Videos

A question: if a pig farmer has 10.000 pigs and you know that 1 pig produces 4.5kg of manure each day, how much manure does the farmer have to deal with on a yearly basis? That's right: a sh*tload of manure. A good thing Natalia Donoso is researching how pig farmers can process this manure in a sustainable way.

Winter, with its cold temperatures, is not the favourite season of our farmers. Certain plants and crops suffer greatly from the cold. But did you know that these plants themselves have the key to withstand the cold? Antoine Persyn explains exactly how this works.

"Sometimes I worry so much about my exams that I get physically ill." Some adolescents struggle with their emotions in stressful situations. Gina Pancorbo Valdivia wants to help them. In her research she develops a tool to help teachers and students to know how to assess and learn skills that will help them to overcome social and emotional challenges in their daily life.

When you think of textiles, you probably think of t-shirts, carpets or perhaps even parachutes. But did you know that even parts of the fuselage of an airplane could be made from textiles?

Ann Cnop lets us to travel in time. Not by means of a real teletime machine, but thanks to a 'simple' violin and ancient scores. Through her research she makes the violin compositions of Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert sound as these musical masters themselves heard them at the time. 

History is more than just a series of facts and events. It is also a science that critically examines the past. The research methods used by historians for this purpose are still very useful today. They can help to distinguish real news from fake news.

Did you know that cancer researchers draw inspiration from applications such as Amazon, Facebook and even Tinder? Armed with a supercomputer, Celine Everaert, like these applications, processes large amounts of data. Not to sell books or to help people get on a date, but to offer cancer patients personalised treatments.

Not every baby is clearly born as a boy or a girl. Dorien Baetens researches this phenomenon, also called 'disorders of sex development'.

While medicine has come a long way to help HIV-patients, current drugs can't rid these patients of their HIV-infection. The drugs do not cure the infection, but suppress the virus to such an extent that no symptoms of the disease occur. Subha Lakshmi Sharma wants to contribute to finding a complete cure for the virus. Something she hopes to achieve by not looking at the virus itself, but by looking away from it.

Did you know that breast cancer is the second most common cancer for women, affecting 1.7 million women worldwide? In her research Ovia Margaret Thirukkumaran is trying to decipher how cancer cells communicate and develop resistance against drugs in so called HER 2 breast cancer, a very aggressive form of breast cancer.

Imagine you are listening to music via your Spotify account and suddenly the Dora theme song starts playing because some day earlier you played music for your child or cousin. Sounds familiar? Irritating isn't it? Martijn Millecamp (KU Leuven) investigates ways to give users more control over their recommendations on platforms and services such as Spotify and Netflix.

From sour wine, to Egyptians and Romans, to the wonderful discovery of Louis Pasteur some 150 years ago: Alexander Cambré tells you about bad bacteria and how they make us sick. In his research he tries to understand more about the Salmonella bacteria so that we can combat them better.