In the Media - July 2023

Swiss researchers monitor rainforest DNA with drones

external page Innovative use of drone technology to monitor the health of a rainforest has seen a group of scientists and researchers from (ETH Zurich) Switzerland reach the final of the XPRIZE Rainforest, a $10 million global environmental competition.

The 'Magnecko' Robot Works on Vertical and Horizontal Surfaces

external page The 'Magnecko' robot has been created by a team of engineering students at the ETH Zurich...as an agile solution that can seamlessly traverse any landscape. The robot features a quadruped design that's inspired by the gecko, and is thus capable of walking on horizontal and vertical surfaces and transitioning seamlessly between the two. The feet on the robot are magnetized to allow for a strong grip with just one of the feet rated to hold up to 2.5-times the overall weight of the robot to ensure stability.

Deep Underground, Robotic Teamwork Saves The Day

external page The US government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) challenged robotics researchers to develop teams of robots that could explore a complex underground space. Here’s a legged robot from the winning team (ANYmal from ETH Zurich's Robotic Systems Lab), shown exploring a tunnel. Its legs allow it to cross uneven terrain more easily.

Rapid test could help treat UTIs more effectively

external page Urinary tract infections (UTIs) could become easier to treat thanks to a new test developed by researchers...The new test, developed by scientists at ETH Zurich and Balgrist University Hospital, employs natural viral predators of bacteria, known as phages, which are highly specialised viruses that can selectively target bacteria.

Also reported in...

external page ZME Science

external page Knowridge

external page News Medical Life Sciences

external page Technology Networks

external page Medical Xpress

external page ScienceDaily

external page New Atlas

external page Labroots

external page The Microbiologist

Voluntary carbon offsets often fail to deliver what they promise...

external page Many companies take advantage of voluntary carbon offsets, and more than a few claim this makes them climate neutral. However, this approach is attracting an increasing amount of public criticism as more and more studies show that an alarming number of offset projects are actually ineffective.  

Disney trials use of animation data to improve robots’ motion

external page Disney’s Research Hub has released a video to represent the ideas presented in a recent paper, which shows how animal motions and animations can be transferred onto legged robots to help them perform highly dynamic motions...he project was completed in partnership with ETH Zürich and ANYbotics robots.

Also reported in...

external page KTLA Television in Los Angeles, California as well as numerous regional television broadcasts in the U.S.

How climate change is redrawing the border between Switzerland and Italy

external page “We have 1,400 glaciers in Switzerland at the moment, many are small. Small glaciers are the first to disappear,” explained Matthias Huss, head of the Swiss Glacier Monitoring Network (GLAMOS) at ETH Zurich...“In the last 30-40 years alone we have lost about 1,000 glaciers. Many didn’t even have names, but now we are losing glaciers that are considered important,” he said.

VC funding in DACH on the road to recovery, reveals new data

external page Christian Noske, Berlin-based partner of NGP Capital comments: “Switzerland and Austria are less mature ecosystems than Germany and don’t yet enjoy its market robustness,” says Noske, adding that the funding slowdown, regulatory complexity, access to growth capital and talent retention are problems for DACH companies across the board...“That said, Switzerland has enormous potential due to its strong talent base in AI and industrial technologies, and international talent continues to be attracted into the country by talent hubs like ETH Zurich.

Researchers From Microsoft and ETH Zurich Introduce LightGlue

external page A result of a collaborative research effort between ETH Zurich and Microsoft, LightGlue leverages a deep network that combines image matching and outlier rejection.  

Rethinking Education in Light of AI

external page Professor emeritus of physics education, Gerd Kortemeyer discusses GPT’s implications for instruction and assessment.

An architecture that combines deep neural networks and vector-symbolic models

external page Researchers at IBM Research Zürich and ETH Zürich have recently created a new architecture that combines two of the most renowned artificial intelligence approaches, namely deep neural networks and vector-symbolic models. Their architecture, presented in Nature Machine Intelligence, could overcome the limitations of both these approaches, solving progressive matrices and other reasoning tasks more effectively.

New Proof Shows That ‘Expander’ Graphs Synchronize

external page Afonso Bandeira, a mathematician at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, and Shuyang Ling, a data scientist at New York University, dove into synchronization research, obtaining a series of noteworthy results on the strength and structure that connections between oscillators must have to force the oscillators to synchronize. That work culminated in an October paper in which Bandeira proved (together with five co-authors) that synchronization is inevitable in special types of networks called expander graphs, which are sparse but also well connected.

Fluorescent Carbon Nanotubes for Bacteria and Virus Detection Offers New Approach in Constructing Optical Sensors

external page An interdisciplinary research team that included researchers from ETH Zurich developed modular optical sensors that effectively detect viruses and bacteria...The researchers used fluorescent carbon nanotubes containing an innovative type of DNA anchors which serve as molecular handles. These anchor structures can function as conjugate biological recognition units interacting with bacterial or viral molecules in the nanotubes.

Also reported in...

external page ScienceDaily

external page The Microbiologist

external page News Medical Life Sciences

external page PHYS.org

Q&A: Research with embryo models needs legal clarity

external page Science often runs ahead of legislation—and this is now also true for research on embryo-like cell aggregates from human stem cells. Bioethicist Alessandro Blasimme of ETH Zurich explains why this controversial topic calls for legal clarity.  

A horrible way to die’: how extreme heat is killing Italian workers

external page “Pre-existing conditions can make people more vulnerable to hot temperatures,” said Sonia Seneviratne, a climate scientist at ETH Zürich who has researched heatwave deaths. “Higher mortality is in particular observed in persons who are older than 65 years old.” But young and healthy people can also die during hot conditions, she added, particularly “in cases of high physical exertion, often combined with equipment or clothing impeding heat loss”.

Also reported in...

external page Yahoo! News

Drought cycles erode tropics’ ability to absorb CO₂

external page “We found that climate models are underestimating the observed effects of tropical water variability and droughts for the global carbon cycle,” study co-author Sonia Seneviratne, a climate scientist at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science at ETH Zürich, told Mongabay in an email. “This is very worrisome, because it could mean that projections are too optimistic with respect to the potential feedback of future changes in droughts for the global carbon cycle, for instance, regarding the global warming level at which the Amazon rainforest could become a much less effective carbon sink or even a carbon source.”

New legged robots designed to explore planets as a team

external page They look like giant metal insects, but the trio of ANYmal robots customized by researchers at ETH Zurich was tested in environments as close to the harsh lunar and Martian terrain as possible...Even if one robot fails, the rest of the team can offset its loss.

Ageing More Slowly in Space?

external page A team (formed around ETH Zurich) of students from various Swiss universities (Academic Space Initiative Switzerland ARIS) wants to investigate how the ageing process in humans changes in space and how cellular senescence influences the development of ageing and age-related disorders...The Swiss Artificial Gravity Experiment (SAGE) is dedicated to this research task.

We Just Discovered What Actually Changes The Size of Your Pupils

external page Doctors have long used pupil response to gauge levels of consciousness, and those of us on common antidepressants may have noticed the saucer-eyed look in response to increased levels of serotonin floating around our brains. A new mouse study conducted by ETH Zurich has just worked out the mechanism behind these responses.

Also reported in...

external page Medical Xpress

external page Neuroscience News

Earlier detection of breast cancer

external page A team of researchers from the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI and ETH Zurich, together with the Baden Cantonal Hospital (KSB) and the University Hospital Zurich (USZ), has succeeded in refining mammography, x-ray imaging technique used to detect tumours in their early stages, to produce considerably more reliable results and be less unpleasant for the patient.

Also reported in...

external page Medical Xpress

external page Bioengineer

external page Tech Explorist

external page News Medical Life Sciences

external page Trend Radars

external page Europawire

external page Science Business

Gastric fluid responsive sensor system enables early and robust detection of postoperative leaks

external page Researchers ETH Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland, have developed a gastric leak sensor system that facilitates the early and robust detection of postoperative complications after bariatric surgery. The system is enabled by a gastric fluid responsive, dual modality, electronic-free, leak sensor system integrable into surgical adhesive suture materials.  

Zurich’ ETH University students share research on Seychelles’ tourism sustainability

external page Research conducted by a group of students from the ETH University in Zurich will give the Seychelles’ tourism department valuable insight into the areas that need to be addressed in terms of sustainability, said a top government official on Tuesday.

Also reported in...

external page African News Agency

external page Seychelles News Agency

UN: International community must urgently confront new reality of generative AI

external page In this regard, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich is developing a prototype of an AI-assisted analysis tool for the United Nations Operations and Crisis Centre which could explore AI’s potential for peacekeeping, particularly for the protection of civilians and peacekeepers.  

Organic chemist Albert Eschenmoser dies at age 97

external page Albert Eschenmoser, professor emeritus at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, died on July 14. He was 97...Chemistry innovator helped synthesize vitamin B12 and explored the molecular origins of life.  

An evidence-based approach to flipped learning

external page Flipped learning is most effective when it places active learning at its core, research suggests. A new model for flipped learning, developed by Manu Kapur and colleagues, aims to do just that...

Fukushima’s Radioactive Water Is Going to Be Pumped Into the Ocean—and That’s Fine

external page The water will soon be diluted and pumped into the sea. Núria Casacuberta Arola, of ETH Zürich, is among those who will be watching. Closely. “We have access to a ship that goes to the coast of Fukushima every year, sometimes once, sometimes twice,” she says. Casacuberta Arola and her colleagues regularly drop an assembly of jars into waters near the incapacitated power plant to collect samples at different depths. The lids of the jars close automatically, one by one, as the device is slowly pulled back up to the surface. By doing this, and also taking sediment samples from the seabed, they hope to be able to tell in the coming months and years whether the disposal of water from Fukushima is causing a noticeable rise in radiation in this corner of the Pacific Ocean.

Also reported in...

external page Energy Central

How AI models teach themselves to learn new things

external page Researchers at ETH and Google have uncovered a potential key mechanism behind their ability to learn on-the-fly and fine-tune their answers based on interactions with their users.

A Thermodynamics Researcher Explains How to Stop Goggle Fog

external page So why do your goggles fog up in the first place? It comes down to thermodynamics and materials science, says Iwan Hächler, a postdoctoral scholar in the laboratory of thermodynamics in emerging technologies at ETH Zürich. He has been researching how to prevent foggy goggles and says that condensation on the surface of the lens is to blame.

To attain food security in S’pore, consumers must change mindset on ‘palatable’ food  

external page Panellist Iris Haberkorn, a senior scientist at the Singapore-ETH Centre, said that if a third of the food that is produced is not wasted, “we could significantly save carbon emissions”. Dr Haberkorn called a focus on upcycling food waste a “promising approach”. “Food wasted by the consumer is an indication of wealth,” she said on the high levels of food waste in Singapore. Dr Haberkorn is leading a team at the centre to develop technology to transform micro-algae into an alternative protein source and food products, to establish a sustainable food system.  

On the Forefront of Biodiversity Research: Drones and DNA

external page Professor Kristy Deiner of ETH Zurich is spearheading this cutting-edge intersection of genetics and robotics. Deiner's focus is on the pressing challenge of biodiversity loss. She explains, “Biodiversity is being lost at a very high rate that we can't control, partly because we don't have the tools and data at the time we need them.” To counter this, Deiner and her team are harnessing the power of eDNA, a collection of genetic material shed by organisms into their surroundings.

DeepJudge Redefining Legal Industry Knowledge Search

external page DeepJudge, founded by ex-Googlers and supported by former executives from successful legal tech companies, is announcing first-of-its-kind Knowledge Search, a solution that enables legal professionals to search their entire document management systems using natural language.

Also reported in...

external page Yahoo! Finance

external page Several regional radio, television, and broadcast stations in the US

Scientists discovered surprising properties of the cytoskeleton

external page Scientists at the University of Göttingen and ETH Zurich have succeeded in precisely measuring and describing the mechanical properties of the two filaments. In the process, they discovered parallels with non-biological materials.

How Tau Protein Sticky Filaments Form in the Brain

external page “This finding highlights how the environment influences the form and shape of the aggregate at the atomic level, similar to how a chameleon adapts its color to the environment. Small changes in temperature are sufficient to change the overall shape of the aggregate, which must be regarded as amazing and usually not observed in functional systems,” says Roland Riek, a professor of chemistry and applied biosciences at ETH Zurich, who was not involved in the study.

Also reported in...

external page SciTechDaily

15 robotics startups to watch in 2023, according to investors

external page (ETH Zurich spinoff), Ascento offers robotics-as-a-service for autonomous outdoor security patrolling. Its two-wheeled robot helps security professionals secure, maintain and inspect their outdoor assets by reducing intervention times and improving their data capturing capability.

Four-legged dog robots could one day explore the moon

external page According to a study published on Wednesday in Science Robotics, researchers at Switzerland’s ETH Zurich university recently oversaw a series of outdoor excursions for a trio of modified quadruped ANYmal robots...Engineers at ETH Zurich worked alongside the Universities of Basel, Bern, and Zurich to program each ANYmal with specific lunar tasks.

Also reported in...

external page AAAS News

external page Yahoo! News (in multiple countries)

external page Princeton Daily Clarion

external page San Francisco Examiner

external page Scientific Inquirer

As well as numerous regional publications, television, and radio broadcasts.

One of InSight's Last Images – NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

external page This is one of the last images ever taken by NASA’s InSight Mars lander. Captured on Dec. 11, 2022, the 1,436th Martian day, or sol, of the mission, it shows InSight’s seismometer on the Red Planet’s surface - (ETH Zurich was a contributing partner to the NASA Mars InSight mission).

New Tree Tech: Data-driven reforestation methods match trees to habitats

external page “In order to get healthy forests that capture carbon in the long term, we must have a natural diversity of species that are necessary for that ecosystem to survive,” says ecologist Tom Crowther of ETH Zürich in Switzerland. Not only do monoculture plantations capture less carbon than diverse natural forests, “they do not survive well in the long term because they are very susceptible to the same threats or diseases.”

Also reported in...

external page South Africa Today

Engineering world-changing materials: Nicola Spaldin on the importance of curiosity-driven research and what it means to be a physicist

external page Nicola Spaldin talks to Laura Hiscott about her work on magnetoelectric multiferroics, the importance of finding fun in research and how physics can benefit from a more flexible idea of excellence.

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external page Lifeboat (blog)

Researchers From ETH Zurich and Microsoft Introduce LightGlue: A Deep Neural Network That Learns To Match Local Features Across Images

external page A research team from ETH Zurich and Microsoft introduced a novel paradigm called LightGlue. LightGlue utilizes a deep network that simultaneously considers both images to match sparse points and reject outliers jointly. The network incorporates the Transformer model, which learns to match challenging image pairs by leveraging large datasets.  

Roots Are Capable of Measuring Heat on Their Own

external page ETH Zurich researchers cooperating with a team led by Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), was able to demonstrate that roots have their own temperature sensing and response system.

Also reported in...

external page AZO Life Sciences

external page Bioengineer

external page Science Magazine

New Tree Tech: AI, drones, satellites and sensors give reforestation a boost

external page “Many people think restoration means the mass planting of trees. [But] this is not how we achieve global restoration,” explains Tom Crowther, an ecologist at ETH Zürich in Switzerland...Ecologists recommend natural forest regeneration as a first priority, where degraded land is allowed to recover on its own without a single seed or seedling being planted.

Also reported in...

external page Mongabay

external page South Africa Today

The Future is Quantum and Neural

external page Prominent institutions and companies like Google AI, IBM Research, and ETH Zurich have embraced QNNs to develop new algorithms, revolutionizing fields such as natural language processing, image recognition, and drug discovery.

Study investigates whether climate-neutral air travel is possible by 2050

external page Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI and ETH Zurich have performed calculations to work out how air traffic could become climate-neutral by 2050. They conclude that simply replacing fossil aviation fuel with sustainable synthetic fuels will not be enough.

Also reported in...

external page AZO Cleantech

external page Bioengineer

external page Daily Guardian EU

The week in AI: Generative AI spams up the web

external page ...Research roundup commences with two very different projects from ETH Zurich. First is aiEndoscopic, a smart intubation spinoff...In a totally different domain, ETH Zurich researchers also contributed second-hand to a Pixar movie by pioneering the technology needed to animate smoke and fire without falling prey to the fractal complexity of fluid dynamics.

Also reported in...

external page Yahoo! News UK

Also in Yahoo! News in Canada, Australia

Unraveling the Mysteries of Human Tissue: A Comprehensive Atlas

external page “The advantage of organoids is that we can intervene in their development and test active substances on them, which allows us to learn more about healthy tissue as well as diseases,” explains Barbara Treutlein, Professor of Quantitative Developmental Biology at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering at ETH Zurich in Basel.

Also reported in...

external page SciTech Daily

Scientists hope to tech the heck out of eDNA sampling with drones, robots

external page “Rainforest is a difficult environment to be in and we really have a hard time accessing what’s living in these spaces,” Kristy Deiner, assistant professor of environmental DNA at ETH Zurich and one of the three team leads for ETH BiodivX, told Mongabay. “Accessing these places and scaling up in a robust way so that you can do repeat sampling, that’s where it makes sense to come up with automation tools.”

Building models to predict interactions in plant microbiomes

external page Microbiomes play a key role for plant health and could make agriculture more sustainable -- but the principles behind the assembly of their communities have remained largely unknown. Researchers have shown how bacteria can compete for food, but also cooperate thanks to differences in metabolism

Why you won’t see kangaroos in Asia but you will find goannas in Australia

external page A major study led by biologists at The Australian National University (ANU) and ETH Zurich in Switzerland provides a new explanation for why you won’t find kangaroos, koalas and other Aussie marsupials in Indonesia, but you will find many groups of animals that originated in Asia, such as goannas, rodents and kookaburras in Australia.

Also reported in...

external page Futurity

external page Environmental News Network

external page Gold Central Victoria

external page Yahoo! News

external page Indonesia Post

external page CNBC

external page Canada Today

external page Aol.

external page Popular Mechanics

As well as numerious regional publications in Australia.

Chinese Scientists Are Trying to Shield Melting Glaciers From the Sun

external page Previous studies have shown that covering parts of glaciers with special materials can reduce the melting of snow and ice by between 50% and 70% compared with unprotected surfaces. But chemicals or plastic particles from the sheets could negatively impact local ecosystems and downstream water quality, according to Matthias Huss, a professor of glaciology at ETH Zurich. Covering large glacial areas may also have huge and unexpected consequences.

Also reported in numerous publications in China and Southeast Asia

GM Food: EU rethinks rules on genetically modified crops

external page Scientists are finding more and more causal links between climate change and frequent extreme weather events that affect food production. So, the European Union is looking at whether it should relax its legislation on genetic engineering and GMO crops.

Also reported in...

external page England News Portal

external page London Channel News

external page Capital Hill Reporter

Global science leaders herald new era of ground-breaking climate and sustainability science at Paris Summit & Symposium

external page Transdisciplinary Research Presented at the Summit & Symposium Included: Carbon storage in the oceans as a function of microscale mechanisms driving particle degradation, Uria Alcolombri, Dept. of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, ETH Zurich, Switzerland and Dept of Plant and Environmental Science, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

Also reported in...

external page Bioengineer

The world’s best universities in 2024 have been unveiled. 5 of the top 10 are in Europe

external page ETH Zurich (93.9) 7th overall

Also reported in...

external page EuroNews

Making More Extracellular Vesicles for Biotherapies

external page Although biologists first suspected the cells secreted EVs to get rid of waste, it turns out that EVs participate in cell signaling. In fact, Inge Katrin Herrmann, PhD, professor of mechanical and process engineering at ETH Zurich  

How key ocean bacteria aggregate without central control

external page Cyanobacteria of the genus Trichodesmium are responsible for these massive blooms. Also known as “sea sawdust,” they are abundant in tropical and subtropical seas and play a fundamental ecological role by fertilizing these nutrient-poor waters and thereby providing food for other marine organisms.

Which European countries have the most AI startups?

external page New research by VC firm Earlybird has mapped the European hotbeds for AI innovation...Switzerland also punches above its weight when accounting for population. It boasts 67 AI startups including the smart data capture unicorn Scandit. The alpine nation has benefited from having one of Europe’s spinout capitals in ETH Zurich, which counts nine AI founders as alumni.  

Fighting tumors down to the last cancer cell

external page Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institue, University Hospital Basel, and ETH Zurich have developed a new drug that could increase the survival chances of patients with metastatic prostate cancer. The drug is now being tested on patients in the PROGNOSTICS project. The research consortium is receiving two million Swiss francs in funding for this project.

Also reported in...

external page Science Magazine

Researchers create antenna for nanoscale light sources using unusual placement of semiconductor material

external page A team of researchers at ETH Zurich led by Prof. Lukas Novotny, together with colleagues at EMPA in Dübendorf and at ICFO in Barcelona, have now found a new mechanism by which tiny but efficient light sources could be produced in the future.

Also reported in...

external page Electronic Specifier

Alphasense Core Becomes Core Research

external page ETH spinoff, Sevensense Robotics’ research-oriented development kit, a multi-camera visual-inertial sensor, has been rebranded as Core Research. 

Sounds of the soil: A new tool for conservation?

external page Marcus Maeder, an acoustic ecologist and sound artist at ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, first got a taste of what the underground could sound like by accident. He was on vacation, sitting on a meadow in the Swiss alps, when, out of curiosity, he jabbed the probe of a special microphone he’d developed for another project into the ground. Immediately, his headphones were hit by a flurry of sounds.

Also reported in...

external page Times of Nation

Antimicrobial Resistance: The Silent Pandemic

external page “You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” said Thomas van Boeckel, a spatial epidemiologist at ETH Zurich. “To set targets for more stringent regulation of antibiotic use, which is to measure how fast antimicrobial resistance is rising, you need to have a monitoring system of some kind.”

Also reported in...

external page Today Headline

Belle, the unobtrusive AI robot fish, is helping researchers protect our marine ecosystem

external page Researchers in Switzerland have developed a new, autonomous fish robot that is capable of giving conservationists a clear picture of creatures living under the sea without disturbing the marine environment.

Also reported in...

external page Reuters video and interview shared in numerous broadcast media and regional television news channels across the U.S.

external page Interesting Engineering

external page EuroNews

external page The Inertia

external page Techeblog

How to Find a Volcanic Diamond Mine

external page “Kimberlites are exciting for two reasons. First, they are the main carriers of diamonds,” said geochemist Andrea Giuliani of the Institute of Geochemistry and Petrology at ETH Zürich, who was not involved in the study. “Second, because these are the deepest magmas…that have reached the Earth’s surface, kimberlite really gives you a unique perspective on the deep Earth.”

A new method to observe chemical reactions taking place in liquids: Why urea may have been the gateway to life?

external page Urea and its photoinduced reactions are a cornerstone in current theories on the origin of life.

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