Seven European hospitals have validated a new methodology developed at Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV, Spain) to monitor patients with glioblastoma. This methodology helps medical doctors know the patients' situation with greater precision; it allows them to obtain several vascular biomarkers directly linked to their survival.

At age 90, Ali Atar, one of the main military chiefs of King Boabdil of Granada, fought to his death in the Battle of Lucena in 1483. It was there that his magnificent Nasrid sword was taken away from him, and researchers from the Polytechnic University of Valencia and a company from Toledo have now modelled it in order to graphically document and present it on the web.

Whenever required to define the colours of an image, one usually falls back on a system of eleven well-known names, such as white, red, green and blue, but a team of Chinese and European scientists propose using an additional 28 terms, such as burgundy, salmon, lavender, plum, tan and olive green These new descriptors offer better results when it comes to classifying images, identifying people and visually monitoring individuals.

The two main pitfalls of robots which imitate the human body are their control and the difficulty encountered when manufacturing them in a cost-effective manner. Researchers from the MoCoTi European project have designed the prototype of an android which learns how to actuate its own limbs and can be easily duplicated. The device, formed of an artificial brain which controls a tendon-driven robotic arm, might be the first step towards low cost humanoid robotics.

Researchers of the Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain) and the National Center for Scientific Research (France) have developed Volbrain. The system enables worldwide scientists to obtain key cerebral information in order to advance in the research on neural pathologies. It provides information on the tissue volume in the intracranial cavity, as well as the cerebral hemispheres, the cerebellum and the brain stem.

In collaboration with other national institutions, researchers at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) are designing a new therapeutic tool for motor rehabilitation for children. In this project, an interactive social therapist robot, which is totally autonomous, is able to perceive patients’ reactions and determine if they are doing their exercises correctly.

Researchers from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), the Chinese Academy of Sciences and other institutions are developing a technique which makes it possible to obtain diagnostic, three-dimensional images in real time. This enables scientists to instantly discover all types of processes ranging from how a fruit fly develops to whether a biopsy was correctly performed.

A group of European researchers are developing a next generation graphene based scanner which will allow hitherto unknown aspects of works of art and other historic objects to be revealed. The equipment will enable the viewing of hidden images on canvases and unveil what is hidden inside three dimensional objects sealed centuries ago.

The imbalanced structure of Twitter, where some users have many followers and the large majority barely has several dozen followers, means that messages from the more influential have much more impact. Less popular users can compensate for this by increasing their activity and their tweets, but the outcome is costly and inefficient. This was confirmed by an analysis of the social network performed by researchers from the Technical University of Madrid.