UGent and the Portuguese maritime institute CCMAR receive a VLAIO Baekeland grant for research into the sustainable protection of vulnerable coastal areas. Ghent University receives a VLAIO Baekeland grant with support and cooperation from Jan De Nul Group, DEME Group, and the Portuguese marine institute CCMAR for its doctoral study 'PLANT ME'.

In brief: Patrice Cani (UCLouvain) and Claude Knauf (INSERM) have discovered a 'jammer' that blocks communication between the gut and the brain, thus preventing proper regulation of sugar and causing insulin resistance in people with diabetes They also discovered that a lipid produced by our body helps prevent this dysfunction and regulate sugar level, thus mitigating diabetes and intestinal inflammation.

The Lasers, Optics and Spectroscopies (LOS) technological platform has just received a new spectrometer. Its particularity? It can be used in many fields and allows the study of phenomena with very high spectral resolution and at very high speed - of the order of a microsecond. It is the first instrument of this type in Belgium and the world's first one qualified for high-resolution spectroscopy!

River blindness is the root cause, and nodding disease can easily be controlled by administering an anti-parasitic drug and exterminating the blackfly. For several years now, researchers from the University of Antwerp have been collaborating with African scientists to investigate the causes of 'nodding disease', a mysterious form of epilepsy that only affects children on the African continent.