After the initial lockdowns of the Spring 2020, the large-scale adoption of contact-tracing apps was endorsed in many countries as a means to facilitate the tracking of transmission chains and the early detection of outbreaks, and thus to minimize the resurgence of Covid-19 contagions. However, centralized approaches, where data captured by the app are all sent to a nation-wide server, raised important concerns about citizens’ privacy and needlessly strong digital surveillance, alerting researchers and policy makers to the importance of limiting personal data collection and avoiding location tracking

How important is technology to understand climate change and protect the environment? I-Seed project will combine bioinspired soft robotics, material science and artificial intelligence to develop new innovative robots mimicking plant seeds behaviour and able to monitor soil and climate parameters, like the presence of pollutants, humidity, CO2 levels, temperature and quality of waters. The project is coordinated by researcher Barbara Mazzolai (Italian Institute of Technology) and it involves The BioRobotics Institute of Sant'Anna School 

In a recent research, published in the international journal “Frontiers in Plant Science”, a team of researchers from the PlantLab Laboratory of the Institute of Life Sciences of the Sant'Anna School (Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna), in collaboration with the Institute of Clinical Physiology of the CNR of Pisa and with the Institute for the animal production system in the Mediterranean environment of the CNR of Naples, has shown that iodine is also necessary for plants