news 2019

ETH researchers are making chocolates shimmer in rainbow colours without the addition of colourants. They have found a way to imprint a special structure on the surface of the chocolate to create a targeted colour effect. By playing this video, you agree to the use of cookies by YouTube This may include analytics, personalization, and ads.

Crafty engineering can help solve many problems, including those we face in our own kitchens. At EPFL's Institute of Mechanical Engineering, students from three laboratories tackled some of the most common kitchen challenges as part of the first Kitchen-Inspired Engineering contest. Cooking the perfect poached egg is a lot trickier than it looks.

Globe magazine , News By: Michael Keller To safeguard the long-term future of agricultural production in Switzerland, ETH and Agroscope are investigating how resistant the country's crop­ping systems are to drought. The heatwave of 2018 was yet another warning to both farmers and the public on the effects of climate change: in the future, Switzerland will see less and less rain during the summer months.

Today, scientists of the Institute of Bee Health of the University of Bern and the honeybee research association COLOSS have published an article in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports that shows a synergistic time-lag interaction between the parasitic mite Varroa destructor and neonicotinoid insecticides reducing survival of winter honeybees, Apis mellifera.

Chimpanzees have a mainly vegetarian diet, but do occasionally eat meat. Researchers at the University of Zurich have now shown for the first time that chimpanzees also eat crabs. In the rainforest of Guinea, the researchers observed how chimpanzees regularly fish for crabs. "Our study is the first evidence showing that non-human apes regularly catch and eat aquatic fauna," says Kathelijne Koops, researcher at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Zurich.

Take protein - for instance, in the form of skimmed-milk powder - and put a pinch of it in a test tube. To determine how efficiently this dietary protein is converted into endogenous protein, follow the recipe described in the online science step-by-step in the laboratory. And voilà, the value of the protein, i.e. its benefit for humans, is revealed.

Around two-thirds of the global adult population cannot digest lactose - milk sugar - due to a deficiency in lactase, the enzyme that is required for lactose digestion in humans. Generally, consumers are unaware of whether they are able to digest the lactose contained in dairy products. However, Agroscope and Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) researchers have now discovered a new method to measure the presence of lactase in the human body, and consequently determine an individual's ability to digest lactose.

EPFL's Digital Epidemiology Laboratory has launched Food & You - one of Switzerland's first citizen science initiatives on personalized nutrition. The study aims to create a digital cohort that will help scientists develop nutritional guidelines that can be personalized to specific individuals. Several studies over the past few years have shown that what constitutes a healthy diet for an individual depends to some extent on his or her physiology and lifestyle.