Belgium Archives

Antilope: A low-cost portable sensor system for air quality monitoring

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Antilope is a low-cost portable sensor system for air quality monitoring

Monitoring air quality and assessing personal pollutant exposure in urban settings remain challenging tasks in atmospheric science. As part of this monitoring, low-cost sensors have become increasingly available. This allows makers to assemble their own air quality stations according to online instructions, and institutions to multiply the number of measurement points. However, most of these commercial devices suffer from limitations […]

One cell’s death is a microbe’s DINNR: How intestinal bacteria use our dying cells as fuel

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Dr CJ Anderson and Professor Kodi Ravichandran research the relationship between programmed cell death and bacterial infections in the intestinal tract, with an aim to understand the potential impact that this could have on chemotherapy patients

Until now, a great deal has remained unknown about the relationship between programmed cell death and bacterial infections. However, recent work by Dr CJ Anderson and Professor Kodi Ravichandran from VIB-UGent, Belgium, has shed new light on this topic and introduced a new layer to the complex host–pathogen interaction. The team has shown that dying mammalian cells produce and shed […]

Intergenerational mobility and school inequality in the US

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a group of school children outside school

Children of different income groups attend schools of different quality. To understand how unequal school opportunity contributes to differences in social mobility and human capital, Professor Jean Hindriks, Head of the Economics School of Louvain at UCLouvain, Belgium, and Dr Andreu Arenas, Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Barcelona, have extended the classical Becker-Tomes-Solon parent-child transmission model to […]

The rocky road to justice for atrocities committed during the Kosovo war

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The Kosovo war marked a period of unimaginable violence. The Serbian campaign of ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians, overseen by then-president of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević, met with retaliatory atrocities by opposing forces, led by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In the years since, various tribunals and organisations have been created to deliver justice, but they have been hampered by continued […]

Fertility preservation options in gender reassignment

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39% of transgender men and 21.9% of transgender women express the desire to become parents. This is complicated by gender confirmation therapies usually occurring at a young age, before consolidation of parental desire. These therapies can involve hormone treatment and gender confirming surgery which can remove the possibility of reproduction. Fertility preservation knowledge and information is limited for transgender people. […]

A novel implant enhances skull surgery outcomes

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During brain surgery, the surgeon removes a piece of the skull to access the brain. The initial damage to the skull is then repaired by a procedure called cranioplasty, but the reconstruction may be complicated by infection and dehiscence (parting of the sutured lips of a wound). Cranioplasty is also used to reconstruct contour abnormalities of the skull. Recently, Professor […]

Learning to lead: Can group reflection help train school leaders?

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The job of a school leader is to ensure teachers are trained to work with diverse students.

With greater student diversity, stricter standards, and school staff and funding in flux, the task of school leadership has become increasingly complex. School leaders require training to help them coach and manage teachers through this troublesome terrain. Against this backdrop, Dr Ellen Daniëls, researcher at the KU Leuven Public Governance Institute in Belgium, investigates group reflective learning as a tool […]

Magma differentiation: The complex processes behind active volcanism

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Active volcanism is prevalent across much of the Earth’s surface, yet the deep mantle and crustal processes that drive it are still being understood by geologists. Untangling the complex chemical relationships that arise from magma differentiation offer some clues as to the relationships between melting of mantle rock and crystallisation of molten magma to igneous rocks. Professor Vander Auwera at […]