In the Media - February 2023

Would Humans Trust an A.I. Judge? More Easily Than You Think.

external page Prof. Alexander Stremitzer reveals in an op-ed for Slate that "studies suggest that the human-A.I. fairness gap is mainly driven by the belief that human judges are still more accurate than machines. However, there are and increasingly will be domains where machines will be demonstrably more accurate than humans, such as tumor classification. And experts predict that A.I. will exceed human performance in other fields over the next century."

AI can now tell us what a pig is feeling, based on their grunts

external page We can now better understand our snouty friends! New research is bringing us closer to a very worthy goal: understanding what pigs are feeling. An international team of European researchers (including ETH Zurich) has developed an automated system that can interpret the emotions encoded inside the various grunts that pigs produce...Researchers hope that their work can help improve animal welfare in commercial and private farms moving forward.

Effects of Chemical Carcinogen Exposure on Lung DNA Mapped at Nucleotide Level

external page Researchers from the Department of Health Sciences and Technology, ETH Zurich, have now reported on a study that has for the first time mapped the effects of exposure to a compound found in cigarette and industrial smoke and known to cause damage to DNA on lung cells, down to the single-nucleotide level.  

Ukraine won the ‘geek war’ but it wasn’t enough on the front line

external page "During the war, it's true that, for example, whenever new drones were used, there were articles proclaiming the changing face of the conflict. We've seen that this was an exaggeration of the impact of technology," said Dominika Kunertova, a specialist in the militarisation of emerging technologies at the Centre for Security Studies of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich).

Diabetes Patients May Have Higher Rates of Fracture

external page Andrea M. Burden from ETH Zurich and colleagues aimed to set out to investigate trends in incidence rates at various fracture sites for type 1 and 2 diabetes patients...

Google’s quantum computer reached an error-correcting milestone

external page The computer’s accuracy improved as scientists used more qubits to fix mistakes...That small improvement suggests scientists are finally tiptoeing into the regime where error correction can begin to squelch errors by scaling up. Physicist, Andreas Wallraff, ETH Zurich commented, “It’s a major goal to achieve.”

New anti-corrosion polymer highlights damage, self-heals and is recyclable

external page Engineers at ETH Zurich have developed a versatile new material that should help in the ongoing battle against corrosion for buildings and vehicles. The polymer coating not only protects against corrosion, but highlights cracks as they form, automatically repairs damage to itself, and can be recycled at the end of its life.

Funga: How does the world’s first fungi-powered carbon removal project work?  

external page Funga founder Dr Colin Averill has been studying mycorrhizal fungal networks for over 15 years. As part of a research team at ETH Zurich University, he has shown that the reintroduction of wild soil microbial biodiversity can accelerate plant growth by an average of 64 per cent.

Quantifying the complex interplay behind heat waves

external page There are essentially three mechanisms that cause the thermometer to climb to unusually high values: air from warmer regions reaches cooler ones...; the air in a high-pressure area sinks, warming up in the process due to compression; or the sun heats the ground with unusual intensity, so that the air above it is warmed up more than normal.

Achieving a Better Understanding of How the Blood-Brain Barrier Works

external page Researchers (at ETH Zurich) have created a new model of the blood-brain barrier that can mimic fluid flow to and from the brain.

Also reported in...

ScienceX, 24 February 2023, external page Best news stories (02-2023)

Zurich-based UNISERS bags €13M to help semiconductor fabrication plants eliminate contaminations

external page Ali O. Altun and Timo Schneider founded UNISERS in 2019 as a spin-off of ETH Zurich to find the source of every particle on a wafer. The Swiss company has developed wafer inspection and particle detection solutions to help semiconductor fabrication plants improve production yields.

New Pressure for European Research Unity

external page (Swiss participation was discontinued) in the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures. This was particularly damaging for European researchers as a whole, as Switzerland is the home of unique cutting-edge infrastructures, such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, as well as other facilities, such as the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre.  

Want To Study Abroad? The 2023 Best Universities In Europe According To Worldwide Rankings

external page According to the most recent World University Rankings by Times Higher Education (THE), the global higher-education landscape is shifting as institutions from around the world appear atop lists that traditionally favored Americans. Among the first 20 places...ETH Zurich in Switzerland #11.

New study settles long-standing debate: Does agricultural erosion create a carbon sink or source?

external page In a new study published in the journal Biogeosciences, two researchers (acollaboration between UCLouvain, Belgium and ETH Zurich) show that the apparent soil organic carbon erosion paradox, i.e., whether agricultural erosion results in an OC sink or source, can be reconciled when we consider the geographical and historical context.  

Conducting supercooled droplet experiments to design and engineer superhydrophobic ice-repellent surfaces

external page In a new report in Nature Physics, Henry Lambley and a research team in mechanical and processing engineering at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland, studied frozen supercooled droplets resting on textured surfaces.

CantiBox, a robotically assembled structure by Gramazio Kohler Research

external page CantiBox is a robotically assembled structure, designed by ETH Zurich Gramazio Kohler Research in 2021-2022, that represents a novel application of the design and automatic assembly of interlocking timber-to-timber connections.

ETH Zürich spin-off grabs $6.8M for its industrial manufacturing platform

external page EthonAI, an industrial tech spin-off from ETH Zurich, has grabbed $6.8 million in seed funding. The funding will help to further develop EthonAI‘s technology and bring its products to a wider market.

Swiss-based Nanoflex Robotics bags €11.2M for its robotic endovascular navigation platform

external page Zurich-based (ETH Spinoff) Nanoflex Robotics, a company that provides advanced medical robotic interventions for treating ischemic stroke, announced that it has raised over $12M (approximately €11.23M) in a Series A round of funding.

Ain’t no mountain high enough: alien invasive plants increasing in higher elevations

external page In Kashmir Himalayas in India, scientists (lead by researchers at ETH Zurich) have noted railway and road infrastructure expansion is a contributing factor to the march of invasive alien plant species higher into the mountains. The findings are based on almost 15,000 observations of 616 non-native plant species from 651 study plots... “The number of alien plant species surveyed in each region has increased by a global average of 16% in the past 10 years...” said first author Evelin Iseli from the Institute of Integrative Biology at ETH Zurich.

Clinical Trials That Will Shape Medicine In 2023

external page Nicola Aceto, associate professor of molecular oncology at ETH Zurich, described his lab's discovery that cancer metastasis is "driven mostly by clusters of circulating tumor cells (CTCs), which are multicellular aggregates of tumor cells that depart from the existing tumor, circulate in the bloodstream, and then metastasize." Their important finding was that CTC clusters can be disaggregated into single cells by treatment with cardiac glycosides such as digoxin and that that reduces metastasis in preclinical models...

Green Hydrogen: How Can it Help Stop Climate Change?

external page Alejandro Nunez-Jimenez, who researches hydrogen at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, said: "It will be extremely challenging to scale up renewable hydrogen production at the pace required to keep the planet from warming by less than 1.5 degrees Celsius [2.7 Fahrenheit]"

Also reported in...

Hellenic Shipping News, 8 February 2023, external page Green hydrogen: How can it help stop climate change?

Swiss Robotic Endovascular Navigation Platform Secures over USD12m in Funding Support

external page ETH Spinoff, Nanoflex Robotics AG, a pioneer in magnetically controlled medical soft robotics, today announced that it has achieved an initial $12 million in funding. Its proprietary technology to generate and control electromagnetic fields for endovascular navigation of magnetic devices is based on over 20 years of research at ETH Zurich.

Researchers Have Developed an Entire Color Palette of Inexpensive Fluorescent Dyes

external page Yinyin Bao, a senior scientist in the groups of ETH professors Jean-Christophe Leroux and Chih-Jen Shih, led a team of scientists in successfully using a new approach to generate a diverse spectrum of colors, including red, which was previously challenging to produce.  

Reactive oxygen species in pancreatic cancer

external page A team of researchers led by Renato Zenobi of ETH Zurich, Switzerland, have now been able to selectively measure the concentrations in cancer cells of three prominent members of this group of compounds—hydrogen peroxide, superoxide, and hydroxyl radicals. Using specific chemical reactions, high-resolution mass spectrometry and biological assays, the team detected the levels of the three species separately. They also showed that hydrogen peroxide is significantly increased in pancreatic cancer cells compared to other ROS molecules and that this increased level makes a critical contribution to the survival of cancer cells...

Also reported in...

News Medical Life Sciences, 7 February 2023, external page Study finds high levels of hydrogen peroxide in pancreatic cancer cells

News Wise, 7 February 2023, external page Reactive oxygen species in pancreatic cancer

Some ‘friendly’ bacteria backstab their algal pals. Now we know why

external page It’s an “eat-and-run strategy,” says Noa Barak-Gavish, a microbiologist at ETH Zurich. “You eat up whatever you can and then swim away to avoid competition … [and] to find alternative hosts.”

"We are impressed with how well the robot handles picking and defoliation"

external page Salman Faraji of ETH Zurich's Robotic Systems Lab (RSL) and his team have developed a robot that does some of the work and can be easily integrated into existing systems. "Our system combines robotics, image processing and advanced AI. It sounds simple, but the technology is backed by two years of intensive research and programming at ETH..."  

Crystalline light catchers

external page New project to advance perovskite-based optoelectronics, such as solar cells, photodetectors, and LEDs...Chih-Jen Shih's team from ETH Zurich's Nanomaterials Engineering Research Group wants to build perovskite LEDs that produce light with particularly high color accuracy.  

Antibiotic use in farming set to soar despite drug-resistance fears

The use of antibiotics in animal farming — a major contributor to antimicrobial resistance — is expected to grow by 8% between 2020 and 2030 despite ongoing efforts to curtail their use, according to an analysis. To estimate antibiotic usage in 229 countries, Thomas Van Boeckel worked with Ranya Mulchandani, an epidemiologist at ETH Zurich, and other colleagues to collect data from individual governments, farm surveys and scientific articles that reported veterinary use of antibiotics.

Also reported in...

Longevity Technology, 13 February 2023, external page Despite drug resistance concerns, antibiotic use is on the rise in farming

Why Crowdsourced Security is Devastating to Threat Actors

external page A study conducted by ETH Zurich found that the exercises used to train users to recognize phishing attempts have the opposite effect — rather than becoming resilient, users become more susceptible to falling for nefarious messaging. What does work, the research found, was crowdsourcing through collective phishing detection...The quick response from the users means that security teams can address the threat quickly.

AI-Augmented Designing Process of a Pedestrian Bridge in Switzerland

external page The current practice of architectural, engineering and construction (AEC) often leads to a disconnect between the conceptual design phase and later phases of the building process...To address these problems, researchers from ETH Zürich developed a method that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to invert the traditional design process.

Extreme cold snaps: Why temperatures still plummet to dangerous levels even as the planet warms

external page “We don’t really have enough research yet,” Daniela Domeisen, a climate professor at ETH Zurich, in Switzerland, told CNN. “Eventually we’ll find a solution to this and actually understand the mechanism, but I just think we’re not there yet.”  

Yoon says nurturing talented people in science is critical for survival

external page President of the Republic of Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol talked about his visit to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich last month, saying he learned how the university has established itself as a hub connecting science and technology with industries."The country's future depends on raising many creative talents that find problems and solutions in the field, not those that rely on acquiring knowledge or memorization," he said. Yoon also stressed the importance of education for balanced regional growth, and the role local universities play.

Also reported in...

Yonhap News Agency, 1 February 2023, external page Yoon says nurturing talented people in science is critical for survival

Clinical Trials That Will Shape Medicine in 2023

external page ...Prevention of cancer metastasis. Nicola Aceto, associate professor of molecular oncology at ETH Zurich, described his lab's discovery that cancer metastasis is "driven mostly by clusters of circulating tumor cells (CTCs), which are multicellular aggregates of tumor cells that depart from the existing tumor, circulate in the bloodstream, and then metastasize." Their important finding was that CTC clusters can be disaggregated into single cells by treatment with cardiac glycosides such as digoxin and that that reduces metastasis in preclinical models.

Patchwork of issues limits solar expansion in Switzerland

external page Whether rooftop solar panels are worth the cost is largely dependent in Switzerland on local compensation rates for solar power and on electricity prices in general—these are the findings of a study by researchers at ETH Zurich and the University of Bern. Many power grid operators pay too little, thereby limiting the expansion of solar power.  

Stable Diffusion “memorizes” some images, sparking privacy concerns

external page On Monday, a group of AI researchers from Google, DeepMind, UC Berkeley, Princeton, and ETH Zurich released a paper outlining an adversarial attack that can extract a small percentage of training images from latent diffusion AI image synthesis models like Stable Diffusion. It challenges views that image synthesis models do not memorize their training data and that training data might remain private if not disclosed.

Also reported in...

GIZMODO, 2 February 2023, external page Researchers Prove AI Art Generators Can Simply Copy Existing Images

Life As We (Don't) Know It...

external page Can ETH Zurich’s New Centre Tell Us Whether Life Exists Beyond Earth? (AZoQuantum)? external page Fascinating interview on the search of life beyond our solar system with Sascha Quanz, Head of the Exoplanets & Habitability Research Group at ETH Zurich.

Microplastics Are Filling the Skies. Will They Affect the Climate?

external page “Here’s something that people just didn’t think about — another aspect of plastic pollution,” says environmental analytical chemist Denise Mitrano of ETH Zürich University, in Switzerland, who co-wrote an article last November highlighting what researchers know — and don’t yet know — about how plastics can change clouds, potentially altering temperature and rainfall patterns.

Also reported in...

YaleEnvironment360, 1 February 2023, external page Microplastics Are Filling the Skies. Will They Affect the Climate?

On ‘Myths and Legends of HPC’ with the RIKEN Center’s Satoshi Matsuoka and Torsten Hoefler, ETH Zurich

external page @HPCpodcast features ETH Zurich professor, Torsten Hoefler on tackling the 12 important topics, from major technology areas to specific capabilities and applications in High Performance Computing (HPC) systems to come.

Engineering for Development (E4D) Doctoral Scholarship Programme 2024...

external page ETH Zurich's E4D programme provides grant funding for mentoring doctoral candidates from low- and lower-middle-income countries...

How grasses avoid inbreeding

external page ETH Zurich researchers have been able to show which genes inhibit self-​fertilisation in grasses. Plant scientists can now use this mechanism in a more targeted way to breed new varieties of forage grasses as well as rice or barley.

Digital foot could revolutionize bionic limbs and other assistive technologies

external page A digital foot sole that enables scientists to see the neurological signals that control how we walk and maintain balance, has been developed by Dr. Rodrigo Kazu Siqueira, a Computational Neuroscientist at the University of Sheffield, and Natalija Katic, a Ph.D. student at ETH Zurich and the University of Belgrade.  

The Prostate Cancer Foundation Announces 2022 Challenge Awards Totaling More Than $12 Million For Prostate Cancer Research

Gunnar Rätsch, ETH Zurich among the team leaders for Leveraging Poison Introns for Therapeutics and Diagnostics of Lethal Prostate Cancer awarded funding to understand the impact of minor intron splicing on prostate cancer biology and therapy resistance and its potential as a risk assessment biomarker.

Here’s what the first two years of Horizon Europe look like in numbers

external page Success rates are up, UK and Swiss participation down, and Widening countries edge up to the EU 27 average...UK and Swiss exclusion has allowed some of the bigger European universities...to climb into the top 20.

Rethinking flipped learning: The 4F model

external page ETH Zurich professor Manu Kapur and team write about how the flipped learning craze hit education a few years ago. Yet, new research raises questions over its impact on learning. The researchers have proposed an updated approach based on conditions that make flipped learning effective. It is called the 4F model.

Robots aren't representing us in court but here are 7 legal tech startups transforming the legal system

external page ETH Zurich spinoff, DeepJudge (Switzerland) - Law firms typically work on hundreds of documents per case, which are nothing short of unwieldy and time-consuming. DeepJudge AG is a spin-off of ETH Zurich focusing on the contextual understanding and processing of legal documents (using AI)

Rainforest Carbon Credits from World’s Biggest Provider are ‘Largely Worthless’, Investigation Finds

external page Limiting deforestation is essential for achieving the world’s climate and biodiversity targets, said Thomas Crowther, professor of ecology at ETH Zürich and co-chair of the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. “But transparency remains a key challenge, and it is critical that we use the best available scientific approaches to ensure the accountability of environmental commitments at scale,” he told the Guardian. “Companies and citizens need to be able to support projects they can trust,” Crowther added. “We need to urgently create a system where this is a reality.”

Switzerland and Japan hold talks on research and innovation

external page Japan is one of Switzerland’s main scientific cooperation partners in Asia. The two countries are pursuing many research areas of common interest, including in the ageing of society, the energy transition and digitalisation. In its capacity as Leading House for cooperation between Swiss science stakeholders and their Asian partners, ETH Zurich has also developed various cooperation instruments since 2008.  

Roads carry non-native plants up mountains

external page Non-native plants are spreading rapidly to higher altitudes along transport routes worldwide, a monitoring study shows. Evelin Iseli from the Institute of Integrative Biology at ETH Zurich was not surprised that the neophytes are occurring higher up. “We were surprised, however, that their spread is proceeding so rapidly and that the number of alien species has increased so much within a decade,” she says. “Normally, it takes several decades for species to become established and widespread in an area.”

Also reported in...

Tech and Science Post, 29 January 2023, external page Alien plant species are spreading rapidly in mountainous areas, says new monitoring study

New Findings Explain Long-Standing, Baffling Cell Mystery

external page Scientists from Paul Scherrer Institute and ETH Zurich have uncovered the mechanism by which proteins form small liquid droplets that act as a smart adhesive in cells...The study was a collaboration between the teams of Michel Steinmetz at Paul Scherrer Institute PSI and Yves Barral at ETH Zurich, with the help of the groups of Eric Dufresne and Jörg Stelling, both at ETH Zurich.

7.6-Kg Rare Meteorite Discovered in Antarctica Sheds Fresh Light About Evolution of Sun, Planets

external page Professor Maria Schonbachler of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, echoed the same sentiment. She considered the rare find a "kind of luck." She added that the space rock appears to be an ordinary chondrite, which contains the oldest material in the solar system. It probably originated from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Also reported in...

Good News Network, 28 January 2023, external page Huge Meteorite Found in Antarctica–One of the Biggest Ever Recovered

Canada Today, 28 January 2023, external page Huge meteorite discovered in Antarctica contains oldest material in solar system

Hypertension drug prolongs life in animal tests: possible ‘anti-aging’ in humans

external page A commonly prescribed drug for high blood pressure, is able to lengthen the pathway in animal models by mimicking the effects of a calorie-restricted diet. Perhaps it can also delay aging in humans. An international research team led by British scientists from the Institute of Aging and Chronic Disease...who collaborated in close contact with colleagues from the Extracellular Matrix Regeneration Laboratory – Institute of Translational Medicine in ETH Zurich (Switzerland) (et al)...reached their conclusions after carrying out experiments with a species of worm...considered one of the best animal models for conducting experiments, having many genes in common with ours.