June 2017

In the past, climate scientists have tended to underestimate the risk of a co-occurrence of heatwave and drought. This is the conclusion of one of the first studies to examine compound climate extremes.

At the Empa and Eawag NEST building in Dübendorf, eight ETH Zurich professors are collaborating with business partners to build the three-storey DFAB HOUSE. It is the first house in the world to be designed, planned and built using predominantly digital processes.

Sensitive sensors must be isolated from their environment as much as possible to avoid disturbances. Scientists at ETH Zurich have now demonstrated how to remove from and add elementary charges to a nanosphere that can be used for measuring extremely weak forces.

At yesterday's Cyber Risks Summit at ETH Zurich, international experts discussed and presented the latest scientific and technological approaches for effectively protecting society from the dangers of cyberspace.

Lavinia Heisenberg is a theoretical physicist. She is reluctant to accept that General Relativity can be used to describe the universe only on the assumption of exotic materials and energy sources. Her goal is thus to update Einstein’s theory.

Technological innovation, often induced by national and sub-national policies, is a key driver of global climate and energy policy ambition and action. Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement will hardly affect this trend.

Computer scientist Olga Sorkine has won this year’s Rössler Prize for her work in the field of computer graphics. The prize comes with a research award of CHF 200,000.

Patients with age-related retinal disease need regular injections in the eye. At the moment, these must be given by specially trained medical doctors, but a robot may well handle this task in the near future.

Digitalisation is leading to profound changes in more and more areas of life. For ETH President Lino Guzzella, it is clear that these changes present a huge opportunity for Switzerland, as the country offers the ideal conditions in which to build a competitive digital industry.

After an extensive hardware upgrade at the end of last year, the CSCS supercomputer Piz Daint is now the most powerful mainframe computer outside Asia. With a peak performance in excess of 20 petaflops, it will enable pioneering research in Switzerland and Europe.