news 2025

Behind the decorations and happy faces, many parents experience the holiday season under intense pressure.

Long COVID remains a complex and often invisible condition. Patients experience symptoms such as extreme fatigue, exercise intolerance, shortness of breath, cognitive impairment, and a pervasive sense of exhaustion for months or even years after a SARS-CoV-2 infection. Because these symptoms are not always objectively detectable through conventional medical tests, patients are frequently told that "everything looks normal", even though their daily lives remain severely restricted.

A new study reveals for the first time how certain cyanobacteria can stabilize a type of calcium carbonate mineral that is generally extremely unstable. This discovery, made by Neha Mehta, FNRS researcher in the Faculty of Science's Biogeochemistry and Earth System Modeling (BGeoSys) department, and her team, opens up new perspectives in materials science and environmental research.

An international research team led by Arne Van der Vreken, Eline Menu, and Karine Breckpot (Translational Oncology Research Center, VUB) has made an important discovery that may advance the fight against multiple myeloma, also known as Kahler's disease.

New research shows how inexpensive, safe materials can directly convert sunlight into sustainable fuels. Researchers at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), in collaboration with Stanford University, Antwerp University and Hasselt University, have achieved a major breakthrough in the development of sustainable materials for the production of solar fuels.

The future of Antarctica beyond 2100 is a cause for concern: high emissions will lead to major long-term ice loss. A study published on December 05, 2025 in Nature Communications warns that the fate of the Antarctic ice cap, the planet's largest reservoir of freshwater ice, will play a decisive role in future sea-level rise.

Yeast plays a crucial role in winemaking. For centuries, winemakers used their own yeast cultures, but today commercial yeasts dominate the sector thanks to their reliable performance.

The news has been widely shared around the world: scientists have explored a 100-square-meter underground spider web - the largest known - housing no less than 110,000 spiders of two species which, strangely enough, cohabit without devouring each other. All the more reason to question our knowledge of the social behavior of spiders.

With an average sea level rise of 0.7mm per year, the coastline has moved 3km inland over a period of 1,500 years Off the Belgian coast some 6,000 years ago there was a barrier island system.

As language models learn to interpret words in a sentence, protein Language Models learn how amino acids work together within a protein Konstantina Tzavella, who used artificial intelligence in her r

Teeth, important in everyday life, whether for eating or even smiling, and which we think we know, in reality remain a real mystery to science. Their living part - the pulp - is enclosed within a hard, opaque enamel envelope, making them difficult to observe. For the first time, a research team led by prof. Nicolas Baeyens and Dr Hoang Thaï Ha of the Physiology and Pharmacology Laboratory has developed a technique that makes teeth transparent, enabling them to follow in detail how a cavity forms and evolves within the tooth itself.

Global agricultural practices exacerbate heat stress and pressure on water resources, warn VUB researchers With population growth and rising food demand, the area of land equipped for irrigation has increased almost six-fold worldwide since 1900. New research, published in three scientific papers led by the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and ETH Zurich, shows that this rapid expansion of irrigation is having increasing effects on the health of populations, due to more intense wet heat stress and increased pressure on water resources.

International research shows that most Antarctic ice shelves could disappear if greenhouse gas emissions are not drastically reduced An international team of scientists, led by researchers from Unive

Two St V concerts, on November 16 and 19 in Charleroi and Brussels, will mark an unprecedented experiment: the Orchestre symphonique de l'Université libre de Bruxelles is taking part in a research project with Cambridge University. Researchers will test a new form of musical writing for the first time, on the scale of a full orchestra, in order to evaluate its impact on performance and audience perception .

Rising seas are irreversible on human time scales and among the most severe consequences of climate change. Emissions released in the coming decades will determine how much coastlines are reshaped for centuries to come. New research shows that near-term mitigation could spare future generations around 0.6 meters of sea-level rise that would be caused by emissions between 2020 and 2090 following current policies, making today's decisions critical not only for limiting warming but also for coastal impacts.

Is it moral, ethical or even acceptable for research projects to be carried out in countries of the "Global South" without any local scientists being involved? A new study has quantified this problem in the Dry Puna and Atacama Desert area of Latin America. An article by Gabriel A. Pinto in The Conversation.

Since 2017, the Centre de Recherche en Archéologie et Patrimoine (CReA-Patrimoine) has been exploring Brussels' Grand-Place and its surroundings. The aim: to understand how this central location of the city was built and transformed between the second Middle Ages and the end of the modern era. Here's a look back at these unusual excavations in one of the world's most beautiful squares.

Researchers at the ULB Center for Diabetes Research, in collaboration with Oxford University and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, have mapped for the first time the effects of over 400 diabetes-related genetic variants on human pancreas cells. Their findings, published in Cell Genomics, open up new avenues for the development of personalized treatments.

How do treatments and socio-economic conditions affect the long-term survival chances of women with breast cancer? That is one of the central questions in the doctoral research of Eva Kimpe, affiliated with the Interuniversity Centre for Health Economics Research (I-CHER) and the Research Centre for Digital Medicine (Vrije Universiteit Brussel).