Europe could turn more of its scientific discoveries into new technologies, products and businesses by changing the way it funds innovation and supports researchers, according to a new Policy Forum published in Science.

Researchers tested a "sunflower" antenna layout on AAVS3, a full-scale prototype station built for the SKA-Low radio telescope. Computer simulations predicted the layout would lose sensitivity directly overhead at around 125 MHz. Real sky observations confirmed this loss and traced the problem to the layout's repeating geometry. As a result, the Observatory decided not to adopt the design for the telescope's final configuration and selected a modified layout instead.

Thousands of rapidly evolving aphid proteins initially resisted both conventional sequence comparisons and AlphaFold2. By sequencing closely related aphid species and supplying the missing evolutionary context, researchers uncovered a shared structural blueprint across approximately 2,400 proteins and established a method that may help scientists study other fast-evolving proteins involved in immunity, host-parasite interactions, and agriculture.