Videos

Do you ever wake up feeling like you have been run over by a truck? You are not alone. As many as 1 in 5 adults suffer from a sleep disorder, ranging from sleep apnoea to insomnia. With a compact, wearable device and AI, Elisabeth Heremans wants to analyse sleep problems in patients from the comfort of their own bed, instead of having them spend the night in a sleep clinic attached to a bunch of wires.

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.

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. 

Up to 25% of the cells present in lung cancer tumours are currently ignored. As such, we don't know what the role of these so-called B cells is. "It is crucial to figure that out because we cannot efficiently fight something we do not fully understand," says Pauline Bardet (VUB - VIB - FWO).

In her PhD, she wants to get to the bottom of those B cells and thus find out whether those cells are "good guys" or "bad guys".

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.

Imagine that, instead of emitting harmful CO2 into the atmosphere, we could recycle it and use it to power your future laptop or smartphone. That's what Kevin Van Daele is researching. He is developing new catalysts to efficiently convert CO2 into formic acid, a valuable chemical that could one day power your future electronic devices. 

Did you know that the average lifespan of a wind turbine is 20 years? After that, unfortunately, wind turbines end up in landfills as they are built from thermosets, materials that can't be recycled (yet). "It's time to change that", says Marlies Thys. She is looking into making recyclable thermosets by using ... wood waste. 

When removing a kidney tumor, a surgeon has just 20 minutes to do the job. During the operation, the surgeon has to cut off the blood supply to the kidney to avoid a true blood bath. But if the kidney is without blood for too long, too much of it will die off, causing the kidney to malfunction. Using mathematical models, Saar Vermijs aims to help surgeons in their race against the clock...

Today, we can treat cancer better than ever. Yet some cancer types remain very difficult to fight. Such is the case of glioblastoma, a highly aggressive brain cancer in which only 7 in 100 patients are still alive five years after diagnosis. Hoping to help glioblastoma get small, Joke Deschildre doctored a sophisticated strategy to attack cancer cells.

Can you think of what products you would like to buy in 10 years' time? Predicting the future is quite difficult, isn't it? And yet that is what we expect from people who invent and develop new products. Lore Brosens wants to help product designers, both students and existing design engineers. How? By training them to think critically and come up with creative solutions.