Carlos Moedas: The EU will fund more social innovation because it’s the future of innovation

Image credit - European Commission

Socially focused innovators across Europe have called on the European Union to put innovation at the heart of its strategy to achieve a ‘social triple A rating’– an ambition set out by European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker in 2014 to give greater prominence to the bloc’s social priorities. Carlos Moedas, the European Commissioner for Research, … Read more

Eliminating coal, oil and natural gas is the easy part of fighting climate change – Johan Rockström

To stop climate change, it is not enough to eliminate the use of fossil fuels like brown coal, says Prof Rockström.

by Annette Ekin To avoid climate breakdown, eliminating fossil fuels is the easy part, according to Professor Johan Rockström, co-director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. He says that safeguarding biological resources such as water, soil and biodiversity will be the ultimate test of whether global warming targets can be reached. … Read more

Bill Gates and European Commission launch €100 million clean energy fund

Bill Gates and Commissoner Carlos Moedas committed to establish a fund to get radical new clean energy technologies to market.

Bill Gates and the European Commission have launched a €100 million investment fund designed to bring radical clean energy technologies more quickly to market in order to promote energy efficiency and cut greenhouse gas emissions. Speaking at the launch in Brussels, Belgium, on 17 October, Gates said that science and innovation hold the key to tackling climate … Read more

Plate tectonics observatory to create seismic shift in earthquake research

We may never be able to entirely predict earthquakes such as those that hit central Italy in 2016, but we could better assess how they’re going to play out by joining up data from different scientific fields in a new Europe-wide observatory, say scientists. In 2016 and early 2017, a series of major earthquakes rocked … Read more

Digital age ‘desperately’ needs ethical and legal guidelines

One of the pressing questions that arise with artificial intelligence is how to account for the actions of machines that make decisions by themselves.

Digital technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics, ‘desperately’ need an institutional framework and system of values to help regulate the industry, an ethics expert has told leading scientists and policymakers. Jeroen van den Hoven, professor of ethics and technology at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, was speaking at a session on ethics … Read more