From solar energy beamed from space to genetic brain maps and live self-repairing bridges, Horizon Europe-funded research in 2025 is promising.
We may also see Horizon Europe-funded projects to make cities greener and cleaner.
In 2025, we could witness genetic decoding of the human brain, collect solar energy in space, and walk across a bridge built of electronically controlled fungi.
Horizon Europe-funded project could crack the brain’s genetics with AI
Detailed maps of the human brain drawn up by the Horizon Europe-funded Human Brain Project are ready for prime time and should start to come into their own in 2025.
These maps will help scientists and doctors navigate towards new treatments for patients with brain disease, according to Professor Katrin Amunts, a German neuroscientist at the University of Dusseldorf and Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany.
She led the landmark ten-year exploration of the human brain that has generated the human brain atlas – with the most detailed maps of brain areas and their cellular architecture ever made – with new developments on the way to help exploit their full potential.
She explained: “In 2025, we will have enormous computation power when one of the biggest AI machines – JUPITER – starts up in Jülich. By bringing data together with AI, we can run virtual expert scenarios on the effects of certain therapies on the brain.
“I want the brain atlases we developed to benefit more patients and to be a useful instrument for informing diagnosis and surgery, for example, about the locality of a tumour.”
She added: “One breakthrough I would like to see is in understanding how the brain functions on a cellular level. I hope that in 2025, we can close some gaps between our knowledge of the relationship of brain cells, their genes and diseases at different scales, from cells to networks, to the entire brain.”
Solar energy gets a helping hand from space
Combining satellite data with AI offers surprising new opportunities where the sky is the limit.
Effie Makri, an electronic engineer and vice president of Research and Innovation at the Greek tech company, leads the Horizon Europe-funded RESPONDENT project, which combines the power of AI, satellite observations and mini-weather stations to boost predictions of energy going to the grid from a solar farm.
“The Galileo and Copernicus satellite programmes are incredible, and Europe should be very proud of these technologies. There are so many areas where we will make future use of satellite data,” said Makri.
“Another potential development I foresee is space-based energy. This would see the solar energy collection in space, which would then be wirelessly transmitted to Earth via microwaves or lasers.”
Creating self-repairing, living, structural materials through Horizon funding
We have limited resources and will need to be mindful of our impact on the climate.
Dr Kunal Masania, an engineer at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and part of the Horizon Europe-funded AM-IMATE project, is working to achieve this.
He is creating composite materials with fungi for future household furnishings, aeroplane parts, and large construction projects such as bridges. Fungi are a renewable resource, and some species can be grown using waste products from agriculture or forestry.
He said: “We’ve made composites with sawdust and pieces of wood, which are bound together by fungi. But what we’ve missed out on is all the interesting capabilities available when your material is alive.
“I’m making Lego-like pieces consisting of fungal cells fitted together by a robot to build a small bridge.
“We plan to put electrodes in this material to listen out for signals of mechanical stress from the fungi. We also want to signal to the fungi in response to repair damage or locally reinforce certain areas, something that the hyphae [filaments] of fungi can do.”
The advantage of structures of living organisms could be that the materials can sense, report and adapt to stresses, reinforcing only where the material is needed.
A better future for bees and nature in Europe
Honeybees are the most frequent visitor to flowers in natural habitats worldwide and pollinate around half of all crops. Yet they have not been doing well, according to Professor Dirk de Graaf, a biologist at Ghent University, Belgium.
“The pollination of crops and wildflowers by honeybees is more valuable than all the honey they produce – by some distance. Yet, on average, one-third of our European colonies are lost yearly. That means that – with the help of technology – the situation with European honeybees will improve in 2025 and beyond. De Graaf leads a Horizon Europe-funded project researching honeybees called B-GOOD, which seeks to restore their harmony with nature.
“The vast majority of honeybees in Belgium and northern Europe were imported, so we don’t race adapted to our climate. In the future, there will be a need to select bees that can better resist parasites such as the varroa mite, rather than relying on chemicals to kill these parasites.”
“The real added value will be when we develop smarter algorithms that interpret the data and send alerts to the beekeeper, so they spend less time working with the bees, and yet their bees will be healthier.”
Greener, cleaner cities that benefit all
According to Dr Annemie Wyckmans, an architect at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, our future cities will be greener, generate fewer carbon emissions, and be more beautiful.
As leader of the EU-funded CRAFT project, she brings artistic and cultural groups together to help kindle sustainable change on city streets. These transformations will be pushed forward primarily by local communities.
“The CRAFT team is drawing inspiration from an EU initiative to bring the European Green Deal to the places where people live. New European Bauhaus, or NEB, wants people’s daily lives and living spaces to take inspiration from art and culture, be in harmony with nature and involve social interaction,” Wyckmans commented.
Alongside CRAFT, projects such as Re-Value, Bauhaus Bites, and NEB-STAR are working towards the same goals, involving more than 100 cities and communities in Europe.
Like the Bauhaus movement in Germany a century ago, the NEB aims to fuse urban design, science, technology, art and community spirit to overcome significant societal challenges. Art itself can be a driving force because it’s widely on display in cities and has the power to galvanise people.
This article was originally published in Horizon the EU Research and Innovation Magazine.
