The European Correspondent

These institutions, particularly in fields such as chemistry, consistently show higher participation by women than private companies or individual inventors.

A data story by Yanika Borg.

Spain stands out as a notable outlier: over 40% of its patent applications include one or more women inventors. Research suggests this is partly due to Spain’s industrial and technological profile, as well as the strong role played by universities and public research organisations.

Of these applications, only around 25% list at least one woman inventor, reflecting broader gender inequalities in STEM fields.

In 2024, more than 199,000 patents were filed in Europe. Patent filings are often seen as an indirect measure of innovation, even though not all inventions are patented, and not all patents represent meaningful breakthroughs.

Can you think of a word in your native language that is missing in English? Tell us in the comments which word we should cover next!

A data story by Ton Voos.

A tenfold improvement is nothing to sneeze at, and plant-based foods require less land to produce the same energy across the board.

While we are certainly not advocating for a carrots-only diet, which would for sure require a lot of chewing, the land footprint of food is something to keep in mind.

And yes, the comments have a point. When looking at calories, the beef-carrot gap indeed becomes smaller. Carrots are no longer 1000 times as efficient as beef but “only” around 100 times.

Surely, a kilogram of beef contains more energy than a kilogram of carrots? Weren't we – so to speak – comparing apples to oranges?

We love critical questions and decided to investigate.

We wrote that the land needed to produce one kilogram of beef could potentially grow 1000 kilograms of carrots.

Since then, hundreds of people have responded on social media. One question came up more than any other: what about the relationship between land use and calories?

A few weeks ago, we published a data visualisation about the land footprint of food. In case you missed it: the bottom line was that beef and mutton were much more land-intensive than any other food.

Take me back to 2016 If you opened any social media feed in January, you probably noticed hazy Retrica filters, selfies with Snapchat dog ears and songs like <em>Closer</e

For millennials and Gen Z, 2016 now feels like the last “lighter” year before permacrisis and the attention-optimised internet. The throwback isn’t just aesthetic — it’s a brief escape from a darker cultural mood.

Read the full piece by Eliška Volencová on our website: buff.ly/GNA5CDf

“2026 is the new 2016” is all over our feeds, from Retrica haze to the comeback of Closer and Sorry. This chart shows why the nostalgia hits: since the 2010s, pop lyrics have grown more stress-heavy while positivity keeps dropping.

Excuse me, but I think this pigeon is watching us… At first glance, it looks like an ordinary pigeon. Look closer, and you see a small wire wrapped around its head and a compact electronic backpack equ

But the line between civilian and military is thin, and the ethical questions are huge.

Read the full piece by Dmitriy Beliaev on our website: buff.ly/1laE6SG

A pigeon with a camera backpack sounds like a meme, until it becomes a prototype. A Russian startup claims it can remotely guide birds using implanted neurotech, pitching “biodrones” for civilian infrastructure monitoring.

Under Donald Trump – who has openly weaponised economic and political dependencies before – this is not a theoretical risk. The real question is no longer whether we’re exposed, but how exposed we are.

A data story by Mandy Spaltman.

That dependence gives the American president an extraordinary lever: the ability to pressure, restrict, or disable systems used across Europe on a daily basis.

As Europe is increasingly determined to achieve ”digital sovereignty”, it stings that its economy mostly runs on infrastructure it does not control. From cloud services to productivity software, US-based technology underpins daily operations across sectors.

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Powder for the people Thinking of taking your family on a wintry adventure? ...Got a few thousand euros to spare? For avid skiers, the rising costs of skiing won't be news.

A data visualisation by Sebastian Gräff. Read the full piece by Toyah Höher on our website: buff.ly/uF1EWo7

Powder for the people Thinking of taking your family on a wintry adventure? ...Got a few thousand euros to spare? For avid skiers, the rising costs of skiing won't be news.

In the Alps, day passes commonly climb into the €80–€100 bracket, while parts of the Balkans still sell access for under €20. The spread underscores a sport being priced upmarket—even before equipment hire and accommodation are added.

Europe’s lift tickets are drifting out of reach. This map plots peak-season one-day pass prices across central and eastern European resorts, where costs vary wildly by country and mountain range.

Domestic flights make a quiet comeback When Ryanair, Europe's largest low-cost airline announced new routes to Bratislava last year, it came with a familiar punchline: “Not sure where Brati

Read the full piece by Tamara Kaňuchová on our website: buff.ly/poYBX0c

Domestic flights make a quiet comeback When Ryanair, Europe's largest low-cost airline announced new routes to Bratislava last year, it came with a familiar punchline: “Not sure where Brati

With flights often undercutting rail fares, Greenpeace found train tickets can cost up to 26 times more, governments are responding with bans and extra taxes on routes where rail is under 2.5 hours, even as travellers complain the tracks aren’t yet ready to take the load.

Domestic flights make a quiet comeback When Ryanair, Europe's largest low-cost airline announced new routes to Bratislava last year, it came with a familiar punchline: “Not sure where Brati

Low-cost airlines are helping keep these hops alive: Ryanair and Wizz Air added a combined 26 new connections to Bratislava last year, as carriers shift away from pricier hubs and towards smaller airports with lower fees and few environmental charges.

Even where trains can rival flying on travel time, Europe’s busiest short-haul routes still rack up dozens of departures each week, from London–Manchester to Paris–Lyon and Madrid–Barcelona.

These can both undermine societal cohesion, reduce cooperation, and erode collective responses to crises.

A data story by Mandy Spaltman.

This trend matters: conspiracy beliefs have been linked to lower compliance with public health recommendations, such as vaccination and other preventive measures, as well as to weakened trust in institutions.

Research suggests that conspiracy beliefs tend to grow in times of uncertainty and when trust in institutions declines, because simple, alternative explanations can feel more certain and psychologically comforting than complex reality.

At the same time, differences between countries have narrowed, suggesting a more uniform mistrust of science across the region.