More information on ScienceToday
Scientific Output
Louvain-La-Neuve
Science in ELI
février 03, 2022
Le réchauffement isole et fragilise les coraux
Une équipe de l’UCLouvain a découvert que le réchauffement climatique diminue les échanges entre récifs coralliens, affectant leur capacité à se regénérer. Conséquence : moins résilients,...
December 02, 2021
Monitoring crops on La Palma
The crops at the foot of the Cumbre Vieja volcano, 90% of which are banana plantations, have been exposed to volcanic ash fallout for over two months. What economic losses will this cause...
September 22, 2021
When the climate shifts to an ice age
When and why does our planet go from a warm, interglacial period to an ice age? What triggers the abrupt changes typical of the end of these periods? They’re associated with a threshold in the...
June 24, 2021
Can cannabis clean up Europe’s soils?
It is estimated that approximately 137,000 km²* of agricultural land in Europe is contaminated to varying degrees by heavy metals. This means that the land can only be used for non-food...
April 02, 2021
Mapping policy for how the EU can reduce its impact on...
EU imports of products contribute significantly to deforestation in other parts of the world. In a new study, published in One Earth, researchers from several universities worldwide, among...
December 08, 2020
Science and environment
Where colonisation accelerated erosion tenfold
Photo taken at the Bio Bio region (Chile), V. Vanacker, March 2013
Over the last century, human activities in North America have resulted in sediment movement equivalent to 3,000 years...
January 19, 2021
Soil: a major resource for storing carbon
© Wikimedia Commons : Hélène Rival, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons Agricultural land in the plain of Forez, Les Massards, Loire.
The CO2 absorbed by plants ends up in...
December 01, 2020
Science and environment
Brazilian beef accounts for 20% of global deforestation
More transparency concerning the origin and ecological footprint of food is the key to building more sustainable supply chains. UCLouvain researchers took a closer look at Brazilian beef,...
August 04, 2020
Environment
Where’s the water on Venus?
The presence of water on planets composed mainly of rocks and metals, such as Earth, Mars or even Venus, dates back to the earliest stages of their formation. This is shown by...
June 25, 2020
Satellite view of COVID-19 impact reveals struggling...
What’s the connection between white asparagus, soft fruit, plastic tarps, and trucks? Each had a role in recent satellite image analysis that shows a major indirect impact of COVID-19....
May 14, 2020
Environment
One ice-free summer by 2050
The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean was once an explorer’s dream. Eventually, big icebreakers made their way through the ice. Soon it could become a routine...
March 31, 2020
Health
The great dilemma: isolate or immunise
Modelling the impact of isolation measures is what authorities turn to when making decisions concerning COVID-19. UCLouvain researcher Emmanuel Hanert has adapted a mathematical model...
March 24, 2020
Mars, from the inside
The mission’s name sums up its goal: InSight Mars should lead to a better understanding of the planet’s internal structure. Since November 2018, data flows have been analysed by scientists,...
October 01, 2019
A genetic ‘switch’ in wasps
Bertanne Visser was recently appointed FNRS research associate at the Earth and Life Institute, gaining the opportunity to continue her research on lipid synthesis in certain wasps during...
September 19, 2019
Environment
Biodiversity: an emergency
We’ll talk a lot about biodiversity this fall at UCLouvain but from an angle that is not often assumed: focusing on the interactions – we wouldn’t dare write ‘synergies’ – between causes of...
September 17, 2019
Mission: satellite data training for ESA
This week, from 16 to 20 September in Louvain-la-Neuve, nearly 100 carefully selected researchers participate in the ‘Advanced Training in Land Remote Sensing’, a training in the exploitation...
May 23, 2019
Environment
Permafrost minerals predict our planet’s future
It was just a year ago that Sophie Opfergelt and her UCLouvain Earth and Life Institute team were taking permafrost samples in Alaska. Today, she is already drawing conclusions from...
May 16, 2019
Environment
What will become of our insects and flowers?
The climate changes we are experiencing today are already impacting the natural world around us. The average temperature is increasing, temperature and rainfall extremes are increasing,...
March 28, 2019
Environment
Controlling nitrate
Agricultural nitrate has polluted water for decades. Today various techniques make it possible to more effectively control the use of this necessary fertiliser. It’s a much more complex...
March 13, 2019
Environment
Oils against insects
At a time when scientists are raising the alarm over the accelerated disappearance of insects, it may seem astonishing to exhibit the results of research aimed at destroying them. But fighting...
March 14, 2019
Environment
Fresh from Antarctica, first impressions
A team of ULB and UCLouvain researchers just returned from a nearly two-month mission in Antarctica. They studied the mass balance of the Antarctic ice sheet by analysing snow accumulation....
March 12, 2019
Environment
Using satellite data to track changes in earth’s surface
A team from the Earth and Life Institute has generated a database describing land-use change so thematically detailed that it is now used by institutions such as the OECD and the United...
November 29, 2018
Disperse to survive
Dispersion is an essential biological process for the survival of individuals and species. A UCLouvain research team led by Nicolas Schtickzelle, professor of ecology and biodiversity at the Earth...
August 29, 2018
François Massonnet
Climate prediction is his forte . At 32 years old, François Massonnet has just been appointed FNRS research associate. While he has been working on the subject for years, he looks forward to...
August 22, 2018
Environment
Forest evolution under the magnifying glass
The research was ambitious: inventory the distribution of mushrooms on a European scale. Recently published in the journal Nature, it could not have been completed without the help...
August 21, 2018
Environment
An urgent warning
Will the earth’s climate reach a tipping point beyond which the planet will become a ‘hothouse’? It’s a possibility scientists warn of in an article that’s urgent reading.
‘The article, in...
August 09, 2018
Environment
Tracking soybeans
The Trase platform, on which Patrick Meyfroidt and his team of researchers collaborate, is unique: it aims to retrace the channels of the main agricultural products responsible for...
August 20, 2018
Environment
A tool for modernising European agricultural policy
Commissioned by the European Commission (EC) and funded by the European Space Agency (ESA), the Sen4CAP research project, led by Sophie Bontemps and Nicolas Bellemans and supervised by Pierre...
July 12, 2018
Environnement
Standardising pack ice measurements to better predict...
At UCL’s Georges Lemaître Centre for Earth and Climate Research (TECLIM), two researchers are passionate about polar region climate variations: François Massonnet and Hugues Goosse....
July 12, 2018
Environment
Alaska: Are surprises in store as permafrost thaws?
Permafrost refers to soil that has a temperature below 0° C for more than two consecutive years. With global warming, the thaw of permafrost is waking up its constituents. Their...
March 22, 2018
Environment
What killed the saiga antelopes?
In 2015, in Kazakhstan, nearly 200,000 saiga antelopes died in less than a month. A multidisciplinary and international team of researchers investigated this mysterious hecatomb.
The saiga...
October 16, 2017
Society
Food: a public commons?
World hunger continues to increase, affecting 777 million people in 2015 and 815 million in 2016. Would it help if we changed the way we look at food in our societies? That’s the idea of José Luis...
September 26, 2017
Environment
Pay to prevent deforestation
To objectively evaluate an anti-deforestation programme, an international team of researchers carried out a randomised study in Uganda, the first of its kind in environmental science. The...
August 17, 2017
A better understanding of Antarctic pack ice variation
While the Arctic pack ice has continued to melt, the Antarctic pack ice tended rather to expand between 1979 and 2015, before its extent was also drastically reduced in 2016 and 2017. A surprising...
July 25, 2017
Jérôme Mallefet’s abyssal fishing
To draw up an inventory of the abyssal fauna; this was the ambitious objective of the Australian international mission in which Jérôme Mallefet participated. Over a month of intensive work in...
January 17, 2017
Global warming: Next stop, the Arctic
Pushing fundamental research toward its applications—that’s the challenge of the European Horizon 2020 APPLICATE project. Its goal is to more accurately predict the effect on Europe of Arctic...
March 22, 2017
A better understanding of deglaciation
The work of two Earth and Life Institute researchers has led to a better understanding of glaciation and deglaciation. We now know how variations in earth’s orbit influence the passage from a...
April 11, 2017
The carbon cycle reveals its secrets
Today, thanks to the work of Kristof Van Oost’s team at the UCL Earth and Life Institute, we have a better understanding of the carbon cycle. Specifically, they have discovered a process that...
January 15, 2017
Tree transpiration
Thanks in part to the contribution of UCL researchers, the amount of water that returns to the atmosphere from a given tract of forest can now be measured. This is a major advance for the field of...
November 10, 2016
Learning how to grow symbiotic fungi
UCL’s Mycology Laboratory is a world leader in the in vitro breeding of a certain fungus of great value to agriculture and research. Each year, Prof. Stéphane Declerck’s team shares its knowledge...
octobre 15, 2020
Science et environnement
Sahara: une densité d’arbres étonnamment grande
Précieux pour les écosystèmes, les arbres isolés offrent abris, nourriture, stockage de carbone et autres services. Une étude publiée dans Nature dévoile qu’ils sont nombreux dans...
December 03, 2020
Brazilian beef accounts for 20% of global deforestation
More transparency concerning the origin and ecological footprint of food is the key to building more sustainable supply chains. UCLouvain researchers took a closer look at Brazilian beef, whose...