Ships have a significant environmental impact during building, operation and when they’re scrapped, but new approaches and composite materials to replace steel – still popular due to its strength and low cost – could make vessels more sustainable, recyclable, and less noisy for marine animals. Using ships to transport goods contributes significantly to global greenhouse … Read more
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 public imagination, finding itself popularised in books and films and regularly generating alarming headlines: asteroids. In our solar system there are millions of space rocks … Read more
The successful development of mRNA vaccines for Covid-19 is ‘transformational’ and opens the doors to new types of vaccines for other infectious diseases as well as cancer, according to Dr Özlem Türeci and Dr Uğur Şahin, the co-founders of Germany’s BioNTech. The main question, they say, is which vaccine to prioritise first. The Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine was … Read more
The speed with which coronavirus vaccines have been developed surprised everyone and could transform public health into the future, says Dr Fergus Sweeney, head of the clinical studies and manufacturing taskforce at the European Medicines Agency (EMA). Here he gives us a glimpse at the work of the regulator over the past year as part … Read more
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 … Read more
Covid-19 has changed the way many people live and work. It has also had an impact on the ways many scientists collaborate and carry out their research – and how they release their findings. The need for speed in the fast-changing research landscape of the pandemic put pressure on biomedical researchers to share their work as … Read more