Research

25 years ago, urine-diverting toilets were no more than an idea, challenging the central paradigm of wastewater treatment plants. Since then, however, modular water technologies have become increasingly important. Using a new method, scientists at Eawag have mapped the dynamics of this transition.

Researchers of the Wellcome Sanger Institute and ETH Zurich have created the first full connectivity map of the human immune system, showing how immune cells communicate with each other and ways to modulate these pathways in disease.

Hubert Keiber, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Werner Siemens Foundation, describes why the Board decided to award a 15 million Swiss francs grant to a team of Empa researchers.

A method known as quantum key distribution has long held the promise of communication security not possible in conventional cryptography. For the first time, an international team of scientists, including researchers from EPFL, has demonstrated experimentally an approach to quantum key distribution based on high-quality quantum entanglement — offering much broader security guarantees than previous schemes.

A team of researchers at Empa developed a water-activated disposable paper battery. The researchers suggest that it could be used to power a wide range of low-power, single-use disposable electronics – such as smart labels for tracking objects, environmental sensors and medical diagnostic devices – and minimize their environmental impact. The proof-of-principle study has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Non-invasive brain stimulation can restore optimal motor skill acquisition in people with diminished learning capabilities, e.g. due to age. The study was carried out by scientists at EPFL.

Scientists from EPFL and the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF have gained deeper insight into how snow slab avalanches form, paving the way to more effective risk assessment measures for these catastrophic events that induce more avalanche accidents and fatalities every year than other types of avalanches.

The new pharmaceutical laboratory for the manufacture of radiopharmaceuticals at PSI is ready for production. With its three state-of-the-art production units, novel and innovative drugs can be brought rapidly into clinical use.

Sarah Kenderdine, head of the Laboratory for Experimental Museology, is leading the digitization and valorization of the Panorama of the Battle of Murten – a 100 x 10-meter work created in 1893 by German panorama painter Louis Braun – in an undertaking that promises to yield one of the largest digital images ever produced.

PSI and ETH Zurich have co-founded the Quantum Computing Hub, where top researchers work together on concepts for quantum computers. One day these machines should comfortably outperform conventional computers in certain computing tasks.

EPFL researchers have shown that people’s perception of office temperature can vary considerably. Personalized climate control could therefore help enhance workers’ comfort – and save energy at the same time.

Even though industrial wastewater is treated at state-of-the art plants, the sheer variety of synthetic organic compounds from the chemical and pharmaceutical industry which end up in surface waters are seriously underestimated. This is shown by a new study carried out by Eawag and ETH Zurich.

Thanks to genetic tools that allow computers to accurately count neurons from microscopy images, EPFL researchers have estimated with unprecedented accuracy the number of neurons and other types of cells in the brain of fruit fly larvae—and discovered that females have substantially more neurons than males.

Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a method that enables time-resolved measurements of electron motion in water clusters lasting only a few attoseconds. The technique can be used for more detailed studies of water as well as faster electronics.

A study published today in Nature Microbiology highlights the great advantage of wastewater monitoring as being rapid, unbiased and cost-effective: the detection of genomic variants of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater offers an early alert and can be based on fewer samples as compared to clinical samples. The bioinformatics tool developed by the groups of Niko Beerenwinkel and Tanja Stadler (ETH, Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering) in collaboration with Eawag and EPFL identifies variants of concern even at low abundance.