The fact that Finland has staged an annual herring festival ever since 1743 tells you something about the historical and cultural significance of the country’s most populous fish.

Imagine living in a building that once leaked heat in the winter and baked in the summer, now retrofitted to be a haven of comfort and efficiency.

Nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium are  a double-edged sword . As key components of fertilizers, they are  essential for life on Earth, but become a threat to human health and the environment when they are in excess and run off into water courses and wastewater.

From homeless, anonymous guy to TV star, at least for one day. Alexandre has appeared on French media , sitting on a bridge in Lyon, while inviting passers-by to give him money by scanning a QR Code with their smartphone .

It began with Angela Merkel. When the former German chancellor opened the borders to refugees in 2015, hundreds of thousands of Syrians and others entered. Many are now settled all over the country.

Imagine visiting a hi-tech museum and being guided by an AI robot. No, you are not experiencing a remake of the “2001.

When we throw a plastic bottle in the right waste container, we feel virtuous because we have done our part for the environment. However, we cannot imagine the huge effort that will be needed to ensure that our bottle is effectively recycled.

The Earth is a sick patient, struggling to survive and feed its inhabitants.

It’s all about connection. This is the key to making a city “smart”, say the smart people working on the subject. And by “connection”, they mean not only the technological kind but especially the human one.

Spring is a season that turns our world green, but olives trees in the hills of Andalusia in southern Spain have never been so pale. For local farmers it is yet another difficult year.

European cities are well aware that transport is a leading emitter of GHGs (Greenhouse Gas, a 33% share in 2019, according to the IEA , International Energy Agency), so decarbonisation of public transport systems is a key component of net-zero carbon strategies.

Calin lives in the Romanian city of Cluj. He suffers from melanoma and his mother died from colorectal cancer, aged 58. “It took two months just for a colonoscopy,” he recalls.

“ E-car batteries are a key technology to implement rapid electrification of transport and achieve the targets of the Paris Agreement . Their production will generate billions of euros in revenue and create thousands of jobs.

Batteries are unanimously seen as key drivers of the energy transition .

Each year over 3.5 million tourists from all over the world visit Pompeii to admire the ruins left by the eruption of the Vesuvius that, in 79 AD, engulfed it together with the nearby city of Herculaneum.

The ongoing energy crisis, which started in summer 2021 due to low natural gas supply and which further deteriorated with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has highlighted the urgent need for a more independent European energy policy .

When Salvatore was diagnosed with brain cancer, he made headlines all over the world . International outlets like CNN and the BBC presented him as “the hacker who decrypted his medical records to create his open-source therapy”.

“If I just look at my courtyard , three of my neighbors have an electric car" , says Christian Patermann, long-time program director at the European Commission and now internationally known as the “father of the bioeconomy”.

In the city, the famous Cabanyal district which had been home to a local fishing community for a long time, has recently been transformed into a testing ground for numerous energy efficiency techniques.

In the mid-90s, when he was 9 to 12 years old, Tommy DeVoss broke into the computer systems of global fast-food and pharmaceutical companies. He also hacked into organisations such as the US government, the US military, and NASA .