Prof. Martijn Nawijn says lung disease is understudied — something he hopes his work will change.
by Ian Le Guillou
Professor Martijn Nawijn, an immunologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, tells Horizon about his quest to map every cell in a healthy human lung. He says this work should help to understand more about the causes of lung disease — which is comparatively understudied — and should lead to new therapies in the next 15 to 20 years.
The lung is the largest surface area we have with the outside world. It’s very intimate, in the sense that it is a barrier to the outside, but it is really inside your body.
What we’re looking at in this picture is a piece of airway wall, where in the middle you see the lumen, the space where the air travels through. So that’s the outside world — that’s the air you inhale. The airways are the tubing of your lung, bringing the air from outside all the way into all the little alveoli (air sacs) where gas exchange occurs. …
We need to create a circular construction industry ‘within five years’, says Dr Catherine De Wolf
by Alex Whiting
Retrofitting Europe’s buildings for energy efficiency is not enough to slash the carbon footprint of the construction sector and cut emissions in time to meet the Paris climate agreement goals, according to Dr Catherine De Wolf, assistant professor of design and construction management at TU Delft in the Netherlands.
She says that we need to design buildings to make them recyclable — but doing this will require a fundamental restructure of the construction industry.
How important is it to ‘green’ the construction industry?
The building sector is responsible for more than a third of our greenhouse gas emissions, and more than a third of our waste … and is one of the most resource-depleting industries. …
We put that question to some of our 2020 interviewees.
by Annette Ekin
There was one science story that dominated 2020 and coronavirus is likely to remain a dominant theme in 2021. But from vaccine rollout to lessons for future pandemics and — that other big challenge that we’re facing — climate change, how will the year in science play out? We asked a selection of our interviewees about lessons from 2020 and what needs to happen in their fields in the coming year.
VACCINE ROLLOUT
How do these tests work, and what are they good for?
by Natalie Grover
To diagnose and contain the spread of coronavirus, testing is critical. There are two types of Covid-19 tests — those that are designed to detect whether you have the infection now, or those crafted to check whether you have been previously infected by the virus — SARS-CoV-2 — that causes the disease. Like any other product these tests have varying degrees of accuracy and reliability, and can be used to achieve different aims.
We want technologies that are fast, accurate, have high capacity, that don’t require expensive, complex laboratory equipment or the expertise of highly trained people, but there’s nothing which fills all of those criteria at the moment, says Professor Jon Deeks, a biostatistician and testing expert at the University of Birmingham, UK. …
Bats chatter, people can’t self-tickle and plants are being programmed to produce vaccines.
by Horizon magazine
From corals bunkering down in deeper waters to wait out climate change stress, to how vaccines can boost our immune system beyond a specific disease — here are the 20 most surprising scientific facts that we discovered this year.
The coronavirus uses a ‘doorway’ that’s also exploited by other deadly viruses.
by Richard Gray
The virus that causes Covid-19 hijacks human cells by exploiting a ‘doorway’ that is potentially also used by other deadly viruses such as HIV, dengue and Ebola, according to recent research that may help to explain why the coronavirus is so highly infectious to a wide range of organs in the body.
Dr Yohei Yamauchi, a viral cell biologist at the University of Bristol, UK, who led the research, believes that the finding could not only lead to new drugs against Covid-19, but other anti-viral treatments that could be used to save patients’ lives in future pandemics.
Why is the molecular biology of viruses important? …
New studies are piecing together our galaxy’s stellar history.
by Jonathan O’Callaghan
Our Milky Way is thought to be home to as many as 400 billion stars, one of which is, of course, our own sun. But how and when did these stars form, and where did they come from?
Understanding the stellar population of our galaxy could reveal a great deal, not only about our own home but also about the universe as a whole. So-called galactic archaeology can reveal how galaxies take shape, and explain some of the interesting complexities of our own.
Of course, given our location inside it, the Milky Way is also the best laboratory we have to study the intricacies of how galaxies evolve, move, and form. And by studying these billions of enigmatic points of light inside our galaxy, a whole realm of understanding is being opened up. …
From side-effects to the speed of development.
by Alex Whiting
The world’s first mRNA vaccine has begun its rollout after being produced at unprecedented speed as part of the global effort to end the Covid-19 pandemic. A second one is hot on its heels. The two — one made by Pfizer/BioNTech and the other by Moderna — mark the first time this vaccine technology has been approved for use.
In trials these vaccines have shown to be at least 94% effective at preventing people from falling ill with Covid-19. But how safe is this new technology? We spoke to Michel Goldman, a professor of immunology and founder of the I3h Institute for Interdisciplinary Innovation in healthcare at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. …
An online platform helps archivists log handwritten documents.
by Fintan Burke
From wars to weddings, Europe’s history is stored in billions of archival pages across the continent. While many archives try to make their documents public, finding information in them remains a low-tech affair. Simple page scans do not offer the metadata such as dates, names, locations that often interest researchers. Copying this information for later use is also time-consuming.
These issues are well-known in Amsterdam, which is trying to disclose its entire archives. For the notary records alone ‘there’s about three and a half kilometres in paper,’ said Pauline van den Heuvel, an archivist at Amsterdam City Archives in the Netherlands. That’s around 11,800 pages of A4 paper laid end-to-end. She says the total collection is about 50km long, equivalent to 170,000 A4 pages. …
Data from ESA’s Gaia mission is also helping to probe dark matter.
by Jonathan O’Callaghan
Our Milky Way is not alone in the universe. Surrounding us are numerous satellite galaxies, taking part in a continuous grand dance. But how do these neighbouring galaxies behave, how do they interact with our galaxy, and what does the future hold for them?
To find out, scientists are making use of a vast new trove of data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia space observatory. This telescope, launched in 2013, has been busy mapping more than a billion stars inside and outside our galaxy — and its latest batch of data has just been released.
On 3 December, the first part of the third batch of data from Gaia — called the Gaia Early Data Release 3 — was made available to scientists. It revealed new positional and velocity data for many stars already in its database, a small portion of which were in these satellite galaxies. …
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