In the Media - April 2025

Satellite jamming is a real and growing threat. How can we protect our space infrastructure?

external page On Dec. 25 of last year, an Azerbaijani plane headed for the Chechnyan capital Grozny crash-landed in Kazakhstan after flying into a GPS jamming bubble...According to Clémence Poirier, a cybersecurity researcher at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, the incident, which killed 38 people, is just the tip of an increasingly frightening iceberg. Some 310,000 flights were affected by GPS interference in 2024, with most cases taking place around Russia and the Middle East.

50 Years of Microsoft – 36 Years of Innovation in Switzerland

external page Its partnerships with ETH Zurich and EPFL exemplify its commitment to AI and spatial computing research...Looking ahead, Microsoft will continue to pioneer at the intersection of technology and society. In Switzerland, this means fostering digital skills, supporting local innovation, and building responsible AI systems that put people first.  

The Prototype: Chatbots Struggle With Analogies

external page ...Researchers at ETH Zurich may have a solution–they gave mice a vaccine against salmonella as well as a probiotic containing benign bacteria strains that compete for its resources. The scientists found that this combination helped fight disease both by triggering the immune system to attack salmonella and enabling the good bacteria to outcompete it. Next up is seeing if this approach works in people. Their findings were published this week in Science.

Why your body and brain might be fighting your efforts to get and stay slimmer

external page One study in Nature found that genes in the fat cells of people who lost a significant amount of weight through bariatric surgery largely continued to behave as if they were still obese. Ferdinand von Meyenn, from ETH Zurich, said that despite these individuals becoming, in many respects, much more healthy, genes that became active during obesity remained active, and genes that were turned off, remained turned off, predisposing them to regain lost weight.

Enhanced Oral Vaccination with Competitive Gut Bacteria

external page Emma Slack, a professor at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at the University of Oxford and ETH Zurich, is tackling this challenge. Alongside a global team of researchers, including Médéric Diard from the University of Basel’s Biozentrum, she’s developed a promising new approach: oral vaccines combined with benign bacteria that outcompete harmful microbes.

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external page Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News

Russia is flying fewer types of drones over Ukraine, making them easier to target

external page Mauro Gilli, a senior researcher in military technology at ETH Zurich, told BI that Russia "does not have the type of production, both scale and diversity, that Ukraine has."...He also said that Ukraine has been the first in the world to develop some drone tech. Ukraine's pioneering drone types have included different naval drones, and drones that can fly over 1,800 miles.

Cisco: Fine-tuned LLMs are now threat multipliers—22x more likely to go rogue

external page “For just $60, attackers can poison the foundation of AI models—no zero-day required,” write Cisco researchers. That’s the takeaway from Cisco’s joint research with Google, ETH Zurich and Nvidia, which shows how easily adversaries can inject malicious data into the world’s most widely used open-source training sets.

Scientists Want Your Sourdough Starter to Help Study Gut Health

external page "The samples came from all over Europe,” Professor Nicholas Bokulich, a microbiologist at ETH Zürich in Switzerland, shared with JSTOR. The team added that these volunteer bakers have also been busy testing the acidity of their home starters and providing detailed insights into how they maintain their mother dough.

A New Study Reveals Why Bumblebee Queens are Suddenly Damaging Leaves

external page Plants are responding to climate change by altering their flowering schedules, and bumblebees are adapting to these changes by altering their foraging behavior. The most recent study headed by Consuelo De Moraes and Mark Mescher of the Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, Switzerland, focuses on queens of the species Bombus terrestris, commonly the buff-tailed bumblebee, and their leaf-damaging behavior as it relates to colony founding.

Researchers Develop Fast-Acting Sensors to Detect Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria

external page Empa and ETH Zurich researchers have also developed a clever method to detect Pseudomonas aeruginosa—a bacterium that often causes urinary tract infections, especially in hospital patients with catheters. Their technique uses magnetic nanoparticles coated with proteins that bind only to this specific pathogen. Once added to a urine sample, the magnetic field can be used to “fish out” the bacterial cells.

Meteor strike may have sparked an explosion of life in the early Earth

external page The researchers used advanced geochemical methods to study carbon isotopes and other markers in the rocks. They found siderites—a type of iron carbonate—closely associated with organic matter. These minerals had light and variable carbon isotope values, a sign of microbial iron cycling in the aftermath of the impact...“It was a bit of a challenging question because the concentrations were very small,” said Stefano Bernasconi of ETH Zurich, who analyzed the carbon isotopes. He noted that the team had to grind the rock samples to extract grains of carbonate trapped in minerals.

NVIDIA Isaac Lab accelerates robot training in simulation

external page Isaac Lab incorporates features from Orbit, an open-source framework jointly developed by NVIDIA, the AI Institute, ETH Zurich, and the University of Toronto. It supports different physics engines and can scale frames per second with multiple graphics processing units (GPUs) training on Linux using the PyTorch distributed framework.

I went to a physics conference—and a hockey game broke out

external page When APS met in Boston in 2019, he and Andreas Wallraff, a physicist at ETH Zürich, decided to open the skate to meeting attendees. Since then, the two lifelong hockey players have taken the game on the road, when possible. In 2020, “I was standing in front of my house with my hockey gear, ready to go, when the meeting in Denver was canceled because of COVID,” Wallraff recalls...Nominally, the contest is a grudge match between scientists working on two different basic technologies for quantum computing. Wallraff captains the Superconducting Lightning, which comprises mostly researchers working with quantum bits, or qubits, made of tiny superconducting electrical circuits.

Ultima Genomics Gives Away Sequencing for Free. Literally.

external page “Ultima’s announcement is commendable,” agreed Catharine Aquino, group leader, Genomics Analytics Functional Genomics Center Zurich, ETH Zurich, “especially given the challenging times. It’s a smart mix of generosity and clever marketing—a good Samaritan approach.”

History made as Berlin researcher becomes first German woman in space

external page Rabea Rogge studied electrical engineering and information technology at ETH Zurich before transferring to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, where she is completing her doctoral thesis.

A New Proof Smooths Out the Math of Melting

external page Mathematicians want to ensure that even after a singularity forms, they can still analyze how the surface will continue to evolve. In 1995, the mathematician Tom Ilmanen (opens a new tab), now at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, proposed the “multiplicity-one” conjecture. It stated that any singularities that do form during the process of mean curvature flow must be relatively simple. “Bad” behavior should be limited to individual points: You should never see, for instance, multiple regions (whether from the same surface or different surfaces) stacked on top of each other.

Water shortage threatens the world’s most abundant lithium reserves 

external page Vanessa Schenker, a researcher with the Institute of Environmental Engineering at ETH Zurich, a Swiss university, says that there needs to be more research on the hydrology of lithium-rich regions around the world...“On top of how much water lithium mines are using, we also need to examine the entire supply chain for lithium and think of components such as chemical processing and transport,” she said. “Understanding the Lithium Triangle will help us understand other systems globally.”

Reliability of AI tested in a Causal Chamber

external page Writing in Nature Machine Intelligence, ETH mathematician Juan Gamella now presents a new approach that researchers can use to check how reliably and correctly their algorithms and AI models work. An AI model is based on certain assumptions and is trained to learn from data and perform given tasks intelligently. An algorithm comprises the mathematical rules that the AI model follows to process a task...

D-Wave “Supremacy” Controversy Overshadows Real Progress

external page The company’s quantum machine can solve certain problems blazingly fast... Both studies push the state of the art for classical techniques, says Juan Carrasquilla, an associate professor of physics at ETH Zurich, in Switzerland, and a coauthor on the Science paper, who carried out some of the calculations that D-Wave benchmarked against. But neither study overturns the paper’s central claim because both groups tackled only a subset of the problems the company simulated, and at shorter time scales, he says. And while on paper these approaches look scalable, in practice it can be more challenging than it seems...“This narrows this range of the claim, but if you want to completely overturn it you should be able to simulate the systems that D-Wave presented in the paper,” says Carrasquilla.