Press releases and news

The European Commission approved a Common Project of European interest (IPCEI) dedicated to the Cloud, opening the way to innovation throughout Europe. The IPCEI-CIS (Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure and Services) project, involving seven member States (France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Holland, Poland and Spain), will be funded with 1.2 billion euro state aid, aimed at supporting 19 projects by European companies. The projects will catalyze further private investments and accelerate the establishment of a new and advanced economy based on digital technologies, particularly data and communication networks.

ENEA has engineered dwarf tomato plants enriched with antioxidant molecules beneficial for the diet of astronauts during long-term missions and able to counteract the effects of cosmic radiation for the plant itself. The activities were carried out as a part of the HORTSPACE and BIOxTREME projects, funded by the Italian Space Agency (ASI), and the results were published in the scientific journals Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences and Frontiers in Plant Sciences.

An ENEA research team has devised a process to turn over 90% of plastic waste from the sea into new "oil” to be used as fuel or to produce new plastics, paints, solvents and countless organic compounds. This activity was conducted as part of the European interregional Italy-Croatia project “NETWAP” on the reduction and innovative management of waste, whose outcomes were published in the ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, the online scientific journal of the American Chemical Society.

Novel smart and compact devices, capable of detecting the effects of ionizing radiation on cancerous and healthy cells and tissues, have been developed to enhance the effectiveness of innovative oncological therapies, such as proton therapy. This is the result of the BIOTRACK project coordinated by ENEA and funded by the Lazio Region. The project ranked highest among those funded to ENEA in the regional call for proposals in the Life Sciences field.

Providing farmers with a predictive model to forecast olive crop yield, which allows them to redesign the agronomic practices to be adopted is the objective of a study conducted by ENEA with the Cnr and the University of California at Berkeley (United States), which identified the main seasonal climate stress factors responsible for bad harvests. The findings of the study, based on data from 66 Italian provinces from 2006 to 2020, were published in the Journal Agronomy and Crop Science.

The first Italian Software Heritage Mirror, an open-access archive that collects, preserves and makes available the source code of all publicly available software in the world, started on December 13th 2023 at the ENEA Bologna research center. An international, non-profit initiative of great cultural, social and scientific significance, it was promoted by the INRIA, the French research institute on information technology and automation, jointly with UNESCO. “We are proud to welcome ENEA – said Professor Di Cosmo, director of the Software Heritage – as the first European institutional mirror of the Software Heritage, and we are eager to explore together the opportunities opened up by this collaboration”.