In the fifth episode of the "Arqus Knowledge Pills", we talk to Valentina Dagienė, a professor of informatics at Vilnius University. She is one of the founders of the “Bebras Project”, a worldwide network that strives to kindle enthusiasm for Computer Science in children, teenagers and teachers. Valentina tells us how the challenges are organized in the partner countries around the world, why it is so important to foster computational thinking and also why a beaver is the mascot of this project. Find more information also on https://www.bebras.org.

In the fourth episode of the Arqus podcast, we tackle yet again basic research. This time our topic is the design and development of drug delivery nanosystems, namely nanomedicines, for cancer therapy. A promising approach in this field is to engineer nanomedicines to stimulate a specific immune response against cancers. Giovanna Lollo from the Laboratory of Automatic Control, Chemical and Pharmaceutical Engineering of the Université de Lyon explains this approach to us.

Note: The vaccines Giovanna refers to are the ones developed by Moderna and BioNTech/Pfizer. In the time that has passed between the recording and the publication of this podcast, those two have gained international recognition as they were among the first authorized vaccines against SARS-CoV-2

The European Research Council (ERC) is one of the biggest institutions in Europe providing funding to carry out basic research. Receiving an ERC grant is a prestigious accolade for any researcher. Recently, the ERC faced the imminent danger of losing a big part of its budget. As a consequence, 19 leading international scientists and universities from 8 different countries formed the “Friends of the ERC” initiative, which included a petition to protest against the cutting of the ERC’s budget. In this third episode of the “Arqus Knowledge Pills”, we talked with Prof. Eystein Jansen from the University of Bergen, who administered the initiative, about its goals and about the worth and relevance of basic research.

Note: When this episode was recorded, the outcome of the “Friends of the ERC” campaign was yet unclear. In the meantime, the combined pressure that this one and other similar campaigns have had, has been in part successful. In the end, the budget amounted to 16,1 billion Euros, which is substantially higher than the originally intended sum.

Website: https://friendsoftheerc.w.uib.no/

Twitter: @FriendsoftheERC

The second episode of the Arqus Knowledge Pills invited Francesca Helm and Claudia Padovani to talk about researchers who are working under precarious circumstances. These indeed include even life-threatening conditions, as the recent example of Ahmadreza Djalali, who is currently imprisoned in Iran, shows. Francesca and Claudia explain why it can be dangerous to be a researcher and tell you how you can be of support. Both women teach and conduct research at the University of Padua and are actively engaged in the Italian section of Scholars at Risk, a non-profit organisation dedicated to ensuring a harm-free environment to scientists worldwide.

In the first episode of the Arqus Knowledge Pills, the pharmacist Andreas Kungl, professor at the University of Graz, will talk about his research project “Stop Covid-19”. In the frame of this research project, Prof. Kungl and his team are investigating how the coronavirus can be stopped from entering human cells. This research project is accompanied by a fundraising initiative open for everyone – a novelty in Austria.