ETH News

Whether tunnels or retaining walls – many Swiss reinforced concrete structures from the 1960s to the 1980s are at risk. Corrosion can make them unstable. ETH start-up Talpa Inspection has now developed a solution to localise corrosion more easily, even in hard-to-reach places.

During her doctoral studies, Liliane Ableitner developed a trading and billing tool for energy communities. Three years on, she is CEO of a flourishing start-up with 20 employees.

It doesn’t have to be a hurricane or a tsunami — even a simple running water tap induces a shock wave upon impact with the sink. Now, with the help of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre's (CSCS) supercomputer “Piz Daint”, mathematician Siddhartha Mishra of ETH Zurich is working to overcome current barriers to simulating and comprehending highly turbulent flows.

Peter Schmidt has been working in development aid for over 30 years, constantly seeking ways to help people help themselves. His first visit to India left him in shock for three days – but ended up shaping the rest of his life.

When working with neural networks, their training is the single most resource-demanding and costly process. Scientists at the ETH Zurich have now developed a software that considerably speeds up training. This will be especially relevant for scientific applications of future users of “Alps” at CSCS.

These days, the cause of death in cancer patients often isn’t the primary tumour, but metastases. With his research, biochemist Nicola Aceto has found a new way to prevent the formation of such secondary tumours. To achieve this, the Latsis laureate had to repeatedly fight against the prevailing wisdom.

Intense agricultural use is causing soil degradation in many areas. Now researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a rapid test for measuring soil quality on site. This should allow farmers to monitor the health of their land themselves in the future.

Chiara Gattinoni, a materials theorist and Marie Curie Fellow at ETH Zurich, uses the “Piz Daint” supercomputer at CSCS to investigate a special class of materials: ferroelectrics. In the future, these materials could constitute the heart of low-energy-consuming, miniaturised data storage in electrical devices. One ferroelectric Gattinoni analysed is, according to her, truly magical.

Whether for explosives, plastic, dyes or medications: some molecules are manufactured in large quantities on an industrial scale. Yet these production processes are resource-intensive and produce hazardous waste. ETH chemist Dmitry Katayev is making these processes more efficient and better for the environment.

Some people are better protected than others against urinary tract infections. This may be because their bodies produce more of a protein called uromodulin. An interdisciplinary research team has now found out how this helper protein brings relief when nature calls and how this knowledge might benefit the treatment and prevention of these painful inflammations.

Trading in digital currencies such as Bitcoin or Ether has become an established practice but using them as a payment means is still a slow process. ETH Professor Srdjan Capkun and his team have now developed a system that makes cryptocurrency payments secure, fast and practical.

They should be fast, portable and easy to use: blood tests that can be done at home. Having already come up with a prototype, ETH Pioneer Fellow Alexander Tanno is working with doctoral student Yves Blickenstorfer to bring the idea to market.

Mariëlle van Kooten’s ingenious idea won the ETH doctoral student second place in the international Falling Walls Lab in Berlin. She is developing an app that creates simple images from complex medical data. This makes it easier for the untrained eye to navigate the data jungle.

This year Renana Gershoni-Poranne was awarded a Branco Weiss Fellowship. The ETH chemist will use the research grant to design innovative compounds that can be used in future generations of electronic devices.

A new method developed by biophysicists at ETH Zurich has made it possible for the first time to detect and analyse signals between individual cells.