February eNews
Welcome to this month's eNews!
We’re excited to bring you our Top 5 Picks, our Editor’s Choice, and the Image of the Month—highlighting some of the most compelling stories and research from the past month.
We're also thrilled to welcome new contributors to the AlphaGalileo community:
📍 Ateneo de Manila University
📍 Keio University Global Research Institute (KGRI)
📍 Nazarbayev University
📍 SKA Observatory
📍 Universität Klagenfurt
As always, we’d love to hear from you! If you have any questions, feedback, or just want to connect, feel free to reach out to our News Team at news@alphagalileo.org
Enjoy this edition of our eNews!
Best regards,
The AlphaGalileo News Team
Marketing and Communications in Higher Education Conference 2025
We are very happy to announce that we are once again sponsoring Universities UK Marketing and Communications in HE Conference.
As the digital space changes, universities must prioritise how they can navigate the upcoming challenges and understand the practical steps that can be taken. So, how can you position yourself for success when creating and delivering marketing and communications strategies?
Join UUK’s Marketing and Communications in Higher Education Conference 2025 on Thursday 13 March 2025, either in London or online, to explore the latest developments within the sector.
We look forward to seeing you there!
Top 5 from January
1. Antarctica: Historic Drilling Campaign Reaches more than 1.2-Million-Year-Old Ice, published on 09/01/15 by Ca' Foscari University of Venice
The fourth Antarctic campaign of the “Beyond EPICA - Oldest Ice” project, funded by the European Commission, has achieved a historic milestone for climate science. An international team of scientists successfully drilled a 2,800-meter-long ice core, reaching the bedrock beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. These ice samples are expected to unveil, for the first time, critical details about Earth's climate and atmospheric history, extending beyond 800,000 years ago and showing a continuous record of the history of our climate as far back as 1.2 million years, and probably beyond. Coordinated by the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council of Italy (Cnr-Isp), the project aims to resolve one of climate science's most complex mysteries.
Read the news
2. Preserving Asian horseshoe crab populations through targeted conservation strategies, published on 27/01/25 by the National University of Singapore
Biologists from the National University of Singapore conduct the first comprehensive population study of all three Asian horseshoe crab species, mapping their population distribution, evolutionary histories and vulnerabilities to climate change to propose customised conservation strategies.
Read the news
3. What is the potential of the “atmospheric mine”? - Concrete as a carbon store, published on 20/01/25 by Empa
Mining the Atmosphere, a new Empa research initiative, aims at capturing excess CO₂ from the atmosphere and storing it in building materials such as concrete. Empa researchers have now calculated the potential of this approach for the first time: Five to ten billion tons of carbon could be used annually as concrete aggregates – well enough to permanently store the current excess CO₂ within 100 years after the energy transition and thus to bring atmospheric CO2 back to climate-friendly levels.
Read the news
4. Advances in gene and cellular therapeutic approaches for Huntington’s disease, published on 02/01/25 by Frontiers Journal
This review discusses the current and emerging gene and cell therapy strategies for Huntington's disease (HD), a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by motor dysfunction, cognitive decline, and emotional disturbances. The authors explore the potential of combination therapies, including the use of human iPSC-derived striatal neurons (hStrOs) and human umbilical cord mesenchymal stem cells (hUC-MSCs), to mitigate HD symptoms and improve treatment outcomes.
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5. A major advance in biology combines DNA and RNA and could revolutionise cancer treatments, published on 17/01/25 by Libre de Bruxelles, Université
Researchers led by François Fuks - Laboratory of Cancer Epigenetics, ULB Faculty of Medicine, ULB-Cancer Research Center and Jules Bordet Institute, H.U.B. - have discovered a new mechanism which enables precise gene regulation by combining DNA and RNA epigenetics. Published in the journal Cell, their discovery opens up new perspectives in biology and could revolutionise future cancer treatments through personalised therapies.
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Editor's choice
Individual cells can be connected to plastic electrodes, published on 28/01/2025 by Linköping University
Researchers at Linköping University have succeeded in creating a close connection between individual cells and organic electronics. The study, published in Science Advances, lays the foundation for future treatment of neurological and other diseases with very high precision.
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Image caption: Chiara Musumeci in the clean room. Credit: Thor BalkhedRestriction: The contents may be downloaded, used and shared in media channels by, for example, journalists, bloggers, writers, pundits, etc., for purposes of communication, description and commenting on your press release, post or information, on the condition that the contents are used unchanged and in their entirety. The creator must be specified to the extent and in the manner required by good publishing practice (which means, among other things, that the photographer of any photographs must nearly always be specified).
Image of the month
Songbirds socialize on the wing during migration, new study says, published on 10/01/2025 by University of Illinois College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES)
The night sky teems with migrating songbirds, aloft in their millions following routes etched in evolutionary time. But those flight paths may not be entirely innate, according to new research led by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Evidence from over 18,300 hours of recorded flight calls suggests songbirds may “talk” to other species as they migrate, forming social connections and — just maybe — exchanging information about the journey.
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Image caption: New research shows songbird migration may be driven by more than innate patterns and memory. Recorded flight calls reveal probable social associations between species making the nighttime trek. Here, an American Redstart streaks across the sky. Photo courtesy of Andrew Dreelin