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On Rare Disease Day 2025, the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) of the University of Luxembourg illuminates once again its building in blue, green, pink, and purple, joining buildings across Luxembourg and around the world. This show of solidarity, organised in partnership with ALAN, the Luxembourg association for rare diseases , pays tribute to the 300 million people diagnosed worldwide with one of the more than 6000 known rare diseases, including 30,000 in Luxembourg.

A group of legal researchers from the Department of Law at the University of Luxembourg is working hand in hand with computer scientists at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) to push the boundaries of Regulatory Technology (RegTech), while keeping in mind the legal framework which surrounds its use.

Sleep apnoea, a condition marked by pauses in breathing during sleep, affects millions of people worldwide, leading to severe health risks, including heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. Traditionally, diagnosing this condition requires an overnight stay at a clinic for polysomnography (PSG) tests, which are costly, complex, and uncomfortable as they involve attaching multiple sensors to the body, making it difficult to sleep naturally.

Who will win the Olympic gold medal in handball this year? Mathematicians from the University of Luxembourg have developed an artificial intelligence model to predict and explain the results of the handball tournament at the 2024 Olympic Games. This is the first time a scientific method has been proposed to predict the final results.

The brain contains many cell types, from the prominent neurons to the lesser-known microglia. The latter are integral to the brain's immune system and play a crucial role as the brain's cleanup crew. A recent study conducted by researchers from the University Hospital Bonn and the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) at the University of Luxembourg, in collaboration with colleagues from France, Hungary, and Germany, highlights that microglia establish connections with neurons through tunnelling nanotubes.

Early in the pandemic, scientists at the University of Luxembourg started to use their expertise to better understand the virus, its acute symptoms and longer-term consequences, and find effective responses against its propagation. Even if the crisis has passed, researchers are still investigating different aspects of the disease.

In the busy streets of Luxembourg, something exciting is happening. Scientists are working on perfecting autonomous driving, so that you and I can be chauffeured to work or school by a self-driving car. This future is what drives Professor Raphaël Frank and his team: they want to change the way we travel and make our daily trips safer and easier.

They are popping up on roofs and car parks all'over the world: photovoltaic panels are becoming increasingly important in the race for renewable energy. This technology, based on the conversion of solar energy - photons - into electrical energy, sees a fast development of its performance. A postdoctoral researcher at the Uni intends to further improve them with a revolutionary structure dedicated to thin-film solar cells.

An interdisciplinary team from the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) at the University of Luxembourg, together with international collaborators, established that a combination of small variations in genes regulating mitochondria, an important component of human cells, is associated with a higher risk for Parkinson's disease.

Swarm intelligence will revolutionise autonomous systems like robots or satellites. Inspired by nature, swarms of autonomous agents can display collectively intelligent behaviours, even though every single agent follows simple rules based on its individual perception. Thinking ahead, such systems can enable completely new possibilities for a multitude of use cases.

Atrial fibrillation is the most common cardiac arrhythmia worldwide with around 59 million people concerned in 2019 . This irregular heartbeat is associated with increased risks of heart failure, dementia and stroke. It constitutes a significant burden to healthcare systems, making its early detection and treatment a major goal.

According to a series of reports published by WHO and the partner study Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC), adolescents who are most likely to have suffered from negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are female, older, from less affluent families, faced prolonged school closures or lacked social support.

Two University of Luxembourg researchers of the Master in Architecture programme and the Department of Geography and Spatial Planning, Francelle Cane and Marija Maric, were selected to represent Luxembourg at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale with their project titled - Down to Earth -. The Luxembourg Pavilion opened on 18 May in Sale d'Armi, Arsenale, as a part of this year's edition of La Biennale - The Laboratory of the Future - curated by Lesley Lokko.

On 12 June, SnT launched AI4Space, its first very own in-space experiment. Hosted on a Skykraft satellite, the SnT system departed from the Vandenberg Space Force Base onboard a SpaceX rocket. The host satellite is currently enroute to its final destination in Low Earth orbit, where it will be deployed and tested before kickstarting SnT-s experiment.

The University of Luxembourg together with Bradford Deep Space Industry have recently started a partnership collaboration to build an efficient and reliable numerical model for water-based propulsion of microsatellites. Sustainability in space Back in the spotlight, the space market is in a great expansion and stretching the limits every day.

Genes influence different structures and the function of the brain. These in turn explain differences in behaviour. Analysing all three aspects at once is a challenge - and has been achieved for the first time. Intelligence is partly heritable. There are studies that show that certain genetic variations are linked to better performance in intelligence tests.

COVID-19, caused by an infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in March 2020. While some people developed severe illness and required medical care, many people reported only mild-to-moderate symptoms, if any at all. However, many of the infected individuals have experienced persisting symptoms or frequent other infections months after the initial infection even if they weren-t much impacted by the disease to begin with.

It is fascinating to see a streak of light across the sky, and never more so than those times of the year when the meteors fall to earth in such a multitude that they look like sparkling rain. The Geminid shower is such an event. Our researchers observed such -shooting stars- falling from the sky at their peak in mid-December thanks to cameras newly installed on top of one of the university buildings.

An international team of scientists from the University of Luxembourg, Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD) at TU Berlin and Google has now successfully developed a machine learning algorithm to tackle large and complex quantum systems. The article has been published in the renowned journal Science Advances.

What is behind dark energy - and what connects it to the cosmological constant introduced by Albert Einstein? Two physicists from the University of Luxembourg point the way to answering these open questions of physics. The universe has a number of bizarre properties that are difficult to understand with everyday experience.