Videos

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.

What impact does man, through sand extraction for example, have on life on the bottom of the North Sea? To find out, experts manually check which (often very small) animals they can find in samples of the seafloor. But this way, it can take up to 10 hours to analyse one sample. In her research, Laure Van den Bulcke is working on a faster and cheaper method.

How do you make a dairy cow emit less nitrogen without her producing less milk? To this end, Tine Van Den Bossche (ILVO - UGent) is doing tests with different feed additives that help the cow make milk proteins, among other things. Her goal: to provide milk that is not only good for all of us, but also better for the environment!

Potatoes are highly susceptible to diseases and pests. To better protect these crops, computer scientist Jana Wieme is deploying drones and artificial intelligence. With that extra eye, potato farmers can monitor each individual plant and thus intervene quickly when needed. In this video, she explains how it works.

Did you know that the electricity generated today was traded yesterday by producers and retailers in the 'day-ahead' electricity market? ⚡️ 🤝 But what happens if we expect a windy day tomorrow 💨 but end up having much less wind, and thus less wind power, than anticipated? Lina Silva-Rodriguez explains how she uses math to help deal with this uncertainty.

Modern electrical devices, such as the smartphone or the electric cars, work with direct current (DC) while our power grid works with alternating current (AC). Therefore, you need e.g. a charger, which converts one type of current to the other. So shouldn't we switch to a DC electricity grid? In her PhD, Leonie Hallemans investigates how we can make such new DC grids as safe as our old AC grid.

Should you be worried if, for instance, your cholesterol level is above the normal value? Not necessarily. As Murih Pusparum (VITO - UHasselt) argues: test results are often compared to a standard range of normal values, while every person might have his or her own range depending on age, gender, and genetic or biological traits. That's why she is working on more personalised diagnosis.

Less than 10%... That's how much of all the plastic is recycled today. The rest is incinerated or ends up in landfills or -worse- in our oceans... The problem is that with current recycling methods, the quality of the plastic decreases with each recycling cycle. So is there no method to recycle plastic repeatedly without losing quality? There is: chemical recycling, aka the 'reincarnation' of plastic. Annelore Aerts (VITO) explains how that works.

To measure is to know. That is the credo of Michelle Laeremans (VITO). Together with a team of researchers, she monitors the health of 300 children in Mol, Dessel, and Retie (Belgium). They do this from pregnancy until the child reaches the age of 18. In this way, they map exposure to chemicals.