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.

Almost 60 million people in Europe live with hearing loss, and the standard test only asks one thing: how quiet a tone you can still catch. Plenty of people pass it without a problem and then sit down in a loud bar catching maybe half of the conversation. A team in Ghent has a name for that gap, a digital copy of the inner ear that explains it and a patented sound that measures it — and at the end you can check how much noise your own ears put up with.

Ammonia, fuels, plastics: the chemical industry still makes almost everything by burning fossil fuels at high temperature and pressure. A European research project has been testing another route - electricity from wind and sun, gas turned into cold plasma, and a catalyst that has to cooperate with it instead of shutting it down. The reported carbon footprint is up to over 90 % lower - and the test at the end asks whether thinking in parameters, conditions and comparisons is already your habit.

Around 330 million male chicks are killed in the EU every year, because they lay no eggs and put on too little meat to pay for their feed. Germany and France have already banned the practice, and other Member States are pushing for an EU-wide ban, which leaves hatcheries with a question they have to answer before anything hatches. A German team funded by the European Innovation Council shines light through the shell and lets an algorithm read the answer - a mix of ethics, optics and code that is worth asking yourself about before you pick a degree.

Star catalogues hand out ages to several decimal places, and the numbers look as solid as a temperature reading. They are not. For decades the models behind them simply assumed how much helium a star holds, because nobody knew how to measure it. The EU-funded CartographY project set out to stop assuming, and in the process it showed how far precision can drift from accuracy — the difference between treating astrophysics as a method and treating it as a view.

Asking whether artificial intelligence is ethical no longer gets anyone very far. The EU-funded AIOLIA project, with Petra Saskia Bayerl of Sheffield Hallam University as its lead researcher, starts somewhere else: with what these systems do to human judgement, and what has to be put in place once a machine starts suggesting answers. Its guidelines cover six European situations, from medical diagnosis to recruitment - and the habit they all come back to is how much of your own judgement you hand over to a model.

Over 1 200 adults in Canada and the United Kingdom answered questions about how they felt and how well their lives were going. Researchers from the University of Toronto and Simon Fraser University expected pleasant emotions to explain most of it. Instead, the strongest signal came from something quieter: the sense of deciding for yourself — a result worth sitting with if you are picking a degree, and one you can try out at the end on what you really need in order to feel satisfied.

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.

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.

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.