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It is no surprise that Transmutex,a Swiss scale-up that uses particle accelerators to transmute long-lived nuclear waste into carbon-free energy, was this week named a 2023 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer. As the drive to slow climate change intensifies, there is growing recognition that the pathway to Net Zero will be faster and easier if nuclear power is part of the solution, according to S&P Global's 10 Cleantech Trends in 2023.
Recent advances, combined with the impact of the energy crisis, have strengthened political support for a nuclear power revival. On June 7, after much debate, the EU Parliament voted in favor of a proposal regarding labeling nuclear power plants as climate-friendly investments.

A flurry of other announcements in June underline how nuclear power– once regarded as a dangerous and undesirable source of energy – is increasingly being seen as a way for Europe to supplement renewables and gain energy sovereignty.

Read on to get the key takeaways from the conference and the week's most important technology stories impacting business.

The medical procession has long been baffled by viruses. Out of 200 plus known virus pathogens there are medications to treat acute infections of only about eight of them. HIV is one but it took researchers several decades to come up with therapeutics. When it comes to other viruses such as Dengue, Zika or even deadly Marburg patients there are no treatments. You either survive or you don’t.

Capsitec, a German synthetic biology startup spun out of the Technical University of Munich hopes to change that by using DNA origami -the nanoscale folding of DNA to create arbitrary two- and three-dimensional shapes – to neutralize viruses. Viruses need host cells to replicate so the idea is to create molecular cages out of synthetic biological material that prevent the viruses from attaching to cells (see the illustration). The approach harnesses the power of DNA origami nanofabrication and AI-supported molecular designs to create shells with gaps that can trap entire virus particles, putting the viruses – not the human – into lock down.

If it works, the treatment could be applied to everything from influenza and human papillomavirus to Chikungunya and hepatitis, savings lives and preventing long term harms.

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Duality Technologies, a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, has developed Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) to help corporates with the challenge of sharing their data while at the same time securing it. One of the PETs the company develops is called homomorphic encryption, which allows organizations to collaborate with their business ecosystem on sensitive data, run queries and train AI while controlling the data and safeguarding privacy. Customers include financial institutions, healthcare providers and governments.

The ability to perform processing on encrypted data will increase trusted data collaboration and has the potential to solve major business challenges faced by companies, says CEO Alon Kaufman.

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Number of years it is expected to take to close the overall gender gap, according to the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report 2023, which was released this week. In its report the Forum uses LinkedIn data to spot trends for women in the workforce. This year that data suggests things are getting worse, not better, for women’s careers. This is particularly true of leadership roles and positions in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). The proportion of roles held by women falls dramatically from entry-level (almost 50%) to C-suite (25%) and in STEM roles drops all the way to 12%. Discouragingly, the report finds that progress made in recent years is actually being reversed.

Inclusive hiring practices can play a big role in helping to level the playing field, according to the report. From thinking carefully about language in job descriptions and making sure it’s gender neutral, to putting in place a hiring panel and candidate shortlists that are balanced, there are a number of ways to make the process more equitable and fair. According to LinkedIn’s data, women were almost twice as likely (1.8x) as men to apply for a job posting when they were shown how their skills overlapped with the job requirements, with a similar positive impact on hiring outcomes.