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.

We spend roughly a third of our lives asleep, and about a quarter of that time dreaming. Most of those stories fade within minutes of waking, which is why dreaming stayed at the edge of serious science for so long. A team in Italy decided to count them anyway: more than 3 700 dream reports from almost 290 people, run through language algorithms. What came out is a picture of dreaming that is anything but random — and of dreamers who differ from one another enough that it is worth asking what kind of dreamer you are.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.