ETH Podcast episode 1 to 9
ETH researcher Grace Crain thinks on a galactic scale. She is hoping to develop an ecosystem that could provide food, drinking water and clean air to astronauts on a space station or to the inhabitants of a Moon or Mars base. In this ETH podcast, she explains why she chooses to use human urine and faeces to fertilise her plants.
“Everything I do on the computer or smartphone is public to a certain extent,” says computer scientist Hoda Heidari. In the new ETH Podcast, she and Elliott Ash, Professor for Law, Economics, and Data Science, talk about the huge digital footprint that we leave behind us on a daily basis. They also discuss how big data is changing the world and our perceptions, why governments are still lagging behind this transformation and how algorithms can learn and become fairer in the process.
Many small, local steps may lead more effectively to peace than big dreams of a perfect state. This principle lies at the heart of an innovative approach to conflict mediation developed by the late Kenyan mediator Dekha Ibrahim Abdi and ETH peace researcher Simon Mason. In this podcast, Simon Mason and Kaltuma Hassan Noorow, the mediator’s daughter, talk about their experiences in Kenya and Switzerland. They also refer to their unconditional will to work – and live – for global peace, not for hatred.
Julia Wysling, a 28-year-old mathematics graduate and former VSETH President, and Richard Ernst, the 85-year-old Nobel laureate in chemistry, talk about their alma mater, their experiences abroad – plus the challenges they faced when returning to Switzerland – and what they’re most passionate about (besides science, of course). This special episode of the podcast forms as a supplement to the current issue of the ETH magazine Globe, which focuses on the 150th anniversary of the ETH Alumni Association.
Last November, news from China shook the research community. Scientist He Jiankui claimed he had edited the genomes of twin girls with the CRISPR/Cas technology. Effy Vayena, Professor of Bioethics at ETH Zurich, and Hantao Zhao, a Chinese PhD student at Disney Research and the Chair of Cognitive Science at ETH Zurich, discuss the ethical implications of this case. Does the nationality of researchers play a role in ethical views and how does global competition in science influence ethical decisions?
The ETH spin-off external pageANYbotics offers a very special product: a dog-like robot that goes by the name of ANYmal. In the future, ANYmal is to play a leading role in maintenance work in the sewerage system or on offshore platforms. However, for this to happen, the company must identify potential customers and convince them of ANYmal’s capabilities.
external pageHaelixa is a young ETH spin-off that aims to commercialise robust DNA-based tracers for tracking fluids and solids. Spin-off founder Michela Puddu is happy to have the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Lab (ieLab) at ETH Zurich, as there are enough other challenges involved in setting up a company. In our third podcast episode, she and her colleague Punit Mehra talk about these challenges.
Would you be willing to spend four days and nights developing a project with strangers? And what about doing it in public in a glass box? The external pageInCube Challenge organised by the external pageETH Entrepreneur Club, a student-run non-profit organisation, requires participants to do just that. In our latest podcast episode we experience these intensive days together with a participant and one of the co-organisers.
In the first episode of the new ETH podcast, we travel to Los Angeles with the students from external pageSwissloop to the third Hyperloop Pod Competition. Over 1,000 student teams from all over the world applied to take part. Swissloop, an association of students from ETH Zurich and other Swiss universities, was one of the 20 teams that received an invitation to the 2018 competition. But the field gets even narrower in the final: only the three best pods get to travel through the 1.25-kilometre long vacuum tube, and the fastest one wins.