February 2016

Augmented creativity can encourage children towards a new-found sense of creativity, cooperation and interaction with their environment. ETH Zurich’s Game Technology Center will present its latest apps in the field at the CeBIT computer expo.

The spring edition of the Treffpunkt Science City series begins next Sunday. The events revolve around the issue of health, and specifically, how the latest advances in research can improve it.

Computer scientists and roboticists at ETH Zurich have developed a robotic walker that makes senior citizens more mobile. Now SmartWalker is waiting for an industrial partner to come along and help get the technology ready for mass production.

It is not too often that Cairo’s informal settlements are hosted at an international architecture event, especially not as a positive case. This year, the “informal” area of Ard-El-Lewa is prominently featured at the Bi-City Biennale for Urban Development and Architecture in Shenzhen, in the Radical Urbanism section.

Last week, the European Research Council (ERC) announced the winners of the Consolidator Grants for talented young researchers. Petra Dittrich, a researcher at ETH, is one of those to receive the much-coveted funding. Martin Vechev was also awarded an ERC Starting Grant.

Klimaneutrale Produkte sind beliebt: Entsprechende Label beruhigen das ökologische Gewissen und versprechen, die nachhaltige Entwicklung ärmerer Länder durch Reduktionsprojekte vor Ort zu fördern. Doch ist die CO₂-Kompensation im Ausland nach den Klimaverhandlungen in Paris überhaupt noch zeitgemäss?

Digitalisation is changing the world. The libraries of the future will have to increasingly adapt to this fact, but shouldn’t restrict themselves to guiding students and researchers through a sea of digital data, writes Ulrich Weidmann, Vice President for Human Resources and Infrastructure, and responsible for the ETH-Bibliothek. The library at ETH will also maintain and provide a complete spectrum of requested media in the long term.

ETH scientists have developed a membrane that protects medical implants from unwanted encapsulation by connective tissue. The researchers founded a spin-off company just over a year ago and have now been awarded funding by the start-up competition Venture Kick.

In patients with heart failure, the pumping power of the heart decreases in a fatal downward spiral. Pharmacologists at ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich have now succeeded in breaking this vicious circle in the mouse model. Their approach could one day also benefit humans.

At the end of January 2016, a hacker infiltrated the ETH Zurich IT system. Thanks to swift intervention and effective cooperation between the public prosecution service, police and ETH Zurich, a suspect was arrested shortly after the attack was discovered. The suspect is an ETH student.