ETH News

New miniature laboratories are ensuring that artificial intelligence (AI) doesn’t make mistakes. They provide a controlled test environment where algorithms and AI models can be checked before being put to work under real-life conditions. The aim is for AI to work reliably.

The ETH spin-off Flink Robotics wants to revolutionize the handling of packages. Its founders Moritz Geilinger and Simon Huber have developed software that allows robots to work together and quickly take on new tasks.

Torsten Hoefler wins the prestigious ACM Prize in Computing for his pioneering work in high-performance computing. The fact that supercomputers have become so powerful that AI models can be trained very quickly with very large volumes of data is partly down to his research.

Life needs sufficient phosphorus. However, the element is scarce, not only today but also at the time of the origin of life. So where was there sufficient phosphorus four billion years ago for life to emerge? A team of origin-of-life researchers has an answer.

Elsbeth Stern will give her farewell lecture on 27 March. Stern, who conducts research on the topics of learning and teaching, has helped shape the discussion around the transition to the baccalaureate school in Switzerland. We talked to her one more time about her insights.

Who were our earliest ancestors? The answer could lie in a special group of single-celled organisms with a cytoskeleton similar to that of complex organisms, such as animals and plants. ETH researchers made these findings in a new study.

Switzerland’s glaciers are in increasingly poor shape. If greenhouse gas emissions are not cut drastically soon, they could cease to exist by 2100 – so says ETH Professor Daniel Farinotti in this ETH News interview to mark the first World Day for Glaciers.

A long-term Switzerland-wide study has found that neighbourhoods with numerous, well-arranged trees exhibit lower mortality risks than other areas. The reasons behind this, and the factors that play a role, will require further research.

How does disinformation impact public trust in science? And can healthy scepticism be a good thing? A debate between climate researcher Sonia Seneviratne, communication scientist Mike S. Schäfer and former Swiss Federal Chancellor Walter Thurnherr.

When it comes to getting along together, trust plays an indispensable role. While we all have an intuitive grasp of what this interpersonal investment involves, even science struggles to express exactly how it works.