Knowledge that works

Homo faber is something of a Swiss national hero. One of the few engineers to have achieved fame in world literature. Damien C. Weber, head of proton therapy at the PSI, has another hero. “Have you...

Cybersecurity, the Swiss way

Cybersecurity. Or security in the digital realm, which is frequently no longer even called cyberspace be-cause it has long since become part of our everyday lives. And that’s precisely where the...

The fun of pure thinking

Alessio Figalli hurries into his office in the main building of ETH Zurich and apologises in a heartfelt Italian way for being two minutes late. His shirt freshly ironed; on his desk a few piles of...

History goes digital: Virtual time machine allows you to step back into the past

“Recently, I was standing on the Rialto Bridge in Venice in front of one of the tourist shops and couldn’t help thinking that in 1740, in this exact spot, Francesco Raspi’s bottega was selling...

Staying young in old age

Johan Auwerx was surprised to be honoured with the prestigious Swiss science prize: "It is good recognition of the research that I have been doing in Switzerland for nine years," the Belgian added....

The guarantee of clean drinking water

The Canton of Basel-Landschaft (BL, “Basel-Country”) is characterised by karst areas used for agriculture, urban settlements in the valleys, and industry with its long history in the urban...

When a field turns into a dangerous slide

24 July 2014: It has been raining for days and now the forecast is for heavy thunderstorms. For five hours it has been pouring down in buckets over the mountains of Emmental. The river Emme is...

Expertise in accelerator technology helps cancer patients

The patient is led into the treatment room, and lies down on the treatment table. After ensuring that she is positioned and held in the right place, the table rotates to the treatment position of the...

Artificial Hand Restores the Sense of Touch

“A Sensation”, “A Moving Breakthrough”, were the headlines in the international press in February 2014, when EPFL-Professor Silvestro Micera and his team published the results of their tests of a new...

A toilet for developing countries

There it is, the very first model in the Eawag foyer in Dübendorf, Zurich. It is a design piece, more than two metres high and made of blue coloured polyethylene. It was dubbed the “poor...