The study, conducted by Katrin Mögele and Ruth Müller of the Technical University of Munich and Clemens Striebing of the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering, examined 87 technology-oriented project proposals addressing the climate crisis, all submitted to the Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe funding programmes between 2014 and 2022. Crucially, the corpus included both funded and rejected proposals, giving the researchers a rare window into the full spectrum of how the research community responds to gender-related policy demands, not just the successful strategies.

Methodologically, the team took an inductive constructivist grounded theory approach, meaning they did not begin with a fixed checklist of what proper gender integration should look like. Instead, they allowed patterns to emerge from the proposals themselves, analysing how sex and gender dimensions were framed, negotiated, and operationalised in the text of real grant applications. This approach is particularly well suited to a question that is fundamentally about language and performance: how do scientists write about gender when they are under pressure to satisfy a funding criterion?

The findings reveal three main themes. The first is a strikingly wide spectrum of integration practices. At one end sit proposals that comprehensively incorporate sex and gender dimensions into their research design, treating them as substantive variables that shape the technology, the users, or the problem being addressed. At the other end, the researchers found procedural or symbolic inclusion, where gender appears in a proposal largely to satisfy formal requirements rather than to inform the science. Between these poles lies a continuum of practices, and the study suggests that where a proposal lands on that spectrum is far from random.

The second theme concerns terminology and conceptual clarity. The analysis found notable differences in how proposals used gender-related language, and in how clearly they defined the concepts they invoked. This matters because sex and gender are analytically distinct: sex typically refers to biological characteristics, while gender refers to socially constructed roles, behaviours, and identities. When proposals blur these categories or deploy the terms loosely, the resulting research designs risk being conceptually muddled, even when the intention to be inclusive is sincere. The study’s evidence of inconsistent conceptual clarity across 87 proposals suggests that many applicants are writing about gender without a shared vocabulary or stable definition of what the funder actually expects.

The third and perhaps most consequential theme is a tendency to conflate equal participation with the integration of sex and gender dimensions in research and innovation itself. In many proposals, addressing gender meant focusing on the representation of women, for example in consortium staffing or leadership roles, while overlooking the broader structural dimensions that gender analysis can bring to research content. This is an important distinction. Equal participation concerns who does the science; sex and gender dimensions concern what the science studies and how. A consortium can be perfectly gender-balanced and still produce climate technology that ignores gendered patterns of energy use, mobility, exposure to heat, or disaster vulnerability. The study’s finding that proposals often collapse these two concerns into one suggests that the policy instrument may be pulling attention toward workforce composition at the expense of research substance.

Running through all of this, the authors identify a central tension between formal compliance and substantive engagement. Applicants know that gender dimensions matter for evaluation, and they respond accordingly, but the depth of that response is shaped by disciplinary norms, institutional expectations, and the signals sent by funders. The original title of the paper quotes a narrative that captures one pole of this tension: the claim that technology and science are, by definition, non-discriminatory. Framed this way, gender becomes something external to the technology itself, a matter of who participates rather than what is designed. The study’s constructivist framing treats such statements as narratives that perform work within proposals, positioning gender integration as either irrelevant to technical excellence or as an add-on requirement to be managed.

The implications extend well beyond academic curiosity. Climate change is not gender-neutral. Differences in caregiving responsibilities, access to resources, occupational exposure, and decision-making power mean that climate technologies and policies can affect men and women differently, and that ignoring these dimensions can produce solutions that are less effective or even inequitable. If the flagship European funding programmes for climate research are producing proposals in which gender is treated symbolically, the scientific community may be missing systematic opportunities to improve both the quality and the justice of climate innovation. The grounded theory analysis suggests this is not a marginal problem but a patterned one, visible across a large sample of proposals from nearly a decade of submissions.

What can be done? The study points to several areas where further support may be beneficial. The authors highlight the need for enhanced training, so that researchers, particularly in technology-oriented and engineering fields where gender analysis has historically been less embedded, gain the conceptual tools to integrate sex and gender dimensions meaningfully. They also call for clearer guidance from funders, more transparent evaluation criteria, and greater institutional support, so that applicants are not left to guess what substantive engagement looks like or to fear that genuine integration will be read as a distraction from technical merit. Without such support, the gap between formal compliance and substantive engagement is likely to persist, because applicants respond rationally to the signals they receive.

For policymakers, funders, and researchers, the study provides a foundational understanding of how sex and gender dimensions are currently addressed in EU grant writing, and it does so with an unusually robust evidence base: 87 real proposals, funded and rejected, spanning eight years of the world’s largest research funding programme. Its message is ultimately constructive. The infrastructure for gender-responsive research exists, the policy mandate exists, and many applicants clearly want to engage with the requirement. What the analysis exposes is the translation problem in between, the point where policy language becomes proposal text. Closing that gap, the authors argue, will require the funding system itself to model the clarity and commitment it asks of its applicants, ensuring that gender integration in climate research becomes a scientific practice rather than a performance of compliance.

Subject of Research: Integration of sex and gender dimensions in European climate research funding proposals

Article Title: “Technology and science are, by definition, non-discriminatory”- narratives of the performance of sex and gender dimensions in European climate project proposals

Article References: “Technology and science are, by definition, non-discriminatory”- narratives of the performance of sex and gender dimensions in European climate project proposals. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41599-026-09092-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41599-026-09092-w

Keywords: sex and gender dimensions, Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe, climate research, research funding, grant proposals, gender integration, science policy, grounded theory, research and innovation, gender equality, European Union

The scale of the problem motivating this work is striking. According to the most recent Italian census of residential buildings, more than seventy percent of the country’s housing stock was built before 1981, when seismic design provisions were absent or only partially enforced, and horizontal earthquake forces were rarely considered in routine design. Concrete buildings erected between the 1960s and the 1990s typically lack the ductility that modern capacity design principles provide, and their unreinforced masonry infill walls interact with the frame in ways that can drastically alter seismic behaviour. The consequences have been visible in the devastating earthquakes that struck Molise in 2003, L’Aquila in 2009, Emilia in 2012, and Central Italy in 2016. At the same time, the building sector accounts for roughly forty percent of energy consumption and thirty-six percent of greenhouse gas emissions in Europe, making integrated renovation an environmental as well as a life-safety imperative.

Existing retrofit strategies each carry significant drawbacks. External steel exoskeletons allow buildings to remain occupied during construction, but they are expensive to fabricate, demand complex connections to the existing structure, and require free space around the entire perimeter for independent foundations, a luxury rarely available in dense cities. Internal solutions such as added shear walls or steel bracing avoid that problem but consume usable floor area and force occupants to endure invasive interior works. Earlier timber-based proposals have shown promise, since cross-laminated timber is lightweight, insulating, and prefabricated, yet most previous systems required removing existing infill walls or transferring substantial new loads into columns that may themselves be degraded. The e-CLT system was conceived to sidestep these limitations by mounting panels externally and letting friction dampers control how forces flow between the new panels and the old frame.

The operating logic of the system is elegantly two-tiered. Under low to moderate ground shaking, the friction dampers hold the CLT panels rigidly against the concrete frame, increasing the building’s lateral stiffness and strength, which reduces inter-storey drift and the internal forces that would otherwise damage columns and beams. When a severe earthquake strikes, the dampers activate and begin to slide, converting seismic energy into heat through friction while capping the forces transmitted to the timber. This deliberate cap keeps the CLT panels within their elastic range even under extreme excitation, meaning the panels themselves should survive a major event without replacement. A companion prefabricated envelope, called e-PANEL, wraps the assembly to deliver the thermal upgrade, so a single intervention on the façade addresses both earthquake safety and energy performance.

Getting there required fixing a subtle but critical engineering flaw. An earlier version of the friction damper had been validated under idealised laboratory conditions in which only displacements parallel to the friction plane were applied. In a real two-dimensional frame, however, the rocking of the panel during an earthquake generates parasitic forces perpendicular to the friction plane. Preliminary tests showed these out-of-plane actions severely compromised the damper, destabilising its dissipative behaviour, overloading the screws and preloaded bolts, and concentrating stresses at the edges of the concrete elements. The research team therefore redesigned the device from the ground up, decoupling the connection system along the two directions parallel and perpendicular to the friction plane so that rocking motions could no longer corrupt the friction mechanism.

The improved damper consists of two principal steel components: an anchor profile mechanically fixed to the concrete inter-storey beam, and a free profile screwed to the back of the CLT panel that is free to slide horizontally. Between them sits a stiffened alignment component housed in a box formed by three plates welded to the free profile. Energy dissipation occurs as the alignment component slides against the anchor profile across shim layers lubricated with graphite, all clamped together by three bolts tightened to a torque of 100 newton-metres, corresponding to a preload of roughly 31 kilonewtons. The geometry is carefully proportioned using capacity design principles: the friction force is deliberately kept below the resistance of both the timber and concrete fastening systems so that sliding, rather than brittle connection failure, governs, and all steel components remain elastic under the maximum expected friction force. Installation requires just three straightforward operations and no specialist equipment.

To validate the system under realistic conditions, the team built two identical full-scale, single-storey, single-bay concrete frames replicating 1970s Italian construction practice, complete with the strong-beam-weak-column behaviour and low concrete strength typical of that era. Columns measured 300 by 300 millimetres, beams 300 by 500 millimetres, with a 4-metre span and 3.2-metre storey height. Four cyclic quasi-static tests were performed at the University of Bologna’s structural laboratory: a bare frame loaded only within its elastic range, a masonry-infilled frame pushed to failure, an identical infilled frame retrofitted with the e-CLT system, and finally the retrofit system itself mounted on a deliberately damaged frame whose columns had their reinforcement cut to create a pendulum-like substructure with almost no lateral resistance. This clever arrangement allowed the dampers to be characterised within the real geometric interaction of panel, damper, and frame, rather than in isolation. A constant vertical force of 250 kilonewtons per column simulated the gravity load of a three-storey residential building.

The results were dramatic. The unstrengthened infilled frame developed an initial stiffness of 47.0 kilonewtons per millimetre and reached a peak base shear of 157 kilonewtons at a drift ratio of three percent, by which point plastic hinges had formed at the column ends and the longitudinal reinforcement had buckled. The retrofitted frame, by contrast, exhibited an initial stiffness of 70.1 kilonewtons per millimetre, a 49 percent increase, and a peak base shear of 263 kilonewtons, a 67 percent gain. The friction dampers activated at a drift ratio of about 0.5 percent and then delivered stable, repeatable hysteretic loops of the nearly rectangular shape characteristic of friction devices. Crucially, the CLT panel stayed elastic throughout, with maximum reversible diagonal elongation of only 0.6 millimetres, roughly 200 microstrain, confirming that it behaved as a rigid diaphragm protected by the capped damper forces.

The energy numbers are perhaps the most compelling headline figure. Up to 0.5 percent drift, dissipation was minimal because the dampers had not yet engaged. Beyond that threshold, the retrofitted system’s cumulative dissipated energy climbed steeply while the unstrengthened specimen’s performance deteriorated with progressive infill and column damage. At a drift level of three percent, close to the collapse-prevention limits defined in FEMA and Eurocode 8 documents, the strengthened frame dissipated approximately three times as much energy as its unstrengthened counterpart. The equivalent viscous damping ratio of the retrofitted system rose to about 58 percent at three percent drift, compared with a range of roughly 16 to 28 percent for the unstrengthened frame, and showed negligible degradation across repeated cycles. Damage to the concrete members themselves was markedly reduced: cracking remained limited to transverse cracks at column ends, with no bar buckling or concrete cover spalling, in stark contrast to the extensive degradation observed in the control specimen.

The authors conclude that e-CLT is a robust, sustainable route to upgrading seismically vulnerable concrete buildings, one whose stiffness and strength gains can be tailored by adjusting the number and size of dampers and panels, and whose prefabricated, external, lightweight installation minimises disruption to occupants. They also note honest limitations: façades with large openings may not accommodate the panels, brittle failure modes may require supplementary local interventions, and long-term effects such as bolt preload relaxation and temperature fluctuations on the friction interfaces still warrant study. Future work will include shaking-table tests on large-scale three-dimensional specimens and comprehensive cost-benefit analyses. For now, the message is clear: a renewable material, a cleverly decoupled steel damper, and a full-scale laboratory frame have together shown that Europe’s ageing concrete stock can be made dramatically safer without demolishing a single wall.

Subject of Research: Seismic retrofit of pre-code reinforced concrete frames using cross-laminated timber panels with friction dampers

Article Title: Structural performance of RC frames retrofitted with CLT panels: experimental evidence from the e-CLT system

Article References: Pozza, L., Barbagallo, F., Morganti, A., Licciardello, E., Marino, E. M., & Mazzotti, C. (2026). Structural performance of RC frames retrofitted with CLT panels: experimental evidence from the e-CLT system. Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10518-026-02690-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10518-026-02690-8

Keywords: cross-laminated timber, seismic retrofit, friction damper, reinforced concrete frames, energy dissipation, quasi-static cyclic testing, e-SAFE project, masonry infill, building renovation, earthquake engineering, energy efficiency, Horizon 2020

The analysis examines the projects BabyRobot, CARER-AID, DE-ENIGMA, DREAM, PlusMe and IM-TWIN, all of which developed semi-autonomous robots or robotic soft toys intended to support autism interventions. Several used well-known humanoid platforms such as Nao, Kaspar and Probo, while the sister projects PlusMe and IM-TWIN designed toy-like soft devices described as Transitional Wearable Companions. None of the robots were intended to operate fully autonomously; many experiments relied on Wizard-of-Oz control, in which human operators quietly steered the machines while researchers worked on the technical scaffolding for semi-autonomous behavior. The interventions targeted socio-emotional and communicative skills such as joint attention, emotion recognition, perspective-taking and imitation, drawing heavily on behaviorist psychology, sometimes blended with developmental and cognitive approaches.

Because robotics papers rarely report ethics practices in detail, a problem the author likens to the ethics black-box known in artificial intelligence research, the study mined formal EU project deliverables, documents that grant agreements require researchers to produce for transparency and accountability. Using a critical thematic analysis informed by critical disability studies and critical autism studies, the author coded each project independently and then compared them across cases, looking explicitly for absences: ethical issues that were never mentioned, mentioned only vaguely, or discussed without nuance. Notably, the author writes from an insider standpoint as an autistic researcher, an approach grounded in what has been called a counterventionist strategy, which seeks to disrupt the normalization agenda embedded in human-computer interaction research rather than treat disability as a problem awaiting technological repair.

The projects varied in their ethical engagement. All obtained ethics committee approvals and parental consent, and all addressed privacy, data protection and physical safety to varying degrees. The DREAM project stood out for surveying stakeholders on whether robots should even be used in autism therapy, on emotional attachment and deception, and on robot autonomy. DE-ENIGMA conducted an extensive user-requirements analysis with educators, flagging concerns that children might become attached to robots, dependent on them, or deceived about the machines’ capacity for feeling and reciprocation, and it openly acknowledged sensory sensitivities. Yet only two projects, DE-ENIGMA and CARER-AID, explicitly sought the children’s assent rather than relying solely on parents. Several projects, including CARER-AID, PlusMe and IM-TWIN, never discussed children’s well-being at all, and the ethics deliverables of PlusMe and IM-TWIN were classified as confidential, illustrating how opaque the ethics of even publicly funded research can become.

The analysis then confronts a more uncomfortable question: whether the interventions themselves rest on solid evidence. Drawing on meta-research, the article notes that autism intervention science has produced roughly a thousand reports over three decades yet still lacks sufficient randomized controlled trials, and that a major meta-analysis of 150 group-based studies involving young autistic children found widespread risk of bias. When studies at significant risk of bias were removed, effect sizes dropped to statistical non-significance. Reported gains tend to be short-term, context-bound and poor at generalizing to everyday life, and adverse events are rarely monitored or reported. Widely recommended interventions, the review argues, therefore carry uncertain efficacy and unacknowledged potential harms, a finding that matters enormously when robots are presented as efficient new vehicles for delivering those same interventions.

The theoretical commitments embedded in the projects come in for particular scrutiny. Several projects invoked the Theory of Mind account of autism, which frames autistic people as lacking the ability to ascribe mental states to others, and some drew on the Empathizing-Systematizing framework, which characterizes the autistic brain as hyper-male and low in empathy. The review argues these models misrepresent and pathologize autistic people as a neurominority, and it contrasts them with the double empathy problem, formulated by autistic scholar Damian Milton, which holds that communication breakdowns between autistic and non-autistic people are mutual rather than a deficit located in one person. The DREAM project built its robot-assisted intervention on applied behavior analysis, or ABA, an operant-conditioning regimen of reinforcement and punishment that can run twenty to forty hours per week, described by critics as essentially a full-time job for a three-year-old.

The evidence on ABA’s safety is deeply contested. Researchers have documented that camouflaging autistic traits is a unique risk marker for suicidality, and mixed-methods studies have reported associations between ABA exposure and symptoms of post-traumatic stress, with autistic adults describing experiences of forced compliance, erosion of agency and trauma. A recent analysis of more than 17,000 autistic youth in a US national sample found preliminary evidence linking ABA exposure to increased mental health hospitalizations, though causation cannot be established. From a bioethics standpoint, it has been argued that ABA systematically violates the principles of nonmaleficence and justice by infringing on children’s autonomy. The review’s central charge is stark: the DREAM project did not mention this critique, and none of the projects employing behaviorist techniques acknowledged the weak evidence base or potential risks of the interventions their robots were designed to deliver.

The analysis also documents how the projects classified autistic children’s autonomy in pathologizing terms. In DE-ENIGMA, a child who failed to respond was labeled non-compliant, while needing several repetitions to comply counted as low engagement; self-regulatory behaviors arising from overstimulation were treated as interruptions to be corrected. In DREAM, distraction or task avoidance was categorized as maladaptive behavior. Even positive reinforcement carried costs: in CARER-AID, when institutionalized, intellectually disabled autistic children answered incorrectly, the Nao robot emitted an unpleasant sound with red eyes, a punishment technique the researchers defended as pedagogically important. In the sister projects, soft wearable companions were deliberately designed to arouse emotional attachment and reward eye contact and physical touch, despite evidence that eye contact can produce amygdala-mediated hyperarousal and genuine pain for many autistic people, and that joint attention in naturalistic play develops through non-gaze-based pathways in both autistic and neurotypical children.

Equally troubling is the pattern the review identifies as testimonial quieting, a structural form of epistemic injustice in which autistic people are deemed incapable of contributing knowledge about their own lives. Most projects justified excluding autistic children from design and feedback by citing communication difficulties, then consulted teachers, therapists and parents instead. The DREAM project’s stakeholder survey had no category for autistic respondents at all, and its collaborative-ethics approach, while democratic, drew overwhelmingly non-autistic input, a configuration critics warn can produce the tyranny of the majority for minority communities. Community research priority studies cited in the review show autistic people rank social-skills interventions among their lowest research priorities, while the primary barrier to socializing, according to experimental work on thin-slice judgments, is the reluctance of neurotypical peers to interact with them.

The article’s conclusion is that these technologies, as currently conceived, function less as assistive tools than as curative ones, in the sense defined by bioethicist Joseph Stramondo: any technology that treats disability as a problem to be erased through normalization is curative, whereas assistive technology expands access while preserving identity. Because the projects consistently framed autism as a costly public-health burden and defined success as neurotypical performance, their robots operated as disciplinary apparatuses that surveil, datafy and condition autistic behavior, in tension with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The author argues that no ethically acceptable robot-assisted therapy for autistic children can exist until the field shifts from deficit-based models toward neurodiversity-affirming, participatory practices, in which autistic children and adults are treated as knowers and experts, consent and assent are continuously renegotiated, and the purpose of support becomes self-determination rather than compliance. Until roboticists ask whose values their technologies encode and whether a robot is even the right solution, the answer to the question posed by the paper’s title remains, uncomfortably, no.

Subject of Research: Ethics of robot-assisted autism interventions for autistic children

Article Title: Can there really be ethical robots for autistic children?

Article References: Elmadagli, C. (2026). Can there really be ethical robots for autistic children?. AI & SOCIETY. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03372-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00146-026-03372-4

Keywords: social robotics, autism, robot-assisted therapy, research ethics, neurodiversity, technoableism, applied behavior analysis, Horizon 2020, epistemic injustice, human-robot interaction, critical autism studies, AI ethics