In the Media - January 2025

Cells all over the body store 'memories': What does this mean for health?

external page The study, conducted by researchers from ETH Zurich, in Switzerland, supports the notion that lifestyle factors, such as unhealthy dietary patterns that can lead to chronic conditions like obesity, can trigger epigenetic memory formation by switching on genes that were not previously expressed.

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external page Aol.

TDK Ventures ‘thrilled’ with its investment into ANYbotics

external page TDK Corporation, the old Japanese multinational electronics giant, says its subsidiary TDK Ventures has invested in ANYbotics, a Switzerland-based global leader in industrial inspection robotics.

Scientists Re-Create the Microbial Dance That Sparked Complex Life

external page To observe the initial steps taken by two microbes as they adjusted to endosymbiotic life, biologists Gabriel Giger and Julia Vorholt re-created a wild endosymbiotic relationship in their lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.

Can LLMs Make Robots Smarter?

external page The RT-2 model is part of a broad Open X-Embodiment Collaboration framework that spans the likes of UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, ETH Zurich...Google DeepMind, and more than two dozen other institutions. Together, participants have conducted nearly a million robotic trials with 527 distinct skills across 22 types of robots.d Using LLMs in conjunction with VLAs, they have pushed up success rates by upwards of 50% and witnessed emergent capabilities in areas like spatial recognition and dexterity.

Genetic Sequencing Breakthrough Reveals Rapid Spread of New Pathogens

external page "We can even use it to start predicting how new variants are going to take over, which means decisions can quickly be made about how to respond," says Noémie Lefrancq - now at ETH Zurich, but carried out the research as first author at University of Cambridge.

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external page PHYS.org

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The new Great Wall: China’s $70 billion, 2,700-mile water transfer mega-project

external page To understand the motivations and implications of this colossal project, Interesting Engineering talked to experts, including Carla Freeman, Senior Expert for China at the US Institute of Peace, and Professor Stephan Pfister from ETH Zurich, a global water consumption impact specialist.

A Geek Leader

external page Productive failure podcast with Prof. Manu Kapur, Director of the Singapore-ETH Centre.

Using Robotic Building Methods for Low-Carbon Construction

Iexternal page mpact printing is being developed as an interdisciplinary collaboration at ETH-Zurich, between Gramazio Kohler Research, the chair of Sustainable Construction and the Robotic Systems Lab. The project vision is to develop an efficient and highly automated additive manufacturing method for excavated materials, to be realized on the full building scale, to produce unreinforced one- to two-story structures.