Videos

More than half of the older population has to take at least five medicines a day. This often leads to mistakes, for example medicines interacting badly, increasing the risk of falls, hospitalisation, or even death. The key is medication optimisation: doctors should review medication intake, but unfortunately, they just don't have the time to do this for every patient. That is why Cheima Amrouch is working on a different approach.

Do you have a lot of fast or rather slow muscle fibers? No worries if you don't know the answer. But for athletes, this is crucial info as it determines how best to train. Only there is one big problem, about 15 centimeters big to be precise .... That's how long the needle, used to remove a piece of muscle to find out someone's muscle fiber type, is. Sounds painful and it is. That's why Freek Van de Casteele is looking for new, reliable, and painless methods.

Some 300,000 people overcame cancer in Belgium in the past decade. Great news, but there is a downside: chemotherapy can cause permanent damage to the sense of hearing and balance, leading to hearing loss, tinnitus, or balance problems. To better identify the problem, Heleen Vander Biest (UGent) will test patients' ears just before starting, during, and after chemotherapy.

If you get a glioblastoma, you usually only have about 15 months to live.This malignant tumour spreads rapidly through the brain and unfortunately cannot be cured. Yanti De Visser is working on a personalised treatment to already slow down the brain tumour - with success. "The first results show that our approach has the potential to extend patients' lives by years, rather than months," she says.

Do you often eat fish? 🐟 Through fish, you get a lot of healthy #omega3 fatty acids. Yet we don't owe those omega-3 to the fish themselves. Marine biologist Jens Boyen tells you about the little heroes who provide the healthy omega-3.

Sujith Reddy is working on perovskites, a promising new solar cell technology that captures more sunlight and costs less than conventional solar cells. Sounds great, right! But there's a catch: these perovskite solar cells ironically tend to break down when exposed to ... light. Sujith wants to uncover the mechanisms behind this degradation in order to improve perovskites and to use them on a larger scale.

What if we could predict whether a person with dementia is about to become agitated? That would help caregivers intervene in time and direct their attention to this person, so as to prevent agitation onset. That's what Hannah Davidoff (KU Leuven - Imec) hopes to achieve. Using wearables and other sensors, she builds algorithms to detect agitation.

Do you own an electric car? Then you know how difficult it can be to find available charging spots. But what if we cover electric cars with solar panels so that they can charge themselves with the power of the sun? Well, that's not easy because conventional solar panels used on roofs can't be integrated into our cars. Electrical engineer Bin Luo is looking at new solar panels suitable for our cars.

Did you know that AI can help doctors detect breast cancer? Or that it can be used to predict sepsis, a life-threatening condition, in premature babies? AI seems to be a great advancement in many ways, yet many people fear or don't trust the technology. Ignace Decroix wants to identify what exactly causes people to have more or less trust in AI.

Producing renewable, low-cost energy in a robust way remains a challenge. Jose Maria Cuevas (Imec - KU Leuven - Energyville) is looking at a new sort of solar cell that might help do the trick: the *take a breath* 3 Terminal Tandem Bifacial Solar Cell 😅 Say what ⁉️ Jose breaks it down and makes it crystal clear for you in this video. 👏

Why is it that some plants like moss stay very small, while others grow to become large trees? 🌳 "There's still a lot that we don't know about how plants grow exactly", says Max Minne (VIB - UGent). To find out more Max uses an innovative technique that allows him to look at every single cell in the plant and unravel how the hormone cytokinin, responsible for plant growth, impacts each one of them. 

The year is 2040. A drone just landed on your doorstep, delivering your favorite pizza, which you just ordered a few minutes ago. 🍕 😋 What a time to be alive right?! To make this scenario a reality, Adnan Albaba (Imec - VUB) is working on radar technology to make self-navigating drones.