Science

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.