It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, September 28, 2026
File-notification systems leave Windows, Linux, Android and macOS vulnerable
A research team at Graz University of Technology has demonstrated that the file notification systems of various operating systems can be exploited to spy on users' activities and forge password prompts.
Credit: Brinda Neela; CC BY 4.0; https://inoti.fyi/
Researchers at the Institute of Information Security at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) have uncovered security risks in the file notification systems of the widely used operating systems Windows, Linux, Android and macOS. Through so-called side-channel attacks, system-wide changes to files, keystrokes and visited websites can be tracked, and password prompt windows can be spoofed to intercept password entries. The researchers summarised their findings in the paper “File Notification Attacks: Templating and Exploiting Side-Channel Leakage from the File-Notification Systems on Linux, Windows, and macOS, which they have published on a dedicated website: https://inoti.fyi
A workaround via readable folders
File notification systems monitor whether files are created, deleted, opened, closed or modified, and automatically deliver system notifications so that applications or the system can react to the change. The research team discovered that apps or other users on the same system can monitor these notifications, even without administrator rights. This makes it possible to track what other users on the system are doing. Read access to specific folders is all that is required to read all files stored in a folder, as well as the subfolders and their contents – even if they do not actually permit read access. One thing that applies to all systems: file contents cannot be read; only file names and changes can be detected. However, this is sufficient to monitor user, system and application behaviour.
Browsing history can be tracked
The research team uses case studies to illustrate what such attacks could actually look like. To bypass the read-access restrictions on folders and files in Windows, the researchers simply tapped into the file notification system of the parent directory that was not read-protected. Using notifications of the main directory C:\, the researchers discovered that it was possible to track all file system events in all subfolders, including filenames. As browsers such as Firefox create a separate folder for every visited website that requires local storage, with the folder name containing the name of the website, attackers can easily trace where users have been on the internet in real time.
Intercepting keystrokes and passwords
On Linux, the researchers used the “inotify” file notification system to track keystrokes within a read-protected file. Although Linux initially prevented direct monitoring on the file, it became possible as it was located in a readable folder, which allowed to spy on everything in it via the notification system. This made the keystrokes in the read-protected file visible. While the team could not see which keys had been pressed, inter-keystroke timing attacks have been around for more than two decades. Thanks to knowledge accumulated over the years, the time elapsing between individual keystrokes now reveals plenty of information.
On KDE Plasma, a popular desktop environment on Linux, the security researchers managed to overlay fake password entry windows on top of the genuine ones as soon as an authentication prompt was called up, even when the secure Wayland display server protocol was in use. To achieve this, they monitored the executable file of the “polkit” programming interface, which carries out authorisation checks. As soon as they detected an access attempt that opened a password window, the test attackers superimposed a fake password window over it so that users would enter their details there and reveal their passwords.
Data exchange via WhatsApp
On Android, the “FUSE” system is actually intended to prevent apps from accessing each other's folders. Not even the folders’ contents should be visible. However, an app without special permissions was still able to spy on activity within another app’s folder by using file notifications as a workaround. The team was thus able to observe whether images, videos and files were arriving in, being sent from or deleted from WhatsApp's folders. The researchers emphasize that they could not see the contents of these files, but they could read the file names, which might reveal something about the file’s contents and the behaviour of the user using the Android phone.
While macOS exposes the least amount of information via globally readable files, the team found that user, application, and system behaviour can still be tracked, pointing out that the macOS “FSEvents” application programming interface (API) still yields meaningful insight into user activity.
As is customary in such cases, the research team alerted the relevant teams at Linux, KDE, Android, Microsoft and Apple to the potential vulnerabilities at an early stage so they could respond before the paper was published. In collaboration with the Linux security team, patches have already been rolled out to address some of the vulnerabilities.
Publication: File Notification Attacks: Templating and Exploiting Side-Channel Leakage from the File-Notification Systems on Linux, Windows, and macOS Authors: Sudheendra Raghav Neela, Xufan Zhao, Jeanette Angelika Wultsch, Hannes Weissteiner, Florian Draschbacher, Stefan Gast and Daniel Gruss Available at: https://inoti.fyi
Method of Research
Data/statistical analysis
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
File Notification Attacks: Templating and Exploiting Side-Channel Leakage from the File-Notification Systems on Linux, Windows, and macOS
Article Publication Date
24-Sep-2026
AI chatbots give us a narrow slice of knowledge: Researchers warn of ‘knowledge collapse’
“Let me just ask the chatbot.” For many of us, this has become an everyday phrase. Where we used to turn to Google to find information, AI chatbots have become a common way of getting answers to everything from what to make for dinner and how to word that difficult email to the boss, to what it actually means when interest rates rise.
But the large language models underpinning AI chatbots give us a significantly narrower range of information than a conventional web search. This is the finding of a new study led by researchers at the Department of Computer Science (DIKU) at the University of Copenhagen.
“Every language model we tested provides users with more uniform information than a simple Google search across all the topics we looked at. In other words, people are to a large extent exposed to the same information over and over again. So AI chatbots are not just changing how we find knowledge, but also which knowledge we have access to,” says first author Dustin Wright, a former postdoctoral researcher at DIKU who is now an assistant professor at Aalborg University.
At least 18% less diverse than Google
The researchers tested 27 different large language models on 155 topics. For each topic, they used 200 different prompt formulations based on questions from real users. This generated a dataset containing around 70 million individual claims produced by the models.
The results show that even the language model producing the most diverse answers – OpenAI’s GPT-5 – provides at least 18.7 per cent less varied information than Google. The topics tested by the researchers ranged from nuclear weapons, marriage, pornography, racism and genocide to more country-specific topics such as Marine Le Pen, the Falklands War and K-pop.
According to the researchers, the fact that people are increasingly using AI models as their primary gateway to information could have significant consequences:
“We risk exposing people to fewer perspectives and a narrower range of knowledge. This could create a vicious cycle in which the most popular content becomes even more dominant, while other content is increasingly overlooked,” says Professor at DIKU and senior author Isabelle Augenstein, adding:
“It’s similar to globalisation. Today, you can buy the same products and find the same coffee chains almost everywhere in the world. That has many advantages, but it has also reduced diversity.”
Why is diversity so low?
According to the researchers, the low level of diversity in language models is partly a result of how the models basically work. They compress the vast amount of text they are trained on and learn the patterns that occur most frequently. In the process, information that deviates from the most common patterns is filtered out.
The effect could be amplified if language models are increasingly trained on text produced by other AI models – something the researchers expect to happen. In that case, models would learn from their own outputs, which are already less diverse than the human-written texts on which they were originally trained.
If this process is repeated over several generations of models, the range of information could gradually become narrower. This is what the researchers refer to as ‘knowledge collapse’.
“It’s a worrying thought. However, we can see that the more recent models produce slightly more diverse answers than older models, so knowledge collapse is not happening yet. But the mechanism that could trigger it in the longer term is already there. So it is something we should be aware of,” says Isabelle Augenstein.
Seek out different sources
The researchers therefore also hope that people will use AI thoughtfully:
“AI chatbot summaries can of course be useful – that is why so many people use them. But it is still important to seek out different sources in order to understand the nuances and get a broader picture – especially for the younger generation growing up with AI. We must not become so dependent on the technology that we stop understanding and thinking for ourselves,” says Isabelle Augenstein.
The AI industry should also pay attention to the issue, the researchers argue:
“We hope AI developers will build language models in a way that preserves the breadth of knowledge available to us. We have developed a method that they can use to measure diversity in models, which could help ensure that future language models do not become less diverse,” says Dustin Wright.
[FACT BOX] ABOUT THE STUDY
The researchers analysed 27 large language models from OpenAI, Meta, Google and Alibaba.
The models were tested on 155 topics relating to 12 different countries.
The analysis covered around 1.7 million AI-generated answers and approximately 70 million individual claims.
The results show, among other things, that smaller AI models generate more diverse content than larger models, and that newer models are more diverse than older models. Overall, however, all the models had significantly lower diversity than traditional web search engines.
The research was conducted by researchers from the University of Copenhagen, Aalborg University, Stanford University, the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Texas at Austin.
The study has been accepted for the international research conference EMNLP 2026, which takes place in October 2026. Read the research paper on arXiv.
[FACT BOX] HOW DOES AN AI CHATBOT WORK?
An AI chatbot is a service such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude that you can communicate with by typing or speaking and that provides answers in return. The chatbot uses a so-called large language model to understand questions and formulate responses.
A large language model is the underlying AI model that powers the chatbot. It is trained on very large amounts of text and learns patterns in how words and sentences relate to one another.
When you type a question into an AI chatbot, the chatbot sends it to the underlying large language model, which generates a response by predicting which words are most likely to fit your question.
Ageing progressively affects the functioning of our body and, among other things, deteriorates the ability of the haematopoietic system— the set of organs and tissues responsible for producing blood cells— to maintain adequate blood cell production. Understanding and measuring this process is especially relevant to study how blood stem cells age and to identify strategies to preserve or recover their function.
The study, led by Dr Maria Carolina Florian, a researcher at the program of Regenerative Medicine at Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) and ICREA Research Professor, and Dr Paula Petrone, a researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), and the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre supported by the "la Caixa" Foundation, presents ChromAgeNet, an artificial intelligence-based tool that identifies ageing-associated patterns in microscopy images of haematopoietic stem cells by analysing the 3D organisation of chromatin, the material made up mainly of DNA and proteins found in the cell nucleus that packages DNA and regulates which genes are active, ultimately determining cell identity and function. The work has been a central part of the doctoral thesis of Pablo Iañez, researcher at ISGlobal, and brings together expertise in stem cell biology, ageing, image analysis and artificial intelligence. The results are published in Aging Cell, an international journal of reference in the field of aging research.
To develop the model, the researchers analyzed three-dimensional images of mouse hematopoietic stem cell nuclei, stained with DAPI, a simple and widely used technique for visualizing DNA. Using a convolutional neural network —a type of artificial intelligence model designed to analyze images—, ChromAgeNet learned to distinguish young cells from aged cells.
Based on the appearance of the nucleus, the model demonstrated a 77% probability of correctly distinguishing cells into two groups, outperforming even a machine learning model based on chromatin features previously defined by the researchers.
Detect what the eye does not see
One of the relevant aspects of the work is that the differences associated with aging are not necessarily visible to the naked eye in microscopic images. Stem cell aging is a heterogeneous process and changes in the architecture of the nucleus can be very subtle. ChromAgeNet allows, however, to identify combinations of spatial chromatin features that contain information about the aging state of cells.
In addition, the researchers analyzed the performance of the model to determine which specific features of the images are the most helpful in distinguishing young cells from aging cells. This analysis identified, among other factors, chromatin entropy, heterochromatin located at the periphery of the nucleus, and certain chromatin condensates as predictive features of age-associated state.
Knowing which elements of the DNA organization the model uses to make its predictions allows us to go beyond a simple classification between young and aged cells and provides information on the characteristics of the nuclear architecture associated with aging. This approach can complement other age biomarkers, such as the so-called epigenetic clocks, which estimate biological age based on certain chemical changes in DNA, including those related to methylation.
A new way to look for rejuvenation strategies
The team also explored the potential of ChromAgeNet as a screening tool for treatments capable of modifying age-associated characteristics. As a proof of concept, the model was applied to aged hematopoietic stem cells treated with different epigenetic drugs to assess whether these treatments produced changes in chromatin organisation compatible with a younger state.
These results do not demonstrate that the treatments have functionally rejuvenated cells, but they do show the potential of ChromAgeNet as a tool to detect age-associated changes in response to different interventions and explore potential rejuvenation strategies.
The use of DAPI, a low-cost stain that is easy to incorporate into microscopy protocols, together with the small number of parameters in the model, facilitates its possible application in high-throughput microscopy workflows, systems that allow large quantities of samples to be analyzed. This could contribute in the future to study a large number of compounds and accelerate the identification of candidates for cell rejuvenation strategies.
As part of the work, the researchers have also made available to the scientific community a dataset of three-dimensional images of hematopoietic stem cells, together with ChromAgeNet. This resource can facilitate the development and validation of new computational tools to study the aging of these cells, an area for which there are currently few publicly available imaging datasets.
Overall, the study demonstrates that the three-dimensional organization of DNA contains quantifiable information about the aging of blood stem cells and that artificial intelligence can help extract this information from microscopic images. ChromAgeNet thus provides a new tool to study cellular aging and explore possible strategies to preserve or recover hematopoietic stem cell functions in a faster and more scalable way.
Aged and young stem cells distinguished thanks to chromatin architecture analysis by ChromAgeNet
Credit
Dr. Eva MejÃa / IDIBELL
Journal
Aging Cell
Method of Research
Experimental study
Subject of Research
Cells
Article Title
Deep learning predicts hematopoietic stem cell aging from 3D chromatin images
Article Publication Date
28-Sep-2026
New analysis shows that uterus transplants help women achieve successful pregnancies
The once impossible surgical procedures, pioneered and refined at Penn Medicine, have led to fewer rates of organ rejection and more births of healthy babies
PHILADELPHIA – A decade of uterus transplantation in the United States has resulted in dozens of healthy births and steadily improving surgical outcomes, according to a new national review led by researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The study found that 70 percent of uterus transplant recipients achieved at least one live birth (or were still pregnant beyond 20 weeks when the study closed), demonstrating that the procedure has matured from an experimental intervention into a replicable clinical therapy for women born without a uterus or those whose uteruses cannot support pregnancy.
The findings, published in Obstetrics & Gynecology, [EH1] summarize outcomes from 60 uterus transplants performed between 2016 and 2025 at the four U.S. centers that have offered the procedure. The analysis represents nearly the entire U.S. experience with uterus transplantation and includes surgical, reproductive, neonatal, and early childhood developmental outcomes.
"One of the reasons I went into obstetrics was to help give more women opportunities to start a family, and I’m proud of the work my colleagues and I have done at Penn to advance this treatment," said senior study author Kathleen E. O'Neill, MD, MSTR, an assistant professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Penn and the director of the Penn Uterus Transplant Program. "The data from this analysis show that uterus transplant is an effective way for women to achieve pregnancy and have children. It should be part of the conversation alongside adoption and gestational surrogacy, and these data give patients and their doctors the information they need to decide whether it's the right path for them."
Absolute uterine factor infertility—the absence of a uterus either from birth or after hysterectomy—affects roughly 3 percent of women. Most transplant recipients in the study had Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome, a congenital condition in which the uterus does not develop. Others had undergone hysterectomy or had a uterus unable to support pregnancy.
Penn pioneers uterus transplantation
Under the leadership of O’Neill, Penn’s first birth from a uterus transplant happened in November 2019 with the arrival of baby Benjamin Gobrecht. His mother, born without a uterus, received a new organ from a deceased donor through the Gift of Life as part of Penn’s UNTIL uterus transplant trial.
Since then, Penn has had eight babies born from seven transplants, mostly from living donors. And three of those transplant recipients, all of whom have delivered a healthy baby, are trying to get pregnant again.
Success rates rise as surgical outcomes improve
Researchers found that 51 of the 60 transplanted uteruses survived beyond the critical first 30 days after surgery. Among the women who received those organs, more than 82 percent ultimately achieved at least one live birth or were still pregnant at 20 weeks or later when the study closed. And since 2020, only one surgical graft failure has occurred among 31 transplants performed nationwide, reflecting major improvements in surgical techniques and patient care.
Across the study period, 48 babies were born to uterus transplant recipients in the United States. Nine recipients delivered two children, demonstrating that transplanted uteruses can support multiple pregnancies before the organ is removed.
Among living donors, major complications requiring additional intervention declined from 33 percent in 2016-2017 to 8 percent in 2024-2025, and no recipient or living donor experienced a life-threatening complication or death related to the procedure.
Children thrive as obstetric challenges persist
While reproductive outcomes were encouraging, pregnancy after uterus transplantation remains complex. More than half of babies, 58 percent, were born prematurely, and pregnancy complications such as preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, and hypertension were relatively common.
Researchers also tracked the health and development of children born following uterus transplantation. All children demonstrated normal development at hospital discharge and at six months of age. Among 29 children evaluated at age 3, researchers observed normal growth and no cases of failure to thrive. Two children had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, while no other developmental disorders were identified.
Both recipients and babies will continue to be followed, said O’Neill, and research is being done to better understand why pregnancy complications are occurring.
Researchers call for wider access
The authors noted that access remains one of the field's greatest challenges. Uterus transplantation is available at only a handful of centers nationwide, including Penn, and is generally not covered by insurance, making treatment inaccessible for many eligible patients.
“I hope this analysis does show insurance companies, and those who can invest in making this procedure more widely available, that we have a technique that has allowed more women to be able to become moms,” said O’Neill. “Women deserve access and options when it comes to how to start a family.”
###
About Penn Medicine
Penn Medicine is one of the world’s leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, excellence in patient care, and community service.
The organization consists of the University of Pennsylvania Health System and Penn’s Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine, founded in 1765 as the nation’s first medical school.
The Perelman School of Medicine is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with more than $588 million awarded in the 2024 fiscal year. Home to a proud history of “firsts,” Penn Medicine teams have pioneered discoveries that have shaped modern medicine, including CAR T cell therapy for cancer and the Nobel Prize-winning mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccines.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System cares for patients in facilities and their homes stretching from the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania to the New Jersey shore. UPHS facilities include the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, Chester County Hospital, Doylestown Health, Lancaster General Health, Princeton Health, and Pennsylvania Hospital—the nation’s first hospital, chartered in 1751. Additional facilities and enterprises include Penn Medicine at Home, GSPP Rehabilitation, Lancaster Behavioral Health Hospital, and Princeton House Behavioral Health, among others.
Penn Medicine is a $13.7 billion enterprise powered by more than 50,000 talented faculty and staff.
Journal
Obstetrics and Gynecology
Subject of Research
People
How straw is returned to soil can make a major difference in nitrous oxide emissions
Pelletized straw cut nitrous oxide emissions by up to 45.7% in saline-alkali soil, while also reshaping key ammonia-oxidizing bacterial communities
Shenyang Agricultural University Collaborative Journals
Straw return methods differentially mitigate N2O emissions with reduced AOB amoA abundance and shifted community composition in N-fertilized saline-alkali soils
Returning crop straw to farmland is widely used to recycle nutrients and improve soil quality. But new research shows that the way straw is returned to soil can strongly influence how effectively it limits emissions of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas.
Researchers compared several straw management strategies in nitrogen-fertilized saline-alkali soil and found that pelletized straw produced the strongest reduction in nitrous oxide, or N₂O, emissions. Under low nitrogen conditions, pelletized straw reduced cumulative emissions by 45.7% compared with soil receiving no straw, while the reduction remained 43.2% under high nitrogen input.
“Our results suggest that straw return should not be treated as a single management practice,” said corresponding author Yuping Zhuge of Shandong Agricultural University. “The physical form and processing pathway of straw can alter microbial nitrogen cycling, which in turn affects how much nitrous oxide is released from soil.”
The study focused on saline-alkali soils, which are often characterized by high pH, elevated salt levels and relatively low soil organic carbon. Farmers commonly rely on nitrogen fertilizer to sustain crop production in these soils, but added nitrogen can also stimulate microbial processes that generate N₂O.
The researchers conducted a 90-day incubation experiment using soil collected from a saline-alkali land improvement demonstration site in Weifang, Shandong Province, China. Two nitrogen application rates, equivalent to 120 and 240 kilograms per hectare, were tested. The team compared soil receiving no straw with four straw-derived treatments: crushed straw, pelletized straw, composted cattle manure derived from straw-fed livestock, and carbonized straw biochar.
Higher nitrogen input increased cumulative N₂O emissions by an average of 41.6%. However, all four straw treatments reduced emissions relative to the no-straw control. Pelletized straw consistently produced the lowest cumulative emissions, whereas carbonized straw was generally less effective. The timing of emissions also changed. In soil without straw, N₂O emissions peaked around day 30, while straw-amended soils showed a delayed peak around day 60.
The researchers then examined the microorganisms involved in nitrogen cycling. They found that N₂O emissions were closely associated with the abundance of the amoA gene in ammonia-oxidizing bacteria, or AOB. Among the functional genes studied, AOB amoA showed the strongest relationship with cumulative N₂O emissions. Straw application generally reduced its abundance.
Straw addition also changed the composition of the ammonia-oxidizing bacterial community. The relative abundance of Nitrosovibrio increased, while Nitrosospira declined, indicating that straw management affected not only the number of ammonia oxidizers but also which groups dominated the community.
The findings highlight an important distinction for agricultural greenhouse gas management: returning crop residues can help reduce N₂O emissions, but the size of that benefit depends strongly on how the straw is processed and applied.
The authors conclude that pelletized straw may be particularly effective for suppressing AOB-associated N₂O production in nitrogen-fertilized saline-alkali soils. Field studies will be important for determining how these effects translate from controlled incubation conditions to working agricultural systems.
===
Journal Reference: Li Z, Dong H, Liu W, Yu Y, Hernández M, et al. 2026. Straw return methods differentially mitigate N2O emissions with reduced AOB amoA abundance and shifted community composition in N-fertilized saline-alkali soils. Nitrogen Cycling 2: e027 doi: 10.48130/nc-0026-0014
About Nitrogen Cycling: Nitrogen Cycling (e-ISSN 3069-8111) is a multidisciplinary platform for communicating advances in fundamental and applied research on the nitrogen cycle. It is dedicated to serving as an innovative, efficient, and professional platform for researchers in the field of nitrogen cycling worldwide to deliver findings from this rapidly expanding field of science.
Straw return methods differentially mitigate N2O emissions with reduced AOB amoA abundance and shifted community composition in N-fertilized saline-alkali soils
Article Publication Date
24-Sep-2026
European researchers set out EU innovation reforms in Science
Science Policy Forum proposes a clearer route from discovery to market, stronger support for high-risk ideas and better incentives for academic entrepreneurs
Europe could turn more of its scientific discoveries into new technologies, products and businesses by changing the way it funds innovation and supports researchers, according to a new Policy Forum published in Science.
The paper, Enhancing Europe’s Competitiveness by Empowering Researchers as Innovators, calls for a more continuous route from fundamental research to commercialisation, simpler funding procedures and greater recognition of entrepreneurship within universities. It argues that persistent institutional and funding barriers prevent scientific excellence from generating its full economic and societal impact.
The work is an initiative of INPACT!, a network launched in 2023 that brings together more than 120 scientist-innovators from over 20 countries in the European research area, mainly European Research Council grantees. It combines researchers’ direct experience with economic analysis of European funding programmes to identify reforms that could strengthen Europe’s ability to translate research into innovation.
Connecting research and innovation
The analysis focuses on Horizon Europe, the European Union’s research and innovation programme for 2021–2027. The authors argue that funding remains fragmented and that discoveries with commercial potential can encounter administrative gaps between European Research Council (ERC) Proof of Concept grants, which help researchers explore practical applications, and European Innovation Council (EIC) programmes supporting technology development and business growth.
One of the main proposals is to bring ERC Proof of Concept grants under EIC governance, creating a more continuous pathway from scientific discovery to technology development and commercialisation. According to the authors, this could reduce repeated evaluations, simplify transitions between programmes and make support more predictable for researchers and investors.
“Europe has extraordinary scientific talent, but too often we lose momentum between discovery and application. We need a more continuous pathway that allows promising ideas to move from fundamental research towards technologies, companies and solutions capable of generating economic and societal impact,”says Dario Polli, Professor at Politecnico di Milano and one of the lead authors of the Policy Forum.
The Policy Forum also calls for stronger support for early-stage, high-risk innovation. Combined annual funding for the EIC Pathfinder and Transition programmes is currently approximately €500 million, while their programme-management capacity remains limited compared with advanced research agencies in the United States. The authors recommend reallocating resources towards breakthrough innovation and giving independent programme managers greater authority to guide promising projects.
“Europe is caught in a middle-technology trap: we specialise in mature industries such as automotive and industrial machinery, while frontier sectors such as AI and biotechnology remain too small. To strengthen Europe’s competitiveness and strategic autonomy, we must rebuild the pipeline from scientific discovery to market-funding the best ideas and enabling researchers and innovators to turn today’s breakthroughs into tomorrow’s high-tech industries,” says Giorgio Presidente, researcher at Institute for European Policymaking at Bocconi University.
Simpler applications and support for excellent unfunded projects
The authors also argue that European funding applications should be shorter and assessed more directly on the substance of the idea and its potential use.
They propose that national funding agencies make multi-year commitments to support excellent projects that successfully pass European evaluation but cannot be financed from the available EU budget, extending the approach already used through the Seal of Excellence.
Universities must recognise researchers as innovators
Reforming European funding alone will not be enough, the authors argue. Universities and technology transfer offices also need to create conditions in which researchers can pursue innovation without being forced to choose between an academic career and entrepreneurship.
The Policy Forum recommends greater recognition of entrepreneurship in academic careers, improved intellectual-property management and clearer routes to patents, industrial partnerships and spin-offs, together with better access to mentoring and entrepreneurial expertise.
These reforms, the authors stress, would not by themselves resolve Europe’s wider constraints in venture capital, regulation and business expansion. However, a more coherent system linking scientific research, technology development and entrepreneurship could help Europe capture more of the economic and societal value generated by its research base.
“To translate more scientific discoveries into new technologies, products, and services that reach the market, we would benefit from a clearer pathway in our institutions, with well-defined steps, predictable timelines, and streamlined procedures. Making the entire process easier to navigate could empower more of us to transform knowledge into solutions for society. I strongly believe that embracing innovation can give new momentum to our careers, reshape how we approach our work, and enable us to play a strategic role in strengthening Europe’s global competitiveness while addressing unmet societal needs.” says Amanda Silva Brun, Director of research at the CNRS and one of the lead authors of the Policy Forum.
About the Policy Forum
Enhancing Europe’s Competitiveness by Empowering Researchers as Innovators is published as a Policy Forum in Science. The article underwent external peer review and revision before acceptance.
The paper is an initiative of INPACT!, a European network of scientist-innovators established to share experience, identify barriers to research commercialisation and contribute proposals to strengthen Europe’s research and innovation ecosystem.
Returning global temperatures to a climate target does not necessarily undo the damage caused by exceeding it, new Concordia-led research finds.
The study shows that temporarily overshooting warming targets such as 1.5°C or 2°C can leave lasting changes in the oceans, permafrost and other parts of the climate system, even if temperatures eventually fall back to below these targets.
The researchers used the University of Victoria Earth System Climate Model to compare 42 pairs of climate scenarios. In each pair, one scenario temporarily exceeded its warming pathway before returning to it, while the other stayed below the threshold.
The researchers measured overshoot using “degree-years” — a measure that combines how much temperatures exceed a target with how long they remain above it. They found that degree-years were a strong predictor of lasting changes in several climate variables.
Some variables were found to be much more susceptible to warming than others. Permafrost, for instance, showed almost no recovery of lost carbon when temperatures returned to baseline levels. Changes to sea-level rise, ocean warming and ocean oxygen levels also largely persisted after overshoot.
The findings suggest that the peak level of warming alone does not tell the whole story. The length of time spent above a target can also determine how much lasting change occurs.
For policymakers, this means climate goals should not be viewed simply as temperature levels that can eventually be reached after limits are breached. The pathway to those temperatures matters. Accounting for the accumulated effects of overshoot could help governments better assess climate risks and plan adaptation measures.
The study was published in Nature Communications Earth and Environment. It was written by Concordia postdoctoral fellow Mitchell Dickau;Damon Matthews, professor, Geography, Planning and Environment; and Kirsten Zickfeld, professor, Geography, Simon Fraser University.
