Europe

With extreme weather events increasingly hitting news headlines around the world, accurate and timely forecasts are essential for effective disaster warning and mitigation systems. This, in turn, calls for joint research efforts within the global meteorological community to improve models and tools for predicting severe weather, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, cyclones, floods, heat waves etc.

The rise in obesity – and particularly child obesity – poses a serious public health challenge. Approximately one in four children in England are now overweight or obese by school entry, rising to a third by the end of primary school. MD-Paedigree is a four-year European Commission funded ICT project to help fight childhood obesity-related cardiovascular and other child diseases.

Thanks to the Mylims platform, scientists around the world are able to process and manipulate data, interpret results and compare them with spectra obtained by other users and those stored in databases, thus accelerating the understanding of compounds. Mylims has already led to breakthroughs in the diagnosis of illnesses, such as leukaemia, and has become a valuable tool for food chemists to detect fraudulent coffee.

More than 20 countries are present in Ny-Ålesund in the Arctic, operating their own research facilities. The most northerly fibre optic cable system in the world has been installed to ensure that the massive amounts of data produced there can be transferred ”live” to global research networks.

Since a large part of the Netherlands is below sea level, the country will inevitably feel the effects of rising sea levels. Changes in sea levels are influenced by the behaviour of oceans. The eSALSA team performs large-scale global climate simulations to examine the effect of changing ocean circulations on local sea levels.

Central Asia is under constant threat from its vulnerability to earthquakes. The region sits on the junction of two tectonic plates that have been colliding for millions of years, building mountains and causing earthquakes. CAREN – the Central Asia Research and Education Network – underpins international scientific efforts in the region to protect lives and to safeguard economic growth from the consequences.

The scale of the SKA represents a huge leap forward in engineering, telescope design and research & development towards building and delivering a unique instrument.