For millions of men, ageing brings with it a set of frustrating and often disruptive urinary symptoms. These symptoms, caused by benign prostatic hyperplasia, or BPH, can affect sleep, confidence, and overall quality of life. Traditionally, treatment follows a familiar path. Patients begin with medications, often for years, and may eventually progress to surgery if symptoms worsen. Yet this pathway is not without its drawbacks. Medications can cause side effects, while surgery carries risks and recovery time. In recent years, a minimally invasive interventional radiology procedure called prostate artery embolisation, or PAE, has begun to challenge this traditional model. At the forefront of this shift is a collaborative research group, led by Dr. Nicholas Brown of the University of Queensland, whose series of P-EASY studies has explored whether PAE could transform how BPH is treated, particularly at earlier stages.

Water resources are essential for human life. Knowing how to manage water, both now and in the future, is necessary to continue using it as well as possible. Nick Martin and Jeremy White are examining limitations to artificial intelligence applications in water resources generated from noisy and estimated data sets. For poor quality data sets, they found that machine learning models will perform poorly relative to tools that explicitly include physics-based descriptions of physical processes; this is because physics-based calculations can use both data and physics knowledge through data assimilation techniques.

Sustainable decision-making requires balancing the costs borne by today’s society with those that will fall on future generations. Climate change is intensifying extreme weather, making floods more severe because a warmer atmosphere can hold and deliver a larger volume of water as precipitation. It may also be the case that severe floods are becoming more frequent as drought becomes more frequent, average conditions rarely occur, and weather oscillates between short duration wet and long duration dry extremes. Worryingly, traditional infrastructure (often designed using outdated, backward-looking models) risks failing under these evolving conditions.
Nick Martin from Vodanube LLC, and his colleagues have applied Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) to flood inundation. Their research optimises current adaptation and future mitigation strategies, even while acknowledging PRA’s limitations. The team demonstrates how this approach can guide more resilient water resource management, and highlights opportunities for further study.

Hydrogen is often touted as the fuel of the future, but how much can it really contribute to global decarbonisation? Dr James D. Burrington, founder of NiceChemistry.com, has modelled how hydrogen technologies, particularly green hydrogen, might support worldwide net zero goals. His research applies rigorous metrics to assess energy efficiency, cost, emissions, and land use. This revealed that, while hydrogen may not directly replace electricity, it could be critical in decarbonising sectors where electrification falls short.