Science

About 7,500 languages are spoken today, which sounds like more than enough until you learn it is only a fraction of what humanity once had. A new study in Science reconstructs 12,000 years of linguistic history and finds a surprise: the peak came just 1,000 to 3,000 years ago, and the decline began long before colonialism. So the language on your timetable is a lucky survivor of history — and at the end you can check what kind of polyglot you are.

Some cancer treatments already work by teaching a patient’s own immune cells to hunt tumours down — but every single dose has to be built by hand, in a specialised facility, over several weeks, for a sum close to 300 000 euros. A team in Utrecht asked a different question: instead of shipping the cells to the factory, why not send the factory to the cells? Their answer is one injection of a nanoparticle — and the habit of mind behind that kind of reversal is exactly what the test at the end of this article is about.

Brain–computer interfaces sound like pure science fiction, yet their biggest obstacle turns out to be ordinary physics: too much data, too little bandwidth and far too much heat inside the skull. A European team behind the IoN project has found a clever way around it, sending neural signals through body tissue instead of radio waves and transmitting only when neurons actually fire — and at the end you can check whether you have the kind of mind neurotechnology needs.

Coffee waste and peanut shells normally end their life in a bin. In a European project coordinated from Lyon they became the raw material for the carbon cores of nanoparticles smaller than twenty nanometres — particles that show a tumour on an image and attack it at the same time. In animal studies the team reports up to 97% inhibition of tumour growth. It is a story about materials chemistry, biology and imaging meeting inside one object — and at the end you can check how you look at things everyone else calls waste.

An electric car battery that can no longer power a vehicle is not rubbish at all – it is a small mine of lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese. The European BATRAW project, coordinated by Leitat, has shown step by step how robots, AI cameras, lasers, clever chemistry and a blockchain passport can turn worn-out packs into high-quality materials for brand-new batteries – and at the end you can find out how much of a circular economy engineer there is in you.

Every brewery produces it by the tonne: the wet, heavy mass of spent malt left in the mash tun once the sugars have been washed out. Usually it ends up as animal feed, or simply as waste. An EU-funded project has just finished asking whether that mass could become a plastic instead — and whether the bottles and trays made from it could later be sorted out and broken back into their building blocks. The answer says a lot about what the word “bio” on a label is actually worth — and at the end you can check how far your own thinking about waste really reaches.

Fish farming is booming, yet only 37% of Europe’s surface waters meet environmental requirements. SusWater tackled this with an unusual toolkit: filters made from cellulose, chitosan, starch and gelatine, fungi taken from wastewater, light-driven catalysts and a pocket-sized sensor for trace pollutants. It is a field where chemists, biologists and materials scientists work side by side – and at the end you can check whether you have what it takes to be a clean-water detective.

Planning what millions of people will eat twenty-five years from now sounds like a job for science fiction, yet a Horizon Europe project spent three and a half years doing exactly that. FoSTA-Health studied Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia and found that a food system is far more than farming: it is soil, animal health, human health, trade and policy tangled into one knot. The team sketched four possible routes to 2050 – and at the end you can check whether you think in systems or in separate cases.

Telescopes keep getting sharper and space missions keep travelling further, yet nobody has found confirmed evidence of life beyond Earth. An international team of researchers suggests that part of the problem may lie in how we look: science worries a lot about claiming life where there is none, and far less about missing real traces. Statistics students call this a false negative – and at the end you can check whether you have the eye of an alien-trace hunter.

Lie on a blanket somewhere far from the city and one thing becomes obvious within a minute: the stars are not scattered evenly. Some patches of sky are crowded, others look almost empty, and a pale band runs straight across the middle. The answer to that one naive question leads through gravity, the shape of the Milky Way, three families of galaxies and a collision already pencilled in for ten billion years from now – and at the end you can check what kind of sky-watcher you are.

Every time you log in, sign up or confirm your age online, a bit of your personal data goes somewhere. The EU-funded TrustED project wants to change the rules of that game: it combines a digital identity wallet, federated learning and advanced encryption so that people and organisations can share data securely and still keep their privacy. The team has already tried it out with volunteers and in hospitals — and at the end you can check how well you look after your own digital identity.

Every photo, message and backup has to sit somewhere, and the world is running out of convenient somewheres. DNA is a tempting answer: huge capacity in almost no space, and it lasts. Writing into it, though, has meant harsh solvents and specialised laboratories. A team in the EU-funded HYPERION project took a silicon chip designed to listen to nerve cells and used it to write 64 DNA sequences at once, in plain water — and then hit a wall somewhere nobody had been looking, which is what the five questions at the end are about.

Many companies want their staff back at their desks five days a week, but new research from the United States suggests that this may not be the smartest move. A team that surveyed over 7,700 workers found that people working fully remotely reported the highest well-being, while those always on site reported the lowest. Even one of the authors expected a different result. So who is right, the bosses or the data? Read on – and at the end you can check whether remote work is really your thing.

Almost everyone knows the moment: you pick up the phone for one thing and put it down forty minutes later, not quite sure where the time went. Researchers from the University of Cincinnati and Northwestern University went looking for the point at which that habit stops being ordinary. They pooled eleven surveys gathered between 2014 and 2024, covering some 183 000 American adults, and landed on a threshold of around 150 minutes a day – and at the end you can look at how your own day with a phone is actually built.

Rising temperatures, melting permafrost and violent storms are loosening mountain slopes, and a block breaking free above a road is no rare event. Engineers long modelled that block as one object on one path — yet it usually shatters in mid-air, becoming a spray of fragments with different reaches and different energies. A project run from Turin rebuilt the calculation around that fact, and the numbers it produces end up being decisions about money and people — and at the end you can check how you handle a risk estimate yourself.

Beneath the oceans lie more than 1.3 million kilometres of fibre-optic cable, and roughly 95% of the world’s internet and voice traffic runs through them. For decades that glass had exactly one job: moving data. Then researchers realised that the same fibre also registers every tremor of the seabed it rests on. The EU-funded SUBMERSE project turned that realisation into a working instrument — and in doing so showed that a new research tool is sometimes just infrastructure nobody had thought to listen to, which is exactly the kind of eye you can test at the end.

Ground engineering usually starts with a truck full of cement. A Swiss research team asked a different question: what if the soil could bind itself? In the CEBREWA project, microorganisms injected into the ground produce calcium carbonate simply by living, and limestone crystals grow between the grains until loose soil holds together like weak rock. Eighteen months took the idea from a single pore to a full-scale slope — and at the end you can check how far you would carry an idea of your own.

Half of a student flat is made of wood-based panels: the desk, the wardrobe, the shelf above the bed. When one of them gives up, it usually ends in a skip, because turning an old fibreboard into a new one is far harder than the word recycling suggests. The EU-funded EcoReFibre project spent four years showing that it can be done at industrial scale, and how - sorting, defibration, mixing ratios, markets - which is also a decent test of how you yourself look at the things around you.

The same moisture that settles as dew on the grass each morning may one day keep the lights on. The EU-funded CATCHER project has been developing a technology that turns water vapour in the air into electricity, working day and night, whether or not the sun shines or the wind blows. Its converters have already run for thousands of hours in demanding laboratory tests — and at the end you can check whether you have a head for the energy of the future.

A solar panel usually brings to mind a heavy slab of glass bolted onto a roof. The technology behind the EU-funded DIAMOND project points somewhere else entirely: to a thin film of crystals that captures light more efficiently than silicon and could be made in Europe instead of shipped in. Behind that film sit whole degree programmes, from solid-state physics to materials chemistry and process engineering - and a short test at the end asks how close the reader already stands to that kind of work.

Limited range, long charging stops and too few charging points still keep many drivers away from electric cars. The European OPEVA project brought together 35 partners from nine countries to tackle these worries with artificial intelligence, energy-aware route planning for delivery vans and smarter battery management that watches every single cell – and at the end you can check whether you are ready to swap a petrol car for an electric one yourself.

A bike, a shared e-scooter, ten minutes to the lecture hall – for plenty of students that is simply how the morning works. The car beside them has airbags, ABS and assistance systems; the person on the scooter has a helmet, at best. The EU-funded SOTERIA project asked a different question: instead of counting collisions after they happen, what would a city need to collect to see one coming? The answer runs through sensors, artificial intelligence and riders themselves – starting with whether your own near miss ever reaches anyone.