Waterlab in South Africa has developed a cost-effective and non-invasive method of tracking and predicting the spread of COVID-19, hepatitis E, norovirus and other infectious diseases through the microbiological analysis of wastewater.

By her own admission, Dr. Gina Pocock, Specialist Consultant at Waterlab, never had any great burning ambition to pioneer a potentially life-saving diagnostic methodology, but she possesses an obvious energy and optimism that drove the South African company’s success.

Honey bees and other pollinators are vital for the planet’s ecosystems and crops, but they are dying out at alarming rates due to climate change, intensive farming and pesticides. A startup in Andalusia, Spain, has a solution: producing hoverflies on an industrial scale. Following an R&D project with Dutch partners, Polyfly is breeding new ways to pollinate more fruit crops.

By Georgia Tindale

Dutch company, Concreet Projectmanagement B.V., joined forces with Ugandan company, Eco Concrete Ltd., to tackle the ever-growing issue of developing sustainable and affordable building infrastructure. Their solution? Creating new recipes for one of the world’s most common building materials: concrete. With the right backing, their geopolymer technology has the potential to go global

By Georgia Tindale

As we have seen in yet another summer of horrendous wildfires across the globe, which crept their way across North Africa, Greece, Tenerife and Canada, when a wildfire strikes, there is no time to waste.

Latvian company, Baltic Satellite Service, has teamed up with partners AD TELECOM (in Spain) and AXSYSNAV (in France), on an innovative early warning technology for wildfire detection: the first of its kind to track fires in real time and guide fire brigades to the incident.

Already attracting interest from clients in Europe and beyond, this early wildfire detection system looks set to become ever more necessary, due to the increase in extreme weather events prompted by climate change.

The determination of one entrepreneurial Danish research chemist and his team at Pentabase have developed a revolutionary new polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test that produces results in hours not days. Ulf Bech Christensen expanded his company tenfold overnight, reopened Frankfurt airport during the pandemic and improved the effectiveness of cancer screening, diagnostics and monitoring to deliver more personalised and more effective treatment and care.