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To meet world population demands for food it has been estimated that the production of rice, the world’s most important staple food, must increase by 24% by 2050. As well as the challenges involved in growing more rice on less land and water, farmers need new rice varieties adapted to changing climatic conditions.

A groundbreaking human-brain atlas, the extraordinary result of a Canadian-German collaboration, is considered so revolutionary that it was recognized by the MIT Technology Review as one of the world’s breakthrough technologies of 2014.

Undersea cables are being installed along Amazon riverbeds to deliver connectivity to remote communities, providing access to education and supporting regional development.

With extreme weather events increasingly hitting news headlines around the world, accurate and timely forecasts are essential for effective disaster warning and mitigation systems. This, in turn, calls for joint research efforts within the global meteorological community to improve models and tools for predicting severe weather, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, cyclones, floods, heat waves etc.

When the Latin American Observatory of Extraordinary Events announced in October 2011 that rainfall was expected to be above average for the South American Northwest and above average for the Southeast of the same region, an early alert for floods was issued for Panama, Colombia and Venezuela, and one of a drought for North-western Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. This is an example of how the information gathered and disseminated by the Observatory, a collaboration involving a number of institutions, helps Latin American nations with risk management for extreme environmental events.

"Today’s students love technology and integrating technology in education every day helps students stay engaged and prepares them for the future. The Museum Robot program at the National Museum of Australia not only integrates technology and engineering concepts, it also brings the history curriculum alive in a new and exciting way to students all over the country."

Faster access to genomics data aids researchers collaborating to find better ways to diagnose, treat and prevent cancer, as well those working to develop new plant varieties resistant to pests, floods and drought.

The rise in obesity – and particularly child obesity – poses a serious public health challenge. Approximately one in four children in England are now overweight or obese by school entry, rising to a third by the end of primary school. MD-Paedigree is a four-year European Commission funded ICT project to help fight childhood obesity-related cardiovascular and other child diseases.

Thanks to the Mylims platform, scientists around the world are able to process and manipulate data, interpret results and compare them with spectra obtained by other users and those stored in databases, thus accelerating the understanding of compounds. Mylims has already led to breakthroughs in the diagnosis of illnesses, such as leukaemia, and has become a valuable tool for food chemists to detect fraudulent coffee.

Over the last decade, ESR - Escola Superior de Redes (Superior School of Networks) has significantly contributed to the advancement of ICT across Brazil. An initiative of RNP (the Brazilian NREN), ESR offers courses to address issues in the areas of Management and Network Design, IT Governance, Security, Support to Digital Collaboration Media and System Administration. This successful training model has now been rolled out to other countries in Latin America and further afield, where RNP partners up with the respective NREN to provide expertise and qualification.

More than 20 countries are present in Ny-Ålesund in the Arctic, operating their own research facilities. The most northerly fibre optic cable system in the world has been installed to ensure that the massive amounts of data produced there can be transferred ”live” to global research networks.

Ocean Networks Canada (an initiative of the University of Victoria) is developing a software system to co-ordinate readings from underwater sensors in order to detect and report natural hazards, such as earthquakes and tsunamis. This system has the potential to help save lives and limit the impacts of natural disasters.