Across Europe, town and city councils are becoming increasingly interested in energy decentralisation , i.e. in producing power closer to where it is consumed.

If aliens were to examine a human, they would think we were just slavish organisms designed to feed microbes and carry them around. Our bodies contain ten times more bacteria than cells , and there are an estimated 3.

There are three ways a crowdfunding project can be financed. Lending: the entrepreneurs borrow money and pay interest; equity: investors in the project become its shareholders; donations: no reward is to be expected (there is a fourth way, a mix of equity and lending called “hybrid”).

United Kingdom - London Array With a peak rated power of 630 megawatts, London Array is the largest wind farm in Europe by capacity, and also the largest offshore plant in the world.

With summertime and heat waves approaching, thunderstorms are becoming more frequent again. Recently several regions in Europe were hit by devastating thunderstorms along with strong winds, lightning strikes, hail and flash floods.

It's a brand new sector: the first steps date back to 2012. Today energy crowdfunding is a way of financing solar panel or wind turbine projects.

Efforts to make buildings environmentally sustainable often focus on the technical side, such as energy efficiency. But there is more to sustainability than just energy efficiency.

For the first time in its history, the Global Seed Vault on the Svalbard Islands, Norway, has authorised a withdrawal. It was requested in 2015 by Syria, a country where the war is endangering the local agricultural seed collections.

All too often, conversations on renewable energy meander toward the same end: green technology is a nice thing, though it has to become economically viable before widespread adoption becomes the norm. ...

As well as being a time for celebration, winter in Europe is a time for serious weather. Blizzards, flash floods, hurricanes, heavy snow fall can cause chaos, major disruption, economic loss, and endanger lives.

Traditionally our electricity grids were designed to move power from large nuclear and fossil fuel power plants to consumers, but renewable energy will see changes to allow smaller power generation from wind and solar to be hooked up to the grid.

From thatched roofing in cold regions to reflective walls in hotter climates, for centuries buildings have been constructed with materials that maximize comfort within a given environment.

In Europe, households are responsible for 32% of greenhouse gas emissions and 42% of energy. Cement production alone contributes to 5% of manmade CO 2 emissions .

African swine fever , or ASF, is a viral disease that kills almost every pig it infects and is likened to Ebola . It gained a foothold in Georgia in 2007, when contaminated pig meat landed from a ship from South-East Africa and was fed to local pigs.

To tackle climate change, new buildings are required to consume as little energy as possible . That’s because, in Europe, buildings are responsible for about 40% of our energy consumption.

Ecosystem services are free, but often hidden. They include pollination and killing of crop pests by beneficial insects. Now, QuESSA , an EU-funded research project, due to be completed in 2017, will try and increase the visibility of such services.

We age in two ways. There is the ageing we count by clock and calendar. And then there is biological ageing. The latter is written into our genes. But, it is also influenced by our lifestyle and history.

When a ship runs aground, or two vessels crash into each other, the damaged one may lose its stability, or worse, sink. But imagine if after a ship accident, balloons popped up like car airbags to keep the disabled vessel upright and afloat .

Bone is one of the most frequently transplanted tissues. And the demand is rising. Transplants treat large defects like those caused by trauma, complicated fractures, tumour resection or osteoporosis. ...

The human genome and those of several other organisms have been mapped. But it is proteins that perform the majority of biological functions within every organism .