A Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Manchester has been working with an international team of colleagues to create a pioneering research platform called ‘Virtual Labs’, which uses autonomous AI to retrieve and share relevant knowledge with research teams around the world who are now in a race to mitigate the impact of climate change. The technology will also help fast-track new research and innovation to support breakthroughs in diverse areas of study, from the development of new advanced materials to the design of new drugs.

A researcher at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and the Sustainable Consumption Institute has co-published a report entitled ‘Being Brave: Innovative Solutions to Public Food Procurement.’ The report highlights how to improve food systems and the resilience of food procurement while also reducing its impact on the climate. The report also finds that there is a pressing need to improve school food provision and that adopting a more sustainable approach to school meals could facilitate substantial benefits in children’s nutrition and health, as well as reduced carbon emissions.

Professor Perdita Barran is working on a way to improve Parkinson’s diagnosis in collaboration with Joy Milne, who has a rare condition called hyperosmia that gives her an extremely sensitive sense of smell and the ability to smell out different diseases such as Parkinson’s. Perdita and Joy have worked closely identify the particular molecules that give Parkinson’s its scent. This has led to the development of a non-invasive swab test that can, in conjunction with the onset of early Parkinson’s symptoms, identify Parkinson’s disease with around a 95% accuracy.