Science & Society
SCTODAY
Society news
January 09, 2018
Health
Promoting appropriate prescriptions for the elderly
Many people aged 75 or older, including those in nursing and care homes and hospitals, receive inappropriate treatment. This is the research subject of Prof. Anne Spinewine, who on 12 December...
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...
July 11, 2017
Philosophy in Andalusia : older than we thought
Europe has its roots in many influences, including the rational thought that emerged in Andalusia when Muslims occupied most of the Iberian peninsula. Godefroid de Callataÿ, a researcher and...
June 27, 2017
Alain Holeyman, 2017 Coulomb Conference guest speaker
This year, the Comité Français de Mécanique des Sols et de Géotechnique (‘French Committee for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnics’) has invited Alain Holeyman to speak at the Coulomb Conference. The...
June 01, 2017
The university: (still) a man’s world?
While they make up the majority during their studies, the proportion of women decreases as the academic career progresses. A consortium of European universities, including UCL, is studying this...
January 24, 2017
Disasters: robots to the rescue
Imagine an earthquake or nuclear accident disaster area where it’s impossible to send in rescuers without putting their lives at risk. At UCL, Nicolas Van der Noot is looking to robots to do the...
December 21, 2016
Mummies full of surprises
In 2015, the Saint-Luc University Hospital Radiology and Medical Imaging Department, in collaboration with a UCL research team, scanned 25 mummies belonging to the Cinquantenaire Museum, revealing...
December 21, 2016
Memories of the Second World War: Which ones survive?
What memories do the people who lived through the Second World War pass on to their children and grandchildren? Two UCL researchers studied several Belgian families to find out.
The humanities...
September 20, 2016
Gamers, who are you?
When it comes to the players of video games, preconceptions abound. They’re often disturbing stereotypes: the isolated youth with eyes for nothing but his computer, tablet or smartphone. Olivier...
August 11, 2016
How emotional intelligence can make you healthier
Being able to identify, understand, express, manage and use our emotions helps us in so many facets of our lives. According to a recent UCL study, emotional intelligence (EI) can even improve your...
June 28, 2016
Adolescent depression: Can mindfulness prevent it?
Adolescents are of course not immune to feeling blue or even depressed. Researchers are betting on mindfulness as a means of prevention, especially at UCL, a pioneer of child mindfulness. Prof....
June 28, 2016
Flanders-Wallonia: Is youth the answer?
The sometimes tense relations between the two main communities of Belgium is a subject of great interest to Bernard Rimé, a professor emeritus, a researcher at the UCL Psychological Sciences...
June 28, 2016
Better big data analysis for better epidemic management
Using big data to precisely and easily predict an epidemic’s course or a virus’s spread—that’s the seemingly incredible goal of Jean-Charles Delvenne, a researcher at the Mathematical Engineering...
June 28, 2016
Are our teens heroes?
The ‘Avoir 20 ans en 2015’ (‘20 years old in 2015’) project followed 50 teenagers in Belgium, France, Reunion and Canada on their journey toward adulthood. Chloé Colpé, a UCL doctoral student...
May 26, 2016
The language of advanced age
Language use evolves throughout one’s entire life. Ageing-related problems can affect one’s ability to express oneself and complicate communication with others. At UCL, a researcher at the Valibel...
May 13, 2016
Health and undocumented immigrants: a social conundrum
Personal opinions and politics aside, the presence in Belgium of undocumented migrants raises the delicate question of their access to health care. Researchers at the UCL Institute of Health and...
April 25, 2016
Senegal: using big data to anticipate food shortages
Four young researchers of the Environmetrics and Geomatics Laboratory, led by Prof. Pierre Defourny of the UCL Earth and Life Institute, have been recognised by the Massachusetts Institute of...
April 25, 2016
A chair for fighting poverty
Among the actors working to reduce poverty and casualisation, one remains poorly known and underestimated: the social enterprise. A Belgian one, Les Petits Riens, partnered with UCL by funding a...
April 21, 2016
Refugee and immigration crises: at what cost to Belgium?
Anxieties have persisted ever since the arrival of thousands of Syrians and Iraqis on Belgian soil. But the frightful perceptions of the economic effects are erroneous, according to Dr...
April 20, 2016
What happens in the mind of an anxiety sufferer?
In Belgium, between 7 and 10% of the population suffers from anxiety disorder (AD). What exactly goes on in their minds?
There are different types of AD: phobias, OCDs, generalised...
March 22, 2016
Pondering pensions: a new UCL chair
Longer life expectancy and declining birth rates are making it harder for public authorities to sustain pension systems, especially given the fragile state of public finances. To see the situation...
January 04, 2016
Analysing mobile data can save lives!
The proliferation of mobile phones has spawned a new research sector: mobile data analysis. The goal? To study new information concerning users’ social behaviours. In countries of the South, such...
March 22, 2017
Metrolab: winds of change in Brussels
The Metrolab research project aims to support European urban development policies, which in turn could lead to environmental, social and economic improvements in Brussels.
Metrolab is part of a...
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...
January 31, 2017
Reducing employer costs depends on low-income earners
Will reducing Belgian employer social security taxes—championed by the last two governments as a cure-all for the economy—really be effective? Only if it focuses on low-income earners, say Drs...
January 24, 2017
From the lab to the hospital: medical robotics, a team...
Exoskeletons, microsurgery robots, robotic prostheses—robotics and the medical sector have never complemented each other so well. In 2014, UCL created Louvain Bionics, a centre of expertise unique...
November 10, 2016
Student mission to Mars
‘Mars to earth, come in, Earth.’ UCL students can pronounce these words every April when they take off for the red planet—so to speak—via Mars Society’s Mission to Mars project.
Space...
May 06, 2016
Getting surfers to smile: online emotion detection
Things go fast on the Internet. A surfer might ‘Like’ something but then all of a sudden, at the least bother or confusion, he or she will click that little ‘x’ that closes your site and move on...
May 11, 2017
Unemployment benefits: what happens to the excluded?
Today, when the Belgian authorities determine that an unemployed person isn’t looking hard enough for a job, they can stop paying that person unemployment benefits. What happens then? Does it...