Liquid water is an important prerequisite for life to develop on a planet. As researchers from the University of Bern, the University of Zurich and the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) PlanetS report in a new study, liquid water could also exist for billions of years on planets that are very different from Earth. This calls our currently Earth-centred idea of potentially habitable planets into question.

The EU Research Project -MELISSA: Mobile Artificial Intelligence Solution for Diabetes Adapted Care- was launched today by a consortium of 12 partners, comprising the ARTORG Center Artificial Intelligence in Health and Nutrition (AIHN) lab. AIHN is the artificial intelligence expert in the project and initiated it in collaboration with DEBIOTECH, but due to Switzerland's non-association cannot act as official leading house.

A prestigious grant from the USA goes to the biomedical scientist Sven Rottenberg, University of Bern, and the clinical scientist Intidhar Labidi-Galy, University of Geneva and University Hospital of Geneva. They received a joint grant from the "Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs" for their project on ovarian cancer. This underlines the high quality of the collaborative research on ovarian cancer in Bern and Geneva.

The Mobiliar Lab for Natural Risks of the University of Bern shows that far greater floods are possible in Switzerland than previously assumed. These extreme events underscore the importance of supra-regional emergency planning. A new modeling tool is designed to help manage large floods.

Researchers at the University of Bern have developed a therapy option that activates the body's own defense system against black skin cancer. Components of a bacterium are embedded in gel and applied directly to the area of the tumor. In the model, the gel was shown to reduce tumor growth, inhibit its spread to other organs and thereby prolong survival. In a next step, the gel will be tested for its efficacy in patients in clinical trials.

Brown dwarfs, mysterious objects that straddle the line between stars and planets, are essential to our understanding of both stellar and planetary populations. However, only 40 brown dwarfs could be imaged around stars in almost three decades of searches. An international team led by researchers from the Open University and the University of Bern directly imaged a remarkable four new brown dwarfs thanks to a new innovative search method.

Adults of the same species usually differ very little in their size. A team from the University of Bern and the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (FMI) in Basel has now discovered a mechanism that ensures such size uniformity. The research using nematodes showed that the speed of growth determines the speed of a genetic clock that times development. Thereby, individuals that grow slowly are given more time to grow and can reach the same adult body size.

Altruistic behavior is often seen as an exclusively human characteristic. However, behavioral research has uncovered numerous examples of altruistic behavior in the animal kingdom. In a new study, researchers at the University of Bern show that animals that help others -selflessly- to raise their young generate an evolutionary advantage.