In the Media - June 2023

New analysis shows what is at stake for Swiss science in not being part of Horizon Europe

external page An analysis of how close research ties between Switzerland and the EU were from 2014 to 2022 shows what is at stake now the country is not associated to Europe’s flagship research programme Horizon Europe.  

Metamaterial Soaks up Photons for Speedy Graphene

external page Researchers at ETH Zurich have demonstrated a new kind of ultrafast graphene photodetector relying on rows of tiny gold antennas.

Robotic fish collects DNA samples in the ocean

external page Designed by mechanical engineering students at ETH Zurich, the autonomous robot, ‘Belle’ uses AI to navigate its location while taking isolated e-DNA samples and high-resolution videos underwater. 

Technology matters, especially when deploying robots in the real world

external page Prof. Brad Nelson illustrates the need for investment analysts as well as roboticists to deeply understand the technology problems being addressed. Many of the problems robotics face are profoundly hard, although humans seem to solve them effortlessly...(Nevertheless) we should also never shy away from communicating our vision of how future developments in robotics will benefit society, and we should encourage investors to help us move in this direction.

How urea may have been the gateway to life

external page Urea reacts extremely quickly under the conditions that existed when our planet was newly formed. This new insight furthers our understanding of how life on Earth might have begun.

Also reported in...

external page Science Magazine

external page Astrobiology

external page Bioengineer

external page Innovation News Network

Entrepreneurs to Watch 2023: Claudia Hössbacher

external page Claudia Hössbacher, the founder and CEO of Switzerland-based Polariton Technologies (an ETH Spinoff). Polariton's current focus is adding plasmonics to the integrated-photonics platform, and it sells what it says are “the world’s fastest and smallest electro-optic modulators” to help break the bottleneck between electrical circuits and optical fibers.

VR Suit Could Help You 'Feel' Things in the Metaverse

external page Engineers at Switzerland's ETH Zurich constructed a full-body tactile suit to amplify immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences. ETH Zurich's Maximilan Eberlein said the Meta Suit's sensors and hydraulically amplified self-healing electrostatic actuator (Hasel) muscles are designed to make VR interaction more natural.

Also reported in the CBS Morning News (USA) and several regional television broadcasts.

Unveiling the Molecular Control Center in Protein Factories

Up to now, it was unclear how methionine aminopeptidases (METAPs) come into contact with the protein factories and, just at the right place and moment, cause the excision of methionine from specific proteins. Biologists Elke Deuerling, Martin Gamerdinger and their team from the University of Konstanz (Germany), together with external page Nenad Ban and his colleagues from ETH Zurich (Switzerland), have now shed light on the subject. The results published in Science show: access of METAPs to protein factories is controlled by a “ribosomal gatekeeper” called NAC (short for “nascent polypeptide-associated complex”).

Global warming could surge the CO2 emissions from soil microbes

external page It is projected that CO2 emissions from soil microbes will escalate by the end of the century. Recently, scientists from – ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology Eawag, and the University of Lausanne– have developed a model from micro to a global scale to explore how changes in soil water content and temperature affect soil heterotrophic respiration. The model shows these emissions could surge by up to 40 percent by the end of the century – most significantly in the polar regions.

Also reported in...

external page Helsinki Times

external page Mother Nature News

external page Science Magazine

external page Daily Guardian EU

external page Washington DC News

external page PHYS.org

Wingtra bringing its drones to Mexico

external page ETH Spinoff, Wingtra will in future be collaborating with the Mexican firm SYSMAP. It is set to offer its surveying drone WingtraOne for its solutions in the fields of security, cadastral, mineral exploration and topographical survey projects.

Drought: How can the water be kept in the forest?

external page A free water reservoir is dead wood: After the wood harvest, a third of a tree in the Bavarian state forest remains in the forest, i.e. branches, root plates, crown material. This is good for biodiversity, but also for the soil and water balance: “Dead wood acts like a sponge,” says Koller...“If the wood slowly rots, the soil also becomes more humus-rich and a humus-rich soil can store more water.” According to current studies by the ETH Zurich, 18 percent of the annual precipitation in the forest is stored in dead wood and litter on the ground.

How AI technology animates the fire creatures in the latest Pixar movie

external page The latest animated film "Elemental" from Walt Disney Studios and Pixar Animation Studio revolves around the fiery Ember, who lives in Element City—a place where fire, water, earth and air beings live. The film is not only made in Hollywood, but also enabled by ETH Zurich technology.  

US DOE funds Synhelion to scale up its solar thermal hydrogen

external page Solar hydrogen is a component of the thermochemical solar fuels that (ETH Spinoff) Synhelion is developing commercially, such as aviation fuel. Synhelion and its partner, University of Florida, announced today that their joint project has been awarded US$ 2.7 million from the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO). The project aims to accelerate the large-scale development and deployment of concentrating solar thermal power (CSP) technology to produce green hydrogen for industrial decarbonization and electric power generation and storage.

This suit may help you 'feel' the metaverse

external page Full-body ‘MetaSuit’ could soon expand your virtual reality experiences helping you feel in the #Metaverse, map movements in movie-making, or even enable a #Parkinson’s patient to walk by using soft artificial muscles according to its developers at ETH Zurich.

Also reported in numerious U.S. regional television broadcasts as well as...

external page TVP World

external page EuroNews

ETH Zurich sent 'tens of gigabits' of data through air using lasers

external page ETH Zurich and its partners have sent large amounts of data using lasers between the mountain peak, Jungfraujoch, and Bern.

Also reported in...

external page Extreme Tech

external page Innovation Origins

external page Tech and Science Post

external page TechXplore

external page Technology.org

external page Inceptive Mind

Testing the limits of mechanical plastic recycling

external page A new paper published in The Journal of Industrial Ecology by Magdalena Klotz from the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering at ETH Zurich looks at the extent to which mechanical recycling can be increased by different measures, taking the whole material cycle into consideration.

Opinion: To achieve climate neutrality in the chemical industry, we must also cut demand

external page ETH Zurich have calculated that it would take a recycling rate of over 75% in order to manage plastics sustainably and within planetary boundaries in 2030. So we urgently need better collection and recycling processes.  

As Switzerland’s glaciers melt, voters approve new climate law to cut planet-heating pollution

external page “This law now brings our country on the path to net-zero emissions by 2050 even though there’s still a long way to go until these changes are fully implemented,” said Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich and who was a member of the Glacier Initiative’s scientific advisory board. The record run of recent climate extremes in Switzerland, and worldwide, “seems to have convinced many citizens that climate change is no longer something looming on the horizon but it’s already here, and everybody is touched by it,” Huss told CNN.

Also reported in numerous syndicated regional television and digital channels in the U.S., as well as...

external page Euro News

external page Gold Coast News (Australia)

external page AccuWeather

Tinamu Labs Secures CHF 1 million investment to drive growth of its indoor drone-based monitoring systems

external page ETH Spinoff, Tinamu Labs...renowned for its indoor drone-based monitoring systems, has recently closed a pre-series A financing round, securing CHF 1 million. This successful round, led by Alpana Ventures and DAA Capital Partners, attracted new and existing investors from the drone and trading industries.

Expansion of space travel in Europe – Europe to take off in manned space travel – News

external page For the former head of science at the US space agency Nasa, the Swiss Thomas Zurbuchen, it is clear: Europe must also be important alongside the great space powers America and China. “It’s better for the world and also good for all opportunities in Europe,” emphasized the current ETH professor after a meeting of Swiss business leaders with the European Space Agency ESA at ETH Zurich.

How did the universe become transparent? New insight here

external page Using data from NASA’s Webb Space Telescope, an international group of astronomers said on June 12, 2023, that light from stars ionized and heated the surrounding gas. This created huge transparent “bubbles” that eventually merged together, clearing the universe of the opaque gas. About one billion years after the Big Bang, the universe was completely transparent (according to Simon Lilly of ETH Zürich in Switzerland and an international team of researcher).

Also reported in...

external page Canada Today

external page Universe Today

external page ScienceAlert

World in Flux: Disrupted Global Water Cycle

external page For Christoph Schär, ETH Zurich’s Professor of Climate and Water Cycle, “global warming” is not quite accurate when it comes to describing the driver of climate change. “A better term would be ‘climate humidification’,” he explains. “Most of the solar energy that reaches the Earth serves to evaporate water and thereby drives the hydrological cycle.”

AIs will become useless if they keep learning from other AIs

external page It is also possible that humans won’t post AI content to the internet without editing it themselves first, says Florian Tramèr at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. “Even if the LLM in itself is biased in some ways, the human prompting and filtering process might mitigate this to make the final outputs be closer to the original human bias,” he says.

Also reported in...

external page UK Today News

Switzerland’s New Inflation Forecast Backs Another SNB Hike

external page The KOF summer forecast of ETH Zurich’s economics center highlighted that thanks to the recent rise in the reference interest rate for rents, “dues for many existing rental contracts will be sensitively increased next fall.” In its forecast, KOF assumes that around half of inflation in 2024 will be caused by rent increases. It expects price growth of 2.2% for this year and 1.5% in 2024. Swiss growth came in unexpectedly strong at 0.5% in the first quarter. But forward-looking indicators including an index of purchasing managers have been pointing toward a slowdown amid subdued industry sentiment.  

New intra-abdominal patch senses hidden postop threat (A "spy" in the belly)

external page Researchers from the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa) and ETH Zurich have developed a leak-detecting patch that can withstand the acidic environment of the gut and may also help with wound closure.

Also reported in...

external page News Medical Life Sciences

external page Medical Xpress

external page Futurity

external page Technology Networks

external page Science Daily

Millions of funding for early detection and treatment of lung cancer

external page ETH Zurich researchers to particpate in lung cancer research as part of an international consortium funded by the European Commission for less invasive and better treatments of lung cancer using imaging and new technology.

Pack It, Knit It, Link It: Challenges in 3D Printing, Textile Production, and Beyond

external page An international team of researchers from ETH Zürich in Switzerland and Université de Montréal in Canada draws inspiration from medieval chainmail armor..."These unique properties make DIM attractive in robotics, orthotics, sportswear and many other areas of application," adds Stelian Coros, collaborator and head of the computational robotics lab (CRL) at ETH Zürich. The researchers have developed a method for computational modeling, mechanical characterization, and macro-scale simulation of these 3D-printed chainmail fabrics made of quasi-rigid interlocking elements (the connectivity of rings or links in chainmail-like material).

Also reported in numerous syndicated radio and regional publications.

Biodiversity emerges from environmental jungle

Satellite imagery is now being used for a huge range of environmental monitoring, from detection of methane leaks to counting wildlife populations and detecting illegal mining. In a 2022 paper, external page Anna Schweiger, a remote sensing ecologist at Crowther Lab at ETH Zürich in Switzerland, found that imaging spectroscopy from satellite images can also now be used to monitor changes in plant community composition in close-to-real-time on a global level.

At Last, Astronomers May Have Seen the Universe’s First Stars

external page Telltale evidence gathered by the James Webb Space Telescope suggests we’re closer than ever before to finding elusive Population III stars...“These papers quite nicely highlight the different aspects of the search,” says Jorryt Matthee of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, who was not involved with either paper. “We’re almost there.”

Webb Telescope Reveals How Light Emerged From the Fog of the Early Universe

The researchers found that regions around the galaxies were bubbles of transparency, suggesting that the galaxies themselves were involved in the reionization of the universe. external page “As we look back into the teeth of reionization, we see a very distinct change,” said study co-author Simon Lilly, an astronomer at ETH Zürich in Switzerland, and the leader of the research team, in a Space Telescope Science Institute release. “Galaxies, which are made up of billions of stars, are ionizing the gas around them, effectively transforming it into transparent gas.”

Also reported in...

external page SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

external page VNExplorer

external page Archynewsy

external page Microsoft MSN

external page Yahoo! News

How Einstein's old stomping ground became Europe's spinout capital

external page ETH Zurich has spun out the most companies of all universities in Europe...

Also reported in...

external page Business Live

external page MSN

Cognitive biases in our senses

external page Our visual perception depends more strongly on the utility of information than previously thought. This has been demonstrated in a series of experiments conducted by researchers at ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich. Cognitive biases can begin at the retina.

Also reported in...

external page SCIENCEBETA

external page Medical Xpress

The Future of Automation in Industrial Processes – ANYbotics

external page ANYbotics was established with the primary goal of commercializing the technology underlying the quadrupedal robot ANYmal...The study began at the legged robots unit at ETH Zurich's Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL).

A Swiss university did a deep dive into Calgary's 'missing middle.' This is what they found

external page Students at ETH Zurich, including senior researcher, Sibylle Waelty recently studied the city design and variety of housing types of the Canadian city, Calgary, Alberta.

Meet PassGPT, the AI Trained on Millions of Leaked Passwords

external page Researchers from ETH Zürich, Swiss Data Science Center, and SRI International in New York have utilized the power of OpenAI's GPT-2 architecture to develop PassGPT, a password-guessing model built on a large language model (LLM). And it’s trained on a trove of leaked passwords from various hacks and exploits.

Also reported in...

external page Medium

Expanse Supercomputer Aids in Nanoparticle Assembly Research

In a recent study conducted using the Expanse supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego, a team of scientists from the Ames National Laboratory at Iowa State University and external page ETH Zurich examined how to assemble perovskites that are shaped as nanocubes with other sphere-shaped nanocrystals.

Sound-based quantum computers could be built using chip-sized device

external page Because many different quantum objects interact with sound, future experiments could also use phonons to transfer quantum information between different, hard-to-connect components of a quantum computing chip, says Yiwen Chu at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

Santiago Calatrava to receive the Leonardo da Vinci Lifetime Achievement Award for Design at the Florence Biennale

Calatrava, who has won several other awards, including the 2005 AIA Gold Medal and the European Prize for Architecture in 2015, has also enjoyed an illustrious academic career adjacent to the work of his 42-year-old practice, including a permanent guest lecturer positions at the ETH Zurich, Yale School of Architecture, and MIT.  

Capsule-Sized Device Permits Noninvasive Exploration Of Small Intestine

external page An international team of researchers has completed preliminary testing of a swallowable device for collecting samples from people under standard, day-to-day conditions to better understand what is happening inside their small intestine. "The beauty of the CapScan approach is that it is sampling the upper intestine where 90% of human digestion happens, meaning locations where enzymes break down food and a multitude of metabolites are made, changed, and utilized...", says Jacob Folz, a former postdoctoral researcher in the Fiehn lab (now working for his second postdoc in a lab at the ETH Zurich.

New insights into how aggressive cancer cells proliferate and propagate the disease

external page As part of a research collaboration led by Ruhr University Bochum...ETH Zurich researchers have studied the properties of metastatic breast cancer cells by directly analyzing metastatic biopsies from patients.

Also reported in...

external page News Medical Life Sciences

external page Medical Xpress

How we are contaminating our waters with microplastics and a multitude of chemicals

external page "You find microplastic particles everywhere, from mountain lakes and spring water to the most remote regions of the world's oceans," says Denise Mitrano, Assistant Professor of Environmental Chemistry of Anthropogenic Materials at ETH Zurich.  

Climate change has a dramatic impact on the global water cycle, say researchers

external page For Christoph Schär, ETH Zurich's Professor of Climate and Water Cycle, "global warming" is not quite accurate when it comes to describing the driver of climate change. "A better term would be 'climate humidification,'" he explains. "Most of the solar energy that reaches the Earth serves to evaporate water and thereby drives the hydrological cycle."

Slow Electrons Could Improve Radiation Damage Analysis

external page A dielectron is made up of two electrons, but unlike an atom, it has no nucleus. Up to now, scientists have been unable to directly detect such an object. While the researchers led by ETH Zurich Professor Ruth Signorell were experimenting with dielectrons, they accidentally discovered a new process for producing slow electrons. These can be used to initiate certain chemical reactions.

Also reported in...

external page AZO Materials

external page Tech and Science Post

external page Nanowerk

external page TechXplore

Developing decentralized, closed-loop modular systems for wastewater management

external page Kai Udert, professor at the Institute of Environmental Engineering at ETH Zurich and Senior Scientist at Eawag sees waste water as a valuable resource.

Air pollution sensors can double as biodiversity monitors

external page “Detecting some species sometimes is not the same as detecting a signal of biodiversity change representative for a larger area,” says Fabian Roger, an ecologist at ETH Zürich, who is testing the potential of air samplers to detect insects that may cause crop or tree damage Researchers don’t know how far from a sensor an organism can be and still be detected, or whether some organisms are easier to detect.

Also reported in...

external page Associated Press / MSN

external page The Japan News / Yomiuri Shimbun

external page Newscenter 1

As well as numerous regional publications and radio broadcasts in the U.S.

The insurability of large-scale cyber risks: The symposium underlines the urgency of sustainably protecting the Swiss economy from major cyber attacks

external page On the scientific side, the economy and state authorities can rely on the extensive expertise of specialist start-ups and national institutions such as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH). Prof. Florian Tramèr, an expert in computer security, privacy protection and machine learning in the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, highlighted how intensively science was currently dealing with the topic – and that future-oriented models were already in development with the involvement of business and the state.  

How Our Cells Kill Themselves – Scientists Decode the Exact Mechanism at the Atomic Level

external page Until recently, it was assumed that cells simply burst and die at the end of their life. Now, researchers at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, the University of Lausanne, and the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE) at ETH Zurich have provided new insights into the final step of cell death.

Also reported in...

external page Newsbreak

external page SciTechDaily

external page List23

external page Report door

Diving robot for dangerous search and rescue

external page Tethys Robotics - recent student project, now a Swiss start up say their underwater robotic drone could keep divers out of harm’s way in situations that are too dangerous for people.

Also reported in...

external page Techeblog

external page InceptiveMinde

external page Head Topics

external page New Atlas

The Race to Make AI Smaller, Smarter

external page The BabyLM Challenge, organized by computer scientists at institutions including...Switzerland's ETH Zurich, is aimed at creating more accessible, intuitive language models, in stark contrast to the race for ever-larger language models undertaken by big tech companies. The goal is to produce a mini-language model using datasets less than one-ten-thousandth the size used by most advanced large language models.

Test for sepsis bacteria's antibiotic resistance

external page “If the bacteria in a blood sample first have to be cultivated for a diagnostic procedure, valuable time is lost,” explained Qun Ren, group leader from Empa’s Biointerfaces lab in St. Gallen. Ren and her colleague Fei Pan worked with researchers from ETH Zurich to find a way to bypass this lengthy intermediate step.

Teaching Physics in the Age of GPT

external page Intrigued by the debate around large language models in the academic world, Gerd Kortemeyer, now the director of educational development and technology at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, decided to put ChatGPT to the test—literally.  

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