August 2017

This summer, environmental scientists were studying individual leaves to understand how trees balance their use of light, water and nutrients, and how this affects the CO₂ uptake of entire forests.

A bed in which you don’t snore and 20 other ETH Zurich research projects with a practical application – Industry Day 2017 offered these inside views. About 600 people from the business community used the platform to engage in an exchange.

The ETH spin-off SpinningBytes programs software that uses machine learning not only to analyse but also to understand huge amounts of data. It enables customised solutions to be developed for numerous IT problems, and allows new insights to be gained from previously unused data.

SpaceX held its second Hyperloop pod competition yesterday in Los Angeles. The Swissloop team including ETH students achieved an outstanding third place finish.

ETH Professor and computer scientist Joachim Buhmann works intensively on healthcare issues. In an interview with ETH News, he explains how computer models will make their way into the world of medicine, and talks about models that are so complicated that humans can no longer process them alone.

Oligosaccharides – chains of sugar building blocks – are essential for biological cells. Scientists had thought that these molecules were freely mobile, but an international research team has now shown that such sugar molecules can form rigid structures, previously found only in DNA and proteins.

The small and medium-sized municipalities own a large share of the settlement area reserves, but often lack sufficient resources and expertise to implement inward development. Successful settlement development requires both a spatial vision and a strategy; good examples can serve as a useful guide here.

What if you had the chance to complete your own research project at ETH over the summer and to join in discussions about the university’s future? Two students, Katherine Bancroft and Siqi Liu, seized this opportunity, made possible by a new student programme at ETH’s Department of Computer Science.

ETH Zurich researchers have identified all the genes required by a bacterium to use methanol as a food source. The results will help scientists advance the use of this resource in the field of biotechnology.

For the first time, ETH researchers have succeeded in applying a millennia-old method for making fabrics to create a completely organic nanoweave. The structure of the trihexagonal “kagome” weave is based on the sophisticated design of the molecules that make up the threads.