Research

For mathematician Joaquim Serra, sketches are a gateway to insight. Sketching out geometric relationships helps him unlock the abstract reasonings required to prove his theorems. On Sunday, he is being honoured for his research into partial differential equations.

A research consortium has deciphered the mechanism of CCR5 receptor activation, providing insights for the development of CCR5 drug antagonists for AIDS, cancer, and inflammatory diseases.

EPFL has just opened a new imaging center to serve as a hub for state-of-the-art technology in imaging systems. The only one of its kind in Switzerland, the center pools the imaging expertise that is currently housed at nearly a hundred laboratories in five EPFL schools. The goal is to facilitate cross-disciplinary research and anchor EPFL’s position at the cutting edge of imaging technology for research applications.

The level of self-sufficiency indicates the extent to which agricultural performance ensures food security. But it’s not geared to the challenges that confront agriculture today, says Roman Hüppi.

The most ancient ice in the Alps will be preserved in Antarctica: During its expedition to the Monte Rosa massif, the international Ice Memory team has extracted two ice cores over 80 metres long from Colle Gnifetti, at 4,500 metres. The cores are to be preserved in the ice core archive for future generations of researchers.

An EPFL Master’s student has shown that artificial intelligence can be used to further automate the process of land-use classification in Switzerland, especially for rare and complicated land categories that until now have been classified manually. A stretch of land in Valais Canton served as the sample for her research.

At PSI, researchers are studying magnetism in the range of a millionth of a millimetre. In doing so, they come across exotic phenomena such as frustrated magnets and nano-vortices, which may one day enable better data storage.

Engineers at EPFL and École Polytechnique in France analyzed the friction between pages in a book and the mechanical force needed to bend them. Drawing on their experiments, they developed a new theoretical model for predicting the elasto-frictional behavior of stacked layers.

Hydropower is considered to be CO2-neutral, but certain power plants in tropical regions produce large quantities of greenhouse gases. Researchers at Eawag have now studied how much carbon dioxide escapes into the atmosphere below the Kariba Dam in southern Africa. Such previously ignored emissions must be taken into account by future carbon budgets.

The benefits of strict climate policies are often underestimated in public debate, while the costs are generally overestimated, says Lucas Bretschger. Climate protection does not have a negative impact on economic development.

Researchers at ETH Zurich have recreated a key step in the evolutionary history of viruses in a laboratory experiment. They succeeded in remodeling a natural protein to create capsids capable of storing genetic material.

How do you teach machines to learn for themselves and support people? Andreas Krause is one of Europe’s leading machine learning researchers. His approaches combine mathematical elegance with a sense of social responsibility. He has now been awarded the Rössler Prize, ETH Zurich’s most generous research award.

PSI researchers have developed a new tomography method with which they can measure chemical properties inside catalyst materials in 3-D extremely precisely and faster than before. The application is equally important for science and industry. The researchers published their results today in the journal Science Advances.

EPFL scientists have made an important discovery about the structure of barium titanate, a material used in everyday objects. Their findings refute existing theories on the displacement of the material’s atoms. 

With the latest analytical methods, potentially toxic substances can be detected even at very low concentrations. However, the aim of research is not merely to document such contamination but also to understand how it occurs in streams and groundwater, and to propose mitigation measures.