wire - news in brief

One extreme year follows another. Glaciers in Switzerland lost 6% of their volume in 2022. However, 2023 saw 4% destroyed, representing the second largest decline since measurements began.

Every year over a billion tons of food worldwide are thrown away or perish, at a hefty environmental and climate cost.

Playing Tetris for fifteen minutes can prevent psychological trauma in mothers after a difficult birth: so suggests a large-scale study conducted at CHUV and HUG and published in Molecular Psychiatry.

The Swiss Light Source SLS at PSI will shut down temporarily as part of a major upgrade project. It will come back online in 2025, ready to supply even more powerful synchrotron light than ever for innovative scientific experiments. At 8 a.m. on the morning of Saturday 30 September, the Swiss Light Source SLS, one of PSI's five large research facilities, will be shut down.

Researchers at EPFL have uncovered a fundamental flaw in the training of machine learning systems and elaborated a new formulation for strengthening them against adversarial attacks.

Researchers at the Department of Oncology (UNIL-CHUV) have published an in-depth analysis in the prestigious journal "Cell", shedding light on the hitherto unknown functions of neutrophils in brain tumor environments. Brain tumors remain one of the most complex medical challenges of our time, affecting thousands of lives every year.

Kimberley Perrenoud, a former student at the University of Neuchâtel, will be unveiling her book Parlons suisse ! at the Institut de langue et civilisation françaises (ILCF) on Monday October 2.

Two research studies carried out at USI by Professor Piotr Didyk from the Faculty of Informatics were presented at ACM SIGGRAPH, the world's largest computer graphics conference.

In many Swiss forests, and especially in protection forests, there is a lack of tree regeneration. One reason is the impact of red deer, chamois and roe deer, which browse on tree saplings or rub their antlers against young trees.

PSI researchers are to receive funding from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) as part of its "BRAIN Initiative".

In line with federal figures, animal experimentation at UNIL-CHUV has risen by 4% in 2022. This slight increase is due to the increased use of zebrafish, the boom in cancer research and, above all, the post-Covid catch-up.

Media Research In the run-up to elections and referendums, the news media play an important role in shaping public opinion.

In an international study, the Gallup AG Switzerland polling institute and the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts examined the legitimacy of 25 primary care organizations in Switzerland, Germany and Austria.

New study in Science Immunology shows that individuals with Parkinson's disease exhibit decreased levels of CD8+ memory T cells and fail to generate memory T cells in response to COVID-19 vaccination.

The new Technology Outlook of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (SATW) showcases the most important findings of numerous Swiss experts from science and industry for a prosperous future. In the areas of Energy and Environment, Manufacturing Processes and Materials as well as Life Sciences, eleven scientists contributed to the identification of the most important trends and their impact on technology and society.

A joint study by the Universities of Lucerne and Zurich and the University Hospital Zurich and Swissmedic shows for the first time comprehensively how many people in Switzerland were admitted to hospital due to medication side effects. Despite the legal obligation, only a small proportion of these were reported in the eight-year observation center period.

On 21 September 2023, the ETH Board elected Anita Risch to the WSL Directorate. The ecologist and private lecturer at ETH Zurich researches the interactions and functions of animals, plants and soil organisms in ecosystems around the world.

Scientists at CHUV and the University of Lausanne have shown that in people living with HIV and taking antiretroviral treatment, cells functioning as "reservoirs" continue to produce parts of the virus that continually stimulate the immune system. This discovery opens the way to new therapeutic approaches.

After a 1.5-year postdoc in the Liberali lab — where he co-developed and tested a new microscope to track the development of organoids in real time — Andrea Boni co-founded a company that provides live-imaging systems based on a revolutionary microscopy technology.

3D printing can produce highly complex shapes. But printing ceramic objects with the help of a laser is a more difficult challenge. Now researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI have for the first time taken tomograms revealing what happens at microscopic level during this fabrication process. The findings will help improve this very promising technology.

Converting electricity into hydrogen in order to store sustainable energy over a longer period is a hot topic. With the expertise and the tools of researchers, a master's student at ETH Zurich has investigated whether the use of a so-called power-to-hydrogen-to-power system in a multi-family house makes sense.

EPFL is collaborating with academic and industrial partners to develop a cardiac intervention simulator. This platform is designed to train interventionalists in much the same way as flight simulators are used to train pilots. More and more cardiac interventions are now performed by inserting a small tube called a catheter into a blood vessel in the arm or groin, and from there into the heart chambers.

The ZHAW requires additional space in Winterthur. The canton of Zurich will coordinate the further development of the university closely with the city of Winterthur and align it with its planning.

Researchers want to accelerate the development of urgently needed new energy storage systems with the help of the Aurora battery robot.

Students from ETH Zurich and Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts have broken the previous world record for acceleration with their hand-built electric racing car, mythen.

History An independent team of historians was given unprecedented access to archives of the Swiss Catholic Church to investigate cases of sexual abuse within the church. The researchers have now documented 1,002 cases of sexual abuse committed by Catholic clerics, church staff and members of Catholic orders that have occurred in Switzerland since the mid-20th century.