Research

Stanisa Raspopovic connects the digital world of sensors and electrical circuits with the nervous system and its cellular circuits. Now he is the recipient of the 2021 ETH Zurich Latsis Prize.

With the help of artificial intelligence and four collaborative robots, researchers at ETH Zurich are designing and fabricating a 22.5-metre-tall green architectural sculpture.

Rising temperatures, invasive species and other factors have changed the composition of species in Lake Constance over the last century. Researchers are trying to understand how this could have happened and what it means for the lake.

The World Climate Conference in Glasgow has just ended, and the question is whether the goal of maximum global heating of 1.5°C can still be achieved. In a model calculation, Empa researchers show how the energy transition could lead to the lowest possible cumulative emissions: Instead of slowly cutting back emissions, we should quickly push ahead with the conversion to solar energy and use fossil power plants at full capacity for one last time to do so.

The separation toilet save! has won the Design Award Switzerland 2021. This is also a milestone for Tove Larsen. She is a member of the Eawag Directorate and has been researching for almost 30 years how the nutrients in wastewater can be recovered in a useful way. In this interview on the occasion of World Toilet Day 2021, she explains how crucial our handling of wastewater is for climate change and for achieving the SDGs sustainability goals.

Together with a team of researchers and designers, Kai Udert has designed a toilet system that makes it possible to recycle nutrients from wastewater on-site. As a result, valuable nutrients can be recovered and used as fertilisers so that they no longer end up in lakes and oceans where they do a lot of damage. Now he wants to make the system ready for market together with industry partners.

Chronic stress can decrease the quality of our lives, and have long-term negative effects on our health that may be irreversible. The new Hochschulmedizin Zürich flagship project STRESS aims to explore the causes of stress and highlight possible treatments.

A new study from EPFL reveals novel insights into the ultrastructure and biochemical composition of huntingtin aggregates, the mark of Huntington’s disease, pointing to new avenues for treatment strategies.

The EPFL Blue Brain Project has created the first digital reconstruction of the Neuro-Glia-Vascular Architecture providing a new framework to study brain function in health and disease. The study, published in Cerebral Cortex, represents a major milestone because they can now reconstruct the architecture of non-neuronal entities such as blood vessels and the supporting cells called glia. These reconstructions of the brain tissue provide a sub-micron precise framework needed to simulate the molecular interactions relevant to understanding how neurons are supported and nurtured. They can also be used to investigate how drugs interact and explore how neurodegenerative diseases arise.

Researchers at ETH Zurich have discovered major vulnerabilities in DRAM memory devices, which are widely used in computers, tablets and smartphones. The vulnerabilities have now been published together with the National Cyber Security Centre, which for the first time has assigned an identification number for it.

Digital twins are computer-based models of an object or even a human organ, and the technology behind them is advancing at a rapid pace. EPFL will host a series of talks and seminars on this topic at its Digital Twin Days on 15 and 16 November. An ideal opportunity to learn more about the work EPFL researchers are doing in this pioneering field.

An international collaboration led by EPFL chemical engineers has overcome a problem in the manufacturing of perovskites that reduces their efficiency as solar panels. The approach produced perovskite solar panels with an efficiency of 23.9% and operational stability longer than 1000 hours.

By combining two microscopy methods, EPFL researchers are able to see what is happening inside a cell and on its membrane simultaneously, giving unprecedented insight into the cellular processes that occur during infection, for example.

Geophysicists can use a new model to explain the behaviour of a tectonic plate sinking into a subduction zone in the Earth’s mantle: the plate becomes weak and thus more deformable when mineral grains on its underside are shrunk in size.

On 9 November 2021 a lung cancer patient was given proton therapy at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI for the first time in Switzerland.