Our environment is changing at increased pace mainly due to anthropogenic activities. Changes such as global temperature increase, CO2 increase, and the emission of chemical pollutants could have deleterious effects on organisms, their communities, and ultimately on the health of ecosystems. In the past few years molecular biology techniques have revolutionised ecological research. The availability of inexpensive ways to genetically characterise individuals and species has allowed quantifying genetic diversity, tracking movement of individuals, characterising new species, and investigating interactions among the communities at ecosystem level.

One of these technologies is DNA microarray, which progressed rapidly in biological research for gene expression analysis. This analysis can also provide a global view of how organisms respond to stressors (such as chemical pollutants, UV light, temperature changes, etc.) and has a great potential role in discovering molecular biomarkers to anticipate the harmful effects of stressors in aquatic ecosystems. This will be an occasion for researchers to explain the role of molecular biology applied to environmental studies, and their contribution to understanding how the ecosystem will be affected by global change.

Both the US and the EU have recently undergone major administrative changes, which not only offer the potential for a restart in trans-Atlantic cooperation in tackling global challenges, but have equally triggered a debate about the role of science in policy-making. In appointing the former President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), John Holdren, as his Science Adviser and Nobel Laureate, Stephen Chu, as his Secretary of Energy, the Obama Administration has put scientific evidence back into the core of the policy agenda. Similarly, the Barroso Commission has identified growth based on knowledge and innovation as key to its mandate and announced the creation of a Science Adviser post, while its independent research arm under Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the Joint Research Centre, is embarking on a new 10 year strategy responding to an ever-growing demand for customer-driven S&T support to policy-making.

In October 2009, the AAAS and JRC took the initiative of organising a Trans-Atlantic Workshop, bringing together 25 high-profile individuals from government, industry, academia, lobby groups etc, each with experiences of real-life scientific support to policy-making. This symposium will reveal what was identified in terms of best practices and pitfalls on both sides of the Atlantic. Speakers will evidence these findings with timely examples of “positive” and “negative” case-studies, exposing the facts as to why things worked or did not, who were the actors involved, what is/was at stake, and what conclusions we can draw about the bigger picture of “evidence based policy versus policy-biased evidence”.

Personalized nutrition attempts to deliver dietary advice at a personal level based on genotype data or on detailed phenotype data. It brings together many disciplines, of which molecular nutrition is the most preminent. But ethical and legal issues must also be addressed, and consumers response to genetic testing needs to be examined. Thus the need of new home based technologies for monitoring health, such as mobile mini bone scans, visual testing, muscle function tests and so forth.

From the molecular nutrition side, we need to study not only common variations in gene sequencing but also metabolomics, which measures very precise metabolic signatures. With these new data we can expect to cluster people together so that some personalized nutrition will be devised at group rather than personal level. The project will draw on the international research consortium www.food4me.org.

Many regions of Europe enjoy an abundance of wind energy. Yet despite its distinct advantages (clean, renewable, distributed, not competing with food production), wind currently contributes less than 4% to Europe's electrical energy. Can its apparent drawbacks (intermittency, geographical variability, unpredictability) be mitigated sufficiently for it to become a large-scale contributor to Europe's future energy requirements? This session will hear from four visionary speakers who believe that the answer is “yes” and who will outline how this goal can be achieved.

Niels-Erik Clausen will present an overview of the state-of-the-art in wind energy technology and set out a vision for the future of wind energy in Denmark and Europe. Aidan Corcoran will review how EirGrid and other European transmission system operators are building the transmission infrastructure necessary to support large-scale wind generation and will also outline plans for a European, offshore SuperGrid. Paul Dowling will outline the next stage in the evolution of offshore wind with the award of leases for sites that have the potential to generate 4,000-9,000 MW, and he will discuss the SuperGrid as a potential solution to building large scale offshore wind. Igor V. Shvets will outline an imaginative proposal to combine large pumped-storage reservoirs with large-scale wind farms to give Ireland significant export capacity for electricity.

Electrons, ions and light have been used successfully as probes to disentangle the nature of correlated quantum systems since more than a century. With the aim to understand and possibly even control fundamental interactions at smallest scales, scientists have been developing and exploiting many-particle imaging methods in combination with novel particle storage rings and light sources and thus pushed the limits of technology ever further.

In this session we will first give a historical overview of this interdisciplinary field with an emphasis on the link between fundamental research and societal and ecological problems: How can an understanding of the correlation effects in atoms help us address present health and energy problems? What is the impact of different kinds of radiation we are exposed to every day on cells? How can we link between observations at sub-atomic systems to macroscopic objects or even galaxies? We will then explain in an interactive setting how shortest light pulses with highest brilliance, radiation in the THz-regime, exotic highly charged ions, and even antimatter are produced in laboratories around the world and why these measurements are the ideal way to move into and up from the quantum world.

The ordinary (baryonic) matter appears to constitute only a very tiny part of the total matter/energy content in our Universe. Dark matter and dark energy are currently invoked as the main ingredients of the Cosmos. Their presence in the Universe is supported by a large host of independent cosmological and astrophysical data. But very challenging questions arise: What is the nature of dark matter and dark energy? How are the dark constituents distributed in the Cosmos? These fundamental puzzles are at the origin of an incredibly large research activity in cosmology, astrophysics and particle physics. The experimental activity involves measurements in underground laboratories, in ground-based observatories and in air-borne detectors. Interpretation of the vast host of data which can be derived form these experiments as well as from completely independent investigations at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN leads researchers to investigate the most advanced theories about fundamental physics. This seminar aims at giving a general overview about hints and ideas being at present investigated in this field.