news 2024

The shark has survived numerous environmental disasters, but now it may be losing the battle against its most dangerous rival: the human being. A new economic analysis shows the conditions under which high demand can lead not only to the extinction of a single species, but also to a progressive, accelerating mass extinction.

A team of Swiss and Greek archaeologists has completed the fourth season of excavations on the wreck of Antikythera, uncovering part of the ship's hull. The 2024 expedition to the Antikythera wreck, carried out from 17 May to 20 June 2024, has led to a breakthrough in the 2021-2025 research program orchestrated by the Swiss School of Archaeology in Greece (ESAG) and supervised by the Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports.

A team from the University of Geneva shows that all the people who lived and were buried in Barmaz necropolises (Switzerland) during the Neolithic period had the same access to food resources. Using isotope geochemistry, a team from the University of Geneva has uncovered new information about the Barmaz necropolis in Valais (Switzerland): 14% of the people buried 6,000 years ago at this site were not locals.

Bronze cauldrons were used by the inhabitants of the Mongolian steppe around 2,700 years ago to process animal blood and milk. This is shown by a protein analysis of archaeological finds from this period. Scattered across the Eurasian steppe, archaeologists repeatedly come across metal cauldrons from the Bronze Age during excavations.

Thanks to a new multidisciplinary approach, a team from the University of Geneva and the CNRS has traced the dietary practices of a Senegalese village. This method will be used for other archaeological digs. Food is more than just a biological need. A veritable marker of culture and identity, it encompasses a wide range of practices that allow us to "read" a region, a country or a social group.

Researchers at the University of Bern have for the first time been able to pin down a prehistoric settlement of early farmers in northern Greece dating back more than 7,000 years to the year. For this they combined annual growth ring measurements on wooden building elements with the sudden spike of cosmogenic radiocarbon in 5259 BC.

Researchers at the University of Basel and the University of Zurich have been able to prove that British squirrels carried leprosy bacteria as early as the Middle Ages. Further results revealed a link between the pathogens found in the medieval rodents and those in the local human population during that period.

A team of researchers from EPFL, UNIL, and Unisanté have published a report that goes through about the legacy of pollution from a trash incinerator that burned in the Lausanne Vallon neighborhood from 1958 to 2005.

Icebergs on the Bosporus and a frozen Black Sea: an international study by the University of Bern with the participation of the Austrian Academy of Sciences shows how volcanic eruptions on Iceland influenced the European climate in the early Middle Ages and led to severe winter cooling anomalies. It was one of the coldest winters the region has ever experienced: In 763, large parts of the Black Sea froze over and icebergs were sighted on the Boporus.

On behalf of Raiffeisen Switzerland Cooperative, researchers examined the beginnings of the Raiffeisen movement in Switzerland. Their focus was on antisemitism as well as Raiffeisen during National Socialism. Raiffeisen Group in Switzerland today has 219 cooperative Raiffeisen banks. It is based on the cooperative movement started by F.W. Raiffeisen in Germany around 1860.

Ozone causes visible damage to the foliage of European deciduous trees, as shown by a large-scale study led by the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL. The researchers found that some plants under certain environmental condition react particularly sensitively to ozone, which is toxic at ground level.

Researchers at the Universities of Basel and Zurich have discovered the genetic material of the pathogen Treponema pallidum in the bones of people who died in Brazil 2,000 years ago. This is the oldest verified discovery of this pathogen thus far, and it proves that humans were suffering from diseases akin to syphilis - known as treponematoses - long before Columbus's discovery of America.