It is the most normal thing in the world in Asian countries like Taiwan, South Korea, China and Hong Kong. Austria has followed suit, as has the Czech Republic. And now even Germany is considering making face masks compulsory in public spaces. Face masks in public have long been ridiculed in the...
Car companies all over the world are shutting down their automobile production. But they are, of course, not standing still either. Development of new (electric) models is continuing. And there is a new development underway on the production side as well. More and more companies are offering to...
Parkinson’s is one of the fastest growing diseases in the world. The same applies to dementia. There is still a lot unknown about these brain diseases. How they develop. Why they develop. Not to mention that there are treatments or medications that can cure or slow down these diseases. A...
We’ve all seen the footage over the past few days of hospitals with drive-in corona tests. Large tents are also being set up in other places where testing for the deadly virus is to be carried out. Already there are people who do it at home before dropping it off at a laboratory. None of...
In a follow up to yesterdays article, the European Union has announced that it is investing €80 million in CureVac, a German biotech company working on a vaccine against the corona virus. Over the past week it has been reported that the Americans wanted to take over the company. The European Union...
One day after we wrote this article (see below) about the fact that biotechnology company Curevac and major shareholder Dietmar Hopp said “no” to a potential takeover by the US, the EU decided to support the company which is working on a vaccine against COVID-19 with a credit of up to...
Graphene is a material which has incredible properties. At 100 times the strength of steel, graphene is the strongest material ever tested. It is also extremely suitable as a semiconductor because its conductivity is 100 times faster than silicon that is currently commonly used. Potential...
This May, the Formula 1 cars will race the Zandvoort circuit for the first time since 1985. Many Dutch people wonder if Max Verstappen could follow in the footsteps of the last winner, Niki Lauda. Never before has a Dutchman won at Zandvoort. On the other hand, there are also a lot of people who...
MUSA is the name of the first robot for super-microsurgery. MUSA was developed in recent years by researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands, the MicroSure company and plastic surgeons at the Maastricht UMC+ medical center. The only thing MUSA lacked was practical experience....
Everybody is familiar with the white condensation trails that planes leave in the air on beautiful days. Most people like them, but what few people know is that these aircraft tracks, or contrails, contribute almost as much to global warming as the CO2 emitted by airplanes. But fortunately there...
Viruses and bacteria frequently manage to infect the human body. The corona epidemic provides further terrifying proof of this. We don’t need to be so ‘scared of fungi. At least not yet, because fungal infections are still learning how to invade the human immune system. Research by the...
In recent decades, tropical storms have caused enormous damage, with the worst being hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria in 2017. These claimed the lives of countless people and cost around US$220 billion. Although predicting these types of hurricanes has proved very difficult up until now,...
The German company Sono Motors which makes electric cars with solar panels on the roof saw the bottom of the greenhouse come into view last year. More money had to be put on the table, but the founders were not in the mood for another round of private equity financing. The company therefore opted...
In the battle against breast cancer, the Department of Radiology at the University of Cambridge has developed a new type of MRI scan that allows doctors to see more accurately which parts of a tumour are active and which are not. It is called carbon-13 hyperpolarised imaging. A contrast dye...
Researchers from TU Eindhoven and TU Twente published a study in the Nature journal about the first building block for a new kind of self-learning system or computer which is inspired by the brain. That’s what the two universities announced on their website on Wednesday. One of the great...
Earthworms, polar bears, bees and buttercups. Which animals and plants are best equipped for climate change? Which species can adapt or migrate and which ones will simply disappear? This is a question that researchers at the Senckenberg und LOEWE-Zentrum für Translationale Biodiversitätsgenomik...
Germany is split on the subject of electromobility. On the one hand, “green scientists” are in a hurry to make the transition from combustion to electric motors. This is the only way to become CO2 neutral and the only way for the automotive industry to survive. On the other hand, there...
Australian and German researchers have applied for a patent for a new type of lithium-sulfur battery that is much lighter, cleaner and more powerful than the currently standard lithium-ion batteries used in electric cars and mobile phones. The universities involved are Monash from Australia, the...
A group of German scientists headed by the Leibniz-Institut DSMZ from Braunschweig succeeded for the first time in isolating the cucumber virus CABYV (Cucurbit Aphid-borne Yellows Virus). They hope to be able to take a step forward in controlling this very harmful disease that affects the cucumber...
This is the third article in a series about measures that Poland is taking against environmental pollution and global warming. Parts 1 and 2 appeared on the 29th and 30th of November. Poland is not exactly at the forefront when it comes to electric cars. In August of this year there were 6,672...
Most people wouldn’t have guessed it, but there is no other European country where electric buses for public transport are as popular as they are in Poland. An important reason for this is that Poland is itself a large manufacturer of electric buses. It is estimated that about a third of all...
This is the first part of a series about the measures that Poland is taking against environmental pollution and global warming. Tomorrow, part two will be devoted to the transition to electric buses in public transport. The sight of the Belchatów brown coal power station is both forbidding and...
Four school friends went off to Valencia for a study trip in April this year. They all jumped on an electric scooter for the first time in their lives and think: “Wow, this is fun. That’s what we need in the Netherlands too.” Half a year later they are the ones who break the...
The first presentation of the Alexander Dennis Enviro200 bus back in March already attracted a great deal of interest. Several videos of this autonomous bus were circulated on the internet. It is not the size of a slow moving minibus, but that of a real full-size city bus. The accelerator can be...
“Gas is sexy!” With these rather remarkable words, the German Minister of Economic Affairs Peter Altmaier opened a meeting in Berlin last week intended to mark the culmination of months of dialogue between the Ministry and industry on the future of natural gas. Natural gas you say?...
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