EU Research Winter 2023
Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding Albert Einstein
Spotlight on the dangers of invasive species
ERC President Maria Leptin welcomes UK’s return to Horizon Europe
UN report on climate catastrophe
Iliana Ivanova appointed new Innovation and Research Commissioner
Disseminating the latest research from around Europe and Horizon 2020 Follow EU Research on www.twitter.com/EU_RESEARCH
Editor’s N T
here are many rewilding initiatives throughout Europe and there are good reasons for rewilding. Many people will know that forests capture carbon, billions of metric tonnes of it, but it’s probably less well-known that animals play a key role in carbon mitigation, which is a worrying realisation when we’re in a mass extinction event. The WWF Living Planet Report 2022 predicts in less than 50 years our planet will have lost 69% of mammal, fish, bird, reptile and amphibian populations. So many species around today will simply be gone. Critically, rewilding animals and recovering their numbers is not just a noble goal, it’s key to ecosystems, climate and our own survival.
What’s interesting in the latest rewilding projects is that animals are used, essentially as nature engineers. We are introducing and nurturing select species in the wilderness, so they develop ideal habitats for other species. We’re using animals like beavers and bison to create better landscapes to serve as a home for all kinds of other animals and plants that will naturally thrive in the environment they develop. Animals like beavers and bison are keystone species that alter landscapes in positive ways that encourage life and capture carbon. It’s a win-win.
As a seasoned editor and journalist, Richard Forsyth has been reporting on numerous aspects of European scientific research for over 10 years. He has written for many titles including ERCIM’s publication, CSP Today, Sustainable Development magazine, eStrategies magazine and remains a prevalent contributor to the UK business press. He also works in Public Relations for businesses to help them communicate their services effectively to industry and consumers.
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Beavers engineer dams, irrigate land, create ponds and wetlands, improve water quality, reduce soil erosion, and increase biodiversity. They create environments that are excellent at trapping carbon. Bison behaviour too, encourages new plants, birdlife and food chains, essentially building ecosystems which capture carbon. Europe has many initiatives using wildlife this way and it’s as clever as it is simple, as a strategy. It gives me a little hope too. It almost feels obvious, that if you balance wildlife, and rebuild nature, you level up your chances for the planet to stabilise its climate. At the same time, it will be a better world to live in for the biodiversity. We strive to change, and we live in hope.
Hope you enjoy the issue.
Richard Forsyth Editor
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Contents 16 Rediscovery of
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Research News EU Research takes a closer look at the latest news and technical breakthroughs from across the European research landscape.
10 ENHPATHY Researchers in the Enhpathy project are working to identify enhancers and how they regulate gene expression in different cells in the body, as Dr Salvatore Spicuglia explains.
13 WELLSire Social security was the core function of the welfare state when it was founded but the focus has since shifted, a topic Professor Anton Hemerijck is investigating in the WellSIre project.
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dielectrophoresis for label-free manipulation and interrogation of single protein molecules We spoke to Dr Sergii Pud about his work in developing a labelfree tool to study proteins and molecules, and how it could lead to deeper insights into protein dielectrophoresis.
18 NeuroCompSkill Researchers in the NeuroCompSkill project are investigating whether people with autism update their predictions of how physical and social situations will evolve differently to those with dyslexia, as Professor Merav Ahissar explains.
21 DOWN2EARTH Researchers in the DOWN2EARTH project are developing new models and tools that will help governments, organizations, and people adapt to the impacts of climate change, as Professor Michael Singer explains.
24 The Fight Against Invasive Species in Europe
Invasive alien species are infiltrating habitats, causing damage to native life and equilibriums in nature. A UN report shows the severity of the escalating challenge. It is likely the problem will get worse before it can improve but there are emerging strategies to fight it, that Europe is adopting. By Richard Forsyth.
28 FlowPhotoChem Dr Pau Farràs and his colleagues in the FlowPhotoChem project are working to develop a new, more sustainable method of producing platform chemicals using carbon dioxide and concentrated sunlight.
30 JUSTNORTH JUSTNORTH is an EU-funded Climate Action Project . Dr Corine Wood-Donnelly explains the project’s broad stakeholder engagement , which helps to resolve critical issues in developing Arctic economies.
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33 SusKelpFood The Norwegian Research Council project SusKelpFood addresses the challenge of producing kelp for Nordic and European food industries. Project Leader, Dr Pierrick Stévant and Dr Arne Duinker tell us about their research.
36 SeaweedPack Researchers in the SeaweedPack project are using the polysaccharides present in seaweed to develop new, flexible, home-compostable films for food packaging, as Dr Adriana Kyvik explains.
38 ARTIS Researchers in the ARTIS project are probing the way that people engage with works of art, opening up the possibility of using art to achieve positive outcomes, as Professor Matthew Pelowski explains.
40 French Literature and
Material Culture, 19th-21st Centuries Marta Caraion, Sophie-Valentine Borloz and Joséphine Vodoz lead a project examining how objects have been represented and conceptualized in French literary works since 1830 and how attitudes to consumer culture have evolved.
42 Training for ambidexterity: how managers can learn to “shift cognitive gears
Jan Richner and Zorica ZagoracUremović told us about their research into cognitive abilities related to leaders’s decision making and in particular, their novel scientific tests of training and education programmes.
45 EPIQUS Researchers in the EPIQUS project are working to develop a quantum simulator on a single silicon chip, bringing together electronic, photonic and quantum components, as Dr Mher Ghulinyan explains
48 s-NEBULA We spoke to Dr Romain Lebrun about the work of the s-Nebula project in developing a new approach to the development of THz technologies and exploring the potential applications of this emerging technology.
50 MAGNESIA Professor Nanda Rea of the ERC MAGNESIA Project is taking a fresh look at the pulsar population to understand how many there are, how they evolve and to explore wider technological possibilities.
EDITORIAL Managing Editor Richard Forsyth info@euresearcher.com Deputy Editor Patrick Truss patrick@euresearcher.com Science Writer Nevena Nikolova nikolovan31@gmail.com Science Writer Ruth Sullivan editor@euresearcher.com PRODUCTION Production Manager Jenny O’Neill jenny@euresearcher.com Production Assistant Tim Smith info@euresearcher.com Art Director Daniel Hall design@euresearcher.com Design Manager David Patten design@euresearcher.com Illustrator Martin Carr mary@twocatsintheyard.co.uk PUBLISHING Managing Director Edward Taberner ed@euresearcher.com Scientific Director Dr Peter Taberner info@euresearcher.com Office Manager Janis Beazley info@euresearcher.com Finance Manager Adrian Hawthorne finance@euresearcher.com Senior Account Manager Louise King louise@euresearcher.com
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RESEARCH
NEWS
The EU Research team take a look at current events in the scientific news
UN report warns global warming approaching 3 degrees this century with catastrophic implications Countries’ ‘emissions gap’ is like an emissions canyon littered with broken promises, broken lives and broken records, says UN chief. The world is on track for a temperature rise of up to 2.9C above pre-industrial levels, a report by the UN environment programme has found, even assuming countries stick to their Paris agreement climate pledges. UN chief António Guterres said that keeping the Paris goal of limiting the rise to ideally 1.5C and well below 2C would require “tearing out the poisoned root of the climate crisis: fossil fuels.” “Otherwise, we’re simply inflating the lifeboats while breaking the oars,” he added. The world has already warmed by at least 1.1C. Coming ahead of the COP28 climate summit in Dubai in 10 days, the latest UN report estimated the size of the gap between the emissions trajectory implied by climate pledges and the one needed to limit warming, The level of greenhouse gas emissions stood at a new peak of 57.4bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, the UN emissions gap report noted, after rising 1.2 per cent from 2021 to 2022. Guterres referred to this “gap” as a “canyon littered with broken promises, broken lives, and broken records.” Emissions cuts of 14bn tonnes or 28 per cent are needed by 2030 to keep within 2C of warming, and a more ambitious reduction of more than 40 per cent or 22bn tonnes is needed for the 1.5C threshold to be realistic. The world now only has a 14 per cent chance of limiting warming to the 1.5C goal, according to UN analysis, even if countries honour all pledges, including weaker conditional promises by developing countries, as well as the non-binding net zero goals. Fully implementing efforts implied by unconditional national commitments would put the world on track for limiting the temperature rise to 2.9C, while the measures conditional on receiving financial and technical
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support would lead to temperatures not exceeding 2.5C above preindustrial levels. These were put at a 66 per cent chance. “Leaders have been in snooze mode, so it is time for them to step up,” Inger Anderson, head of UNEP, told the Financial Times. Guterres said the joint statement made last week by the world’s two biggest polluters, China and the US, for co-operation on some measures was a “positive first step”. The UN leadership is looking for three concrete commitments from almost 200 countries at the COP28 summit, including a tripling of renewable energy capacity, the doubling of energy efficiency, and money for a “loss and damage” fund to help vulnerable countries cope with climate change. The UNEP highlighted that detailed climate action plans submitted by Paris agreement signatories did not match up to the ambition implied by their net zero pledges. In particular, none of the G20 group of countries are reducing emissions fast enough to meet countries’ net zero targets, it said. The long-term average 1.5C goal enshrined in the Paris Agreement, at which scientists believe irreversible changes to the planet will occur, is a different measure from the average increase in a given month or year. On that basis, climate scientists have calculated that 86 days between January and the start of October had average temperatures that exceeded 1.5C. Last week, the daily global average temperature surpassed 2C above pre-industrial levels for the first time, the EU earth observation agency Copernicus said. “This doesn’t indicate a breach of the Paris Agreement but underscores our proximity to the internationally agreed-upon limits,” it added.
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European Research Council president Maria Leptin welcomes UK’s return to Horizon Europe “You shouldn’t have a research programme without the best scientists”, says Maria Leptin on the UK’s return to the fold. Science in Europe is stronger now that the UK has finally joined the EU’s €95.5 billion Horizon Europe research programme as an associate member, says Maria Leptin, president of the European Research Council (ERC). “I am so happy we’ve got them back in,” Maria Leptin told Science|Business. “I’m so happy we’re a unified community again when it comes to funding the best ideas for the best researchers. Welcome back.” At the same time Leptin expressed sympathy for researchers in Switzerland who remain outside Horizon Europe because of a similar row over association status. “They are not alone in the sense they are loved by all the rest of us, and we want Switzerland back in as much as we wanted the UK back in,” she said. “There is very high-level research being done in Switzerland, same as in the UK. We all want to be one group that competes at the same level and is evaluated by the same high-level panels.” The UK has long been a top performer in winning EU research funding. Under Horizon Europe’s predecessor, Horizon 2020, it had the third highest number of unique participants and received the second most in net funding, behind Germany. Since leaving the EU in January 2021, the UK was outside Horizon Europe, but finalised a deal last week to rejoin as an associated member. While UK-based researchers have continued to be eligible to apply for ERC funding in the past three years, successful applicants had move to a host institution in an eligible country. Now scientists in the UK will be able to receive ERC funding without having to move their research abroad. Leptin said there had been a “slight dip” in the number of UK-based ERC grant applicants last year, but that could just be down to annual fluctuations. “If UK researchers had decided not to apply, I hope they will now have the enthusiasm to come back,” she said. This will not mean other countries missing out, Leptin stressed. As part of the UK’s association deal, it agreed to pay in around €2.6 billion per year for participation in Horizon Europe and the Copernicus Earth Observation programme. This extra money means there is more to go around for ERC applicants, she said.
acknowledges that politics generally plays a part in science but says, “There was a formal process with both sides conducting negotiations. We were the victims but it wasn’t targeted against science.” Campaigners from Switzerland and the UK formed a united voice in calling for association to Horizon Europe. Now, Switzerland stands alone in being a major European research nation locked out of the framework programme. The latest view from Switzerland is that university heads don’t expect Horizon Europe association any time before 2025, with a federal election this October taking political priority. In November 2021 the UK set up a Horizon Europe guarantee scheme to fund researchers and entrepreneurs who could not take up EU grants while the UK was out of the framework programme. This gave grant winners the choice of remaining in the UK to carry out their projects. The other option they had was to relocate to an EU member state or other associated country. According to the ERC, 42 researchers chose this option, with another four cases currently being processed, and four other recent grant winners expressing an interest in leaving the UK. As of the end of August 2023, the UK has given out just over £506 million to 342 ERC grant winners under its guarantee scheme, UK government statistics show. With the UK’s Horizon Europe association applying from 1 January 2024 onwards, any UK-based ERC grant winner who applied and won funding for a call under the 2021-2023 ERC work programmes will have to rely on the guarantee scheme for financing. Those applying for calls under the 2024 programme will be funded by the EU. In total, the UK has handed out £1.35 billion in grants to substitute for Horizon Europe funding. Portrait image © Michael Wodak / MedizinFotoKöln, 2021
The UK’s return is a benefit for European scientists, Leptin said. “The value of the ERC is higher if the UK is in because the level of competition is higher. You don’t have big football competitions and say the UK and Spain have to stay out so other countries can win.” The UK’s association to Horizon Europe was long in the making, as set out in this timeline charting the key moments. At several points in the past three years, it looked like an agreement was all but inevitable, only for more political wrangling between London and Brussels to get in the way. A major disagreement came when the UK threatened to trigger Article 16 of the Northern Ireland protocol and temporarily suspend parts of the trade deal it signed with the EU in December 2020. The European Commission used access to Horizon Europe as a bargaining chip to head off this move. This situation was only cleared up in May this year when UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak agreed a deal to solve the problem. There followed several more months of haggling over how much the UK should pay into Horizon Europe and what would happen if it won less in grants that it was putting in. Leptin
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EU Parliament backs new innovation commissioner Iliana Ivanova Bulgarian economist has been appointed the new EU innovation and culture commissioner. Iliana Ivanova is the new EU commissioner for research, innovation and education, after EU ministers and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen confirmed the appointment today. Ivanova starts the job at a decisive time for her portfolio, with major evaluations of the €95.5 billion
Horizon Europe research programme and the €26.2 billion Erasmus+ education programme underway, and the first moves to shape the next EU research framework programme now in hand. A former MEP and member of the European Court of Auditors, Ivanova was nominated for the position in late June after her predecessor Mariya Gabriel was called back to Bulgaria to help form a coalition government. Since her nomination, Ivanova has done her homework on the intricacies of the EU’s numerous research, innovation and education policies, smoothly sailing through a three-hour hearing at the European Parliament in early September. At the hearing, she named ensuring a stable – and growing – EU budget for research and innovation as a key priority. Here, her experience as vice chair of the European Parliament’s budgetary control committee during her stint as an MEP may come in handy. Ivanova joins the current Commission just a year before its term ends, but with a long list of priorities. During her tenure, research and innovation policy experts hope to see her concentrating on the next research framework and continuing Mariya Gabriel’s work on closing the EU’s east-west innovation divide. © European Union, 2023
In sickness and in health, couples share high blood pressure Partners in heterosexual relationships may have high blood pressure that mirrors one another, finds new study. If one spouse or partner in a heterosexual couple has high blood pressure, the other partner often does too, according to new research published in the Journal of the American Heart Association. “Many people know that high blood pressure is common in middle-aged and older adults, yet we were surprised to find that among many older couples, both husband and wife had high blood pressure in the U.S., England, China and India,” said senior author Chihua Li, Dr.P.H., a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Michigan and the study’s corresponding author. “For instance, in the U.S., among more than 35% of couples who were ages 50 or older, both had high blood pressure.” Researchers investigated whether heterosexual partners in the U.S., England, China and India mirrored each other’s high blood-pressure status. Previous studies have explored the union of high blood pressure and other diseases among couples in a single country setting or used small regional samples. “Ours is the first study examining the union of high blood pressure within couples from both high- and middle-income countries,” said study co-lead author Jithin Sam Varghese, Ph.D., an assistant research professor at the Emory Global Diabetes Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta. “We wanted to find out if many married couples who often have the same interests, living environment, lifestyle habits and health outcomes may also share high blood pressure.”
biostatistics at the School of Public Health at West Virginia University, and chair of the writing committee for the Association’s 2021 Statement on Physical Activity as a Critical Component of First-Line Treatment for Elevated Blood Pressure or Cholesterol. “Following this idea, making lifestyle changes, such as being more active, reducing stress or eating a healthier diet, can all reduce blood pressure; however, these changes may be difficult to achieve and, more importantly, sustain if your spouse or partner (and greater family unit) are not making changes with you,” she said. “These findings also hint at a broader approach -- interventions using a socioecological model considering determinants of hypertension across individual, interpersonal, environmental and policy levels are likely going to be necessary to reduce the global public health burden of hypertension.”
These findings are important because hypertension is among the most dominant modifiable cardiovascular risk factors and remains highly prevalent and poorly controlled on an increasingly global level. As the authors point out, the current focus of clinical and public health strategies to control hypertension on the individual level is not adequate. The authors suggest that interventions that target spouses may, thus, be especially effective,” said Bethany Barone Gibbs, Ph.D., FAHA, an associate professor and chair of the department of epidemiology and
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European Commission calls for urgent action on antimicrobial resistance Is this the EU’s chance to address antibiotic resistance and leverage its role in global health? EU member states are trailing other countries when it comes to research into antimicrobial resistance, a growing public health problem that promises to unleash a “slow pandemic”, undoing some of the gains of modern medicine. Overuse of antibiotics has led to some bacteria developing resistance to current treatments, leading to a growing number of lethal infections with few new drugs in sight. In Europe, 33,000 people died as a result of drug-resistant bacterial infections in 2020, more than flu, tuberculosis and HIV/ AIDs combined, and the problem is predicted to get worse as resistance grows. Globally, drug-resistant bacteria are estimated to have killed 1.27 million people in 2019, more than malaria. The World Health Organisation estimates this could rise to 10 million by mid-century. A new report tracking global research into antimicrobial resistance finds that the US, China, UK, India and Australia are the leading nations in this research field, having published more papers since 2000 than any EU state. Germany is the most prolific EU country, with nearly 6,000 publications, which is around half the output of the UK or India. Iran has published more papers on the issue than France, followed by Canada, then Italy, according to The Antimicrobial Resistance Research Landscape and Emerging Solutions report from the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, a think tank based at Georgetown University in the US.
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There are no EU universities or research institutes in the top ten producers of antimicrobial resistance research. That table is led by Harvard University, followed by Oxford, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and John Hopkins University. That is despite the fact that the European Commission is one of the biggest global funders of antimicrobial resistance research, though no national EU member state funding agencies make the top ten. The field has been one of the key priorities for health research in the Horizon Europe framework programme. The report also tracks research into novel approaches to circumventing antimicrobial resistance, such as phage therapy, which uses viruses to target bacteria, or the synthesis of antimicrobial therapies not found in nature. Research into these areas is growing, but from a low base, and the report recommends policymakers boost spending on these new drug classes. Antimicrobial resistance is a particular priority for public funding agencies because the pharmaceutical industry has all but stopped developing new antibiotics. A key problem is that the antibiotics market in Europe and elsewhere is broken, because preserving effectiveness of new products requires measures to limit their use, while health technology assessments invariably weigh them against cheap generics, underestimating their value. “The clinical pipeline of new antimicrobials is dry,” the World Health Organisation warned in 2021.
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Stressed Jellyfish hint at dangers of deep-Sea mining Experimental mining plumes and ocean warming trigger stress in a deep pelagic jellyfish. An experiment to test how seabed mining could affect deep sea life has revealed unexpected impacts on common jellyfish. There is increasing interest in extracting precious minerals from what are called metallic “nodules” that naturally occur on the seabed. But marine scientists are concerned about the harm that could be caused. These researchers studied helmet jellyfish, using special tanks on a research vessel to simulate conditions created by mining activity. They found that the gelatinous animals were “highly sensitive” to plumes of sediment - a condition created to mimic how mining would stir up seabed deposits. Deep-sea mining has been proposed - and opposed - for decades. Mining companies and other supporters say mineral deposits on the seabed can be collected in less environmentally damaging ways than mining on land - and that it could help meet demand for materials for green technologies. But many marine scientists point out that there will be consequences for marine life that we do not yet understand. Much of the deep ocean is unexplored, so seabed mining opponents also point out that mining activity could cause irreparable damage to ecosystems we do not yet understand. So far, there has been little research into how it would affect the creatures that live their lives moving and floating through the water column, the vast area between the surface and the seabed.
One of the lead researchers on this study, Dr Helena Hauss from the Norwegian research institute Norce told EU Research that this was the impetus behind the new experiment. “The idea was to get hold of an organism that’s globally distributed, and that would be exposed to these conditions in the real world,” she explained. Because the jellyfish the team studied are so sensitive to light, the scientists worked at night. They captured about 60 animals and put them in temperature-controlled tanks, in a dark lab aboard their research ship. Marine scientist Vanessa Stenvers, from the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, explained that this simulated the debris that would be disturbed and released by underwater vehicles extracting minerals from the sea floor. “These are rotating tanks,” she said. “Essentially re-creating a situation where sediment is disturbed and doesn’t settle - it’s circulating through the water.” The experiment, which was part of the European iAtlantic project, revealed some unusual effects on the jellyfish: When their bodies became coated in sediment, they produced excessive amounts of a protective mucus. Doing that, the scientists explained, is energetically expensive, so the animals used energy they would otherwise be expending on feeding or movement. Samples taken from the animals also showed signs of what the researchers called “acute stress” including activation of genes that are associated with wound healing.
Photo by Marat Gilyadzinov on Unsplash
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Serotine bat (Eptesicus serotinus)
Bat wields huge heart-shaped penis like an arm during sex Researchers reveal that penetration does not occur when serotine bats mate; instead males use their penis to push a protective membrane out of the way. Scientists have found that a species of bat uses its penis in a unique way during reproduction, avoiding penetration completely. Researchers from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland studied the serotine bat, which has a penis about seven times longer than its partner’s vagina. The animal also has a heart-shaped head that is seven times wider than the vaginal opening. The size and shape in theory makes penetration impossible. However, the researchers say the bats use their oversized penises like an extra arm to push the female’s tail sheath out of the way. The unique use of the appendage allows the bats to engage in contact mating - a behaviour more commonly seen in how birds reproduce. First author Nicolas Fasel said: “By chance, we had observed that these bats have disproportionately long penises, and we were always wondering, ‘How does that work?’. “We thought maybe it’s like in the dog where the penis engorges after penetration so that they are locked together, or alternatively maybe they just couldn’t put it inside, but that type of copulation hasn’t been reported in mammals until now.” The researchers observed the unique mating ritual with cameras placed behind a grid the bats could climb on. Their studies found that during mating. the male bats grasped their partners by the nape and moved their pelvises in a probing fashion
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until they made contact with the female. At this point they remained still and held the females in a long embrace. These lasted some 53 minutes on average, with the longest incident stretching to 12.7 hours. After mating, the researchers observed the female bats’ abdomens appeared wet, suggesting the presence of semen. Further research is needed to confirm that sperm was transferred during events. The researchers suggested the male bats may have evolved their oversized penises in order to push aside the female bats’ tail membranes, which females may use to avoid sex. Professor Fasel suggested: “Bats use their tail membranes for flying and to capture the insects, and female bats also use them to cover their lower parts and protect themselves from males, but the males can then use these big penises to overcome the tail membrane and reach the vulva.” The researchers collaborated with a bat rehabilitation centre in Ukraine, which filmed mating pairs, and with Jan Jeucker, a bat enthusiast and citizen scientist who filmed hours of footage of serotine bats in a church attic in the Netherlands. Altogether, the team analysed 97 mating events - 93 from the Dutch church and four from the Ukrainian bat rehabilitation centre. The findings are published in the Current Biology journal.
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Figure 1: Enhancers are essential players for the regulation of gene expression. Enhancers are cis-regulatory elements that are located far from the genes they regulate (from few kilobases to Megabase distances). Upon cell differentiation, activation or stress response, they come close to their target genes and activate the upstream promoters to initiate gene transcription (arrows).
Cell differentiation Activation Stress response
kbs to Mb
Enhancer
Promoter
Studying enhancer function to understand human disease Enhancers play an important role in determining how genes are expressed in different cells in the body. The goal of the ENHPATHY consortium is to identify these enhancers and how they regulate gene expression. Knowledge about enhancer function may eventually lead to new treatments against diseases associated with enhancer dysfunction, as Dr Salvatore Spicuglia explains. In multicellular organisms, spatial and temporal regulation of gene expression is crucial for development, cellular differentiation, and homeostasis. Cell-type-specific regulation of gene expression is achieved through the interaction between regulatory elements that are either proximal (promoters) or distal (enhancers) to genes. Enhancers, which primarily function in a cell type-specific manner, play an important role in determining where and when genes are expressed in different cells in the body. These enhancers are short regions of DNA that contain binding sites for transcription factors which can increase the expression of nearby target genes. Enhancers can work in a synergistic way to direct a specific pattern of expression for a given gene and regulate different genes at different time points. “These factors help to determine how genes are expressed in the human body,” says Dr Salvatore Spicuglia, Director of Research at the TAGC Institute in Marseilleand scientific coordinator of ENHPATHY. Enhancers can be altered in different ways, such as through structural variation or point mutations, which can increase the susceptibility of the carrier to a particular condition. “Point mutations can lead to alterations in gene expression, which is a factor that contributes for instance to the development of malformations. There can also be an increased risk of complex genetic disorders, like diabetes, obesity and cancer,” explains Dr Spicuglia. “Point mutations in enhancers influence the way genes are expressed, and that will increase the risk of developing a disease.” 10
The major genetic cause of human disease has historically been thought to be mutations within coding genes; however, there has been a shift in perspective over recent years, with more attention now being paid to the role of the non-coding regions in the genome. This is a highly complex area of research, as identifying and characterizing mutations on DNA regulatory sequences is a technically challenging task. “Mutations on DNA regulatory sequences are difficult to interpret,” says Dr Spicuglia. These
ENHPATHY consortium As the coordinator of the EU-funded ENHPATHY project, Dr Spicuglia is part of a multi-disciplinary team investigating the molecular basis of these human enhanceropathies. The consortium operates as an Innovative Training Network (ITN), in which 15 Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) are investigating several different topics around the role of enhancers in health and disease. “We are training a new generation of ESRs with multdisciplinary skills, involving genetics, molecular biology and bioinformatics.
Point mutations at enhancers can lead to alterations in gene expression, which is a factor in the development of malformations for example. There can also be an increased risk of complex genetic disorders, like diabetes, obesity and cancer. mutations are known to be involved in certain genetic disorders, as well as many types of cancer. “We know that the oncogenes that are involved in cancer progression are driven mainly by dysregulation of regulatory elements, that drive very strong expression of these oncogenes in the cancer cell,” continues Dr Spicuglia. “They can also be involved in drug resistance, by inducing the expression of some genes that are known to be involved in these processes. These alterations in genes can lead to diseases called enhanceropathies.”
We want to understand how genes are regulated in normal individuals, and also in the pathological context,” outlines Dr Spicuglia. The aim of this research is to build a deeper understanding of the mechanisms underlying enhanceropathies, with ESRs pursuing research organised into three workpackages. “The first is about understanding the features that control enhancer activity, and how a specific mutation can alter the function,” says Dr Spicuglia. “The second focuses on unravelling how enhancers work within complex regulatory cascades. Enhancers can be located at different distances
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from their target genes, but a given gene can also be regulated by many different enhancers. The third is about identifying disease-causing enhancer alterations and setting the ground for the development of new enhancer-based diagnostic and therapeutic tools.” The question here is how enhancers work together to regulate a given gene, and why they don’t regulate other genes in their vicinity. A gene may be regulated by a specific enhancer in a given tissue, while in another tissue it may be regulated by a different enhancer, part of a complex overall picture. “It’s very important to try and identify all the enhancers that are active in the different tissues, but also in different pathological contexts,” says Dr Spicuglia. The latter topic is being addressed in the third workpackage (interview with Jorge Ferrer overleaf), which Dr Spicuglia says is focused more on disease. “We aim to identify enhancers and try to understand how they can affect the regulation of genes in certain disease contexts,” he explains. “One way of identifying enhancers is by looking for epigenetic marks on the genome. We can also use high-throughput reporter assays, where we essentially clone these pieces of DNA in front of a reporter gene, then we look in parallel at how these sequences will activate the reporter gene in different cell types or cellular contexts.” This will help researchers build a deeper picture of the relationship between enhancer
dysregulation and disease. With diseases like diabetes or obesity, mutations are already present in our DNA and differences in cells will accumulate over time; Dr Spicuglia says mutations in cancer cells are different. “There you have somatic mutations, which may arrive at a certain point in the lifecourse. These somatic mutations may alter enhancer function, leading to the over-expression of some genes that will then become oncogenes,” he explains. As part of his own role in the project, Dr Spicuglia is collaborating with the Advanced BioDesign company and a team led by Meritxel Alberich Jordà from the Institute of Molecular Genetics in Prague to co-supervise an ESR conducting research into acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a form of cancer that affects white blood cells. In this research, Dr Spicuglia and his colleagues are investigating the reasons behind resistance to certain drugs in AML patients, and significant progress has been made in this respect. “We have identified enhancers that get activated in cells when exposed to a drug used in chemotherapy, contributing to the development of resistance to the treatment,” he outlines. “Next, our aim is to prevent cells from developing resistance.” Researchers in the project are also exploring therapeutic possibilities against other enhanceropathies. For example, researchers are working on new approaches to treating thalassaemia, an inherited condition that affects the body’s ability to produce haemoglobin, a
protein that transports oxygen around the body. “The team led by Wouter de Laat at the Hubrecht Institute in the Netherlands is working on the beta-globin locus, which is often deleted or mutated in people with thalassaemia. Normally the foetal haemoglobin is active before it declines and then the adult haemoglobin starts to be expressed. In thalassaemia the adult haemoglobin gene is mutated and not properly expressed anymore,” explains Dr Spicuglia. Researchers are trying to modify the regulatory sequence of the foetal haemoglobin so that it can be expressed again, and Dr Spicuglia says early results are promising. “Our partners have shown that this approach works with primary cells. They can reposition the haemoglobin regulatory sequence, and rescue or recover haemoglobin expression,” he outlines. This is a good example of how a deeper understanding of regulatory mechanisms can lead to more effective therapeutic strategies, which is a central part of the project’s overall agenda. While a lot of attention in the project is focused on investigating the underlying mechanisms behind enhanceropathies, Dr Spicuglia and his colleagues also aim to translate their findings into new therapies and improved diagnostic techniques, work which is ongoing. “There is a lot of interest in building on this research to develop improved treatments against enhanceropathies, and a further project is planned,” he continues.
Figure 2: Enhancer dysfunction in disease. Mutations of genetic variations in non-coding regions such as enhancers will modify the efficiency of transcription factor binding and subsequence regulation of gene expression. This might results in either loss-of-function (reduced gene expression = less arrows) or gain-of- function (increased gene expression = more arrows). The altered gene expression will results in divers types of disease referred as enhanceropathies
Health
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Mutation or Genetic Variation
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loss of function
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Mendelian diseases Increased risk in complex genetic disorders Cancer Drug resistance
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gain of function
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ENHPATHY
Molecular Mechanisms of Diabetes
Molecular basis of human enhanceropathies
Project Objectives
ENHPATHY aims to identify key deregulated enhancers and regulatory mechanisms, and provide new biomarkers and therapeutic avenues for enhanceropathies. To achieve this goal, ENHPATHY has set up an innovative, integrated and disease-focused research programme that brings together European leaders in enhancer biology, computational biology and human genetics.
Project Funding
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 860002.
Project Partners
https://www.enhpathy.eu
Contact Details
Project Coordinator, Salvatore Spicuglia Inserm – Aix-Marseille University U1090 163, Avenue de Luminy 13288 MARSEILLE cedex 09 T: +33(0)4 91 82 87 E: salvatore.spicuglia@inserm.fr W: https://www.enhpathy.eu/ Zaugg JB, Sahlén P, Andersson R, Alberich-Jorda M, de Laat W, Deplancke B, Ferrer J, Mandrup S, Natoli G, Plewczynski D, Rada-Iglesias A, Spicuglia S. (2022) Current challenges in understanding the role of enhancers in disease. Nat Struct Mol Biol. 2022 Dec;29(12):1148-1158. doi: 10.1038/ s41594-022-00896-3
Salvatore Spicuglia
Jorge Ferrer
Professor Jorge Ferrer is coordinator of the Medical Genomics Transversal programme at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona. He leads workpackage 3 within the Enhpathy network, in which he is supervising research into the molecular mechanisms behind different forms of diabetes. EU Researcher: What is the main focus of your research?
Professor Jorge Ferrer: The major focus of our genetic studies is on less common single-gene disorders, so called monogenic or Mendelian disorders. Many patients with monogenic diabetes do not have mutations in DNA sequences of genes that encode for proteins. We are looking for mutations in enhancers and other types of regulatory elements that cause these sub-types of diabetes. For example, people born without a pancreas sometimes have a mutation in an enhancer that is necessary to switch on pancreas development. We’ve modelled these mutations in mice and human stem cells, and we’ve learned that this is a special enhancer, what we call a lead enhancer.
EUR: Does that enhancer function as part of a team in a way?
Professor Ferrer: Yes, there are clusters Salvatore Spicuglia is a Director of Research from the French National Institute of Medical Research (INSERM) and group leader in Functional Genomics at the Theories and Approaches of Genome Complexity laboratory (TAGC, Marseille). His team is devoted to genome-wide studies to decipher epigenetic and gene regulation mechanisms at play during normal and pathological contexts. The team has revealed novel type of cis-regulatory elements and shed lights on mechanisms involved in epigenetic deregulation in Leukemia. Jorge Ferrer leads a team that has revealed genetic mechanisms underlying different forms of diabetes. He is Senior Group Leader and Coordinator of The Computational Biology and Health Genomics Programme in the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, and CIBER de diabetes y enfermedades metabolicas, as well as Professor in Imperial College London.
of enhancers that regulate a single gene. Enhancer clusters have built-in redundancy – there are multiple enhancers, and if one fails then there are others which can be called up. However, a lead enhancer kicks in before all the rest and activates them, which makes that enhancer more essential. The question then is; how many other lead enhancers are there? There are different ways of addressing this question, such as experimentally with genome-editing tools and using screening permutations. We’re working
to identify rare mutations in enhancers that cause relatively rare forms of diabetes in young people.
EUR: Are you also conducting research into other forms of diabetes?
Professor Ferrer: Yes, we’re also looking at type-2 diabetes for example, the genetics of which is very different to the monogenic forms. Type-2 diabetes is a polygenic disease – hundreds of genetic variants have a tiny effect on an individual’s susceptibility for developing the disease. We’ve made maps of enhancers and pancreatic islets, looking to understand which genes are regulated by these variants, and how that affects susceptibility to type-2 diabetes. Some people have such a high number of these type-2 diabetes susceptibility variants that they develop the disease, even if they’re not particularly obese or sedentary, which are known to be important risk factors.
EUR: What implications does your research hold for the diagnosis of diabetes? Could your research lead to more precise, earlier diagnosis of diabetes?
Professor Ferrer: Yes. We’re combining information from enhancer variants and coding variants to try to develop diagnostics, particularly for young people with the disease. Genetic testing will play a key role in diagnosing diabetes in future.
ENHPATHY’s stage in Marseille: Event VI & EMBO workshop meeting, 15-20 October 2023.
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Investing in the future of the welfare state Social security was the core function of the welfare state when it was founded but today the focus has shifted to social investment, towards building people’s capabilities to participate in the knowledge economy, which will help sustain welfare provision for an ageing society. This topic is central to Professor Anton Hemerijck’s work as Principal Investigator of the WellSIre project. European
welfare states have seen continuous reforms in recent decades, as nations seek to adapt to the challenges of demographic ageing, technological innovation, and economic internationalization, alongside changing cultural and gender norms. Consequently, welfare states have moved beyond the traditional function of social security in the direction of social investment policies, such as widening access to childcare, longterm care and lifelong learning, as well as encouraging active ageing. These policies are typically designed to enable households to combine work and family life, and to boost employment rates and workforce productivity in today’s knowledge economy. The WellSIre project, led by PI Anton Hemerijck, Professor of Political Science and Sociology from the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, aims to explain both welfare state stability and change, as well as the effect of social investment reforms on citizens’ life chances and the overall economy. This is conducted by analysing how social investment is associated with employment and redistribution, by gender and age, at the country level (Layer 1); examining the individual- and household- level inferences on employment, poverty (Layer 2) and subjective wellbeing (Layer 3), with a focus on particular
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emphasizing the role of the EU in social investment policy diffusion (Layer 4), and the practices of social investment policy delivery at the sub-national level across post-industrial European cities (Layer 5).
Post-industrial society
risk groups and the availability of social investment provisions across critical lifecourse transitions. The manner and extent to which welfare provision has moved towards the social investment template varies considerably across countries. Making comparative sense of this transformative change, both in theoretical and empirical terms, the project addresses the comparative politics of social investment reforms across European countries,
At its core, the objective of 21st century social investment reform is to enhance people’s opportunities and their ability to deal with the ‘new’ social risks typical of post-industrial societies. Work, income, family, and lifecourse trajectories are central to the social investment paradigm, particularly with the gradual growth in employment rates among women since the 1990s and increasing marital instability. This calls for a more genderinclusive outlook that stresses equal access to employment as a prerequisite for female economic independence and child wellbeing. Based on his team’s research, Hemerijck has been able to confirm a ‘life-course multiplier’ mechanism, whereby social investment returns reaped over the life course generate a positive cycle of wellbeing returns, in terms of employment opportunities and gender equity, with a positive impact on intra- and intergenerational poverty mitigation. Fundamentally, an individual’s prospects of a healthy retirement correlate strongly with whether they enjoyed a happy childhood (see Figure 1 overleaf).
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At the micro-level this multiplier suggests that social investments - from early childhood on - improve material household wellbeing (employment and income) and help mitigate social risks later in life through opportunities to gain new skills, helping to ease (gendered) labour-market transitions. At the macro-level, the multiplier suggests a variety of societal benefits, ranging from improved productivity, higher employment, and reduced gender gaps to lower poverty, longer careers, and later retirement. These are all crucial to economic growth and the fiscal sustainability of the welfare state in today’s knowledge economies, which need to generate the wealth to support growing numbers of elderly people. Central to the financial sustainability of the modern welfare state is the number and productivity of current and future employees and taxpayers. To overcome the unwarranted opposition in the academic discourse between passive, ex post compensatory social policies and active, ex ante capacitating social policies, Hemerijck has developed a new twentyfirst-century conception of the welfare state comprising three core functions. The first is about fostering the lifelong development of human capital, helping people develop the skills they need to thrive in today’s knowledge economy, a function which Hemerijck describes as ‘stock’. These cover the education and training designed to improve people’s capacity to work. The second is easing the ‘flow’ of family life-course and labour market transitions in a gender-balanced fashion, helping people balance work with family life and other commitments over their lives. The third is about sustaining inclusive social protection ‘buffers’, a prerequisite for those (temporarily) out of work. The evidence shows that policies promoting ‘stock’ and ‘flow’ functions contribute to ensuring high levels of employment, helping to sustain the ‘carrying capacity’
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FIGURE 1. The social investment life course multiplier at a micro and macro level. Adapted from source: A. Hemerijck, S. Ronchi, I.Plavgo, Social investment as a conceptual framework for analysing well-being returns and reforms in 21st century welfare states, Socio-Economic Review, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwac035
of welfare state ‘buffers’. “We see that with the Scandinavian countries, and to some extent the Netherlands and Germany,” says Professor Hemerijck. Countries that combine a strong emphasis on social investment and inclusive buffers are generally in a good position to recover quickly following an economic crisis by minimizing its impact on poverty and unemployment. Over time, researchers observe a relatively coherent trend of increasing spending on capacitybuilding services in combination with social protection cost-containment, without per se undermining inclusive income protection. While the evidence at the macro-level of the economy (Layer 1) is strong, the individuallevel findings (Layer 2) show that education and active policies have a positive impact on employment rates, together with a positive
knock-on effect of poverty mitigation across the life course, which is also apparent among hard-to-reach groups. Also, more effective ‘stock’ and ‘flow’ policy complementarities are associated with higher employment rates among mothers and lower levels of child poverty. With respect to working-age individuals the EU evidence suggests that education, active labour market policies, and day-care services reinforce each other’s effectiveness in promoting employment and fighting poverty across one’s life course, particularly for single mothers in Germany. Moving from material to subjective wellbeing, work on Layer 3 suggests that higher life satisfaction is achieved in countries with social investment policies designed to support families and encourage lifelong learning. “Young couples experience positive
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wellbeing when they know that there is good quality and affordable childcare in the vicinity,” says Professor Hemerijck. Processes of social investment reform across various welfare states studied in Layer 4 are analysed by identifying the political drivers and institutional factors shaping reform sequences across ten countries and is centred around three key empirical questions. “First, have buffers become more inclusive? Second, have stocks become more lifelongoriented? Third, have the flows become more gender balanced?” outlines Professor Hemerijck. “We have a database on all the relevant reforms. We are busy assessing
governing and reforming the welfare state as all EU member states are grappling with economic and demographic challenges. Over his career Professor Hemerijck has worked closely with policymakers. As a prominent member of the EU High-Level Group on the Future of Social Protection and the Welfare State, many of Hemerijck’s insights have found their way into the HLG report that was launched by the European Commission in February of this year. With the acceleration of demographic aging, Professor Hemerijck believes it is a sine qua non not to leave anybody behind, but rather invest in the skills people need
WellSIRe Wellbeing Returns on Social Investment Recalibration
Project Objectives
The focus of the welfare state has shifted over recent years towards an increased emphasis on social investment, towards building people’s capacity to participate in the modern knowledge economy. This encompasses equipping people with the skills they need for the modern workplace, developing policies that help people stay in work during transitions in their lives such as having a child, and redistributing resources to support people who fall out of work. Researchers in the WellSIRE project are using a conceptual framework of ‘stocks’, ‘flow’s and ‘buffers’ to analyse the social investment paradigm and assess its effectiveness in supporting and enhancing wellbeing in several European states.
Project Funding
In order to pay for popular social protection, it’s imperative to invest in children and families and the social service backbone of advanced economies. where countries have been moving and why, considering their political systems, social partnership and administrative traditions.” The project’s agenda also includes investigating the delivery of capacitating services on the local level in several urban centres. These are post-industrial cities, which Professor Hemerijck describes as laboratories of social investment. “Post-industrial cities tend to attract sizable numbers of highly skilled people, which may crowd out more vulnerable households. But low-skilled workers are still needed to provide essential services, as we saw during the pandemic,” explains Professor Hemerijck. In addition, many post-industrial cities like Amsterdam, Stockholm, Vienna, and Warsaw are governed by progressive citygovernments, and as such they seek to tame perverse exclusionary dynamics.
Reforming the welfare state The findings of the WellSIRe project hold great value for policymakers charged with
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in the knowledge economy. “It’s not that social protection isn’t important, but to finance it you need a lot of people working in the economy. You need to reap the returns on social investment to pay for social protection in knowledge economies and ageing societies,” he explains. Not so long ago, Europe’s political elites were wary about the future of the welfare state, questioning the impact of social spending on competitiveness. Today, we know better. What matters is not the quantity or ratio of social spending, relative to GDP, but its quality, composition, and efficacy. In many countries, a social investment-oriented welfare state helps boost competitiveness based on a normative ethos of inclusive and capacitating, or ‘stepping-stone’ solidarity. “The greater the focus on social investment, the greater the revenue base produced by people in work. That means there are more resources to buffer well and work on antipoverty programmes,” Hemerijck concludes.
This project, which will cover the period 9/20208/2025, has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement number 882276).
Project Participants
Research Fellows: Ilze Plavgo • Johannes Karremans • Heta Pöyliö • David Bokhorst Ph.D. Researchers: Luca Cigna • Manuel Alvariño Vázquez • Leon Küstemann
Contact Details
Principal Investigator, Prof. Anton Hemerijck Department of Political and Social Sciences European University Institute (EUI) Via dei Roccettini 50014 San Domenico di Fiesole (FI) Italy T: [+39] 055 4685 442 E: anton.hemerijck@eui.eu W: https://wellsire.eui.eu/ Hemerijck, Ronchi, Plavgo (Socio-Economic Review). This article is also the reference to the life-course multiplier figure in the review. The book, forthcoming: Anton Hemerijck and Manos Matsaganis, Who’s Afraid of the Welfare State Now?, Oxford University Press, 2024.
Prof. Anton Hemerijck, DPhil
Anton Hemerijck is Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the European University Institute in Fiesole, Italy. He holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford, and regularly advises the European Commission on social policy, social investment and the welfare state.
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New methods to study single proteins The phenomenon of dielectrophoresis holds great potential as a means of manipulating different particles and cells, yet there are gaps in understanding when it comes to applying it on very small scales. We spoke to Dr Sergii Pud about his work in developing a label-free tool to study proteins and molecules, and how it could lead to deeper insights into protein dielectrophoresis. A dielectric material develops a dipole when placed in an electric field, causing electrons to shift within it. When the dipole is placed in a sufficiently non-uniform electric field, different parts of it will experience different forces, and as a result the dipole will start moving in the direction of the gradient of the electric field. “This effect is called dielectrophoresis,” explains Dr Sergii Pud, an Assistant Professor in the lab-ona-chip group at the University of Twente. In his research, Dr Pud is now developing new tools and methods to study this effect, which could open up new possibilities in separating and manipulating different types of particles. “Dielectrophoresis has been used extensively in manipulating ensembles of nanoparticles, including sub-micron sized particles as well as proteins,” outlines Dr Pud. “There has however not been a lot of research into applying dielectrophoresis with single entities.”
Rediscovering dielectrophoresis
3D render of the electrodes
This topic is at the core of Dr Pud’s research, inspired to a large degree by the earlier development of a label-free optical methodology called iSCAT (Interferometric Scattering Microscopy), which allows scientists
Chip with electrodes made in MESA+ cleanroom.
to effectively see single protein molecules free of labels and assess their size. The iSCAT methodology doesn’t provide much time to study the dynamics of these molecules, so Dr Pud aims to extend the observation time by arresting the motion of these molecules using dielectrophoresis. “We use cleanroom nanotechnology to make pointy tips that are only 20 nanometres apart. The nanogap between two gold electrodes creates an electric field to trap proteins and particles,” he says. A field somewhere between 106 and 107 volts per meter is thought to be sufficient to trap a single globular protein. Moreover,
using these electrodes, researchers also aim to develop the ability to hold it in the same position and release it. “Once a particle arrives, our setup is able to detect that something is in the trap, and act upon it,” continues Dr Pud. Dielectrophoretic force is very specific to the electric properties of the trapped object, therefore measuring this force can yield a lot of valuable new information about the particles. Measuring the DEP force is challenging, as this force is very local to the gap between the electrodes. “That will tell us something about the size of the particle and its polarisability or embedded dipole moment,” outlines Dr Pud. “We gradually attenuate the trapping electric field parameters to the point when the particle leaves the trap. This includes amplitude and the frequency of the field. Particles and proteins interact with an electric field differently at different frequencies. We can make a spectra, which will be a signature of a protein.” This goal was part of the initial vision of the project, but as research has progressed Dr Pud says it has become apparent that the methods can also be used in other ways as well. “The methodology we develop is promising to study how proteins bind to small molecules detecting proteins binding small molecules,
Actuation of polystyrene nanoparticles using dielectropherisis
Schematic layout of the single-particle dielectrophoretic trapping experiment. Fluorescent polystyrene beads of ~45 nm diameter are attracted, trapped and actuated in the gap. The time traces on the bottom right represent examples of fluorescence signals from particles trapped with actuation at 1000Hz and at 250Hz and the upper part of the panel shows corresponding Fourier spectra of the optical signal.
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REDISCOVERY OF DIELECTROPHORESIS Rediscovery of dielectrophoresis for labelfree manipulation and interrogation of single protein molecules SEM image of the electrodes and the COMSOL simulation of the electric field in the electrodes.
something that is very hard to measure with labelled techniques,” he continues. “A lot of protein-small molecule interactions don’t significantly change either the volume of the protein or its configuration, yet this binding can change the dipole moment.” The project team are working to develop the methods to a level where these types of changes of the dipole moment can be seen by researchers, and to further improve their sensitivity. Currently Dr Pud is preparing a paper on trapping polystyrene particles 30 nanometres in size, then the plan is to study proteins, which are an order of magnitude
proteins, which is a major challenge. The problem here is that dielectrophoresis was initially theoretically described for rather large objects, and the standard equation (the Clausius-Mossotti relation) used to calculate the dielectric constant does not fully reflect the situation with respect to smaller objects. “The situation when you place a submicronsized particle in solution is highly complex. The particle is surrounded by a cloud of ions and is slightly charged, so it’s forming an extra dipole, on top of its polarisability,” explains Dr Pud. The existing equation still works to a degree on micron-sized particles, but Dr
Dielectrophoretic force is very specific to the electric properties of the trapped object, therefore measuring this force can yield a lot of valuable new information about the proteins and their dynamics. This is the focus of our lab’s research. smaller. “Most proteins are in the range of 3-10 nanometres in size,” he says. The expectation is that the gap between electrodes will need to be close to the size of the protein being studied if it is to be immobilised effectively. “We’re confident we can reach a gap of 10 nanometres, and that could be sufficient to trap proteins,” continues Dr Pud. “A PhD student in the project will focus solely on proteins, and another is dedicating a lot of time to improving the trapping strategies.”
Protein measurements This research is currently ongoing, with Dr Pud and his colleagues in the project hoping to gain meaningful measurements from
Pud says the effect of this cloud of ions is increasingly apparent as you move towards smaller objects. “This cloud plays a huge role. We can’t really think of polarisability for proteins, because they already have their own dipole moment on top of that,” he continues. As researchers apply more sophisticated techniques to study protein dielectrophoresis, Dr Pud believes it will be possible to learn more about how it works, opening up wider possibilities in sorting and manipulating proteins. The project’s research represents an important contribution in this respect. “We’re building a system that will be able to capture how a single protein interacts with an electric field,” says Dr Pud.
Project Objectives
This project is aimed at creating a new tool for label-free studying of protein physical parameters in real time. In a nutshell we plan studying protein molecules one by one through engaging them in a game of molecular pingpong and observing their behaviour in it.
Project Funding
The project has been funded by NWO Veni initiative and through internal funding of EEMCS Faculty (University of Twente).
Project Partners
This project is a collaboration between BIOS Lab-on-a-chip group and group of Michel Orrit (Leiden University).
Contact Details
Project Coordinator, Dr. Sergii Pud University of Twente Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science Carré C2409 P.O. Box 217 7500 AE Enschede The Netherlands T: +31 5 348 93590 E: s.pud@utwente.nl W: https://www.utwente.nl/en/eemcs/ bios/research/Lab-on-a-chip%20 tools%20for%20nanobiology/Protein%20 actuation%20spectroscopy/ Dr. Sergii Pud
Dr. Sergii Pud is an Assistant Professor at the BIOS (Lab-on-a-Chip) group, University of Twente, concentrating on the intersection of biological research with nanotechnology. His expertise lies in developing nanodevices for meticulous single-cell and single-molecule studies. With a primary focus on understanding of protein interactions with electric fields, his work is directed towards refining our knowledge of biological systems and propelling biomedicine forward with power of nanotechnology.
Project team.
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New insights into difficulties in skill acquisition autism versus dyslexia
Is the cerebellum - the source of slow-update in autism?
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Our predictions about how physical and social situations are based on our past experiences, both recent and more distant, and different populations integrate these experiences differently across time. Researchers in the NeuroCompSkill project are exploring the idea that people with autism update their predictions differently to those with dyslexia, as Professor Merav Ahissar explains. Many of the conversations we have in our everyday lives develop along broadly familiar lines, and often we are able to anticipate the utterances of family and friends before the words even leave their mouths. This is the result of our ability to form predictions about how social situations are likely to develop, based on integration of information from past experiences. “This is an automatic, implicit process. We integrate things that have happened recently, as well as information about things that have happened over longer timeframes,” says Merav Ahissar, Professor of Brain Sciences at ELSC Centre of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Evidence suggests that highfunctioning autistic people put less weight on relatively recent events in this process, which limits their ability to form predictions and communicate effectively in social situations, which require fast online updating of predictions at the sub-second level.
NeuroCompSkill project As Principal Investigator of the ERC-backed NeuroCompSkill project, Professor Ahissar is now exploring how autistic people absorb information from the surrounding environment in daily life, and contrasting this group with dyslexic populations. While people with autism are slow in setting predictions, people with dyslexia experience a rapid decay of their implicit memory, which then affects their proficiency with their native language. “This affects reading and writing skills, and the way that people put phrases together,” explains Professor Ahissar. Together with her colleagues in the project, Professor Ahissar is now contrasting the slow updating of autism with
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the fast decay of dyslexia, based on neural evidence from studies of a phenomenon called neural adaptation. “If you present a particular stimulus to an individual, and shortly afterwards you present the same stimulus again, the subsequent response will be smaller than the first. This shows that
the neurons have adapted,” she says. “We think of this as a form of implicit memory since it is evoked by external stimuli rather than by intentional recall. If you present a very different stimulus, you will not see this reduction in response, indicating stimulusspecificity of this memory.” As long as the active system that responds to stimuli remembers the first event, then the response will be smaller when it is repeated, to a point where there may not be any response at all in some people. The aim for Professor Ahissar now is to use this phenomenon to investigate how long this implicit memory is active in different populations. “We measure how long this neural adaptation lasts in the general population, in people with autism, and in people with dyslexia,” she outlines. Part of this research involves recording responses to stimuli from the auditory cortex of the skull, and researchers have found variations in the adaptation time across different populations. “In people with dyslexia the adaptation is short, and the repetition of a stimuli within a short period can be like an entirely new event,” continues Professor Ahissar. “We can also see that this adaptation is correlated with updating. People with dyslexia update their predictions quickly, whereas people with autism update more slowly.” A further aspect of the project’s research involves investigating people’s motor updating. It is still an open question whether perceptual predictions and motor plans are updated together. One would think they should be coordinated, so that if a target moves, people’s reaching plans will need to be updated online. To test whether updating motor plans is also slowed in autism - perhaps explaining the nature of motor difficulties that many people
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with autism experience - Ahissar’s group tested how people synchronise their own movements with external stimuli. To simplify the experimental question, they measured synchronizing finger tapping to an external metronome with a fixed beat of two beats per second. Autistic people tend to have difficulties in synchronising, a topic that Professor Ahissar is exploring in the project. “We can measure whether you tap in an accurate manner, and the extent to which there is any variability, namely – precise manner” she explains. “We study the sources of this variability and find that it is due to an online problem in online error correction. When they do not synchronize well, their correction is very partial.” The project team are also conducting research into a task that can be performed across different species, and is known to be very challenging for people with autism. In this task people are asked to place a finger on
mechanisms behind these updating processes are not particularly well understood in the general population. Working with large populations will help researchers build a fuller picture in this respect, and shed new light on differences in sub-populations. “We need to understand variability in the general population,” acknowledges Professor Ahissar. It’s now possible to use internet-based assessments to gather data on large numbers of people, yet people may not necessarily behave in the same way at home as they would in the lab, an issue Professor Ahissar is taking into account in her research. “We’re trying to replicate the mental context of the lab, and we have established reliable protocols,” she says. “In the first round, we saw that people who had previous experience of participating in lab-based research produced the same results at home, but people who are less familiar with the lab environment did not.”
If you present a particular stimulus to an individual, and shortly afterwards you present the same stimulus again, the subsequent response will be smaller than the first. This shows that the neurons have adapted. an iPad, then to move it towards a target upon a certain signal. “When the light changes to green you can start moving. The light turns off pretty rapidly, so you have to move to the target quickly,” outlines Professor Ahissar. Occasionally the target jumps to a different position, and researchers are able to measure how quickly people are able to update their direction of movement, with clear results. “People have to update their motor perception to the new position very quickly. We consistently find that people with autism are slower in updating their movement direction,” says Professor Ahissar. “The question then arises; what is it that is difficult for them to update? Is it due to reduced intake of external stimuli, due to slower integration of these stimuli, or to slower changes in motor commands? This needs further study,” she says.
Autism and dyslexia This research is focused primarily on specific sub-populations, namely people with autism and people with dyslexia, yet the brain
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Researchers are tweaking the protocols to get study participants in the right frame of mind, so that results gained from online assessments are of the same quality and rigour as those from the lab-based work. This will then allow researchers to work with much bigger populations, while Professor Ahissar is also interested in working with young people, although some changes will need to be made. “It’s not obvious how these tasks would be performed by younger people, and we anticipate that we will need to make certain adaptations and modifications to keep children interested,” she says. This research could lead to a deeper understanding of how we acquire communication skills, which holds wider relevance to teaching. “This could eventually lead to a better teaching environment. It’s about understanding when you should be explicit, what kind of information needs to be repeated, and when intervals should be introduced. You might want to provide more temporally spaced conditions in some circumstances,” outlines Professor Ahissar.
NEUROCOMPSKILL Learning to talk: A neuro-computational look at verbal and non-verbal communication skills
Project Objectives
Researchers in the NeuroCompSkill project is using a neurocomputational framework to investigate how people with autism integrate information from past experiences and comparing them with dyslexic populations. This research will shed new light on how people acquire certain social skills and open up new insights into developmental disorders.
Project Funding
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) - EXCELLENT SCIENCE research and innovation programme under Grant agreement ID: 833694.
Contact Details
Project Coordinator, Professor Merav Ahissar The Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences The Suzanne and Charles Goodman Brain Sciences Building, Level 1, Room 1103, Edmond J. Safra Campus, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 9190401 T: +972-2-5883409 E: msmerava@gmail.com : @MeravAhissar W: https://elsc.huji.ac.il/people-directory/ faculty-members/merav-ahissar/
Professor Merav Ahissar
Merav Ahissar is Professor of Brain Sciences at the ELSC Centre of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The main focus of her lab is on understanding the neurocognitive mechanisms that underlie skill acquisition. She conducts research into both dyslexia and autism, and is interested in the dynamics of using recent history in autism.
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Bringing climate forecasts down to earth Climate change is causing shifts in historical weather patterns in the Horn of Africa, negatively affecting agriculture and pastoralism across the region. Researchers in the DOWN2EARTH project are developing new models and tools that will deliver information to governments, organizations, and people on the ground, helping them adapt to the impacts of climate change, as Professor Michael Singer explains. The Horn of Africa is highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and even a slight tip in the balance towards making the region drier can lead to many complications for human society. Regular rainfall is essential to the production of agricultural crops, which is an important part of the economy in the Horn of Africa drylands (HAD), and people in the region have organised their economic activities around established patterns. “Rainfall patterns vary across the region, but in general there’s a rainy season sometime between October and December, called the short rains. There’s another season between March and May, called the long rains,” outlines Professor Michael Singer from Cardiff University, Principal Investigator on DOWN2EARTH. Climate change, driven by global emissions from developed countries rather than by countries of the HAD, is disrupting these rainfall patterns and negatively affecting lives and livelihoods in the region. “The anomalous heating up of sea surface temperatures in distant oceans drives particular weather patterns, that yield extremely high or low rainfall in the HAD,” explains Prof Singer. “These changes
in climatic extremes and the increase in associated hazards can have significant impacts on people that rely on water sources, vegetation, and crops for their lives and livelihoods.”
DOWN2EARTH project This issue lies at the heart of Prof Singer’s work as the Principal Investigator of the DOWN2EARTH project, an EU-funded initiative bringing together partners from across Europe and East Africa. The wider aim of the project is to help people and communities in the Horn of Africa adapt to the impacts of climate change in part by delivering information that is directly relevant to their circumstances, beyond the more general picture provided by climate forecasts. “Forecasts tell us about rainfall or temperature, but we rarely have direct information from those forecasts about whether there will be water in a well, or enough soil moisture to support crop growth,” says Prof Singer. The idea in the project is to take these climate forecasts and essentially bring them down to Earth (where the project gets
its name), helping people in the region – including subsistence farmers and pastoralists raising livestock – to adapt to the impact of climate change. “We aim to use our novel impact-focused modelling, and a deeper understanding of what’s happening at both the land surface and below it, to improve our understanding of the problems that people face,” outlines Prof Singer. A lot of effort has been devoted to community-based work to understand peoples needs and the strategies they apply in their daily lives, providing a solid foundation for the project’s wider agenda. “We can then look to develop better tools, strategies, and policies for adaptation across the region,” explains Prof Singer. A new, high-resolution hydrological model has been developed in the project, which is now being operated on a regional scale, spanning Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya and surrounding areas. A lot of work has been devoted to developing the model so that it reflects the specific circumstances of dryland environments and provides detailed outputs that support decision making at different levels in society. Prof Singer says It’s already installed, ready for operation at the IGAD
DOWN2EARTH team visiting pastoralist ranch in drylands Kenya. Photo Credit: Michael Singer
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Pastoralist woman in northern Kenya carrying fuelwood. Photo Credit: Diana Njeru
Climate Prediction and Applications Centre (ICPAC) in Nairobi, an international body supported by the World Meteorological Organization to provide a range of climate services to multiple stakeholders in 11+ countries across East Africa. “ICPAC will embed the model within their seasonal forecasting workflow, so that it becomes part of the regular system that they use to provide impact-based warnings to different member countries in response to key rainfall seasons,” he outlines. The insights generated by the model can also be sent to individuals and communities via other channels, making sure that it reaches the people likely to be affected by climate change. “We are creating application programming interfaces (APIs)
that connect our modelling algorithms to different app services,” explains Prof Singer. “That could be a Whatsapp group, chatbot, or a web-based geographical platform such as that which ICPAC is already using; there are lots of different possibilities. Our aim is to create a decision support system that is agnostic to the end delivery mechanism, which is where APIs come in. They allow endusers to request precisely what information they want.” The idea from DOWN2EARTH is to give people access to information that they didn’t previously, which could then support more informed decision-making and help them adapt to climate hazards (e.g., floods and droughts) and climate change. For example, if
Livestock drinking water from a water hole on a pastoralist ranch in drylands Kenya. Photo Credit: Toby Pitts
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people in an agricultural community learn that their local area is likely to be a lot drier than normal in the upcoming season, then they can make different decisions about when and what crops to plant. “People make those kinds of decisions on a regular basis, but without a clear expectation about conditions of soil moisture, for example. We’re trying to provide more information to support these life and livelihood decisions,” says Prof Singer. This could have a wider impact in the region, for example in helping overcome socio-cultural-religious divisions between communities and encourage collaboration. “If more communities have access to the same information, then they can start to interact with one another and share that information for the benefit of the region as a whole,” continues Prof Singer. “We want to move away from a situation where people tend to hoard information, and get to a point where most people have access to similar information, but maybe in different forms specific to their local needs.”
Power of technology There may be some people and communities in the region who prefer to rely on more traditional forecasters who use indigenous ways (e.g. reading goat intestines) to predict the upcoming seasonal rains. But many community members, especially in the younger generation, recognise the power and utility of technology, and are perhaps more likely to make use of the project’s modelling outputs in addition to traditional methods. The modelling system created by DOWN2EARTH doesn’t generate absolute predictions about what conditions to expect, but rather provides more nuanced outputs about the conditions in the upcoming season working in collaboration with regional seasonal forecasts. “We’re not saying; ‘your well will be dry.’ Rather we’re saying; ‘locally, there’s a higher probability that your well will be dry in the next few months compared to a historical baseline’,” explains Prof Singer. The goal is to present this information in a way that’s useful for people on the ground, and Prof Singer says progress is being made. “We’re getting very close to that point of provision. We now have a full working version of our regional modelling system for the HAD, and we’ve set it up so that we can start exploring what the outputs mean for people,” he outlines. “We can then decide how best to disseminate this critical information in a tailored way to a range of potential stakeholders. We are also researching how best to display the information so it is understandable for climate action to different audiences.” Project researchers are working to deliver sustained benefits via capacity building and new climate adaptation policy frameworks
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© ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
DOWN2EARTH Translation of climate information into multilevel decision support for social adaptation, policy development, and resilience to water scarcity in the Horn of Africa Drylands
Project Objectives
Our project activities are aimed at improving regional climate services delivery, promoting adaptation to climate change for HAD through new and enhanced decision-support tools, capacity building, citizen science, information dissemination to improve multilevel decision making, expansion of data networks, and climate change adaptation policy implementation.
Project Funding
DOWN2EARTH has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 869550. Women fetching water from a hand-dug well along a river in drylands Kenya. Credit: Diana Njeru
to people in the region. This is particularly challenging in the case of Somalia, which still faces significant governmental and political instability, yet Prof Singer and the project team are working very closely with their colleagues in the country. “We’re trying to build capacity there by investing in their infrastructure, for example in new automatic weather stations that have filled in gaps within the existing network. We are working closely with Somali government officials to take ownership of the station infrastructure and the data that’s been collected, and to share
trying to incorporate their perspectives and needs to all the DOWN2EARTH project work. ICPAC will have a major role to play in this respect, and a delegation from the organisation have travelled to the UK for training on how to use the new regional hydrological model and generate the sorts of outputs that are required for decision support. Subsequently, several members of the project team have travelled to Nairobi, Kenya to embed the model in ICPACs forecasting workflow. “We have now installed the model at ICPAC in late
Climate change is impacting weather patterns, yielding much higher or lower rainfall in the Horn of Africa drylands, and creating associated climatic hazards. These changes can have significant effects on people who plan their lives and livelihoods around key rainy seasons. that data more broadly amongst more users,” he says. The project team is also working with radio stations and journalists in the region to provide training and mentoring and heighten awareness of climate change. “BBC Media Action developed a massive open online course (MOOC) to train journalists around the world in how to report on climate issues and climate change, and we have supported the provision of that course in Somali, so that new climate-focused reporting will reach millions more people,” says Prof Singer. The project team is also working with rural communities in Ethiopia, Somaliland, and Kenya to understand their information needs and access, and researchers are now
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November, and train local people operating it on the technical aspects. Next year we’ll hold a full-blown training session for ICPAC staff on both how to run the model, and also how to interpret its outputs for early warning purposes,” outlines Prof Singer. “We plan to scale that up and do something similar in Ethiopia, while we will also invite other external stakeholders for training. It’s an open-source modelling system so the idea is that it can be installed anywhere, in any institution with the capacity to run it and use it once trained.” These innovations are expected to build new capacity in the HAD to adapt to climate in an increasingly uncertain world.
Project Partners
The DOWN2EARTH project is led by a consortium of 14 institutional partners from 8 countries and is coordinated by Cardiff University.
Contact Details
Project Coordinator, Michael Singer School of Earth and Environmental Science Cardiff University Cardiff Wales CF10 3AT UK T: +44 29208 76257 E: down2earth@cardiff.ac.uk W: http://down2earthproject.org/ Michael Singer
Michael Singer is Lead Principal Investigator on DOWN2EARTH. He is also Deputy Director of the Water Research Institute and Professor in the School of Earth & Environmental Sciences at Cardiff University, as well as Researcher in the Earth Research Institute at University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). He received his PhD in Environmental Science and Management from UCSB. He is a Certified Professional Hydrologist American Institute of Hydrology.
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The Fight Against Invasive Species in Europe Invasive alien species are infiltrating habitats, causing damage to native life and equilibriums in nature. A UN report shows the severity of the escalating challenge. It is likely the problem will get worse before it can improve but there are emerging strategies to fight it, that Europe is adopting.
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n invasive species can be plants, animals, insects or microorganisms that are non-native to an area, and which are introduced to a location, causing it harm. They have several impacts that alarm scientists. Invasive species damage ecosystems, sometimes irreversibly. They might eat native species or outcompete them for food and living space. They can drastically change the habitat and food chain for native animals or fauna, which may starve because of a depletion of food. They may bring diseases with them that spread to native species and kill them off. An invasive species can affect us more directly by damaging our agriculture and forestry with an associated economic cost. Similarly, aquatic creatures can alter the physical and chemical composition of bodies of water negatively. These wide-ranging alien invasive species are transported via human activity like trade and travel and through modes of transport either unwittingly or deliberately. For example, shipping can inadvertently deliver hitchhiking invasive species. Sometimes, specific animals are introduced to help manage a pest but the experiment does not go to plan. An example can be seen with Cane toads when they were introduced to Australia from Hawaii in 1935. It was hoped they would feed on beetles that were destroying
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By Richard Forsyth sugar cane crops but the project backfired. The toads bred out of control and as they were venomous, any animal eating them died. The toad eventually had a destructive impact on the ecosystem. Another scenario for an alien species invading a geographical area occurs when people obtain exotic pets or plants, which they eventually release from containment into gardens, waterways or wilderness, where they breed and multiply in number. In short, there are many opportunities for invasive species to expand their population and destroy or upset the native nature they encounter. Countries in the EU are particularly vulnerable to invasive species due to their connected geography and freedom of movement between countries. Despite this, it was only a few years ago that the EU acted to create legislation to tackle alien invasive species. It was in 2014 that the Regulation on Invasive Alien Species (IAS Regulation) came into effect. The regulation provides a framework for preventing, managing, and mitigating the impacts of invasive alien species in the EU. For example, invasive species are listed and tracked. More than 14,000 invasive alien species are reported by EASIN, Europe Alien Species Information Network, including animals, plants, fungi and microorganisms. In addition, there is a ban on the sale, possession and transport of certain invasive species and there are coordinated risk assessments and management plans between countries.
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On-going threats Many invasive species are robustly established in the EU. A notable example is the Asian tiger mosquito, which is thought to have caught a ride on cargo ships, and which can spread diseases like Zeka and Dengue. There’s also the American mink which was brought to Europe for fur farming in the 1930s but now runs wild and poses a threat to waterfowl and native mink. There is the signal crayfish which outcompetes with the native European crayfish, and which is now at home in 25 countries from Finland to Greece. Invasive plants too, create problems, like common ragweed, Himalayan balsam and Japanese knotweed. Common ragweed has become rife in 30 European countries and ranked the 12th worst exotic plant in Europe, in terms of socioeconomic and environmental impact. It is seemingly unstoppable and chokes out other plant life. Himalayan balsam is known to lead to riverbank erosion and in turn flooding and distracts pollinators away from native plants. Japanese knotweed grows and spreads so rapidly that it weakens buildings and infrastructure that need costly interventions. Japanese knotweed causes an estimated 205 million euros of damage a year in England, Scotland and Wales alone.
These are just three examples amongst a broad spectrum of destructive plants that have arrived and spread throughout Europe. New threats with invasive species are escalating, often fuelled by the changes brought on by climate change, making unwelcome species more at home, from warmer climates. Fire ants are one of the latest major concerns for Europe. In 2023 a study in the scientific journal Current Biology stated that 88 red fire ant nests were discovered across a five hectares area in Syracuse in Sicily, Italy. This destructive, invasive non-native species is likely to spread throughout Europe. The red fire ant is considered one of the most destructive invasive species. It destroys crops, infests electrical items including cars and attacks native plants and animals. In terms of damages, it’s considered the fifth most costly invasive species on Earth, spreading with the help of humans from the US, Mexico, Australia and the Caribbean. Invasive threats are not confined to land. Over 1,000 non-indigenous species have been identified in The Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea. All kinds of unusual animals including invasive jellyfish, prawns and various marine species that are not normally prevalent are being
Countries in the EU are particularly vulnerable to invasive species due to their connected geography and freedom of movement between countries.
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Fire ants are one of the latest major concerns for Europe. In 2023 a study in the scientific journal Current Biology stated that 88 red fire ant nests were discovered across a five hectares area in Syracuse in Sicily, Italy. reported according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. It may trigger dramatic and negative changes in delicate ecosystems and the fishing stocks supporting our food security.
The rise of invasive species The scale and impact of the threat is only recently becoming apparent. A team of 86 researchers from 49 countries put together The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystems Servies (IPBES) Assessment Report on Invasive Species and their Control, or the Invasive Species Report for short. This was an assessment for The UN Environmental Programme. They measured the impacts of 3,500 harmful invasive species, tallying the overall cost to $423 billion a year, stating that invading species were a key development to 60% of plant and animal extinctions. The report concluded that the ‘severe global threat posed by invasive alien species is underappreciated, underestimated and often unacknowledged.’ With 31% of the invasion impact relevant in Europe, it’s a problem the EU cannot afford to ignore. The majority of negative impacts, 75%, were on land in forests, woods and agricultural areas whilst there was also a very heavy hit on 25% of the world’s islands, where alien plants outnumber native ones, threatening extinctions. Around the world, the spread and impact of invasive species are increasing and are predicted to rise significantly in the future. As we lose multiple unique native species to overwhelming, newly introduced ones, we lose a tool in the battle against climate change. Biodiversity is heralded as one of the strongest defences against climate change, as it absorbs around half of manmade emissions that are heating up the planet.
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Taking action Strategies to tackle the challenge include prevention with strict border controls, public awareness, and rapid response to eradicate invasive species before they establish a foothold. A novel and cost-effective approach is to rely on Citizen Science. Using apps and online platforms, citizens can report sightings of invasive species so authorities can track and respond effectively. Many invasive species are prohibited by law from being introduced to countries, and those charged with checking at entry points into countries are vigilant for the most serious that are listed. In the EU there are specifically 88 invasive species that are most strictly regulated, including 47 animal species of Union concern and 41 plant species which pose the most ominous threat. Scientists are looking at all kinds of measures, some drastic, to tackle invasive species and the damage they cause. The first, most obvious, and most arduous way to tackle invasive species is to physically exterminate them, plant by plant, animal by animal, where they are creating chaos and threatening native species. That takes a dogged determination but there are organisations willing to take up the challenge. One such organisation is Wildlife Management International, based in New Zealand’s South Island. The team for this organisation has been protecting natural ecosystems for over 30 years and eradicating invasive mice, rats, feral cats and rabbits on over 20 islands around the world. This is a programme of culling with traps and poison, to promote predator-free zones to protect native endangered species, especially birds. Targeting and killing invasive species to protect established but dwindling native animals is a brutal but definitive solution and it works.
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Alternatively, there are schemes for focusing on natural habitats to try and maintain and expand them. The EU is invested in a biodiversity strategy with deliverables for 2030, to restore degraded ecosystems. Part of this strategy is about enlarging areas of nature and natural habitats for species needing protection. A similar and welcome strategy by the EU is to attempt to restore ecosystems already impacted by invasive species to favour conditions for the native species. There are innovative methods to tackle invasive species where scientists could be said to adopt a ‘fighting fire with fire’ approach by introducing or re-introducing species that will do the heavy lifting and restore natural habitats to make them uncomfortable for invading species and favour native species. It can be a risky and unpredictable game, as previously highlighted by the Cane toad example, but there are successes with this approach as a mechanism to help nature rebuild and heal, especially to reverse the damage of invasive species. A case in point in Europe is seen where beavers are being introduced to 26 countries. Sometimes referred to as ‘nature’s engineers’, beavers have the innate ability to restore wilderness by gnawing down trees and building dams. Beavers were on the peripherals of extinction when their numbers dwindled to a sparse 1,200 animals in the 20th Century but with a concerted effort to increase their population, they have bounced back and with their return, they’ve been landscaping environments to nature’s broadest advantage.
Beavers create dams which in turn create ponds and wetlands, irrigating land and capturing carbon. They fell trees to allow light through the forest canopy which helps lower layers of fauna proliferate. In short, their presence encourages all kinds of wildlife from insects to birds and from plants to fish. Known as a keystone species, introducing the Beaver is proposed to reverse the impacts of invading species and support native ones. They’re effectively ‘preparing the ground’ for increased biodiversity, to make it more challenging for one species to dominate. Successful ecosystems rely on having a rich biodiversity. Bison, vultures, lynx, wild horses and Spanish ibex are also being reintroduced as part of some rewilding projects in Europe, chosen because of the benefits they bring to nature and countering the destruction brought by unwelcome invasive species. Despite having strategies, it’s evident that it is nearly impossible to prevent some invasive species from finding a way to cross borders and make a mess of established natural systems. Second only to direct destruction, invasive species are a main cause of biodiversity and natural habitat loss. The trajectory of the rise and impact of invasive species is dramatic and complex. Fighting these invasions will require manpower, resources and environmental understanding to mitigate threats in a meaningful way. Furthermore, as a global problem, it will take a global response to deal with emergent threats.
Known as a keystone species, introducing the beaver is proposed to reverse the impacts of invading species and support native ones. They’re effectively ‘preparing the ground’ for increased biodiversity, to make it more challenging for one species to dominate.
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FlowPhotoChem platform for sustainable chemical production
Current methods of producing platform chemicals like ethylene lead to the creation of a significant amount of pollution. Researchers in the FlowPhotoChem project are working to develop a new, more sustainable method of producing platform chemicals using carbon dioxide and concentrated sunlight, as Dr Pau Farràs explains. Platform chemicals are the initial chemical compounds used to produce a variety of different materials in the manufacturing industry, and are used, for example, in the production of plastics and cosmetics. The vast majority of these platform chemicals are currently produced using fossil fuels, yet with the sustainability of existing methods an increasingly prominent concern, research into alternatives is widely recognised as a major priority. As the coordinator of the EU-funded FlowPhotoChem project, Dr Pau Farràs is working to develop a new, more environmentally friendly method of producing these largely carbon-based platform chemicals. “Instead of taking carbon from oil and gas, we’re looking to use carbon dioxide (CO2) from industrial processes or the atmosphere,” he explains. The project is focused at this stage on producing a platform chemical called ethylene, which is currently produced by essentially destroying ethanol. “When we remove water from ethanol, we produce ethylene,” outlines Dr Farràs. “Ethylene is used to produce different types of polyethylene, one of the world’s most commonly produced plastics.”
FlowPhotoChem project Researchers in the project are now working to develop three modular flow reactors, in
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order to deliver a more sustainable approach to producing platform chemicals. “Firstly, we aim to show that the system can produce ethylene, then we want to prove that the system is sufficiently flexible to produce a wide range of products,” says Dr Farràs. The overall system itself consists of three technologies; a photoelectrochemical reactor (PEC), a photocatalytic reactor (PC) and an electrochemical reactor (EC). “We can target different types of products with each of these reactors. This flexibility means that we can widen the variety of products we can produce even further by combining the reactors in different ways,” continues Dr Farràs. The first step however is to demonstrate the ability to produce ethylene, using concentrated sunlight, water and CO2. One part of this work involves developing solar concentrators, which function in a similar way to a hall of mirrors. “The concentrators essentially focus sunlight onto a single point. You can concentrate the intensity of the light to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the design,” outlines Dr Farràs. The sunlight is converted into energy, driving chemical reactions which are then used to produce ethylene. “We envisaged three different pathways to producing ethylene. The most feasible at the moment is to use the PEC reactor to split water into oxygen and hydrogen.
Then the PC reactor will combine CO2 and hydrogen to produce carbon monoxide (CO), which is fed into the EC reactor to generate ethylene,” continues Dr Farràs. Much of the project’s attention is centered on developing new, more durable catalysts for these three different reactors. Computational chemistry techniques are being used to design effective catalysts, an approach which Dr Farràs says can help speed up development. “If we know what characteristics and structure we want from a material, then we can use simulations to identify the catalysts with the most potential,” he explains. Another major challenge being addressed in the project is combining reactor testing with material design. “We want to see how the whole reactor works, using only simulations and models,” says Dr Farràs. “One of our partners in the project is working on computational models of different materials. Calculations of different parameters can then be fed into a model of the reactor so we can see what’s going on with that material, right down from the atomistic scale.”
Sustainable development goals The wider backdrop to this research is the aim of producing commercially important chemicals in a more environmentally friendly way, in line with European climate targets and
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sustainable development goals. Alongside developing the technology, researchers in the project are also considering its environmental impact. “We are conducting life cycle analysis of the different components, looking at the environmental impact of the catalysts, membranes and the reactors,” outlines Dr Farràs. This spans everything from the sourcing of material precursors, right through to the eventual recycling of a material. “The analysis is very comprehensive. We have been working on different types of catalysts, and our partners are able to identify which have a smaller environmental footprint,” stresses Dr Farràs. “Recyclability is also important. These factors are considered in the process of selecting the best candidates.”
implications for the chemicals industry, and Dr Farràs is keen to heighten awareness of the technology, including in Africa. “We have a partner in Uganda. Last year we organised a workshop there with several stakeholders, to explain what the project is about,” he says. A follow-up workshop is planned for next year in the Ugandan capital Kampala at which Dr Farràs hopes to be able to highlight results from tests on the integrated system and describe the potential of the project’s technology in terms of meeting the growing demand for ethylene, hydrogen and other chemicals in Africa in a sustainable way. The PEC and PC reactors, in particular, could play an important role in enabling the distributed production of chemicals, believes Dr Farràs. “Large-scale
We aim to show that the FlowPhotoChem system can produce ethylene, then we want to prove that the system is sufficiently flexible to produce a wide range of products. The ultimate goal is to bring the reactors to practical application and transform the way chemicals are produced, with researchers aiming to produce a demonstrator of the integrated system by the end of the project at Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 5. With the project set to conclude in 2024, researchers are now working to demonstrate the effectiveness of the reactors and to validate scaled-up versions. The PC reactor is currently the focus of the work. “Once we have shown that the PC reactor is working as we expect, we can start looking to integrate the three reactors and conduct the testing. We plan to bring the different elements together and show that we can produce ethylene,” continues Dr Farràs. This work holds important
EPFL solar concentrator
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production facilities and infrastructure require large investments. The technology that we are developing is designed for small- or mediumscale distributed production,” he explains. These attributes are well-suited to the African continent, and Dr Farràs is keen to explore the technology’s wider potential as a means to use solar energy to produce valuable chemicals using a flexible, integrated system of reactors. In addition to ethylene, the team also see huge potential for generating other products with the reactors, like green hydrogen and oxygen. “The technology we are developing can become a game-changer in regions with abundant solar resources, where the electricity network is underdeveloped and distributed production manufacturing has a clear competitive advantage,” he says.
FlowPhotoChem Heterogenous Photo(electro)catalysis in Flow using Concentrated Light: modular integrated designs for the production of useful chemicals
Project Objectives
The FlowPhotoChem project aims to develop new, more sustainable methods of manufacturing chemicals using CO2 and sunlight, potentially replacing the fossil fuels used in production today. This work involves combining several different innovations, with the project bringing together leading research and development teams from across Europe.
Project Funding
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 862453.
Project Partners
The FlowPhotoChem project has a total of 15 partners from 8 different countries. https://www.flowphotochem.eu/partners/
Contact Details
Project Coordinator, Dr Pau Farràs, University of Galway, University Road, Galway, Ireland H91 TK33 T: +353 91 524411 E: pau.farras@universityofgalway.ie W: https://www.flowphotochem.eu/
Dr Pau Farràs
Photo by Gerard Reilly.
Dr Pau Farràs is an Associate Professor in Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Galway, where he created the ChemLight group, focusing on the preparation of molecules and materials capable to drive light-driven reactions for the production of fuels and chemicals. The group studies nanomaterials, organometallic complexes and hybrid systems for their application in energy and health.
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Resetting Processes for Economic Development in the Arctic
Sulitjelma Copper Mine, Credit: Gustav Sigeman.
JUSTNORTH is an EU-funded Climate Action Project creating processes for ethical decision-making for Arctic resources. Dr Corine Wood-Donnelly explains the project’s broad stakeholder engagement to resolve critical issues in developing Arctic economies. Within an Arctic region including Russia, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Greenland, Iceland, Canada and the United States, the JUSTNORTH research spans an enormous, diverse geography. The project is specifically a response to the EU’s requirement to evaluate the viability of sustainable economic development in the Arctic. The EU has a vested interest in the resources of the Arctic, to meet raw materials and sustainability goals, so defining the most appropriate and sustainable approach has become critical for planning ahead. The area north of the Arctic Circle is an important part of the world. It’s a barometer of climate change and it is changing at pace. It remains rich in natural resources
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and consequently is of great interest to a wide variety of organisations. The Arctic has tremendous appeal as one of the great resource basins of the world to industrial developers, investors, and governments but also existing communities living in the Arctic. Critical raw materials and energy resources continue to attract attention toward Arctic development. While holding a long-time attraction to adventurers, the Arctic is becoming one of the most attractive new adventure destinations for cruises. There is potential for harvesting biotic resources - timber and marine life and whilst prospecting organisations see all this abundant development potential, the impacts on ecosystems, local communities
and competing Arctic stakeholders can be left out of decision-making that impacts their daily lives. Within these countries inside the Arctic Circle, the communities that live in them and investors from outside the region, all compete for land use to exploit or manage its valuable commodities and landscapes. There needs to be more consideration of sustainable development and respect for the sensitivities and needs of those living in the region. Often decision-making about development in this region of the world revolves around technical feasibility and profitability alone, leaving the ethics of how that development affects local communities residing in the Arctic, firmly in the shadows.
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Whilst there is an increase in protests about development in the Arctic by indigenous people and also political and scientific groups, there is also much disquiet and irritation about local impacts, a silent resentment toward injustices and the way decisions about land use, laws and developments are made in the first place. There are many pressing issues, such as how ecosystems are impacted by overfishing and mining without proper governance, how pollution comes with industrial processes, how shipping increases with tourism, how to maintain biodiversity under threat, managing land and protecting vulnerable local communities and how some developments compromise values and cultural identity. The conflicts, injustices and disagreements that occur require more robust methodologies and new frameworks, including procedural and legal ones, to support fairer, balanced involvement of all those relevant to the debate, so all the voices have an opportunity to be heard. “We need to have justice as the foundation for the decision-making about the development of economic activities in the Arctic for the future,” explained WoodDonnelly. “We would bring different aspects of distributional justice, recognitional justice, procedural justice and also hopefully a cosmopolitan overview of justice, which brings the global top-down perspective for justice because we’re all stakeholders to the Arctic.”
A history of development From the trade in whale oil from the 1830s to the modern-day extraction of hydrocarbons, the Arctic has long been perceived and exploited as an environment ripe with economic opportunities. Wood-Donnelly explained: “There has been a long history of development in
Photograph by Corine Wood-Donnelly.
the Arctic. Take, for example, the Hudson Bay Company in Canada with fur trading, and the LKAB iron ore mining company in Sweden, which is over a hundred years old. You see the way the infrastructure has been brought into the landscape, often without consultation or permission from the people who live there. There are conflicts between communities because you have competing land use issues, and you have different types of economies trying to operate in the same space using different resources within that space. In one place you could have forestry, tourism, reindeer-herding and that same space is used in these different ways by different groups.”
Research on the ground The JUSTNORTH researchers sought to work hand-in-glove with a wide range of stakeholders to understand the challenges, value systems and injustices in decisionmaking in the Arctic region. Seventeen case studies were created to evaluate various economic activities. “For each case study, each researcher was expected to conduct at least twenty interviews with stakeholders, yet some did fifty or more and all-in-all we worked with more than four hundred stakeholders and rightholders.
“Our research methodology was co-production for engagement with communities, so this was not just desk-based research. We needed to speak and work directly with local communities. We worked together with stakeholders to inform and achieve the results of the project. With many injustices that we found, we had no previous indication that these existed, and it inspired tweaks for barriers to be removed.” For the purposes of organisation, stakeholders were inserted into categories depending on whether they were community, industry actors, government actors or voluntary sector. Within each of the categories were a vast range of subgroups, for example, government would include everything from a Mayor’s Office to an EU Member state representative, businesses could be local small businesses to major corporations and volunteers could mean local charities to global charities. Community included both stakeholders and rightsholders of people living in the Arctic. From the findings of these engagements, recommendations were made for policies and practices aimed to create more inclusive, balanced decisionmaking processes in the Arctic’s sustainable economic development.
New structures for just decision-making After the lengthy research process, a series of recommendations were created. The recommendations revealed many concerns that may have been overlooked. For example, rural communities wanted more investment in transport links, which were unevenly distributed and centred in urban areas. There was ‘ire’ towards some renewable energy projects, where consultation and Photograph by Corine Wood-Donnelly.
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JUSTNORTH Towards a Just, Ethical, and Sustainable Arctic
Project Objectives
JUSTNORTH explores the diverse perspectives and values that stakeholders can bring to decision-making in the Arctic economies. The overall aim is to support ethical and just decisions in terms of development, fairness and justice for the many different Arctic stakeholders. Based on a series of in-depth case studies and research the EU-funded project provides recommendations for municipalities, regional and national governments, and the EU.
Project Funding
This project has received funding from the European Union`s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under agreement No 869327.
Project Partners
https://justnorth.eu/about-partners/
Contact Details
Project Coordinator, Corine Wood-Donnelly Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Faculty Uppsala University T: +46 (0) 18 471 00 00 E: c.wood-donnelly@nord.no W: https://justnorth.eu
Corine Wood-Donnelly
Corine Wood-Donnelly is Associate Professor of Social Sciences with expertise in International Relations & the High North at Nord University. She is also a researcher at Uppsala University where she is the Scientific Coordinator for the EU-funded project JUSTNORTH (GA 869327). Wood-Donnelly is an interdisciplinary scholar and specialises in governance and policy of the Arctic region. She has published on iceberg sovereignty, justice in Arctic Governance Structures as well as Science Diplomacy and the role of the environment in normative rulemaking for the Arctic.
involvement, and also permissions would have been valuable prior to development. “Some recommendations will be targeted towards municipalities, giving them the opportunity to say ‘no’ to development proposals or ask for preferable conditions to be in place before proceeding. Recommendations will also be for national-level legislation, including things we initially didn’t expect to find that could be embedded in labour law, tax law and import and export law. These are often little tweaks that change things.” The project recognised a need for more transparency and openness, less compartmentalisation in institutions and more communication, for instance via roundtable meetings. Many issues have
and value systems, providing a method to determine the viability of economic activities in the Arctic and to create pathways for clear ethic-based decision-making, for sustainable and just development. To communicate the project’s aims and impacts accessibly to a wide audience, a documentary film was created, which can be shared with conferences, forums and theatres across Europe. “I like the idea of doing something a bit different to reach an audience. There are a number of messages that we’re trying to highlight in the documentary. One is the fact that the Arctic is a region that’s impacted by climate change and development must be understood in the context of climate change.
We would bring different aspects of distributional justice, recognitional justice, procedural justice and also hopefully a cosmopolitan overview of justice, which brings the global top-down perspective for justice because we’re all stakeholders to the Arctic. become amplified with a lack of interaction, communication and understanding between all the relevant stakeholders and so addressing this will be advantageous. A benefit of the project is comparing ideas from different countries to share and duplicate the ones that work well. For example, one recommendation for bolstering energy security is the promotion of community-based ownership structures for local energy, where energy is owned by a small community, which can feed into the energy security of Europe. With this concept, the impact would be farreaching, adding benefits for a local community whilst driving wider sustainability aims. In addition, the JUSTscore negotiation tool was created by the project. This is designed to reconcile multiple intersecting ethics
We’re trying to bring out recognition of the legacies of colonialism, and the impact that this has on people’s ability to trust decision-making processes, together with the lack of trust that exists for procedural justice. We’re trying to highlight issues of competing land use and distributional justice; we are trying to identify the harms and the benefits of economic development. We’re asking how does the Arctic fit into the context of globalised processes?” As climate change affects the Arctic Circle, the Arctic could also hold some of the answers to climate mitigating actions and whilst economic development is inevitable in the region, the specifics of how it is done, who benefits, and the wider impacts of these actions can now be worked out via just and ethical processes.
Photograph by Corine Wood-Donnelly.
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EU Research
A Taste of Things to Come with Sea Kelp The Norwegian Research Council project SusKelpFood addresses the challenges of producing kelp for Nordic and European food industries. Project Leader, Dr Pierrick Stévant, Ph.D and Dr Arne Duinker, Ph.D explain their research, undertaken to bolster the efficient production of safe, nutritious and tasty seaweed food products. Farming kelps (i.e. brown seaweeds) has many advantages to growing land-based crops and has been identified as a food source that can match the requirements of at least four EU sustainability goals, including responsible consumption and production, life below the water, industry innovation & infrastructure, and climate action. “It can be cultivated with virtually none of the inputs used for agriculture like fertiliser, chemicals, soil and fresh water, relying on sunlight for growth,” explained Stévant. Seaweed has the potential to be a costeffective, nutritious and abundant food source and as a benefit, it absorbs carbon dioxide and can boost marine biodiversity. “There are more than enough good arguments for
farming kelp,” adds Duinker. “It is an amazing food choice in terms of the flavours and the functionality and the kinds of nutrients you get from these plants.”
From the Ocean to the Plate The growing processes are relatively straightforward. Young kelp plantlets are first grown in indoor facilities under controlled conditions before being seeded on strings. They are then deployed at sea in autumn to be harvested in late spring. “The growth starts to increase around late March when the light comes, and from there until the end of April there is about two meters of growth. It grows very quickly. The focus of our project starts when the kelp biomass is harvested,” described Stévant. The harvesting occurs in a relatively short, and intensively busy period, as the production of several hundred tonnes of seaweed can be completed in just a few days. However, kelp production needs to explore new and more efficient conservation and processing methods to ensure commercial success as a mainstream food source for Europe. Seaweed, especially kelps, has long been known as a widespread food source in Asian countries like China and Japan, as a staple ingredient in diets. Although
experience and know-how from Asian kelp production should be drawn, this model may not be replicable in Europe. In Asia the kelp species produced are different, the labour costs can be far cheaper, and sun exposure is often more predictable and reliable for drying out the seaweed naturally to preserve it, post-harvest. It is necessary to analyse how much energy is used to process and preserve the seaweed as it impacts overall sustainability. “As drying large quantities of seaweed may be energy-intensive, the end-product is not so sustainable anymore. Our job is to look at different processes for the stabilisation of kelps that use less energy and yield high-quality products, in terms of nutrients, food safety and flavour. “Unlike Asian countries, sun-drying is not a viable option in Northern Europe. Fermentation is an interesting alternative to drying for the preservation of large quantities of kelp with virtually no or minimal energy input to the process. But optimised and reliable methods are not established yet,” said Stévant. “We investigate different technologies and test them. We look at the product from the perspective of sustainability, so when using a method, we estimate how much energy is being used in the process, what materials are employed during the process, and how long these materials last.”
Farmed sugar kelp. Credit: Arne Duinker.
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Kelp crisp on fish. Credit: Arne Duinker.
“This is the starting point of the project where we discussed how can we reduce iodine without losing all the nutrients,” continued Duinker. “Normally, you would boil the kelp in fresh water so there is no iodine left but there are no nutrients either. We had a student that used warm seawater and it looked promising. In the first season of the project, this method was implemented in the whole production chain. Put the kelp in moderately warm seawater and the iodine goes out quickly and you retain most of the other nutrients much better than with previous methods.”
Planning for Change
A Practical Project The researchers are working hand-in-glove with the major Scandinavian food company, Orkla Foods together with the leading kelp producers in Norway to turn kelp from a relatively niche product into a widespread, pervasive food source. “We’ve established a good synergy between researchers with expertise in kelp processing, food science and engineering, food safety, sensory science and sustainability evaluation, and industrial partners with practical knowledge of commercial food and kelp production and processing systems,” said Stévant. The research focuses on improving and innovating post-harvest processes like fermentation and pre-treatments, to keep the kelp products safe, nutritious and tasty. We are studying the two main kelp species cultivated in Norway i.e. sugar kelp and winged kelp. Processing techniques are tested and refined at the laboratory and our industrial partners’ facilities to reduce the levels of potentially toxic elements, such as iodine which is high in kelps. We also investigate potential risks linked to seafood allergens. There is a need to understand how much of a problem these potentially harmful substances are, in the context of including kelps in food products with a broad distribution, and if these concerns are overstated. “The levels as an ingredient are not a problem,” states Duinker. “The species that we are working with are not particularly high in heavy metals compared to other seaweeds. I’ve been writing a few reports on the content of the contaminants in seaweed. If you compare high-mineral seaweeds to other highmineral foods like blue mussels, for example, the levels of heavy metals are the same and we never worry about using blue mussels. This is
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one of the challenges we are facing with such a new type of food, people are sceptical and it’s easy to misunderstand things.” Excessive iodine intake may have adverse effects on thyroid gland function. Reducing the iodine level of kelps during processing has been a priority for the past years. This is easily done during production but kelp can lose a lot of its nutritional benefits during the process. “We know that the iodine content can be quite high, so we have been researching methods to reduce it. At the same time, we want to keep the good stuff in the seaweeds and retain the best of the nutritional compounds,” confirmed Duinker. In this regard, the project found early successes by investigating new methods. Scientists from the team found a new technique that not only worked but was swiftly adopted by some commercial partners, to become an integral process for kelp food production. Researcher Dr. Susan Løvstad Holdt (Technical University of Denmark) and industrial partner Dr. Linn Anne Bjelland Brunborg (Orkla Foods) with sugar kelp. Credit: Pierrick Stévant.
Another challenge is the market for kelp food products has to be developed at the same time as developing the production. Essentially, the industry should only scale up in line with market growth. It’s clear that in Nordic and European countries kelp food products are a promising segment with great potential but if and when these products become a household ingredient, innovative solutions will be needed to secure commercial success. Market conditions can change quickly, so research and commercial interests will need to bend and adapt to the directions and speeds of change. For kelp to be used as an ingredient it will need to be effectively marketed and attractive for Europeans to buy it. One key to such success is to get large and trusted food industry companies to implement kelp as an ingredient in their products. Part of the project deals with analysing sensory properties and categorising flavouractive substances as well as to gain insight into the consumer perception of kelpcontaining food products. Throughout sensory evaluation sessions researchers have systematically described kelp ingredients from sugar kelp and winged kelp in terms of flavour, odour and texture and how these attributes are affected by post-harvest processing methods. “We also evaluate shelf-life and identify key flavour compounds which are important steps in optimising the processing conditions to yield products with attractive flavours.” Seaweed can be a versatile food; noodles can be made from it, it can be served with crackers or fish soup and there’s potentially a wide range of food products and recipes that can make sea kelp attractive for consumers as an ingredient. The umami or taste enhancing effects of adding seaweed is very interesting both for the food industry and for cooking at home. “It’s salty, you can get this crunchiness – you can fry it, boil it!” enthused Duinker.
EU Research
SUSKELPFOOD
Researcher team from NOFIMA during harvest of sugar kelp cultivated on ropes. Credit: NOFIMA.
SUSTAINABLE INGREDIENTS FROM CULTIVATED KELP TO THE FOOD INDUSTRY
Project Objectives
Kelp aquaculture is a sustainable way of producing biomass for food. SusKelpFood is testing and developing energy-efficient processes to conserve and prepare kelps, reducing the iodine and heavy metal content and at the same time preserving nutrients, other bioactive substances and flavour. Enabling the use in large-scale food applications.
Project Funding
Funded by The Research Council of Norway. Reference number: 326803
Project Partners
https://www.suskelpfood.com/consortium/
Contact Details
Regardless, the trajectory of Europe’s food security means that aquaculture offers an attractive solution for feeding a population in a rapidly changing climate, that will further impact agriculture and land resources over time. Duinker concludes: “We need more food
culinary applications. The first results from our consumer study show that there is a positive attitude and that respondents are willing to pay a little extra for kelp food provided that the kelp ingredient adds value to the product in terms of health benefits, flavour or sustainability.
“There are more than enough good arguments for farming kelp. It is an amazing food choice in terms of the flavours and the functionality and the kinds of nutrients you get from these plants.” from the oceans, and to get enough food it needs to be in the bottom of the food chain, so the algae or the bivalves. In the long term, this is something we should do more of in Europe, as a way of getting more food out of the ocean to sustain a growing population. On the other hand, western consumers are relatively unfamiliar with kelp and need to be educated in using this type of ingredient in everyday
However, there is a strong need for more information about these new foods. “There is a hunger problem in the world but there is also this hidden hunger which is a lack of nutrients in food.Seaweeds can provide a lot of minerals for long-term health in large parts of the world where there are problems with malnutrition. There is a long way to go but it’s important to start.”
Dr. Pierrick Stévant, Ph.D Møreforsking AS Borgundvegen 340 6009 ÅLESUND T: +47 48 12 95 49 E: info@suskelpfood.com W: https://www.suskelpfood.com Dr. Pierrick Stévant, Ph.D Dr. Arne Duinker, Ph.D
Dr. Pierrick Stévant holds a PhD in marine biotechnology and food science specialized in seaweed processing and its effect on quality to food applications. He has worked with seaweed-related topics since 2012 and has experience with seaweed cultivation. Dr. Arne Duinker holds a PhD in bivalve physiology and has been working with seafood since the late 90’s, with a wide variety of species including bivalves, crustaceans and fish. This work has included seaweed since 2014 with several project with the seaweed industry focusing on seaweed as food.
Cod fillet served with leeks and sugar kelp. Credit: Pierrick Stévant.
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Sustainable packaging with seaweed Plastic has long been used in food packaging, but with concern growing over its ecological and environmental impact, the hunt is on for alternatives. Researchers in the SeaweedPack project are using the polysaccharides present in seaweed to develop new, flexible, home-compostable films for food packaging, as Dr Adriana Kyvik explains. There is widespread concern over the environmental impact of conventional plastic food packaging, much of which cannot be recycled, prompting an intense focus on research into alternatives. One possible source of materials for food packaging is seaweed, a topic that Dr Adriana Kyvik and her colleagues at the Norwegian green tech company B’ZEOS are exploring. “Our expertise lies in the use of seaweed as a biomass source. We are looking to develop alternatives to fossil-fuel based materials such as plastic for packaging applications,” she outlines. Seaweed is a rich source of polysaccharides – or crude extracts – which can then be used to create new, more sustainable packaging. “One polysaccharide found in certain types of seaweed is alginate for example, while others are agar and carrageenan,” says Dr Kyvik. “These polysaccharides are present in different types of brown or red seaweed.”
Featured - Seaweed extract, B’ZEOS pellets & flexible film.
SeaweedPack project As part of her work in the SeaweedPack project, an initiative funded under the Eurostars programme, Dr Kyvik is looking to use these seaweed extracts to develop new, compostable films for food packaging. Seaweed is widely cultivated for a variety of different applications, including biofuels, food and agriculture, with Dr Kyvik looking to make use of waste streams after highvalue compounds have been extracted. “We want to use the waste streams for packaging, a relatively low-value application,” she explains. Researchers in the project are taking polysaccharides supplied by industrial partners, primarily alginate, and blending them with other additives and ingredients, with the aim of developing formulations which can then be extruded into film. “This
Cast Extrusion of B’ZEOS seaweed based films at pilot scale.
is quite a complex process,” continues Dr Kyvik. “Our expertise lies in creating blends of pellets, which are then extruded into different formats – some can be extruded into films, others are intended to be rigid.” This depends to a large degree on the nature of the formulation, with researchers exploring different possibilities and assessing their effectiveness in food packaging. Part of this work involves looking into biochemistry and biopolymer chemistry, investigating different additives and how they behave in combination with others. “We are working to develop a set of formulations, each with a different set of combinations of additives, designed to be suitable for certain types of films and products,” says Dr Kyvik. A wide variety of different polymers are currently used in the plastics industry for various products, and Dr Kyvik expects things will be similar with biobased alternatives. “We are putting together different types of formulations for different types of products,” she says. “Our top priority is to develop a home-compostable film. This film will follow a different end-of-life path to conventional plastic.” The project’s agenda also includes research into the processing step, with researchers looking at how different manufacturing processing parameters are affected by the presence of a particular material. The aim is to develop a formulation that is stable, capable of working effectively in packaging food, and is also extrudable. “We have to find the right combination of plasticisers so that the material will not be too brittle,” says Dr Kyvik. “So we fine-tune the formulation, while we also look at the processing. What temperature profile would we have to use? What type of machine configuration? What type of screw geometry?”
Pellet Extrusion at pilot scale.
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EU Research
SEAWEEDPACK
Alternative Researchers don’t have vast amounts of data to build on here, as this is a relatively new area of investigation, and there is still much to learn about seaweed-based polysaccharides. However, Dr Kyvik believes that seaweed is a potentially rich source of biopolymers for food packaging, and she is keen to collaborate with industry to turn this research into practical application. “We’re very alive to what industry requires. We want to offer practical solutions to companies,” she stresses. Alongside investigating different formulations and manufacturing processes, researchers are also working with manufacturers and retailers to understand their needs and the types of constraints they are operating under. “Heat sealability is a big issue within the retail industry for packaging applications. These kinds of issues are a very important consideration in terms of product development with these types of materials,” stresses Dr Kyvik.
Seaweed based compostable packaging for food applications
Project Objectives
Pellet Extrusion/Extrusion compounding for seaweed based filaments at pilot scale.
B’ZEOS is a green-tech company that uses the regenerative seaweed biomass to develop a cost efficient and sustainable alternative to conventional plastic packaging across various industries. B’ZEOS is developing innovative seaweedbased pellets that can be converted into final packaging materials using current manufacturing technologies. Their unique plug & play approach seamlessly integrates into existing production lines, resulting in a 100% biodegradable and homecompostable final product.
of plastic packaging and consumer pressure will however intensify demands on the commercial sector to look at alternatives, believes Dr Kyvik. “We believe that regulations and requirements from final consumers will mean that companies in future will be more willing to pay a higher price for these types of materials,” she outlines.
Project Funding
Our expertise lies in the use of seaweed as a biomass source. We’re are looking to develop alternatives to fossilfuel based materials such as plastic for packaging applications.
Contact Details
There is wider commercial interest in this research, with businesses under pressure to find alternatives to plastic as concern grows over its impact on the environment. However, plastic is well established as a packaging solution and is also fairly cheap, so Dr Kyvik and her colleagues need to consider the cost-effectiveness of their formulations. “Cost-efficiency comes with speed – if we can produce the films faster then we’re going to be able to reduce the price. That’s the challenge at pilot scale – to be able to deliver a product at a price that customers are willing to pay,” she says. Growing awareness of the impact
The films will be rigorously tested in terms of parameters like their mechanical properties and home compostability, with the goal of bringing them to the food industry soon after the conclusion of the project, representing an important contribution to the fight against plastic waste. Most of the flexible packaging currently in use is not recycled, which is where Dr Kyvik believes the project’s work can make a difference. “We are developing films that can be used for certain types of food products, and at the end of their life they can be discarded into organic waste,” she says.
We have been granted Eurostars funding from the EurekaNetwork to develop our SeaweedPack R&D project together with our partner Moses Productos, with an allocated budget of 1.2k€.
Project Partners
• Moses Productos Kela Feller Communications & Partnerships Manager, B’ZEOS T: +34 658 874 524 E: kela.feller@bzeos.com W: https://www.bzeos.com/post/our-newproject-seaweedpack Adriana R. Kyvik, PhD Guy Maurice Kela Feller
Adriana Kyvik, Co-Founder and CTO at B’ZEOS is one of the leading seaweed packaging biopolymer formulation experts. Adriana has a PhD in Materials Science and has a background in chemical engineering. Guy Maurice, Founder and SeaEO of B’ZEOS, has a background in waste management and extensive experience in project management with organizations like WHO, ECWP/Reneco, and Equinor. Kela Feller has a background in environmental studies and international business administration. She manages communications, marketing, business development, and partnerships at B’ZEOS.
B’ZEOS final products.
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The Last Judgement (Hieronymus Bosch, 1482) in The Paintings Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Veronika Mayerböck, left, lighting designer (ALLES oder Licht, https:// www.allesoderlicht.com/) and collaborating partner, and colleague discuss a new study on the impact of lighting and visitor reactions.
Can art have a positive impact on society? Can art have a positive impact on individuals and society? Can it reduce anxiety and help bring people together? Researchers in the ARTIS project are probing the way that people engage with works of art, which could then open up the possibility of using art to achieve positive outcomes, as Professor Matthew Pelowski explains.
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The experience of viewing art can
ARTIS project
have a positive impact on both individuals and society, for example by reducing stress, helping bring people together, and even changing attitudes, behaviours, or peoples’ views of themselves and the world. However, the nature of what happens during the actual experience of viewing art is still unclear, a topic at the heart of Professor Matthew Pelowski’s work as the Coordinator of the ARTIS project, an initiative funded under the EU Horizon 2020 programme. “We want to look at the way people engage with art. What does that look like? How do we experience art? What role can the arts have in our institutions and society?” he outlines. The project itself brings together nine partners, with researchers from a wide range of disciplines – including philosophy, psychology, art education, and arts or cultural policy – looking at how people experience art in locations across Europe. As one of the main undertakings of the project, Pelowski notes, “we’ve been documenting how thousands of people experience visual art, from art in galleries or museums, to murals on the side of buildings, to sculpture or drawings. Before we can even begin to start talking about how art might be applied in various settings or to different challenges, or the importance and value of having art around us, we need to start understanding the possible ways we can experience it and what art could do!”
Researchers in the project have recently finished a major component of their overall program. This work, led by Professor Pelowski and Stephanie Miller, a PhD candidate in his Vienna lab, involved gathering data on thousands of peoples’ reactions to specific works of art. These were assessed by using a list of what Professor Pelowski calls ‘phenomenal states’, broadly speaking the way that people felt after viewing a work of art. The general aim in the project is to reconstruct people’s experiences based on their
responses to a set of questions, with respondents reporting their reaction immediately after viewing a work of art, which then forms the basis of what’s called a network model. “This is a cloud of interconnected reactions, but interconnected in a way that’s driven by the data, essentially reflecting how these feelings go together during an art experience,” explains Professor Pelowski. A sophisticated mathematical approach called latent profile analysis can then be applied to look for shared patterns. “It doesn’t matter who you are or where you viewed a work of art, we
We want to look at the way people engage with art.
What does that look like? How do we experience art?
Marta Pizzolante (visiting PhD candidate, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart) prepares a participant with a functional near-infrared spectroscopy, fNIRS, brain-imaging device for use in the Albertina Museum, Vienna (collaborating institution partner).
can find a basic pattern that describes what happened,” he continues. The next step is then to connect the kinds of experiences that people are having to specific outcomes, such as relieving stress, changing ideas or actions, or possibly even preventing the development of disease. This research also holds wider pragmatic importance to museums and policy-makers, as people who enjoyed the art are more likely to visit again, while others may react very differently, and the project’s work will also yield insights in this respect. “We can even talk about when and why art might bring you insight or make you bored, or mad,” says Professor Pelowski. Studies have been conducted on how people experience art at galleries in several
EU Research
cities, including Berlin, Venice and Vienna, and Professor Pelowski says the project team have access to a lot of data beyond basic patterns of feelings. “We can really track a lot of things,” he stresses. One part of the project involves looking at movement tracking data for example [Further information here]. “We can track individuals as they walk around in a gallery. We saw that some people would move in a kind of ‘T’ pattern, where they enter, approach a work of art, then move backwards and forwards, and from side to side,” outlines Professor Pelowski. “The extent to which they showed this movement pattern in front of a painting was related to the depth of insight and reflection that a work provoked, which in turn can be connected to a basic type of experience. Individuals who didn’t move in that way were found to be less likely to have engaged deeply with a work of art.” These insights, then, hold great potential value for artists, curators or galleries keen to know more about their visitors and the nature of their experiences. While some galleries and museums may not historically have seen this as a priority, Professor Pelowski believes attitudes are shifting and says there is growing interest in the project’s work. “A lot of museums have contacted us to ask; ‘what are you doing? What are you finding? Would you tell us about it?’” he outlines. The nature of people’s reactions to a work may vary widely, from sensations of awe and wonder to negative and troubled feelings, and Professor Pelowski is keen to stress that there is no single ‘correct’ way to experience art. “Individual people may react to art in very different ways, but each of those reactions is valid and none of them are wrong,” he says, “but it is important that we start understanding them.” A change in setup or presentation can also influence the ways that people react to a work of art, another topic researchers are investigating in the project.The Paintings Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, for example, holds a triptych by the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, The Last Judgment, and the gallery experimented with a new lighting setup to showcase the work. “They wanted to make it as powerful an experience as they could. We had the opportunity to work with the director and
the lighting designer and we did two different setups – the new one and the old – then asked people questions,” says Professor Pelowski. “By tying these investigations to our broader work to understand and tease out the nuances of art experience, we can now provide feedback to institutions and say, ‘OK, this is what these changes do’.” In addition, Pelowski, his team, and the wider ARTIS consortium are also exploring the impact of similar art visits on mental wellbeing, stress, anxiety, and also recently started testing impacts on activation in the brain, using mobile methods for study in the gallery.
ARTIS
Reactions to art
Project Website and Partners
This research feeds into a wider debate about the purpose of art institutions, beyond the view that art and culture is intrinsically good, towards a deeper understanding of the types of reactions that it might elicit in different people. The intention is to link the psychological data that has been gathered to specific outcomes, which could open up the possibility of using art to achieve change at both the individual and societal level. “Which kinds of experiences and artworks lead to the results that we want to achieve? We have about 18 months left in the project, and we plan to start feeding our results back to museums and policy-makers,” outlines Professor Pelowski. The presentation of these results is an important consideration for Professor Pelowski and his colleagues in the project. “I’m coming at this from an art theory perspective. I’m interested in the psychological process, but then we want to put that information into a relevant form for a curator, or even an artist, for example,” he says. “There is a growing awareness that art can be really useful in different ways, such as in patient care, or in helping people regulate their everyday lives, reduce stress, or even opening new ways of seeing the world” says Professor Pelowski. “We are looking at how people engage with art, then relating that to their training or background. What is the context? How does this lead to different experiences? How can this knowledge be used to further the importance of art in our cultures and cities? That’s really what we are trying to do.”
Study participant, wearing fNIRS device, engages with the painting The Water Lily Pond (Monet, 1917-1919) in the Albertina Museum’s Batliner Collection.
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(A)rt and (R)esearch on (T)ransformations of (I)ndividuals and (S)ocieties
Project Objectives
We argue that to make better policy that advances art’s efficacy, it is necessary to build a systematic program that combines empirical and theoretical research with perspectives of artists, art educators, and other art stakeholders.
Project Funding
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870827. https://artis-h2020.eu/who-we-are
Contact Details
Project Coordinator, Matthew Pelowski, Ph.D. Asst. Professor, Psychology of Cognitive and Neuroaesthetics ARTIS Lab: Art Research on Transformations of Individuals and Societies University of Vienna Faculty of Psychology, Vienna CogSciHub Wächtergasse 1/306, 1010 Vienna E: matthew.pelowski@univie.ac.at W: https://artis-h2020.eu Trupp, M. D., Bignardi, G., Specker, E., Vessel, E. A., & Pelowski, M. (2023). Who benefits from online art viewing, and how: The role of pleasure, meaningfulness, and trait aesthetic responsiveness in computer-based art interventions for wellbeing. Computers in Human Behavior, 145, 107764. Kühnapfel, C., Fingerhut, J., Brinkmann, H., Ganster, V., Tanaka, T., Specker, E., ... & Pelowski, M. (2023). How Do We Move in Front of Art? How Does This Relate to Art Experience? Linking Movement, Eye Tracking, Emotion, and Evaluations in a Gallery-Like Setting. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 02762374231160000. Pelowski, M., Cotter, K. N., Specker, E., Fingerhut, J., Trupp, m. D., & Speidel, K. (in press). For a Moment, Maybe: An Exploratory Study of the Incidence and Duration of Art Exhibition-Induced Prosocial Attitude Change Using a Two-Week Daily Diary Method. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. DOI (preprint): https://osf.io/w594s/
Matthew Pelowski, Ph.D.
Matthew Pelowski, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Neuroaesthetics in the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Vienna. He has a background in both the humanities, with undergraduate degrees in both oil painting and advertising from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and in social science. He completed his PhD in Information Science at the University of Nagoya in Japan. Currently he is Coordinator of the H2020 project ARTIS and has a main research interest on the impacts and implications from our engagements with visual arts.
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Literature and Material Culture: 1830-2020 Marta Caraion and her collaborators Sophie-Valentine Borloz and Joséphine Vodoz lead an SNSF-funded project examining how objects have been represented and conceptualized in French literary works since 1830 and how attitudes to consumer culture have evolved. An edited volume with more than 40 contributors and a literary database are currently under preparation. The two industrial revolutions were part of an important period in the history of material culture, as new ways of producing and consuming goods were developed, leading to dramatic social and economic change. These changes were reflected in many works of French literature, as writers developed new theories and ideas about objects and the role they play in our lives, a topic Marta Caraion, Sophie-Valentine Borloz and Joséphine Vodoz are exploring in the ‘Literature and Material Culture (18302020)’ project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). “The project aims at highlighting the consistency between scientific accounts of objects and the scenarios constructed by literary texts,” they outline. A variety of texts are being considered in the project, dating from 1830 right up to the present day: “1830 marks the beginning of a new political regime in France, the July Monarchy; as well as the triumph of a new social class, the Bourgeoisie, characterized by an unprecedented mass culture”. From this starting point right through to contemporary literature, the team examines various phenomena that elaborate specific relations to materiality, on subjects as diverse as travel literature, trade catalogues, Holocaust objects or narrative relics. In so doing, they examine how literary texts help us to think about the complex relationships we have with the material world, their evolution and their ideological underpinnings, effectively founding a new field, that of Literary Material Culture Studies. This field is developing along two major lines: consumption and memory. An edited volume will be produced, written by 46 authors from a variety of different backgrounds, reflecting the inter-disciplinary nature of the project. “Theoretical interdisciplinarity is at the core of the project, with disciplinary ties ranging from History, Anthropology, Art History and Philosophy to Sociology and Ethnography. However, literature, considered in its dialogue with Human, Social and Historical Sciences, remains the focal point,” stresses the editorial team. The book itself covers four major areas: 1. ‘Commodity and consumption’, devoted to the evolution of consumption patterns and consumer goods over the period studied, and how literature responded to them;
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A merry-go-round of commercial goods (Les Modes, April 1st 1924)
2. ‘Singularization and aesthetization regimes’, focusing on the tension – inherent to industrialization – between one-off objects and mass-produced items; 3. ‘Material Memory’, dealing with the capacity of objects to retain a trace of the past and to operate as memory triggers; 4. ‘Techniques, tools and materials’, on more technical aspects relating to the fundamental question of progress and innovation. In addition, a database is also being developed, which will be an important resource for other researchers. “The database
provides reading notes on books from the 19th century to the present day, in which objects play a key role. It can be browsed by texts (currently numbering 293), authors (164), objects (254) or extracts (566), and it is growing daily,” the team outlines.
Consumer goods Representations of consumer goods and consumer practices are one of the project’s main areas of investigation. “We can observe different stages, mutations and disruptions, from both a historical and cultural
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standpoint,” says the team. While at some points a desire to accumulate material goods and objects has been viewed positively, at others it has been seen as a sign of decadence. “Literature has played a part in promoting consumerist practices, desires and values, just as it has often denounced them, depending on the genres and the social and media spaces in which it circulates,” they add. “Today, in France, particularly in high and middlebrow circles, the tone is more one of criticism and disillusionment with the ideology of progress that characterized the last century.” This evolution is under scrutiny in Joséphine Vodoz’s doctoral thesis, entitled The Great Tales of Consumerism (XIXeXXIe centuries) (“Les grands récits du consumérisme (XIXe-XXIe siècles)”). Her
dramatized on the one hand by technologies that virtualize knowledge and collective memory, and on the other by growing awareness of environmental problems linked to over-consumption,” outlines the research team. “Faced with these phenomena, writers feel the need to elaborate a material memory and build a critical discourse.” These questions are at the root of another aspect of the project, focusing on the issue of waste. The many literary existences of waste and their evolution throughout the period under scrutiny are investigated in the edited volume. They are also the subject of an MA class co-taught by Marta Caraion and Sophie-Valentine Borloz, as well as specific research led by the latter. In a book in progress, she questions the
Literature has played a part in promoting consumerist practices, desires and values, just as it has often denounced them, depending on the genres and the social and media spaces in which it circulates. research explores the viewpoint that the advent of the ‘consumer society’ is the result not only of a series of socio-economic developments, but also of a profound cultural revolution. She is interested in the narratives of consumerism, from the end of the 19 th century to the present day, with a view to inscribing the history of literary representations in the cultural genesis of our contemporary lifestyles. Based on literary analysis, with a particular emphasis on mass-market novels, her thesis traces the evolution of consumer values, the cultural normalization of consumerist behaviour, its promotion and criticism. By identifying, for example, consumerist character types and recurring narrative structures, as well as the links between this theme and questions of gender, amorous and marital practices and lifestyles, the aim is to reveal the modelling function of literature in modern mores or customs.
Environmental concerns Our collective attitude towards consumer goods has however shifted over recent years, as the consequences of over-consumption have become more apparent. The relationship between material culture and sustainability is a major topic of interest to today’s writers on material culture. “Contemporary authors including Annie Ernaux and François Bon have explored the memorial, sociological and historical potency of objects in their works. This interest is probably increased and
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possibility of a poedechetics – a poetics of waste – seen as the capacity of waste to produce narrative and initiate narrative devices, both as a singular object and as an indistinct mass. She traces the evolution of these literary treatments of waste over time, from the ragpickers of the 19 th century to today’s ecological crisis, observing how these developments reflect and infuse the social conceptions surrounding waste. Cover of Marta Caraion’s book Comment la littérature pense les objets. Théorie littéraire de la culture matérielle (Champ-Vallon, 2020).
FRENCH LITERATURE AND MATERIAL CULTURE, 19TH-21ST CENTURIES Project Objectives
The Literature and Material Culture (LCM) project is a multi-disciplinary initiative which aims to shed new light on literary descriptions of material culture from 1830 right up to the present day. The research team will study how literary figures over this period sought to describe, criticise and conceptualise material culture.
Project Funding
The ‘Literature and Material Culture (18302020)’ project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).
Project Partners
• Judith Lyon-Caen (EHESS) • Jacob Lachat (Lausanne University)
Contact Details
Prof. Marta Caraion Section de français Faculté des Lettres Université de Lausanne Anthropole 3181 1015 Lausanne Switzerland E: marta.caraion@unil.ch E: lcm@unil.ch W: https://www.unil.ch/fra/home/ menuinst/recherche/poles-de-recherche/ litterature-et-culture-materielle/le-projetlitterature-et-culture-materielle.html Professor Marta Caraion Sophie-Valentine Borloz Joséphine Vodoz
Marta Caraion is Professor of French Literature at the University of Lausanne. A specialist in the links between literature and material culture, she is the author of How literature thinks about objects. Literary theory of material culture (Champ Vallon, 2020), as well as several books on the subject. Sophie-Valentine Borloz is a post-doctoral researcher. After specialising in the field of Smell Studies, she is currently working on the literary forms of waste. She is the author of “The sense of smell has its monsters”. Olfaction and perversion in the fin-de-siècle imagination (1880-1905) (Peeters, in press). Joséphine Vodoz is a doctoral student, specialising in the literary depictions of consumerism. She is currently completing a thesis entitled The Great Tales of Consumerism (XIXe-XXIe centuries), which follows on from her several articles on the subject.
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Inside the mind of a leader Leaders must be able to build on current practices and exploit their existing knowledge. However, they must also be able to adapt to changes in the environment by exploring new opportunities and acquiring new knowledge. We spoke to Jan Richner and Dr Zorica Zagorac-Uremović about their research on cognitive abilities related to leaders’ decision making and how they balance exploration and exploitation. The ability to switch between different modes of thinking is an important attribute for leaders and managers when dealing with the varying challenges that can arise in complex, rapidly changing working environments (Laureiro-Martínez and Brusoni, 2018). While in some circumstances a leader may be able to identify the best option based on the exploitation of their existing knowledge, in others they may need to be more open to exploring new ideas. As part of a project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), Jan Richner, Zorica Zagorac-Uremović and Daniella Laureiro-Martínez from the COLAB at the Technology and Innovation Management Group at ETH Zurich, explore the concept of cognitive flexibility, aiming at developing a deeper understanding of the ability to flexibly switch between exploration and exploitation, which can then inform leadership training and education programmes. “It’s important that a
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leader should not stick rigidly to one mode of thinking,” says Jan Richner, and adds that we know that cognitive flexibility is important when it comes to people being able to balance exploration and exploitation. “But we do not understand how people can use their cognitive flexibility to identify how and when to switch between exploration and exploitation effectively,” he outlines. A finer understanding of how people use their cognitive flexibility is needed in order to develop training programs or design working environments in ways that allow leaders to fulfil their potential.
Cognitive flexibility The concept of cognitive flexibility – or the ability to switch between different modes of thinking - is based on certain cognitive functions, which Richner calls the antecedents of cognitive flexibility. The four main antecedents of cognitive flexibility are attention, working memory, inhibition and
switching, “Cognitive flexibility antecedents have neural correlates and are enabled by processes in several large-scale frontoparietal and frontostriatal brain networks,” explains Dr Zorica Zagorac-Uremović. “All healthy individuals have these brain networks, but differences emerge in the degree to which we actually use them in our daily lives”, she continues. “If someone has a high degree of cognitive flexibility, that means they have the hardware to make better decisions between exploration and exploitation. How could the context then influence, in a positive or negative sense, these persons’ ability to balance exploration and exploitation?” says Richner. “We know that there are factors that can increase or decrease people’s ability to actually employ their own hardware.” In more detail, a recently published work by the researchers found that emotional stability, stress and task motivation are interconnected with cognitive flexibility, and these variables
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affect exploration-exploitation performance in leaders. For instance, task motivation correlates with exploration-exploitation performance, but this correlation disappears when we include the mediator of cognitive flexibility. This means that task motivation affects explorationexploitation performance because it increases cognitive flexibility (Richner, Zagorac-Uremović and Laureiro-Martínez, 2023). Based on their findings, the researchers conclude that it is possible “to account for both the negative and positive effects of different factors on exploration and exploitation by implementing appropriate organisational designs and job roles that allow leaders to better cope with stressors and choose work tasks that motivate them. Furthermore, by cultivating the importance of self-awareness and emotional regulation, leaders can effectively prepare themselves for the critical moments of making exploration-exploitation decisions and transcend past pressure.” The results are based on a study with data of around 300 officers in the Swiss armed forces, an organisation in which cognitive flexibility is a highly valued attribute. Armed conflict is dynamic, and it has been argued that leaders with a high degree of cognitive flexibility will perform more effectively. “Cognitive flexibility allows you not just to be innovative, but equally to do what you know works in a particular situation,” says Richner. The researchers have tested the idea that cognitive flexibility is an important leadership attribute in the military, and Richner says the results are very positive. “We can see very clearly that cognitively flexible
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leaders do better in a military environment,” he continues. “Cognitive flexibility allows a leader to adapt better to whoever is their counterpart and also to the people under their command. For example, they would be able to grasp that a particular person needs support, and they would be able to provide it. Maybe someone has had a good idea and doesn’t want to be led in a hierarchical or autocratic way – a cognitively flexible leader would be able to spot that and adapt accordingly.”
organisations and in everyday life more generally. In a related project, the researchers are studying community leaders in fragile ecosystems in the Pacific region of Colombia, looking at how they strive to achieve multiple goals such as economic, environmental, and social objectives. “We investigate how the leaders define different goals and deal with tensions between them,” says Dr Zagorac-Uremović. These goals centre around improving economic conditions
“We know that cognitive flexibility is important for exploration and exploitation. But we do not yet understand how to train cognitive flexibility, to decide when to
switch between exploration and exploitation.” This relevance of cognitive flexibility for leadership applies not only in an absolute sense, but also in a relative sense. This means that while cognitive flexibility shows a strong correlation with leadership on its own, it also does so when compared to the 16 assessment centre measures (e.g., reasoning ability, personality trait of conscientiousness) used to select military officer cadets. Even if all 16 assessment centre measures are included, cognitive flexibility still explains or predicts an additional proportion in leadership performance. The ability of cognitive flexibility is not just important in the military, but also in a wide variety of other contexts across different
for their communities, giving a voice to Afro-Colombians in the public and political spheres, preserving cultural identity and protecting local ecosystems and inhabitants from the acute threat of illegal crops, that unfortunately abound in the region. “Our hypothesis is that cognitive flexibility allows community leaders to switch between these different goals, and also allows them to adapt to the different needs that may arise in a context full of extreme uncertainties,” continues Dr Zagorac-Uremović. “We recently finished the data collection stage with our research partners from the Universidad de los Andes. The next step will be to analyse
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TRAINING FOR AMBIDEXTERITY Training for ambidexterity: how managers can learn to “shift cognitive gears”
Project Objectives
The wider aim in the project is to help managers and business leaders become more ambidextrous in their thinking, helping them recognise when to exploit their existing knowledge, and when to explore new ideas. This will be built on research into the underlying reasons behind differences in cognitive flexibility, which will then inform training programmes designed to enhance it, spurring innovation in the field.
Project Funding
Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation: Grant No. 185199.
Contact Details
Project Coordinator, Jan Richner Doctoral Student Chair of Technology and Innovation Management ETH Zurich | Department of Management, Technology and Economics Weinbergstrasse 56/58 | WEV J 430 | CH8092 Zurich T: +0041789562211 E: jrichner@ethz.ch W: https://timgroup.ethz.ch/people/phdstudents/jan-richner.html Laureiro-Martínez, D., & Brusoni, S. (2018). Cognitive flexibility and adaptive decision-making: Evidence from a laboratory study of expert decision makers. Strategic Management Journal, 39(4), 1031–1058. doi: https:// doi.org/10.1002/smj.2774 Richner, J., Zagorac-Uremović, Z. & Laureiro-Martínez, D. (2023). Individual and context-evoked antecedents of exploration-exploitation performance. Frontiers in Psychology, 14. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1167135
Jan Richner Dr Zorica Zagorac-Uremović Dr Daniella Laureiro Martinez
Jan Richner received his MSc in Organizational Psychology from the University of Neuchâtel and is doing a PhD at the Chair of Technology and Innovation Management at ETH Zurich. Before joining academia, he worked in management consulting, and he has also spent time in the Swiss Armed Forces. Dr Zorica Zagorac-Uremović is a researcher at COLAB in the Technology and Innovation Management Group at ETH Zurich. She studies the cognitive antecedents of adaptive behavior and innovation. She holds a PhD in business economics and has several years of management experience. Dr Daniella Laureiro Martinez has worked at ETH Zurich, in the Technology and Innovation Management Group since 2011. She leads the COLAB, a research area focused on cognition, learning and adaptive behavior.
this data from around 40 community leaders and to develop pedagogical tools for the next generation of community leaders.”
Training The wider aim in the project is to use the insights gained from this research to inform training programmes designed to help industrial and educational leaders improve their cognitive flexibility. The idea is to help people use their own abilities more effectively and efficiently, building from an awareness of who they are and how they think and feel. “For instance, if I become aware that I tend to act impulsively in a certain situation I can find strategies to deal with such situations that trigger my impulsivity, and to become more flexible. In order to improve cognitive flexibility, an individual needs to first control their own thoughts better,” explains Dr ZagoracUremović. These insights are being applied to different executive courses, run by the researcher team. For example, “we regularly train international leaders at the Behavioral Science Academy held in Zurich, and we train senior leaders in an executive MBA programme at ETH, run jointly with the University of St Gallen, a unique, international programme which attracts students from business and government. We have an average of about 30 participants a year, and we have successfully conducted cognitive flexibility training in the last two years,” continues Dr Zagorac-Uremović. A tailored strategy can then be developed to help students improve their cognitive flexibility, for example helping them to pay attention, prioritise effectively, or inhibit certain reactions. Students also learn how to
switch to new ideas, avoiding the tendency to see similarities to previous situations, when actually a novel approach is required. “We may focus overly on the familiar aspects of a situation, which leads us to believe that prior solutions would be well-suited. We have developed what we call a mental compass, designed to help people pay attention to the current situation and shift to new solutions when needed,” says Dr Zagorac-Uremović. The training and educational programmes have been successfully implemented on relatively small scales, but the effects have not yet been shown on a bigger scale, another area that the researchers are working on at the moment “We plan to finish another, larger experiment in the Swiss Military this year, to publish our results, and to transfer this knowledge to the Swiss armed forces and to the executive programmes and training in other organisations,” outlines Richner. This work is being conducted alongside continued research at the TIM Group into the cognitive abilities involved in decision-making and learning. While cognitive flexibility is a central aspect of this, Dr Zagorac-Uremović is also interested in linking it to other important leadership abilities “I’m interested in comparing cognitive flexibility to other abilities, such as creativity and cognitive complexity (i.e., the ability to differentiate and integrate different aspects of a problem of bigger scope) and understanding how these interact with each other,” she says. “Furthermore, it would be interesting to move away from training just individuals to understand what makes whole teams and organisations more flexible and better balance exploration and exploitation, and thus be better prepared for the future.”
Definition of Key Concepts Cognitive flexibility is the “ability to appropriately and efficiently adjust one’s behavior according to a changing environment” (Dajani & Uddin, 2015, p. 571) Ambidexterity is the “behavioral orientation toward combining exploration and exploitation related activities within a certain period of time” (Mom, Van den Bosch & Volberda, 2009, p. 812) “Exploration entails disengaging from the current task to enable experimentation, flexibility, discovery, and innovation. Exploitation aims at optimizing the performance of a certain task and is associated with high-level engagement, selection, refinement, choice, production, and efficiency” (Laureiro‐Martínez, Brusoni, Canessa & Zollo, 2014, p. 320) Sources Laureiro-Martínez, D., Brusoni, S., Canessa, N., & Zollo, M. (2014). Understanding the explorationexploitation dilemma: An fMRI Study of attention control and decision-making performance. Strategic Management Journal, 36 (3), 319-338. Mom, T. J. M., van den Bosch, F. A. J., & Volberda, H. W. (2009). Understanding variation in managers’ ambidexterity: Investigating direct and interaction effects of formal structural and personal coordination mechanisms. Organization Science, 20 (4), 812-828. Dajani, D. R., & Uddin, L. Q. (2015). Demystifying cognitive flexibility: Implications for clinical and developmental neuroscience. Trends in Neurosciences, 38 (9), 571-578.
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Prototype chip.
Quantum simulator on a single chip Effective quantum simulators could enable researchers to gain deeper insights into unresolved questions in physics. Researchers in the EPIQUS project are working to develop a quantum simulator on a single silicon chip, bringing together electronic, photonic and quantum components, as Dr Mher Ghulinyan explains. The energy of a given quantum system can be described by a set of equations called a Hamiltonian, which become extremely difficult to solve using classical or standard computers as the system complexity grows. This is where quantum simulators could play an important role, as they allow researchers to build an architecture which will work with ions, photons, semiconductor qubits or other quantum particles. “You can then design an architecture which is formally described by the same set of equations as your real system of interest,” explains Dr Mher Ghulinyan, a Senior Researcher at the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Trento, Italy. The system of interest itself could be a low temperature physics problem, a chemical
reaction, or even a set of financial transactions, in fact anything that can be described by quantum rules. “You run your simulator and collect statistical data. You can run millions of simulations within few minutes and then reach a statistical result,” continues Dr Ghulinyan.
EPIQUS project As the coordinator of the EU-funded EPIQUS project, Dr Ghulinyan is part of a team working to develop a quantum simulator, which could prove to be an important tool across many fields of research. This research is still at a fairly early stage however, with Dr Ghulinyan and his colleagues exploring new ideas and novel concepts in their research. “We want to
bring together, on a single silicon chip, all the different components that we need to run an integrated, miniaturised quantum simulator operating at room temperature,” he outlines. A source of single photons is required for this, as well as a photonic integrated circuit that can be used to manipulate the photons and a detector to register their arrival, all on a single, portable chip. “On one side of the chip single photons are generated in silicon nitride (Si3N4) waveguides. This is done by a strong optical pump that comes from outside – it enters the waveguide as an intense laser pulse, which then interacts with the material,” says Dr Ghulinyan. This leads to a non-linear optical process called four wave mixing, and the generation of
Analog chip
A conceptual sketch of a quantum photonic chip.
Phase shifters
Si SPADs
Pulsed NIR DL
SiN waveguides
Coherent pump splitting
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Scalable photon sources
Qubit manipulation
Photo-Detection & quenching circuits
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Photonic chip testing set-up.
two new photons at two different wavelengths. These photons are entangled, as they have been created through the same unique process. “They are correlated with respect to their properties. You cannot have one without the other,” explains Dr Ghulinyan. Getting these photons to a detector is a significant technical challenge, for which researchers have developed a new process. “We have developed a very simple technological process, through which we are able to geometrically tilt the optical waveguide down towards the detector,” says Dr Ghulinyan. “This coupling between the photonic circuit and the electronic part – the detection – is essential. This is because we don’t lose photons like you would if you took them from a chip and used a fibre to go into an external detector. We go directly to the detector, which has already been fabricated in the substrate. These detectors operate at room temperature which in terms of cost-efficiency is a huge advantage over other detecting technologies which require cryogenic temperatures.” The waveguides themselves are pieces of silicon nitride with a width of around 600 nanometres and a height of 150 nanometres,
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and they effectively guide the photons. Waveguides can have loops or corners with different angles, while Dr Ghulinyan and his team are also using a novel technology to realize phase shifters which can be used to manipulate photons and guide them in a certain direction. “A phase shifter modifies the phase of the optical wave, or the photon. This changes its properties so that it interacts with
This allows researchers to reconfigure the integrated optical circuit by running different currents through the phase shifters, thus changing the conditions of an experiment within a fraction of a second. The output of these experiments is collected through an array of Single Photon Avalanche Diodes (SPADs) – the detectors, which are then saved to the computer. “The computer can then plot a histogram of experiments, so you see a statistical distribution of the output of the waveguides. You can run millions of experiments a second,” says Dr Ghulinyan. This is a potentially powerful system, as Dr Ghulinyan explains. “Quantum simulators don’t do precise calculations, rather they predict a possible outcome of a quantum system. You can run millions of simulations and then gain a statistical result,” he outlines. “For example, you might be interested in a chemical reaction involving different raw materials, and you don’t know maybe what the result will be. You can then simulate this reaction using photons which interfere within waveguiding circuitries following the same governing rules as the electrons do in your real reaction.”
We want to bring together, on a single silicon chip, all the different components that we need to run an
integrated, miniaturised quantum simulator. the circuit in a different way,” he outlines. A phase shifter is a resistor, a tiny piece of metal, and when current flows through the material it heats up, causing a change in the refractive index. “When you change the refractive index, you change the refraction of the light and the path of the photon,” continues Dr Ghulinyan. “For example, if you have a y-junction you can use the phase shifters to direct the photons into one or the other arm differently and manipulate photons in that way.”
Quantum simulator The project consortium is working to make this a reality, with each of the partners bringing their own expertise to bear on the challenge of developing an effective quantum simulator. The consortium as a whole has all the expertise and technological skills required to build a fully integrated system, so Dr Ghulinyan says there is no need to bring in external partners. “We have access to a silicon microfabrication facility at FBK and the SPADs are a highly
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EPIQUS Electronic-photonic integrated quantum simulator platform
Project Objectives
EPIQUS aims to demonstrate a cheap, easyto-use, performant Quantum Simulator (QS) based on full integration of silicon nitride photonics with silicon electronics. The core objective of EPIQUS is to set a cornerstone technology – demonstrate the first breakthrough device – which will simulate quantum mechanical problems in a compact device operating at ambient temperature.
Project Funding
EPIQUS has received funding from the European Commission - H2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 899368. Integrated photonic circuit.
Project Partners
https://epiqus.fbk.eu/partners
sophisticated technology, the result of 30 years of development. We don’t need to send wafers to someone else to make integrated photonic circuits, and another for the single photon detectors. Everything involved with the chip is being fabricated here through a monolithic integration process,” he stresses. Alongside developing the integrated circuits and the electronics, researchers in the project are also considering the types of problems that could be studied using the fabricated chip. Some of the project partners provide ideas on what could be simulated, while the teams at the University of Vienna and University of Rostock are validating some ideas on different types of chips. “They do an experiment, a quantum simulation using laser written optical waveguide circuits and fibernetwork setups, and say; ‘ok, this architecture or this concept works. Let’s see if you can miniaturise it and put it on a single chip, with tiny waveguides’,” says Dr Ghulinyan. “We transfer these kinds of ideas to a very small, dense integrated circuit. We do the same experiment that was done on a fiber-network setup and validated as a concept, but this time we do it on a single chip.”
The project team is working to develop a demonstrator at a TRL of 4-5, although some of the individual components are closer to practical application. “Some of the FBK’s SPADS have been used on the international space station and CERN experiments, so they have a TRL of 8 or 9. We also do other integrated photonics for SMEs. We do small volume fabrications for some industrial contracts,” outlines Dr Ghulinyan. This is a highly complex area of research, with the partners working on different concepts and technologies which then need to be brought together. This can be a lengthy process, with researchers bringing together electronic, photonic and quantum technologies, yet Dr Ghulinyan says progress is being made. “We have produced some chips and are currently characterising them,” he outlines. There are also plans for a successor project, building on the progress that has been achieved so far in EPIQUS. “We hope to continue this research and conduct further experiments. We plan to work on the software to improve the performance of the system, and also explore new ideas on the quantum side of the concept,” continues Dr Ghulinyan. An optical image of a 1 cm wide photonic circuit.
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Contact Details
Project Coordination and Management Dr Mher Ghulinyan Fondazione Bruno Kessler via Sommarive, 18 38123 Trento, Italy T: +39 0461 314 676 E: ghulinyan@fbk.eu W: https://epiqus.fbk.eu M. Bernard, F. Acerbi, G. Paternoster, G. Piccoli, L. Gemma, D. Brunelli, A. Gola, G. Pucker, L. Pancheri, and M. Ghulinyan. Topdown convergence of near-infrared photonics with silicon substrate-integrated electronics. Optica 8, 1363-1364 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1364/OPTICA.441496 G Piccoli, M Sanna, M Borghi, L Pavesi, M Ghulinyan. Silicon oxynitride platform for linear and nonlinear photonics at NIR wavelengths. Optical Materials Express 12(9), 3551-3562 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1364/OME.463940 Neef, V., Pinske, J., Klauck, F., Teuber, L., Kremer, M., Ehrhardt, M., Heinrich, M., Scheel, S. and Szameit, A. Three-dimensional nonAbelian quantum holonomy. Nature Physics,19(1), pp.30-34 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01807-5 Schiansky, P., Kalb, J., Sztatecsny, E., Roehsner, M.C., Guggemos, T., Trenti, A., Bozzio, M. and Walther, P. Demonstration of quantum-digital payments. Nature Communications 14, p. 3849 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-39519-w
Dr. Mher Ghuliny
Dr. Mher Ghulinyan received the MS in 1995 and PhD in physics in 1999 from the Yerevan State University (Armenia). His early-career research at the University of Trento (2002-2006) focused on optical cavities and superlattices leading to first-time demonstrations of Bloch oscillations, Zener tunneling and Anderson localization of light. Moving to FBK in 2006, since then he works in the field of integrated classical and quantum photonics. Since 2020, he is coordinating the EU-funded research project “Electronic-photonic integrated quantum simulator platform” (EPIQUS).
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Take Terahertz for a spin Despite important developments in photo-conductive switches and quantum cascade lasers for THz generation, THz technologies are used in only a few relatively niche applications. We spoke to Dr. Romain Lebrun, the project coordinator from Thales Research Center, about the work of the s-Nebula project in developing a new approach based on spintronics and exploring the potential applications of this emerging technology. The terahertz frequency band lies between the microwave and the far infrared range, yet it remains difficult to address this frequency band, an issue that is referred to as the terahertz (THz) gap. As the coordinator of the EU-funded s-Nebula project, Dr Romain Lebrun is working to address this issue, building on earlier research in the field of spintronics. “Several years ago people found that spintronics devices could be used to generate a THz (1 THz=1012 Hz) signal. So if you send a femtosecond (10 -15 of a second) laser pulse onto a nanometer thick magnetic heterostructure, this generates a THz signal,” he outlines. This approach has proved to be effective in comparison to existing methods of generating broadband THz signals from 1-30 THz. “The amplitude of the emission from a spintronics device is not far from what can be achieved with standard photoconductive switches, which are quite efficient below 4 THz, but don’t really operate above that. Their extremely large bandwidth has no equivalent in other systems, and is thus quite promising, especially for applications in spectroscopy,” says Dr Lebrun.
Terahertz radiation This work provides solid foundations for researchers in the project as they aim to develop new solutions for the generation and detection of THz radiation using spintronics physics. Part of this work is exploratory and involves developing different spintronic stacks to provide new building blocks of spin-based THz technologies such as continuous THz emission or THz detection. Another part consists in boosting the emission efficiency of THz spintronic emitters. “We have been working on the integration of THz spintronic emitters. For example, we put an infra-red cavity on top of the ferromagnet/Heavy metal bi-layers. This helps to absorb the femtosecond laser pulse into the ferromagnet,” explains Dr Lebrun. “The project’s agenda also includes engineering work to integrate these emitters on chip within a wider platform. We also try to match these properties up with some applications.” A number of potential applications of this technology were identified at the
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Voltage controlled THz spintronic emitters. Reproduced from G. Lezier et al., Appl. Phys. Lett. 120 152404 (2022), with the permission of AIP Publishing.
beginning of the project, for example in nondestructive testing. Technologies capable of procuding THz waves could thus be used in the automotive industries to detect the thickness of metallic layers in a vehicle. “If you send a THz signal through a metal it will be absorbed and cannot be transmitted further. This can then provide you with key information about the properties of ultrathin metallic layers,” says Dr Lebrun. The thickness of the layers can be detected with great precision, down to a resolution of less than 10 micrometers, and Dr Lebrun says this approach could brings some significant benefits over more conventional alternatives.
“There is also interest in using these types of emitters for THz imaging biosensing, as well as for ellipsommetry.” These various application areas will have different requirements in terms of THz generation and detection, and so the ability to predict the nature of the emission based on the composition of the stack would be highly valuable. One work package in the project is also dedicated to modelling, and Dr Lebrun says significant progress is being made. “We can now make quite accurate predictions. So we can see the impact of combining different layers, or integrating in standard photonic stacks including cavities or anti-refractive coating
Emission spectra from a nanometer thin THz spintronic emitter. Reprinted by permission from Seifert et al., Nat. Phot. 10, 483 (2016). Copyright 2016 Springer Nature.
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layers,” he outlines. The more fundamental part of the project also requires the development of new materials, including investigations into anti-ferromagnetic materials. “We have been trying to understand if we can get new THz functionalities with anti-ferromagnetic materials instead of ferromagnetic materials. This is really basic science, as it’s not clear if we can apply the same physics with this new type of magnet,” acknowledges Dr Lebrun. “Whilst the efficiency remains to be largely improved, we have been able to demonstrate that we can generate narrow band THz emission with them.”
Innovative ideas The s-Nebula project itself is a FET Open initiative, where the primary focus is on exploring innovative idea, and to develop proof-of-concept of device functionality rather than translating research into commercial development. However, a spin-off company has already been established, offering products developed on the basis of the project’s work. “Some of our German colleagues have started a spin-off, selling a THz emitter system that could be useful for applications which needs high amplitude THz pulses,” says Dr Lebrun. There are several of these kinds of relatively niche applications of THz technologies, now researchers aim to broaden the range of applications, with a 3-day workshop planned
You can generate intense THz signals from nanometer
thick magnetic films
for later this year to heighten awareness. “We plan to gather experts from materials science, spintronics and optics fields to identify new perspectives of research, as well as engineers in order to explore the full application potential of this emerging technology,” continues Dr Lebrun. The maturity of the technology varies according to the application. The emitter intended for use in research laboratories or synchrotron based facilities is already available for example, while others are further away from practical applications. “For the fibreintegrated tip for non-destructive testing and THz imaging that is being developed in s-Nebula, I would expect that we’ll be close to Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 3 by the end of the project, which is a proof-of-concept, while with the continuous wave emitter for potential communication applications, we are still at the first observations at TRL 2,” says Dr Lebrun. Further research is planned to build on the progress that has been made in s-Nebula, with Dr Lebrun planning to focus more precisely on certain parts of the THz frequency band in future. “Currently there is no technology to efficiently emit a THz signal between 5-10 THz,” he explains. “Below 5 THz there are photoconductive switches, but between 5-10 THz there is really nothing efficient at the moment, so we will try to look in that direction in the future.”
s-NEBULA Novel Spin-Based Building Blocks for Advanced TeraHertz Applications
Project Objectives
s-Nebula is a FET OPEN project that explores and develops a revolutionary approach to TeraHertz (THz) technology, both for generation and detection of THz radiation, initiating the new field of spinbased TeraHertz (s-THz) technology, a game changer for the future of THz field. The ambition of s-NEBULA is to provide a platform of room-temperature innovative spin- based THz building blocks, arising from novel combinations of magnetism and optics.
Project Funding
The s-Nebula project has received funding from the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Commission under FET-Open Grant No. 863155. The content of this article reflects the views only of the s-Nebula Consortium, and the European Union cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
Project Partners
Our consortium is composed of 7 european research institutions from 4 different countries (France, Germany, Sweden and Czech Republic). https://s-nebula.eu/theconsortium/
Contact Details
Project Coordinator, Romain Lebrun, PhD Msc Physics Researcher at CNRS-Thales, UMR-137 Thales Research & Technology – France (TRT-fr) 1 Av. Augustin Fresnel, 91767 Palaiseau cedex - France T: +33 1 69 41 60 78 E: romain.lebrun@thalesgroup.com E: THALES GROUP INTERNAL@sNEBULA_2020 W: https://s-nebula.eu
used in memory devices by the microelectronic industry, which brings promising prospects for terahertz technologies. Romain Lebrun, PhD
Fiber on tip spintronic terahertz emitters. Adapted with permission from F. Paries et al., Opt. Express 31, 30884-30893 (2023) © The Optical Society
www.euresearcher.com
Romain Lebrun is a research scientist at the Thales research centre in Palaiseau, France, having previously held positions at several different academic institutions across Europe. He is a condensed matter experimentalist, and has published papers in many prominent journals.
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Expanding our Knowledge of Pulsars and Magnetars Prof Nanda Rea of the ERC MAGNESIA Project is taking a fresh look at the pulsar population, including highly magnetised neutron stars called Magnetars, to understand how many there are, how they evolve and how we can use pulsars for technologies that will benefit us. Simulation representing all the pulsars. Credit: Nanda Rea
As one of the most extreme objects in the Universe, highly magnetised neutron stars known as magnetars are almost impossible to imagine. About 20 kilometres in diameter, they have a density equating to about a billion tonnes for an area the size of a sugar cube, and spin at phenomenal rates. They have a hard iron lattice exterior and inside them, the protons and electrons have crushed into neutrons. Their huge magnetic-field instabilities trigger emissions of electromagnetic radiation, like X-rays and gamma rays. They are thought to be also related to phenomena like Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) and Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs). Discovered in the late ’70s via their powerful gamma-ray flares, we now know they share similarities with other pulsars in many ways. There is a lot that is not known about the pulsar population, and exact reach of the magnetars, and that’s why a team of researchers for the EU project, MAGNESIA, are tasked with collecting more data and information on what they are, simulate how many of them there are and how they can be of use to us.
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A New Era of Discovery Magnetars differ from standard neutron stars as they have a much higher magnetism. Due to their incredible magnetised state, movement and density, they tend to erupt, quake and crack on the surface as they spin, releasing spectacular bursts of energy. They emit and flare when they spin, making them highly visible reference points in the void. “There are a lot of different kinds of neutron stars,” explained Prof. Rea. “However, they
are all formed the same way, have the same equation of state, that’s what we think for now. They form from supernova explosions when a very massive star ends its life. At a certain point inside, it reaches the iron limit, then it explodes, and the core becomes compact. We observe some differences in neutron stars when compared, for example, they don’t all emit in the same way. This indicates that some process happened or there are parameters at birth or in their evolution, so something
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occurs to make a star extraordinarily bright, or alternatively very faint.” These differences in neutron stars have traditionally made them easy to miss. As the scientific community grasps more of an understanding of them and importantly, how they differ, new instrumentation is being developed to detect them more accurately. With advances, in the last 10 years, there have been thousands of discoveries, yet it’s becoming apparent this is only the beginning of the search in a lively Universe. Magnetars, the most magnetic extremes of the population, have become a source of many recent scientific revelations. For example, Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), were powerful radio flashes or pulses, that were first seen in radio surveys around 2007 and when the first one was observed it was a complete mystery – it was even proposed early on that it could be signalling from ‘little green men’. It was a very bright signal, equal to the release of three days of the Sun’s output in a mere millisecond. The scientific community responded to solve the mystery and built radio sky-monitoring instruments to see if there were similar signals and subsequently discovered there were thousands. Only few years ago it was realised for the first time that magnetars and FRBs were related to each other. Furthermore, it was well known that magnetar flares were possibly related to other transient events like Gamma-
Ray Bursts (GRBs). With these new connections understood the hunt was on to discover more. “We use data from X-ray satellites, gamma ray satellites and radio telescopes mainly to detect more of them”, said Prof. Rea.
Map of the Stars One of the aims of the project is to create a census and model the distribution of the neutron stars, to essentially create a map of these galactic objects to understand how many exist and their population properties at birth. “We aim to predict the properties and numbers of these, in our galaxy and beyond and even those we cannot see for various reasons, such as if they are too faint to be observed, or they are behind the galactic centre.” One of the main goals is to know how big the population of these stars is, with the different magnetic fields they have at birth, and the different rotations and properties. The project is looking at the evolution of neutron stars, a subject that is arguably more related to nuclear physics than astrophysics. To do this, the team have to simulate a neutron star field evolution to fully understand its lifecycle and the variables that define it. Further, they are aiming to predict how many of them there are, how old they are and to reveal what their magnetic fields look like when they are older. The only way to do this is by devising accurate simulations, with new techniques such as machine learning.
Credit: Tomasz Nowakowski, Astrowatch.net
“With current standard instrumentation, we can observe only about three thousand pulsars, and a few tens of magnetars, and we expect there to be around ten million of them in total, so what we observe is really the tip of an iceberg. You need to know the physics of how those sources emit and how they are evolving in time.” In an innovative approach to the challenge, the latest knowledge of 3D magnetic field evolution, numerical modelling, nuclear physics and flaring rates is combined and fed into a computer model, in turn making it easier to create a realistic representation of the pulsar population. Graphic simulations are created with a computer, and machine learning is used for testing the outcomes and results.
Spin-off Technology Whilst developing a better understanding of these stars and uncovering their whereabouts is exciting fuel for our knowledge of the Universe, the unique nature of pulsars also means they have a practical use that could help us reimagine Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and even help us navigate in deep space.
“ The idea is that each of these sources has its own signal which is unique like someone’s DNA. They can be so bright that wherever you are in space, you can detect them and use them as a reference.”
Credit: Shackleton Books/ Gallego Bros
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MAGNESIA The magnetar census and impact of highly magnetic neutron stars on the explosive and transient Universe
The MAGNESIA group organizing the COST Action PHAROS Annual Meeting in Rome in 2022.
Project Objectives
Neutron stars, or pulsars, are amongst the most extreme stars, wielding the largest magnetic fields of any known object in the Universe. The most magnetic ones are called magnetars. These stars are thought to be the source of the most luminous transients, such as the super-luminous supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, fast radio bursts, or magnetar giant flares. Several giant flares have been detected within the Milky Way. However, scientists lack a complete census of the pulsar and magnetar population. The EU-funded MAGNESIA project is developing the first pulsar population model using Machine Learning techniques. The new model will take into account neutron star 3D magnetic field simulations and observational constraints from all multiband data archives.
Project Funding
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement ID: 817661
Project Partners
https://www.ice.csic.es/ercmagnesia/group-members/whilst
Contact Details
Project Coordinator, Professor Nanda Rea Head of the Astrophysics and Planetary Department Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC, IEEC) T: +34 937 37 97 88 E: rea@ice.csic.es W: www.ice.csic.es Professor Nanda Rea
Nanda Rea is a Professor of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) at the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE) in Barcelona, Spain. Nanda Rea was part of the ESA Astronomy Working Group that advises the ESA director on proposals for new space missions, and a member of the ESA Athena Science Study Team. She has won numerous awards and served in over 40 committees, many of them as Chair. In 2018 she obtained an ERC Consolidator grant from H2020 to work on the Galactic neutron star population and its connection with the transient Universe.
Working with the European Space Agency (ESA) and two industrial companies on the PODIUM Project, Prof. Rea is helping with the creation of new innovations that could change how we use certain types of technology, forever. “The idea is that each of these sources has its own signal which is unique like someone’s DNA. They can be so bright that wherever you are in space, you can detect them and use them as a reference. Wherever you are in the galaxy you can recognise a sort of map of these and know which ones are closest to you and which are the ones furthest, so you can calculate your own position.” A test of this practical use came in 2018, when an instrument about the size of a washing machine was put in the International Space Station (ISS). It was an X-ray counter which looked at X-ray energies and had software to track pulsars and use these timing signals to calculate the precise position of the ISS in space, as it moved at 24,000 km per hr. The device worked perfectly. ESA has since been investing in research to make this technology smaller to fit into any satellites, and eventually, it is hoped in a far future, to be small enough to be fitted in smartphones.
“We now have a prototype of an instrument which instead of being the size of a washing machine is more like the size of a microwave, which is very compact. We might not need to send strings of satellites to orbit in the future to enable the use of GPS. Many countries cannot afford to send up all these satellites, so relying on a pulsar in the sky instead is an attractive alternative. Also, if we ever want to leave the solar system and explore deep space, this is one way to be able to navigate back without being lost.” The practical applications of this positioning technology are exciting for engineers and innovators, and these are merely the beginnings of broad studies of pulsars in general. The everbuilding map and understanding of these objects and other unusual signals being detected will increase over time. As a relatively new field, it’s no surprise that discoveries are happening regularly and seem destined to continue to do so. “We are recently finding very bright and slowly periodic radio signals in the sky and they are probably not regular pulsars, we just don’t know, because there is nothing comparable that produces these kinds of emissions. There are still these ongoing open mysteries and so there is much still to discover.”
Magnetars figure. Credit: ICRAR
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