This post was originally published on Horizon: the EU Research & Innovation magazine | European Commission and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
Common medicines that have passed through patients’ bodies are ending up in the environment, but the threat many of them pose to wildlife and human health still needs to be determined. It may even be possible to recover some of these life-saving compounds so they can be reused.
By Vittoria D’Alessio
There are a lot of things that pose a threat to our planet – climate change, natural disasters, and solar flares, for example. But one threat in particular often captures the public imagination, finding itself popularized in books and films and regularly generating alarming headlines: asteroids.
by Jonathan O’Callaghan
Asteroids – the bits and pieces left over from the formation of the inner planets – are a source of great curiosity for those keen to learn about the building blocks of our solar system, and to probe the chemistry of life.
Humans are also considering mining asteroids for metals, but one of the crucial reasons scientists study this ancient space rubble is planetary defense, given the potential for space debris to cause Earth harm.
Fears over supermarket shortages during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic led many people to buy their food from local producers, raising the prospect of a transformation in the way people get their food in the future. But while eating locally and shorter supply chains are often viewed as a more sustainable alternative to our global food system, the reality is much more complicated, explains Dr. Tessa Avermaete, a bioeconomist at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium.
In our continuing search for other life in the universe, one place has always looked promising – Mars. It is a rocky planet like Earth, orbiting the same star, and at a distance where water could have been present on the planet.
Understanding the stellar population of our galaxy could reveal a great deal, not only about our own home but also about the universe as a whole. So-called galactic archaeology can reveal how galaxies take shape and explain some of the interesting complexities of our own.
The Milky Way might be right on our cosmic doorstep, but a group of astronomers suspects that the way we currently study it is stunting our understanding. Professor Ralf Klessen at Heidelberg University in Germany is one of four researchers who have recently begun a six-year project, ECOGAL, to try something new: imagine our home galaxy as one huge galactic ecosystem. Prof. Klessen believes that using this lens could answer fundamental questions about how stars and planets form, and how they shape the Milky Way’s future.
Today’s silicon solar panels are an industry standard, but these rigid, heavy blocks may be shunted aside by plastic rivals – lightweight, flexible solar panels that could be printed and stuck onto buildings or placed in windows or cars, turning light into electricity in locations inaccessible to their heavier cousins.
The standard solar panels we see on homes and businesses are made from crystalline silicon. These rigid photovoltaic (PV) panels convert light into electricity.
On 12 April, the International Day of Human Space Flight commemorates the first human – Yuri Gagarin – traveling to space in 1961, and the inaugural Space Shuttle mission on the same day in 1981.
Since Gagarin, humans have flown to space hundreds of times, including six missions to the moon, and have maintained a permanent space presence onboard the orbiting International Space Station (ISS) since November 2000.
But now new challenges are on the horizon, including returning to the moon and possibly going to Mars. We spoke to the head of ESA about why humans should go to space, the value of robotic exploration, and what role Europe has to play in the future.
By Jonathan O’Callaghan