In the Media - May 2023

Tiny sensor could guide needles through the body, monitor health from afar

...A new device, the size of a grain of sand, that can transmit a wireless signal up to 25 centimeters away. The work could also have implications for measuring blood pressure and tracking how medications metabolize inside the body, researchers say...external page "The device is “really exciting,” says Nako Nakatsuka, a chemist who develops miniature biosensors to measure brain compounds at ETH Zürich and who was not involved with the study. The ability to maneuver inside the body with minimal disruption, she says, “is very cool.”

Also reported in...

external page World News Era

external page Newsy Today

"Sepsis sensors" with magnetic nanoparticles rapidly detect bacterial pathogens

external page In the case of blood poisoning, the bacteria in the blood must be identified as fast as possible so that a life-saving therapy can be started...researchers at EMPA worked together with researchers from ETH Zurich...

Also reported in...

external page Nanowerk

external page PHYS.org

Droughts increasingly reduce carbon dioxide uptake in the tropics, finds study

external page The Earth's climate system features numerous feedback loops. These are processes triggered by global warming that have a feedback effect on climate change and either amplify or diminish it..."It is...difficult to quantify exactly how terrestrial carbon sinks will respond to additional human-induced climate change," says Sonia Seneviratne, Professor for Land-Climate Dynamics at ETH Zurich.

Also reported in...

external page UK Today News

external page Smart Water Magazine

Is the era of VCs making money from 'bull***t' closing? 4 takeaways from Sifted Sessions Berlin

external page DACH is home to leading research institutions such as...ETH Zurich — but taking a deeptech company to market can be tricky...“There are very strong universities and very strong hubs on certain topics, but on the company side it's difficult to get state support for deep research,” said Christoph Jenny, cofounder of Swiss foodtech startup Planted.  

‘Electricity sinkhole’ or ‘important step forward’? Swiss citizens to vote on new climate law

external page Professor of climate physics, Reto Knutti calls it an “important step forward in the area of climate and energy policy” after “years of political stalemate”. Knutti is one of more than 200 scientists at Swiss universities who have signed a public statement in support of the proposal, which they believe will make the country stronger...

Also reported in...

external page Yahoo!

external page MSN

Meditation could help you make better decisions

external page People who meditate daily are less likely to avoid negative information, researchers report.

Also reported in...

external page Technology.org

external page Neuroscience News

external page Trendeepro

external page Medical Xpress

What does GPT-3 “know” about me? – MIT Technology Review

external page Tech companies such as Google and OpenAI do not release information about the data sets that have been used to build their language models, but they inevitably include some sensitive personal information, such as addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. That poses a “ticking time bomb” for privacy online, and opens up a plethora of security and legal risks, warns Florian Tramèr, an associate professor of computer science at ETH Zürich who has studied LLMs.  

When were the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica last wet?

external page Under the guidance of my second PhD supervisor, Dr Kevin Norton, I spent months in the lab leaching meteoric Beryllium-10 from sediment samples from the Friis Hills and other high elevation sites in the McMurdo Dry Valleys...I took my samples to the Laboratory of Ion Beam Physics at ETH Zurich to work with state-of-the-art equipment in collaboration with Dr Marcus Christl and his team. My samples were given royal treatment as they were the first to go through their new Multi-Isotope-Low-Energy-System (MILEA).  

Emergence of solvated dielectrons observed for the first time

external page An international research team that includes Prof. Ruth Signorell, ETH Zurich, generates low-energy electrons using ultraviolet light.

Also reported in...

external page Tech and Science Post

external page Science Daily

external page Science Magazine

Expert discusses how to realistically achieve quantum speedups beyond the hype

external page In theory, quantum computers vastly outperform classical computers in terms of computing speed. For them to do so in practice, it is necessary to design more and novel high-speed algorithms, says ETH supercomputing specialist Torsten Hoefler.

Also reported in...

external page Tech and Science Post

external page TechStreet

external page News8Plus

external page News Update UK

external page Technology.org

Marsquakes reveal suitable surfaces for a future base

external page A team of scientists at ETH Zurich have been analyzing the sound of an estimated 4.6-magnitude quake on Mars to determine the structure of the crust. They say their research will help determine where to position a base for future manned missions to the Red Planet.

Also reported in...

external page MSN

external page World Today News

external page Archyde

external page Archynewsy

external page Di-Markets

external page UK Today News

external page Public News Time

Thomas Zurbuchen – The Next Step, Across The Atlantic, As An Immigrant

external page "I am thrilled at the opportunity to shape this new Master’s program, focusing on the Space Industry of Today and the Future..."

Also reported in...

external page MyScience

external page CNBC (scroll down to "Boldly going" section)

external page Get to the text

external page The Conservative Investor (scroll down to "Boldly going" section)

external page Archyworldys

external page SwissTrade

external page Connectivity Business News

Drone research center takes autonomous building repairs to the skies

external page Drone research center takes autonomous building repairs to the skies...flying drones focused on detecting building issues before they become serious and carry out repairs autonomously. It sounds like science fiction, but researchers aim to explore whether it could indeed be realized at the DroneHub.

Study shows drugs for high blood pressure increase lifespan and slow down aging process

external page "...Research carried out in collaboration with scientists from ETH Zurich and Harvard Medical School...found that so far, calorie restriction has been the most effective anti-aging measure. However, human calorie restriction studies have had mixed results and side effects...

Meet the AI-powered robot replacing humans as security guards in Switzerland

external page In Europe, people living in Switzerland have been seeing an autonomous two-wheeled robot roaming around the country for the past six months. The patrol bot, developed by a robotics start-up from ETH Zurich, Ascento, has been acting as a guard for Swiss security firm Securitas AG.

Also reported in...

external page Yahoo!news UK

external page BusinessNews

external page Wonderful Engineering

external page iTechPost

external page Interesting Engineering

Quantum computers: what are they good for?

The world’s largest quantum computer in terms of qubits is IBM’s Osprey, which has 433. external page But even with 2 million qubits, some quantum chemistry calculations might take a century, according to a 2022 preprint2 by researchers at Microsoft Quantum in Redmond, Washington, and ETH Zurich in Switzerland.

Researchers Elucidate the Exact Mechanism of Cell Death

external page 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 Verve Times

Energy security in a climate-neutral Switzerland is possible, say experts

external page ETH Zurich's Energy Science Center (ESC) took a detailed look at the question of whether and under what conditions Switzerland could achieve its target of net zero emissions by 2050 and ensure continuous security of energy supply.

How do you measure biodiversity? Take a listen

external page Finding a way to measure biodiversity has long preoccupied ecologists...Doctoral student, Giacomo Delgado, ETH Zurich Crowther Lab uses bioacoustic technology to hear the sounds of the forest.

Forests can store less carbon than previously believed

external page Reducing the intensity of forest management increases carbon sequestration in forests. However, even if forest management were removed altogether, the mitigation potential of this strategy is limited.  

Our chocolate could have caused more deforestation in West Africa than we think

external page The amount of land being used to cultivate cocoa in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana could be almost 40% larger than official estimates - causing more forest loss in the countries than previously thought - according to Australian and (ETH Zurich) researchers.  

Quantum Theory’s ‘Measurement Problem’ May Be a Poison Pill for Objective Reality

external page "Grappling with such questions requires a better understanding of theories in which the measurement problem can arise—which is exactly what Ormrod, along with Vilasini Venkatesh of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and Jonathan Barrett of Oxford, have now achieved."

The Largest 'Marsquake' Ever Recorded Might Shake Up The Mystery of Mars's Crust

external page "From this quake, the largest quake recorded during the entire InSight mission, we observed surface waves that circled Mars up to three times," said Doyeon Kim, who is a seismologist at the Institute of Geophysics at ETH Zurich, and lead author of the study.

Also reported in...

external page Universe Today

external page MSN

external page HD Daily News

Earpiece speeds up recovery after a stroke

external page ETH Zurich researchers have developed a smart earpiece that, by stimulating the brain, helps it rewire neural circuits. ETH researchers Paulius Viskaitis and Dane Donegan from the Rehabilitation Engineering Laboratory have developed a new system that is set to make vagus nerve stimulation much easier and available much faster...

Chemical & Engineering News announces its 2023 rising stars in chemistry

external page Athina Anastasaki, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) - This materials chemist shows prowess for pulling polymers apart.  

Countries would be well advised to assist each other with regard to gas

external page Researchers in the group of Giovanni Sansavini, Professor of Reliability and Risk Engineering at ETH Zurich, have examined this using model calculations. One of the study’s key findings is that collaborating in solidarity is worthwhile. At the very least, it would allow European countries to avert drastic and involuntary energy demand curtailment.

JWST Will Hunt for Dead Solar Systems—And Much More—In Its Second Year of Science

Rohan Naidu (MIT) will also be scouring the distant universe, but not for those highest-redshift galaxies. Instead, his program, which he external page co-leads with Jorryt Matthee of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), will be using a giant cluster of galaxies called Abell 2744 to gravitationally magnify the light of some smaller objects up to 750 million years after the big bang.

Saving the forests won’t be enough to stop climate change — we need substantial emission cuts

external page “We focused more critically on naturally occurring disturbances that happen in forests without any human intervention, such as fires, storm related damage, insects etc. This led to an estimated additional carbon storage potential that is more than twice as small as the previous estimates,” says Caspar Roebroek, the lead author of the study and a researcher at ETH Zurich and the European Commission Joint Research Centre.  

3d-printed mineral foam blocks for sustainable building

external page ETH Zurich explores digital fabrication for construction elements using cement-free mineral foams in collaboration with ETH Spinoff, FenX.

Also reported in...

external page ArchDaily

external page Waste Advantage Magazine

Korea, Switzerland prepare for the quantum future

external page Jonathan Home, professor of physics at ETH Zurich (among others) speaks at a quantum science forum organized by the Swiss Embassy in Seoul at the IBS Center for Quantum Nanoscience at Ewha Womans University on Thursday.

NextGuide cane guides blind users via a pointer under their thumb

external page ETH Zurich student Alexander Bayer was inspired to invent the device after seeing how a blind classmate struggled with her conventional white cane. He is now commercializing the technology with three other students via start-up company, NextGuide.

Recognizing Research Excellence and Accomplishments at ISC 2023

external page The inaugural Jack Dongarra Award winner is Dr. Torsten Hoefler, an associate professor at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. This award acknowledges Hoefler’s significant contributions to converging HPC and AI.

Researchers determine global thickness and density of Martian crust

external page A strong quake in the last year of the NASA Mars InSight mission, enabled researchers at ETH Zurich to determine the global thickness and density of the planet's crust. On average, the Martian crust much thicker than the Earth's or the moon's crust, and the planet's main source of heat is radioactive.

external page Technology.org

external page Tech Times

external page Aol. UK

external page IFL Science

ETH spinout ANYbotics raises $50m for AI-led robo workforce

external page ETH Zurich spinoff and Swiss startup ANYbotics, which is building four-legged autonomous robots for industrial use, has raised a $50m Series B led by Walden Catalyst and NGP Capital. The company will use the fresh cash to deliver on product preorders, grow its headcount and expand to other markets.

This Is the Quietest Sound in the Universe

external page “We clearly don’t see superpositions in macroscopic objects,” says physicist Matteo Fadel of ETH Zürich. “We don’t see Schrödinger’s cats walking around.”

Together raises $20M to build open source generative AI models

external page Together, launched in June 2022, is the brainchild of Vipul Ved Prakash, Ce Zhang, Chris Re and Percy Liang...Zhang is an associate professor of computer science at ETH Zurich, currently on sabbatical and leading research in “decentralized” AI.  

Physicists Create Biggest-Ever Schrödinger’s Cat

external page Researchers in the Hybrid Quantum Systems Group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) excited the crystal into vibrations such that its atoms oscillated back and forth simultaneously and in two opposite directions—putting the entire crystal in what is known as a state of quantum superposition.

15 fastest-growing university spinouts in Europe

external page ETH Zurich spinoffs, Climeworks, Nexxiot, and Planted featured among the 15 fastest-growing university spinouts in Europe.

How AI Knows Things No One Told It

external page In 2022 a team at Google Research and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich...showed that in-context learning follows the same basic computational procedure as standard learning, known as gradient descent. This procedure was not programmed; the system discovered it without help.  

These Hardy, Arctic-Dwelling Microbes Can Break Down Plastic with Little Energy

external page A creative solution for plastic pollution may be hiding in the Swiss Alps and the Arctic. These chilly environments house tons of microbes with unique traits, as scientists have discovered in recent years...For the new study, they examined samples of 19 bacteria strains and 15 fungi strains growing on plastic in frigid locales, including microbes collected in Svalbard during a 2018 project by ETH Zurich students. Some of the Swiss soil came all the way from a nearly 10,000-foot-tall mountain summit.

Climate: modelling micro-algae to better understand the workings of the ocean

external page The ocean absorbs a quarter of the CO₂ given out by human activities, playing a major role in slowing climate change. To have a better grasp of these processes is crucial to understand the ocean’s role in the global climate system and to better foresee disruptions caused by the changing climate.A year of surface nitrogen fixation using the new digital system (developed by ETH Zurich researchers) within the Project NOTION framework.

Qubits 30 meters apart used to confirm Einstein was wrong about quantum

external page A new experiment (at ETH Zurich) uses superconducting qubits to demonstrate that quantum mechanics violates what's called local realism by allowing two objects to behave as a single quantum system no matter how large the separation between them. The experiment wasn't the first to show that local realism isn't how the Universe works—it's not even the first to do so with qubits. But it's the first to separate the qubits by enough distance to ensure that light isn't fast enough to travel between them while measurements are made...

Also reported in...

external page HPC Wire

external page Inside HPC

external page Semiconductor Engineering

external page Tech and Science Post

external page Eurasia Review

external page MSN

external page New Scientist

external page UK Today News

external page Scitech Daily

external page Science Alert

external page El Pais

Wildfires may have stoked rare ‘triple-dip’ La Niña+

external page "Although the wildfires seemed to clearly impact La Niña in the simulations, no model is perfect," says Robert Jnglin Wills, a climate scientist at ETH Zurich who didn’t work on the study. “Can we trust this is a good representation of how the real world responds?”

Nestlé's research institute addresses agricultural sustainability, aligning with its climate mitigation plans of reaching net-zero by 2050

external page Nestlé's 2020 Net Zero Roadmap mapped out a climate mitigation plan to reach net-zero by 2050. Partnering with organizations like ETH Zurich has pushed the company into exploring comprehensive solutions to mitigate climate change while increasing nutritional quality and yield in dairy and crop farming.

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Why Is It Hard to Make Progress in the Social Sciences?

external page According to computational social scientists at ETH Zurich, social science’s slower progress is due to fragmentation. While the natural sciences are unified under sweeping theories supported by rigorous evidence, the social sciences are often fragmented into competing theories. This leads scientists to work in isolation, away from critical discussion and disagreement. However, this hampers scientific progress. The researchers suggest that social scientists break free from their schools and seek out discussion and disagreement to foster scientific progress.

High-Resolution Image of the Human Retina Reveals Stunning Details

external page Researchers (from ETH Zurich) developed a new imaging technique to visualize several dozen proteins in a thin tissue section at high resolution using fluorescence microscopy.

Also reported in...

external page Ophthalmology Times

external page Bioengineer

external page Medical Xpress

external page ScienceDaily

external page ScienMag

external page Canada Today

external page Technology Networks

external page Optics

Team creates heaviest Schrödinger’s cat yet

external page Researchers at ETH Zurich have created the heaviest Schrödinger cat to date by putting a crystal in a superposition of two oscillation states.

Defeating Blood Cancer: New Strategies for Effective Treatment

external page One of the main challenges is the cancer’s tendency to return even after treatment. This is because treatment makes the cancer cells more resistant to the drugs used, until eventually, after several rounds of treatment, no effective options remain...To address this issue, ETH Zurich researchers have adapted their screening platform to look for ways out of this problem, and thereby offering new hope for more successful treatment outcomes.

Swiss Pharma giant Roche looks to disrupt drug discovery with innovative organoid technology

external page The company plans to expand the IHB to around 250 scientists and bioengineers over the next four years, with staff from Roche working alongside academics from the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology, ETH Zurich, and EPFL...Roche is betting that human model systems, such as organoids, will provide a more accurate way to gather data for predicting patient responses to drug candidates.

Araris Biotech AG Supported with CHF 2.5M Swiss Accelerator Grant from Innosuisse to Develop Antibody-Drug Conjugate Candidates

external page Araris is a spin-off company from the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) and ETH Zurich.

Also reported in numerous television and radio broadcasts in the U.S.

A new form of human-computer interaction

external page Researchers from ETH Zurich created a new open-​source platform and programming language for human-computer interaction called LMQL. This programming language makes it easier, cheaper, and safer to interact with large language models like ChatGPT.

Also reported in...

external page NewsBit

external page TechThinkers

As well as numerous others...

Marsquakes reveal Red Planet’s deep secrets

external page The results of a recent study shows that Mars’ liquid-iron core is smaller and denser than scientists previously thought. They also revealed that about one-fifth of the core consists of elements such as sulfur, oxygen, carbon and hydrogen. Co-author Doyeon Kim of ETH Zurich said, "Determining the amount of these elements in a planetary core is important for understanding the conditions in our solar system when planets were forming and how these conditions affected the planets that formed."

Also reported in...

external page SciTech Daily

How cells are influenced by their environment as tissues grow

external page For a long time, biology was about studying cells and the biochemistry of the metabolic processes within them, often regardless of their natural environment. Prof Viola Vogel and Mario Benn, by contrast, are focusing on the extracellular matrix (ECM), a fibrous structure that surrounds body cells. This matrix is produced by the cells themselves and is a major component of all tissue.  

How species distribution mediates the global relationship between forest productivity and richness

external page Prof. Thomas Crowther, (ETH Zurich) senior author of the paper, explains, "Increasing a forest's diversity doesn't only mean increasing the number of species. It can also mean working to promote the natural evenness of those species."  

Ranking: the Swiss and Austrian startups to watch in 2023

external page Sifted has ranked the 50 startups from Switzerland (including ETH Zurich) and Austria to watch out for this year

A Very Big Small Leap Forward in Graph Theory

external page Referring to the Ramsey theory...The theory can be applied to most anything you can count. Its central lesson is that “you cannot create a completely chaotic system,” said Benny Sudakov, a mathematician at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.

Microsoft and ETH Take Aim at Quantum Computing’s Hype (and Promise)

external page A fascinating ACM paper by researchers Torsten Hoefler (ETH Zurich), Thomas Häner (Microsoft*) and Matthias Troyer (Microsoft) – “Disentangling Hype from Practicality: On Realistically Achieving Quantum Advantage” – and a Microsoft blog published yesterday by Troyer bring a much-needed dose of reality to the quantum computing conversation.

Also reported in...

external page Communications of the ACM

Physicists Set New Quantum Record With Heaviest 'Schrödinger Cat' Yet

external page A tiny vibrating crystal weighing little more than a grain of sand has become the heaviest object ever to be recorded in a superposition of locations. Physicists at ETH Zurich coupled a mechanical resonator to a type of superconducting circuit commonly used in quantum computing to effectively replicate Erwin Schroedinger's famous thought experiment on an unprecedented scale.

Also reported in...

external page Archyde

external page Business Telegraph

external page COSMOS

external page Popular Mechanics

Watch twelve years of leading edge Swiss robotics  

external page From 2010 to 2022, the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Robotics played a key role in developing Swiss robotics. It was led by by EPFL professor Dario Floreano and ETH Zurich professor Robert Riener with seven major research institutions across Switzerland.

Exploring the Future of Digital Twins

external page Nilson Kufus is CEO and Co-Founder of Nokomo and a Guest lecturer at ETH Zürich & FH HWZ talks about digital twins.

What can we learn from previous bird flu outbreaks?

external page To better understand the dynamics of bird flu outbreaks, a team of scientists led by ETH Zürich has recently investigated the epidemic caused by another subtype of avian influenza (H7N9) in China from 2013 to 2017, which not only decimated a vast number of poultry, but also killed 616 people who had close contact with infected poultry.

A bioethicist and a professor of medicine on regulating AI in health care

external page The advantages of health AI could possibly be huge. Examples embrace extra exact prognosis utilizing imaging know-how, the automated early prognosis of illnesses by way of evaluation of health and non-health knowledge...and the instant technology of medical plans for a affected person...Opinion piece from Effy Vayena is the founding professor of the Health Ethics and Policy Lab at ETH Zurich.

Also reported in...

external page The Economist (original article on 28 February 2023)

Pharmacoscopy: Novel Screening Method for Multiple Myeloma

external page One of the main challenges is the cancer’s tendency to relapse after treatment. This is because treatment makes the cancer cells more resistant to the drugs used, until eventually, after several rounds of treatment, no effective options remain. To address this issue, ETH Zurich researchers have adapted their screening platform to look for ways out of this problem, thereby offering new hope for more successful treatment outcomes.

Also reported in...

external page Futurity

Breeding, technological advances enhance taste, texture and nutrition of plant-based protein

external page "New extrusion technologies expand beyond traditional high and low moisture extrusion processes are enhancing texture and overall structure, such as ETH Zurich's combination of dies for pea proteins and emulsion-based fats that are combined to create 3D, marbled plant-based meats."

Swiss Glaciers Spared Absolute Minimum Snow Record, But Concerns Remain for the Future

external page Thanks to late snowfall in the past few weeks, the Swiss glaciers have been spared an absolute minimum record amount of snow this year...The lack of snow at the beginning of winter did not bode well, said glaciologist Andreas Bauder from ETH Zurich...Compared to the average for the years 2013 to 2022, there is currently a well below-average amount of snow on most Swiss glaciers.

The Science Behind the Food Disgust Test, and Why Revulsion Varies From Person to Person

external page Some food aversions are learned, while others are inherent. But there’s a lot of personal preference in between...Christina Hartmann, Ph.D., and Michael Siegrist, Ph.D., are both professors and researchers with the Consumer Behavior Group at ETH Zurich, or the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. “Our group’s aim is to enhance understanding of individual and organizational decision-making under conditions of uncertainty.”

Spanish heatwave: Is climate change behind record heat in Europe?

external page Erich Fischer at ETH Zurich in Switzerland says dry soils can increase the severity of a heatwave by 2 to 3°C. “Drought is basically an amplifier of the heatwave,” he says. But, he notes, it is unusual to see this effect so early in the year. “Typically at this time of year, even in southern Europe, the soils still have humidity,” he says.

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