Connecting Science and Society

Dr Richard Davies was an 18th century physician whose bold ideas spanned medical science, public health, and university reform. Yet, his name is little known today. From discovering features of inflammation in blood, to proposing a national system to control cattle plague, his work prefigured modern approaches to medicine and governance. Nevertheless, his calls for change often fell on deaf ears, and his contributions were overlooked or appropriated by others. Dr Margaret DeLacy revisited Dr Davies’ remarkable career, exploring how a forgotten doctor helped shape the future of medical thinking.

Today’s demand planning landscape is increasingly defined by radical uncertainty. Professor Yves R. Sagaert from the research group Predictive AI and Digital Shift at VIVES University of Applied Sciences is one of many scholars who posits that to survive and thrive in this new normal, demand planners must consider incorporating leading macroeconomic indicators into their demand forecasts. This field of research is vital for better understanding how the early warning signals in leading macroeconomic indicators can be used to inform precision forecasting and minimise forecast-reality variance.

Stroke is the third leading cause of both death and disability worldwide, but unfortunately, current diagnostic tools are unsatisfactory. Dr Roustem Miftahof and Dr Alexander Hermann at Advanced Biosimulation Technologies LLC, USA, are overcoming the limitations of existing diagnostic tools with the development of the Neuro-Glia-Vascular Unit Engine. This transformative tool for clinicians and biomedical researchers provides patient-specific health insights with the potential to improve care not only in stroke but across a range of neurological disorders.

Traditionally, rubber waste was nearly impossible to recycle due to crosslinked sulphur bonds. But a team of researchers led by Dr Shigetaka Hayano from Zeon Corporation, in Japan, have achieved a groundbreaking feat in rubber recycling. Using mild conditions for the reaction, scientists have overcome the unfavourable cross-linked structure and have achieved recovery of rubber’s original monomers. This process restores cyclopentene monomers with 90% efficiency, allowing old tires and industrial rubber waste to be chemically recycled into high quality materials. If scaled up, this innovation could revolutionise waste management, reduce environmental pollution, and enable a circular economy for rubber production.

The origin of life has puzzled science and philosophy for thousands of years. While the prevailing scientific narrative is of an ‘RNA world’ or ‘polymers first’ approach, Prof Doron Lancet’s group of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, present an alternative, describing a ‘lipid world’ scenario as a plausible origin for life, in which lipid micelles (simpler structures than cell-like vesicles) could have been nanoscopic protocell precursors. Core to the theory is that these micelles could exhibit catalysis and compositional self-reproduction, passing information through the mixture of their lipid components rather than through a genetic sequence.

Mirrors play a key role in space telescopes, but to keep increasing the scale of this technology, mirrors need to be light and compact, so they can be transported in spacecraft, but also able to be adaptively corrected and controlled to ensure their accuracy. Dr Rabien and his colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, in Germany, have developed a technique to make extremely thin and lightweight mirrors, which can then be controlled with adaptive optics, making them a potential solution for larger space telescopes.

Medical research has historically focused predominantly on male subjects, leading to dangerous gaps in our understanding of how diseases and treatments affect women. Dr Alyson McGregor from University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville has devoted her career to addressing this critical issue, highlighting how biological sex differences impact health outcomes. Her work demonstrates that ignoring these differences can have life-threatening consequences and advocates for more inclusive research practices to ensure safe and effective healthcare for everyone.

How we eat dramatically impacts our health, yet millions of Americans live in ‘food deserts’ – areas with limited access to fresh, nutritious food. Recent research reveals that solving this crisis requires looking beyond just physical access to food to understand how our entire community environment shapes our dietary choices. Through a series of pioneering studies, Dr Terrence Thomas and colleagues at North Carolina A&T State University have been investigating how different aspects of our food environment influence what we put on our plates. Their findings suggest that creating lasting change requires reimagining how communities engage with food at every level.

In the atoms that make up the matter around us, negatively charged particles called electrons have properties such as spin and orbital angular momentum. Researchers at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg have developed a theoretical framework which allows them to simulate the dynamics of the spin and orbital angular momentum of electrons in materials when probed with an ultrafast laser pulse. Using this framework, they are able to simulate different materials and improve our understanding of dynamics on an atomic scale.

In the Aínsa Basin of the Spanish Pyrenees, the Mondot-1 well was drilled, cored, and fully logged to capture a detailed record of a long-buried ancient river delta system. Dr. John D. Marshall, Dr. Jürgen Grötsch, and Dr. Michael C. Pöppelreiter with co-workers at Shell International used this core to trace how sediments once flowed across the landscape, and were deposited under shifting tectonic conditions. The team employed augmented reality and interactive virtual displays; these innovative tools offer new ways to explore subsurface depositional systems, and are particularly useful in locations where physical access to the core is difficult, or no longer possible.