Author: Maria Vlastara

Hepatitis B is a chronic infection affecting roughly 254 million people worldwide and causing about 1.1 million deaths each year, mainly from cirrhosis and liver cancer. Although a preventive vaccine has been available for more than 40 years, there is still no cure for people already living with the disease. Current antiviral medicines can suppress […]

During conversation, our brains are constantly predicting which word comes next. That ability helps us understand speech in a noisy café, or anticipate a friend’s next sentence. This skill for prediction is also linked closely to our enjoyment of music. For Professor Shihab Shamma, an auditory neuroscientist at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and […]

When a dancer leaves the stage for the last time, their art often vanishes with them. Unlike books, paintings or music, contemporary dance has no universal score or lasting archive. Much of Europe’s modern dance legacy survives only in living bodies. Now, an EU-funded research initiative called DanceMap is seeking to preserve that heritage before […]

What if the biggest untapped resource in European agriculture is not technology or funding – but the women already working in the sector? At 34, Albertine Ekkels from the Netherlands found herself torn between daily life on a dairy farm and her dream of starting a business. “The biggest challenge for me was time,” she […]

From fancy oat milk lattes to organically grown produce at the local market, organic food has moved from niche to mainstream. But Europe’s farmers, weighing the complex rules and costs of green farming, are struggling to keep pace with demand. In 2020, the European Commission set a bold goal: 25% of EU farmland under organic […]

Asier Larrañaga Ochoa de Eguileor, a wildfire analyst at the Catalan Fire and Rescue Service, experienced the Solsonès wildfire in Spain in 1998 and still remembers it as a revelation. “I had basic fire theory training, but what I saw on the ground didn’t match any of it. Fires were jumping over valleys. Firebreaks were […]