By Patrik Jones, Imperial College London

Converting renewable energy into electricity is one thing; converting it into fuel is quite another. The vast majority of global energy demand is for fuel, and a renewable source could help us heat our houses and travel efficiently long into the future. It might even mean we could avoid the conflicts that will arise while competing for the last remaining fossil fuels.

By Emma Rees, University of Chester

By Dirk Hebel, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich

Bamboo, a common grass which can be harder to pull apart than steel, has the potential to revolutionize building construction throughout the world. But that’s not all. As a raw material found predominantly in the developing world, without a pre-existing industrial infrastructure built to skew things towards the rich world, bamboo has the potential to completely shift international economic relations.

By Ashok A. Kumar, Harvard University

Every year, 300,000 children are born with sickle-cell disease, primarily in Africa and India.

It is a genetic disorder that causes some blood cells to become abnormally shaped. The result is that those who suffer from it have a shorter lifespan.

By Rob Brooks

My social media accounts today are cluttered with stories about “mutating” Ebola viruses. The usually excellent ScienceAlert, for example, rather breathlessly informs us “The Ebola virus is mutating faster in humans than in animal hosts.”

By Dr. Jason Liu, Monash University

It sounds like a scene from a science fiction novel – an army of tiny weaponized robots traveling around a human body, hunting down malignant tumours and destroying them from within.