January 2020

Pioneer Fellows Cyrill Hess and Melanie Binggeli want to market duckweed as a healthy food that’s good for the environment.

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.

ETH researchers confirm the paradox: rather than withering during droughts, plants at higher elevations absolutely thrive, as a study just published in the journal Nature Climate Change shows.

For the fourth time, ETH Zurich was present at the WEF in Davos from 21 to 24 January. With the slogan “RETHINKING Creativity”, this year’s exhibition was devoted to the interfaces between art and science – both of which are driven by human creativity.

The Argentinian Tomás Bartoletti wants to tell history from a global perspective. Since the summer of 2019 he has been doing so at ETH Zurich, where he has been researching the story of the Swiss naturalist Johann Jakob von Tschudi and his travels around Latin America. He hopes to discover new insights into Switzerland’s postcolonial past and the history of Latin America.

He built one of the largest modular synthesizers in the world: Joe Paradiso is in the new episode of our podcast.

ETH Pioneer Fellow Marcel Schuck is developing a robotic gripper that can manipulate small and fragile objects without touching them. The technology is based on sound waves.

ETH scientists have further developed QLED technology for screens. They have produced light sources that for the first time emit high-intensity light in only one direction. This reduces scattering losses, which makes the technology extremely energy efficient.

Anna Jobin has investigated together with researchers from the Health Ethics and Policy Lab which ethics guidelines for artificial intelligence already exist, and finds that ethical AI is by no means merely a technical matter.

ETH Meets Davos during the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting 2020 with  "Rethinking Creativity" - an interactive exhibition featuring five new prototypes that  show how creativity plays an essential role in scientific and technological innovation.