Physical sciences, Earth sciences

What weighs 23 000 tonnes and has a potential temperature of 150 million °C? Literally, it’s the new star of the energy world, the ITER reactor.

An EU initiative helps citizens engage in electricity grid expansion processes to smooth the way towards a greener economy.

An EU initiative is utilising gamification and other strategies to change energy consumption habits in buildings.

What do you do if you are a smaller country without the resources to fully exploit the next generation of nuclear energy? As one project has discovered, the answer could lie in smart regional collaboration.

European engineers have developed a novel generator that could be used to power thousands of homes.

Researchers are developing tools to substantially reduce the operations and maintenance costs of wind farms. The novel tools will be tested on three European wind farms in 2020.

The European Commission is supporting the World Alliance for Efficient Solutions. The Solar Impulse Foundation (Switzerland) backs the World Alliance and its commitment: collecting 1 000 Efficient Solutions addressing five Sustainable Development goals - Clean Water Clean Energy Sustainable Cities Responsible Consumption & Production and Industry & Infrastructure. The portfolio of 1 000 Efficient Solutions aims to encourage decisionmakers to adopt ambitious environmental targets innovative regulations and sound policies.

Scientists have uncovered eccentric quantum properties of a new class of hybrid materials. Their study could open up a range of novel device applications.

Wastewater treatment is no longer just about making water reusable. Researchers show how energy, nutrients and added value by-products can be extracted from wastewater.

Pollution is a serious issue in many parts of the world, especially in urban areas. Using novel graphene-based materials, researchers from the Graphene Flagship Functional Foams and Coatings Work Package have provided solutions to tackle environmental contamination, among other applications.

Integrating graphene sheets into silicon photonics could form the basis for next-generation data communications. Researchers from the Graphene Flagship initiative have pushed the technology closer to application by demonstrating the world’s first high-speed graphene-based data communication at a data rate of 50 Gb/s.

Graphene Flagship researchers produced graphene-based spintronics devices that utilise both electron charge and spin at room temperature. Demonstrating the spin’s feasibility for bridging distances of up to several micrometres, results open up new possibilities for integrating information-processing and storage in a single chip.

The world''s first two-dimensional material, graphene, possesses unique and outstanding properties. A major EU-funded initiative has developed the material and its application in a myriad of new technologies.

Graphene’s unique combination of properties paves the way for a wide variety of applications, from energy and electronics to biomedical devices and aircraft. To meet these increasing demands, researchers have to scale up graphene production to industrial scale.

In an ingenious set of experiments, European teams have tested graphene under microgravity conditions for the first time. The exciting results provide a valuable foundation for developing graphene devices for use in space.