Power outages have been a problem since the beginning of widespread use of electricity. As power grids have recently become more interconnected, outages have become more costly and dangerous.
Car accidents remain one of the leading causes of death and injury. Last year, car collisions in the European Union resulted in 35 000 deaths and 1.2 million injuries. The crashes also cost hundreds of billions of euros. Although technological advances like airbags have helped lessen the severity of accidents, there has been minimal progress in reducing the number of collisions.
Today's construction industry features increasingly groundbreaking and innovative architecture. Over the past few decades design has advanced, and new challenges have emerged concerning the utility and cost-effectiveness of building materials.
Molecular biologist Désiré Collen from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium is responsible for major advancements in understanding the formation of blood clots, together with revolutionary approaches to treatment.
German nuclear physicist Wolfgang Krätschmer broke new ground with a procedure that allowed for the production of research quantities of "fullerenes", a new group of carbons. The tiny nano particles can now be fully investigated and are used in a wide range of industries.
Vast amounts of sensitive financial data pass through the World Wide Web every second. This data is secured by an intrinsic set of encryption methods, many of which have been developed by pioneer cryptographer Peter Landrock from Denmark.
Thanks to the inventions of Canadian engineers Ben Wiens and Danny Epp, electrochemical fuel cells are now a commercially successful alternative to fossil fuels. Ballard Power Systems, based in Vancouver, BC, sells the sustainable fuel cells around the world as a source of reliable backup electricity and of power for public buses.
Devices with Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation have become part of everyday life. Through their innovative GPS chipset design, American engineers Sanjai Kohli and Steven Chen are major contributors to the success – and mass popularity – of GPS technology today.
New medications featuring so-called Anti-VEGF antibodies now provide a highly targeted approach that stops the blood supply of cancerous tumours, thanks to an innovation pioneered by Napoleone Ferrara and optimised by researchers Manuel Baca, James Wells, Leonard Presta, Henry Lowman and Yvonne Chen at US pharmaceutical company Genentech in 2004.
German researchers Jürgen Pfitzer and Helmut Nägele at the Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology (ICT) invented a plastic material made of "liquid wood". Turned into products by Fraunhofer spin-off company Tecnaro, the material has the potential to save fossil fuel and natural resources.
