s far more to them than destruction and war – for example drone technology can help save lives in disaster zones reaching places that no humans can tread. Now researchers from Laval University in Canada have revealed another surprising and positive drone application – tracking the impact of…

The energy efficiency of buildings commonly entails reduced energy consumption in their use phase – which is one of the key targets under the EU’s climate and energy package. However the energy required for the production of these buildings, also known as embodied energy, is equally important to the assessment of their environmental impact. In…

Museum curators, art restorers, archeologists and the broader public will soon be able to learn much more about paintings and other historic objects, thanks to an EU project which has become a pioneer in non-invasive art exploration techniques, based on a graphene scanner. Researchers working on INSIDDE, which received a EUR 2.9 million investment from…

Elderly people with walking difficulties are often intimidated by busy public places. This led an EU research project to develop a robot walker to guide them around shopping centers, museums and other public buildings, thus enhancing their autonomy. Shopping centers, airports, museums and hospitals are the kind of complex and confusing environments where elderly people…

Tracheobronchomalacia (TBM) is a rare condition that occurs when the walls of the airway are weak potentially causing the airway to become narrow or collapse. This can result in side effects such as an inability to absorb food, respiratory failure, and even cardiac arrest. In order to save three young TBM sufferers in the USA,…

It didn’t take long for the scientific community to react. Two weeks after the sacking of the 300 year-old Mosul Museum by a group of ISIS extremists went viral on Youtube, researchers from the ITN-DCH, IAPP and 4D-CH-WORLD projects launched Project MOSUL to virtually restore damaged artefacts and make them accessible from virtual museums. “We…

European researchers have developed a wireless sensor system to monitor the safety of large infrastructure. The new system will not only potentially save lives when the structure is old, it is reducing costs during construction, too. Building structures can be affected by earthquake, landslides or construction defects from a previous era. But collapses in infrastructures,…

Coatings have become ubiquitous, whether to impart aesthetic properties such as brilliant colors or shine or functional properties such as increased hardness or corrosion resistance. Physical vapor deposition (PVD) is an important plasma coating technology that relies on vaporizing materials under vacuum conditions. It is one of the most promising processes as it delivers brilliant…

The design of airport runways has remained largely unchanged ever since airplanes were created. The EU-funded project ‘The endless runway’ (ENDLESS RUNWAY) conceived a revolutionary design for a runway, based on a circular track that runs around the airport. Such a runway could enable planes to take-off in any direction and land from any direction,…

The space industry appears to be edging towards increased privatization. How will this change the industry and how will the European space sector adapt to this brave new world? Speakers gathered at last week’s Seventh Annual Conference on European Space Policy to discuss the issue. Investment in Space The market may be growing increasingly privatised…

The attempt to settle space is not a fantasy, it’s an inevitability, according to explorer and archaeologist, Cameron Smith. However if we’re going to achieve it then we need to make a major shift in our thinking, away from individual space explorers and towards diverse communities of space pioneers. During his recent TEDx Brussels talk,…

At Trinity College Dublin Professor Jonathan Coleman and his team are creating a ‘gateway technology’ in material science that, if successful, will open the door to a host of industrial applications. Their research focuses on producing two-dimensional monolayers of a variety of materials by exfoliation. Prof. Coleman’s TEDx talk introduced the audience to this technology…

A prosthetic hand, which provides a sense of touch acute enough to handle an egg, has been completed and is now exploited by the NEBIAS project after 10 years of EU-funded research. The world’s most advanced bionic hand was tested with the help of amputee Dennis Aabo Sørensen who was able to grasp objects intuitively…

Sewage systems are crucial for reducing the risks of waterborne diseases and avoiding the flooding of cities. Within these systems, a reliable inspection tool that could efficiently manage the cleaning process to meet real-time needs would be helpful. The PIPEGUARD project developed such a system. It consists of an ultrasonic inspection device that detects the…

The sinking of the Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia in 2012 – and the reported difficulties in evacuating over 4,000 people with the eventual loss of 32 lives –underlined the urgent need to accurately trace passengers during emergencies. Indeed, while most people on board were brought ashore during a six-hour evacuation, the search for missing…

There is strength in numbers. That is the logic behind an EU-funded project that, by pooling the resources, know-how and technology of multiple organizations across Europe, has helped greatly to advance current research trends in the increasingly important field of photonics. Photonics, a branch of physics that covers technical applications of light from telecommunications to…