news 2024

Engineers at EPFL and ETH Zurich have come up with a new approach for reducing traffic congestion in large cities during rush hour. Their system is designed to be both fair and effective. Rush-hour traffic congestion is a major headache for commuters and a real problem for city planners. Worldwide, a huge amount of time is wasted stuck in traffic.

Aquatic invertebrates are used as bioindicators to evaluate the quality of Swiss watercourses. However, climate change is also leading to changes in the species composition of these organisms. Eawag has now investigated the impacts of increasing temperatures on water body evaluations on behalf of the FoeN.

EPFL professor's passion for sustainable flying and expertise in machine learning and computer vision drives innovation in green aviation design and beyond. Aerodynamic shape optimization (ASO) is a key technique in aerodynamic design aimed at enhancing an object's physical performance while adhering to specific constraints.

An organism as a tenant in another - in biology, this often works quite well. researchers have now shed light on how such a partnership of a cell in a cell can establish. Endosymbiosis is a fascinating biological phenomenon in which an organism lives inside another. Such an unusual relationship is often beneficial for both parties.

An AI research collaboration led by EPFL professor Alexander Mathis creates a model which provides deep insights into hand movement, which is an essential step for the development of neuroprosthetics and rehabilitation technologies.

A team of scientists including researchers from the University of Bern, the University of Geneva and the NCCR PlanetS used the ESPRESSO Spectrograph to discover a sub-Earth mass exoplanet orbiting Barnard's star, the second-closest star system to the Sun. This discovery helps to understand planetary formation around red dwarfs and provides insights into the diversity of planetary systems in our cosmic neighbourhood.

Public discourse campaigns often promote social responsibility, but do such discussions also impact our market behavior? Economists at the University of Zurich have published a new study that shows that engaging in public discourse increases socially responsible market behavior - regardless of participants' social norms and values.

Researchers at the University of Basel have made significant progress in understanding a rare but serious immune disease. The team has uncovered critical mechanisms involved in the cellular recycling process, thus providing novel therapeutic approaches. LRBA deficiency is a rare and severe autoimmune disorder that was first described in 2012.

A new study from the University of Lausanne reveals how cities influence precipitation and storms, and are prone in summer to more severe and localized rainfall events than surrounding areas. This phenomenon could lead to an increased risk of flooding in the future, as urban areas expand in line with global warming.

In a discovery that sheds light on the complex mechanisms of gene regulation, scientists at EPFL have uncovered a critical role for the protein ZNF274 in keeping certain gene clusters turned off by anchoring them to the cell nucleolus. Our DNA is not just a string of genes; it's a complex and dynamic structure where the spatial organization within the nucleus plays a crucial role in regulating which genes are turned on or off.

A research team led by Inselspital, Bern University Hospital, and the University of Bern has shown that a high percentage of kidney stones are excreted without symptoms. This finding should be incorporated into the future treatment of patients with recurrent kidney stones. Kidney stones are caused by the deposition of minerals and salts in the kidneys and can lead to severe pain when passing through the urinary tract.

Results from a preclinical study in mice, led by EPFL, and a collaborative clinical study in patients show that the type 2 immune response - associated with parasitic infection and thought to play a negative role in cancer immunity - is positively correlated with long-term cancer remission. In 2012, 7-year-old Emily Whitehead became the first pediatric patient to receive pioneering chimeric antigen receptor (CAR-T) therapy to fight the recurrence of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL).

Scientists from the University of Geneva and HUG have developed CAR-T cells capable of targeting malignant gliomas while preserving healthy tissue. Glioblastoma is the most common and most aggressive primary brain tumour, with an average survival after diagnosis of less than two years, and against which current treatments remain ineffective.

What factors lead to chronic respiratory disease? Researchers investigated this question using health data from about 780 infants. Their analysis shows that children's risk of developing asthma later in life can be more reliably predicted by observing the dynamic development of symptoms during the first year of life.

ETH spin-off Terensis is able to forecast the harvest yield and climate risks such as droughts and frost with the help of satellites.

Geneva, 25 September 2024. At a seminar held at CERN this week, the NA62 collaboration reported the unequivocal confirmation of the ultra-rare decay of a positively charged kaon into a positively charged pion and a neutrino-antineutrino pair. Experiments including NA62 have previously measured and seen evidence of this process, but this is the first time it has been measured with a statistical significance of five standard deviations , crossing the threshold traditionally required to claim a discovery in particle physics.

A long-term study by the Universities of Zurich and Utrecht has confirmed a dynamic correlation between self-esteem and sexual satisfaction. The results provide valuable insights about longstanding questions about whether better sex makes you feel better, feeling better makes you have better sex, or both.

Until a few years ago, the butterfly known as the southern small white could barely be found north of the Alps. That was before a Europe-wide invasion that brought a huge increase in the insect's distribution - at the same time as a rapid decrease in genetic diversity within the species. It took a while for zoologist Daniel Berner to notice that a butterfly species that wasn't local to his area had become established in his garden.

Thanks to recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), civil engineers can inspect large-scale infrastructure more efficiently and cost-effectively, while also monitoring the progression of damage severity over time. A team of researchers has demonstrated the feasibility of an AI-driven method for crack detection, growth and monitoring, and will soon test it on the railway section between Zermatt and Brig in Valais Canton.

Antonio Landi, PhD assistant at the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences and winner of USI Equal Opportunities Award 2024 for scientific contributions on topics of equality and diversity , presented his research to us, providing a comprehensive examination of gender medicine. Antonio Landi, could you please explain the research you conducted and the results it led to? "The study, published in JAMA Cardiology, aimed to analyse the impact of gender on optimal drug therapy in patients with coronary atherosclerotic disease undergoing angioplasty with coronary stent placement.