wire - news in brief

Researchers have developed a smart earpiece that helps people relearn physical actions faster and more easily after a stroke. By stimulating the brain, the earpiece helps it rewire neural circuits. Strokes are the number one cause of persistent physical impairment among adults worldwide. Sufferers often find it hard or even impossible to perform everyday physical actions like walking or reaching for something.

ETH Zurich is boosting its medical research and establishing a new site in Schlieren. It is leasing a new building (SSA) right next to the Bio-Technopark in Schlieren; the site is currently being set up as a laboratory building for medical research.

UN International Day of Forests on 21 March is the perfect opportunity to showcase some of the important forest research being done at EPFL.

Life is a constant stream of decisions that pit sober reflection against powerful emotions, conscious deliberation against gut instincts. Using complex models and sophisticated experiments, researchers study how we combine these different decision-making strategies. One mention of insects is enough to draw a sceptical smile from Michael Siegrist.

Gregor Weiss is fascinated by the inner workings of our cells and is driven by the hope of finding a non-antibiotic therapy for urinary tract infections.

The federal government has just published the updated Red List of fish and cyclostomes. Eawag was involved.

Three scientific prizes will be awarded this year by the Leenaards Foundation, including two for research carried out in partnership with EPFL.

FMI researchers are awarded competitive grants and fellowship throughout the year, which speaks for the quality and potential of their work.

Biologists at Eawag have identified ten species of whitefish in the lakes of the Reuss river system. Of these, seven have been described as distinct species for the first time - although in two cases this required inspection of specimens from historical collections, since eutrophication of lakes in the 20th century also led to the extinction of fish species in Central Switzerland.

As the population ages, the number of people with Alzheimer's disease in Europe will double by 2050.

Researchers at ETH Zurich and the Swiss Federal research institute WSL have developed a flying device that can land on tree branches to take samples. This opens up a new dimension for scientists previously reserved for biodiversity researchers. Ecologists are increasingly using traces of genetic material left behind by living organisms left behind in the environment, called environmental DNA (eDNA), to catalogue and monitor biodiversity.

In this new series, we feature FMI alumni and the diverse careers they have chosen after leaving our institute.

Paul Glimcher, co-founder of the field of neuroeconomics and professor at New York University, recently held a keynote speech at UZH.

We posed this question to researchers. In return, we got five intriguing answers from the perspectives of biomedicine, computer science, biology, robotics and philosophy. Life and death within us ''DNA is the building block of life. It contains all the information necessary for life, from reproduction and metabolism to growth and the ability to respond to stimuli.

FMI researchers have honed in on a key process that happens when yeast cells divide to form gametes, which are the equivalents of human sperm and egg.

The ETH Board has appointed Christian Wolfrum as Vice President for Research at ETH Zurich effective 1 January 2023.

New work by FMI researchers shows that key proteins help to stabilize the interaction between otherwise highly dynamic DNA structures.

A medication used to treat MS also has a beneficial effect on the composition of the intestinal flora, according to researchers from the University of Basel and the University Hospital Basel. Conversely, the gut flora also plays a role in which side effects occur during treatment with the medication.

For the first time, farmers in the Philippines have cultivated Golden Rice on a larger scale and harvested almost 70 tonnes of grains this October.This nearly never-ending story began at ETH Zurich.

Scientists from Eawag, along with researchers from the former Eawag spin-off aQuatox-Solutions and the National Institute of Biology in Slovenia, have won almost 800,000 Swiss francs in the second phase of a contest run by the British Centre for the Replacement of Animals in Research. Countless chemical substances that are in daily use, such as pesticides, pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals, sooner or later find their way into rivers, lakes and groundwater.

Wyss Center symposium at Campus Biotech Tuesday 6 December 13h All welcome Register here Over recent years, research groups and companies have accelerated the development of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) with the goal of restoring movement and communication for people with severe paralysis.

Blood stem cell transplantation is a radical but highly effective therapy for multiple sclerosis. A study led by the University of Zurich has now examined in detail the way in which the treatment curbs the autoimmune disease and how the immune system regenerates afterwards. A better understanding of these mechanisms should help the treatment approach, currently approved in only a few countries, to gain wider acceptance.

Vascular aging is the most common cause of fatal cardiovascular diseases. Can blood vessels be rejuvenated using fat cells? Cardiologist Soheil Saeedi is developing a novel method to do just that.

"These new results are an important step towards demonstrating safety and efficacy of the device while recording and transmitting neural data in real time over a period of months.

The study "Subcapsular sinus macrophages promote melanoma metastasis to the sentinel lymph nodes via an IL-1?-STAT3 axis" has been published in the scientific journal Cancer Immunology Research.

The Paul Scherrer Institute PSI and Apollo Health Ventures launched Focal Biosciences.

The three FMI internal science prizes are awarded yearly and recognize respectively the best thesis, the best postdoc study and an ingenious new method or tool.

Scientists have a duty to initiate a dialogue with the public on cellular engineering, says Daniel Müller.

It has long been proven that daylight has a positive influence on physical and mental health. Nevertheless, this knowledge is still little used in everyday life and in the clinic.

It has long been proven that daylight has a positive influence on physical and mental health. Nevertheless, this knowledge is rarely used in everyday life or in clinical practice.

On 1 September 2022, a new research group led by Dr Arianna Baggiolini began its activities at the Institute of Oncology Research (IOR) in Bellinzona.

Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a method to explore the possibilities of how the pandemic virus could evolve. Thanks to their work, it may be possible to develop antibody therapies and vaccines that are more likely to be effective also against future viral variants. SARS-CoV-2 is constantly mutating and each new variant often catches the world by surprise.