Falling Walls Falling Walls Science Summit 2022

We have selected suitable material for primary school students and we have conducted a small campaign to engage students. Students during the isolation period, in-home conditions (with the help of adults) perform experiments, challenges, and the same are presented on social networks. This relieves them of the stress of closure,…

The M890 holds a pressure vessel of highly compressed carbon dioxide that it delivers to the target fire. This acts to suppress the fire by pushing oxygen away from the ground smothering the fire. Tags: Climate change, Engineering, Environment & Nature.

Graphite as it occurs in pencils is a brittle material that does not exactly spur the imagination, but modified into a two-dimensional web of hexagonal structures, it gains extraordinary superpowers. Graphene, a nanomaterial discovered in 2004, is 200 times stronger than steel, conducts both electricity and heat, and is almost…

PRESENTED BY Gen Sakaeda NOMINATED BY Waseda University Tags: Oral Health, Hands Free, Toothbrush, Clean Teeth

Michelle leads the Food and Agricultural Proteomics teams at Edith Cowan University and CSIRO, using revolutionary technology to identify key proteins to benefit Australia’s food and agriculture industries. She invented gluten-free barley, now known as Kebari®️, used to produce gluten-free cereals, beers and food products. These have the nutritional benefits…

We are a non-profit, independent, creative digital science communication platform. We create social network based content that is entertaining, rigorous and informative. Our work focuses on making interesting what is important, science. We like to think of Shots de Ciencia as a machine that takes in scientific papers or other…

HOW IMMUNISATION AND MALARIA CONTROL ARE SAVING SENEGAL’S NEW GENERATIONS According to The Economist, child mortality in Senegal has dropped fourty percent in just five years from 2005 to 2010, one of fastest reductions the world has ever witnessed. The country had falls of more than eight percent a year…

Jaime Celedón has developed a biodegradable and compostable shirt that purifies the air through its photosynthetic coating.

As well as employing established schemes like analysis of sex-disaggregated data, mentoring and trainings to stop the leaky pipeline, the project developed innovative strategies to challenge traditional structures and ways of thinking in marine sciences. Some examples are a new tool for the incorporation of gender perspectives into research content,…

We offer custom data solutions using cutting-edge technologies based on AI and machine learning and we are building a kind of SaaS platform connected to Salesforce to automatise predictions. Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Foresight, Nonprofits.

Algorithmic prediction is disrupting how society manages an uncertain future. Whereas traditional forecasts distribute risk over a population, algorithmic systems predict the riskiness of particular individuals. I explore this transformation in the fields of insurance, medicine, and policing. Giving up the principle of shared uncertainty may come with a heavy…

My research sheds light on the materiality of cryptocurrencies, their communities, and markets. Locating a historically new money form, Data Money, it shows that cryptocurrencies draw on monetizing the right to send data privately on the public accounting blockchains. Employing an ethnographical study of one crypto community and a macro…

Rare-earth elements have distinct properties that make them vital to the electronics and energy sectors. However, the current method of their extraction remains highly toxic and unsustainable. Arshia Mostoufi proposes using a novel biological-based system for the cost-effective and environmentally friendly extraction of rare-earth elements from metal ores using a…

The nominating institute University of Chicago on the project: Swartz and Hubbell are a married couple who collaborate on engineering interventions derived from chemical engineering and materials science. Their new approaches to immunotherapies show enhanced antitumour efficacy, reduced adverse events and tolerogenic T-cell education. These can be exploited for desired…

In this Falling Walls Breakthrough Conversation, digital participants had the chance to engage in a live conversation with Maryna Viazovska, winner of the Fields Medal 2022. She talked about her work on sphere-packing. The interview series provided an intimate personal atmosphere, in which high-level guests, speakers and panelists of the…

Living Maths initiated our annual Space Tour in 2017. We bring an astronaut to South Africa and we visit schools, science centres and offer public talks. We conduct interviews on TV, Radio and in the press. The aim is to spread the excitement of stem and encourage engagement with a…

PRESENTED BY Varinder Singh NOMINATED BY Chitkara University  

PRESENTED BY James Nguyen NOMINATED BY The National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC-IRAP) Tags: Quantum Security, Quantum Cryptography, Quantum Computing, Quantum Communication, Cyber Security

The nominating institute University of Zurich on the breakthrough: While mutualism was already acknowledged by Darwin, almost all studies have focused on highly specialized, one-on-one interactions. This misses the fact that mutualism shapes networks of interdependencies involving dozens of species. Bascompte’s work fills this gap by showing that the structure…

To remove heavy metals from produced wastewater, Praise Eromosele proposes using sawdust, a natural adsorbent from wood factories, in place of the more expensive methods, ultimately creating a sawdust “cycle”.

Our products are Artificial limbs. Now we have a design of knee and we started to build it. We are aiming to design more and build it too. Tags: Diversity, Engineering, prosthetic limbs.

Brian Nosek, Executive Director of the Center for Open Science (COS), is increasing openness, integrity, and reproducibility of research by challenging and changing the research culture to accelerate expansion of knowledge and discovery of solutions. COS provides infrastructure to make all research available regardless of outcome, catalyzes grassroots efforts to…

We contribute to the project with our simulated moving bed technology to separate sugars and sugar alcohols from the mixed sugar streams.

Ten years ago, Professor Arno Rauschenbeutel was the first to couple laser-trapped atoms with light in glass fibers that are 100 times thinner than a human hair. This achievement was a door opener for the field on quantum nanophotonics. There, one studies the interaction of atoms, molecules, or artificial atoms…

The nominating institution Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research on the breakthrough: In February, SORMAS was extended by a module for the control of COVID-19. Since then, it supports international health authorities in risk assessment and disease control. SORMAS is already used in Ghana and Nigeria, and the governments of 8…

Over the last decade, we have witnessed technological leaps of a magnitude that exceeds our wildest dreams. In the life sciences, the discovery of the CRISPR-Cas gene editing tool has opened up possibilities for research and novel applications that inspire hope but also pose existential questions: which technologies should we…

The global presence of steroid hormones in water (even after traditional treatment methods) is causing harmful effects on humans, animals, and the environment. The combined use of membrane technology and photodegradation in a single process can produce large amounts of water free of steroid hormones using solar light as an…

Deep ocean extreme environments – sites of immense beauty, wonder and intrigue – harbor unique and unimagined microorganisms that thrive at radically different pressure, temperature, salinity, and pH regimes compared to those on land or in the surface ocean. State-of-the-art genomic and computational approaches will guide targeted discovery of unique…

He coordinated an initiative of biological evaluation and repositioning of tenofovir fumarate for the treatment of COVID-19 and is conducting clinical studies with patients and applying metabolomics techniques. In 2005, he helped fund a Tech Park in Ribeirão Preto, elected among the top 20 in the world (UBI Global 2019…

James Collins is the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering & Science and Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT, as well as a Member of the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences & Technology Faculty. He is also a Core Founding Faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University,…

PRESENTED BY Nermina Mumic NOMINATED BY Vienna University of Technology Tags: Machine Learning, Music Streaming, Royalties, Streaming Manipulation

How to Debunk Myths About the Public Sector and Achieve More Inclusive Growth  How many times do we hear that to increase innovation and competitiveness, we need more market and less state? This commonplace position ignores history: the IT, biotech, nanotech and emerging ‘green’ revolutions have all been initiated by a courageous…

Monika Janíková is exploring erythroprogenitor-to-erythrocyte maturation in cell cultures, focusing on materials released in enucleation. This can proceed via methods well-established in neutrophil ET research.

Dr. Sabrina Badir from ETH Zurich was the jury’s choice and winner of the Falling Walls Lab 2015 with the development of a reliable and easy-to-use device that allows the risk of premature birth to be recognized in time so that appropriate treatments can be started promptly.

Due to technical problems, this falling walls breakthrough conversation could not be recorded in full. In this Falling Walls Breakthrough Conversation, digital participants had the chance to engage in a live conversation with Aline Sara, Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year 2022 in the category of Future Learning. She…

Blanca Costa Ávila addresses the problem of respiratory distress due to fibrosis and stenosis of the airways produced by chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. She suggests that implanting a bronchial splint solves airway stenosis and improves pulmonary ventilation.

Ayitévi F. E. Hounou-Adossi’s vision is to use information and communication technologies to reduce preventable deaths and disabilities through simple actions that everyone must know and can do.

Nominated by: Ruhr-Universität Bochum Presented by: Alexander Kanitz

The nominating institution Austrian Academy of Sciences on the breakthrough: Cachexia is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in various cancers, chronic inflammation and infections. But our understanding of it is limited, especially infection-associated cachexia (IAC). In the present paper, Bergthaler and his colleagues describe a model of reversible…

Ahmed Albagdady encourages the shift towards automation by utilizing the well-established 3D printers’ movement mechanism to provide small & medium-sized industries with affordable and customisable 3D stages with minimal skilled labour requirements.

Detecting malignant cancer cells in very early stages in order to provide treatment long before tumours spread across the body is something patients, doctors, and public health officials have been looking forward to for a long time. A novel diagnostics technique might make this dream come true and save millions…

Project FUEL documents, designs and passes on human wisdom from all ages and backgrounds across the world; using the tools of education, art, media and events. Our methodology has been recognised as one of the world’s top 100 innovations in education by Finland based organisation HundrED and recently adopted by…

Ana Montalban-Arques’ novel therapeutic approach applies bacteria as a stand-alone therapy for colon cancer, a therapeutic approach that shows striking efficacy of bacteria as monotherapy.

A key challenge on the road towards a functional quantum computer is to integrate the individually demonstrated components into a functional and scalable device. I have pioneered the realization of fully chip-integrated quantum gates with trapped ions and have recently demonstrated a high-fidelity self-contained computation register that is both resource-efficient…

Mental Health: Do we Need a New Super Science? Falling Walls Circle Tables are lending the spotlight to world-leading scientists, science strategists and policy-makers from academia, business and politics discuss how we can apply science, research and innovation to get the world moving again. While stigma around mental health may…

I study the development of scientific knowledge–particularly in the earth and environmental sciences–as well as the political, social, and cultural obstacles to the development and dissemination of scientific knowledge. I am interested in both how knowledge is produced and how ignorance is sustained. It’s a “core idea” because it we…

The nominating institute German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases on the breakthrough: Disease classification by machine learning is key to precision medicine, yet current solutions often violate privacy laws. Using transcriptomics, Swarm learning leads to precise and accurate classifiers for COVID-19 or leukemias. Tags: Artificial Intelligence, COVID-19, Precision Medicine

Water is a clean source of energy that be used as a fuel for a hydrogen-powered, self-manufacturing hydrogen-cell car that does not need expensive hydrogen fuel stations.

Neuroprosthetics: How electronics can be used to mimic the biology in our brain The human brain is made up of anything between 80 and 100 billion neurons. How exactly these basic working units communicate with each other and transmit information through electrical impulses at the synapses, is a crucial matter…

Background and Aim In Japan, it has been noted that interest in science declines as the school year progresses. According to the 2019 TIMSS results, the percentage of elementary and middle school students who say “studying science is fun” declined as they reached middle school, falling below the international average…