Despite cancer rates similar to Western Europe, patients in the Balkans are far more likely to die from the disease. Experts point to delayed detection, weak primary care, and limited access to advanced diagnostics as the principal culprits.

Across the Balkan Peninsula, health systems face a stark contradiction: while the incidence of solid tumours broadly mirrors that of Western Europe, mortality remains stubbornly elevated. Lung, colorectal, and prostate cancers are the leading killers among men, while breast, lung, colorectal, and cervical cancers take the heaviest toll on women.

New treatments – including experimental cancer vaccines from Moderna show promise in late-stage trials, but their cost puts them out of reach for most patients in the region. According to Dr Marchela Koleva, founder and Head of the Department of Medical Oncology at St. Sophia Hospital the core problem is not a lack of therapies but a chronic failure to diagnose early enough.

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) is committed to pursuing world-class research and fostering innovation to address global challenges. Prof. Charles Chunbao XU, Chair Professor of Advanced Biorefinery in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Director of the Research Centre for Resources Engineering towards Carbon Neutrality, has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Academy of Science for 2026.

In recent years, relationships between research and researchers have been discussed with the recognition that perfect objectivity in research is impossible. This study examined the impact of research on a researcher (called retrospective reflexivity) by reanalyzing the researcher’s nine-year study. The analysis demonstrated diverse impacts of the study on the researcher and showed how retrospective reflexivity can facilitate researcher well-being as well as reinterpretations of existing data, in which emotions can play a central role.

Can Flock Cameras Ever Be Trusted? UVA Cybersecurity Expert Weighs In on Privacy Safeguards for License Plate Readers

University of Virginia School of Data Science's Daniel Graham discusses warrant requirements, data retention, data deletion, and audits as ways to build public confidence in license plate reader technology

Use of automatic license plate readers is growing across the country, and so are concerns about mass surveillance. The Charlottesville City Council discontinued its contract with Flock Safety after a one-year pilot of 10 cameras. Proponents cite law enforcement benefits, while critics argue the technology enables broad surveillance without adequate privacy protections.

Daniel Graham, associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Data Science and author of the bestselling cybersecurity book Ethical Hacking, conducts research at the intersection of cybersecurity, software engineering, and data science. In a Q&A with the School, he discusses why license plate readers have sparked public concern and what technology companies could do to better protect privacy.

Graham says the cameras' connectedness is what makes them a challenge. Because they share information across locations, they can be used to establish trends in people's movements. The data is stored in a single location, and anyone with access to it can query the cameras without a warrant. Each camera processes images on the device and securely sends the results to a central database.

Graham compares this to cell phone location data. He notes that in Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court determined that access to historical cell-site location records should generally require a warrant, and that software gates have been put into those systems to prevent warrantless access. The same software safeguards are not currently in place for Flock cameras, he says.

Graham suggests building public confidence through:

A warrant and due process requirement for accessing camera data, as with cell phone location records

Shorter retention. He floated five days instead of the current 30 for data not useful to a case.

The ability to delete one's data, similar to controls over Google search history

Audits by ethical hackers and cybersecurity firms, comparable to financial audits

 

On reports of misuse, Graham says it can occur when built-in protections aren't turned on, which can give users broader access than intended, such as repeated searches of the same plate or access to cameras outside their region.

He describes three levels of safeguards: users who deploy the systems configuring them correctly, vendors designing systems that make misconfiguration harder, and policy that keeps pace with reasonable expectations of privacy.

"I think ethical hackers can help from the technical perspective, but we really need policy thinkers to shape these ideas that we want to implement," Graham says.

Entangled curves repeating periodically in three directions appear in DNA origami, polymers, and crystalline materials, but lacked a rigorous diagrammatic theory like the one used for classical knots. Researchers introduce ”tridiagrams”, a new representation capturing these structures in three coupled projections, enabling a generalized Reidemeister theorem and a crossing number invariant.

Over the past decade, Okayama University of Science has turned wine into a platform for education, research and regional collaboration. Its Wine Project has trained students in grape cultivation and winemaking, developed the new wine grape Muscat Shiragai, and worked with local producers on sake and wine. Now, researchers are looking to the project’s next chapter: making wine from Muscat Shiragai using locally discovered yeast to create a wine distinctly rooted in Okayama.

The Revive & Survive San Diego initiative reached its goal of training 1 million people in hands-only CPR, turning bystanders into lifesavers. Tim Winter’s collapse near Mission Beach and rescue by a bandmate shows why seconds matter — and how one CPR-trained person can change everything.

A new open-access catalogue of whale calls will help researchers and orca enthusiasts identify distinct killer whale populations, clans and family groups by their vocalizations alone.

Developed at Simon Fraser University, the Orca Call Catalogue serves as a field guide to killer whale calls, pulling decades of recordings into a searchable online library for the first time, says John Ford, scientist emeritus at Fisheries and Oceans Canada.