TeCHnology

Laboratories could be creating life from scratch by the end of the century, according to Swiss Nobel Prize winner Didier Queloz. “In my opinion it is only a matter of time before we succeed,” he said.

"We have had the power of destruction since we had nuclear weapons. In this century we will attain the divine power of creation by creating artificial life from the ground up,” Queloz told the Tamedia media group in an interview on Friday.

The emergence of life is ultimately a chemical process, says Queloz. "If the conditions are right, life will emerge. I see no need for an initial push from a creator god," said the Nobel Prize winner. ...

A new Swiss instrument has been installed as part of the European Southern Observatory telescope in Chile. Among other things, it will help to search for traces of life on distant planets.

The new instrument is a so-called laser frequency comb, which was developed by the Swiss Centre for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM), the organisation said on Tuesday.

The comb generates light with an exceptionally stable frequency spectrum characterised by evenly distributed lines. It serves as an optical scale, which allows the speed at which a star is travelling towards or away from the Earth to be determined more precisely, the CSEM said. ...

Some 37% of Swiss now use payment methods such as a smartphone or a smart watch – up from 25% just two years ago.

This is shown by the results of the third edition of the Visa Payment Monitor carried out in collaboration with the forsa research institute. According to the representative online survey of 1,000 people in Switzerland, almost three-quarters (72%) now prefer to use digital payment methods.

According to the survey, 27% of Swiss in German-speaking regions actively avoid shops where they can’t pay digitally. The figure is 34% in French-speaking Switzerland and as high as 37% in Ticino. Across Switzerland, the figure is 29%.

Unnoticed by animals, robots from Switzerland have been filming crocodiles and lizards in Uganda. A new version of these robots has now been adapted for use in disaster response. The new robot was presented on Wednesday evening in the journal Science Robotics.

“It's always exciting to build a new robot. But building one that comes so close to nature is even better,” said Kamilo Melo in an interview with Keystone-SDA news agency. Melo founded KM-Robota in Lausanne, a company that develops robots.

Melo started building nature spies because of the British television station BBC. In November 2015, the producers of the BBC documentary “Spy in the Wild” approached Melo, who was doing his doctorate at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) at the time, to design crocodile and lizard-like surveillance robots. These were to be able to stay undetected by real animals on the Nile in Uganda in order to film the competition between the two species. ...

The Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) has equipped itself with a new-generation magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner, assisted by artificial intelligence. It will be tested by a dozen research teams.

This state-of-the-art equipment was acquired jointly by the CHUV, the University of Lausanne and the Biomedical Imaging Center. It weighs just 3 tonnes, half the weight of a standard system, and is around 2 metres high. The magnetic field is also lower.

For the time being, this "low-field" MRI unit is dedicated exclusively to research, a first in Switzerland. The aim is to evaluate the potential of this new technique, the CHUV said in a press release on Wednesday. ...

A unique solar reactor promises to overcome the high costs and transport difficulties involved in developing green hydrogen. The first pilot plant will go into operation in Switzerland in February 2024, but the innovation is also attracting interest abroad.

The parabolic dish installed on the campus of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) does not go unnoticed. With a diameter of seven metres and pointed towards the sky, it looks like a telescope. However, it is designed not to receive radio waves from space but to use sunlight and water to produce hydrogen and oxygen. ...

Hackers have published large amounts of data from the Swiss city of Baden on the darknet, it has been confirmed.

NZZ online first reported the data theft on Monday. Data from the city of Baden, located in northern Switzerland, has been available for download on a hacker forum since last week, including tables with the names and addresses of residents.

In addition to partially public data, such as the city's budget from 2013 to 2023, the NZZ reported the release of sensitive information, such as parts of accounts and a list of people who have been cremated. ...

The Federal Institutes of Technology in Lausanne and Zurich want to position Switzerland as a leading global centre for artificial intelligence (AI). With this aim in mind, they launched an initiative called "Swiss AI" on Monday.

As part of the initiative, new large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT are to be developed and trained, the two universities (federal technology institute ETH Zurich and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL)) announced on Monday. Unlike the large language models currently available to the public, however, the initiative is based on transparency.

"It must be clear to everyone how and on which data the models were trained and how they arrive at their results," emphasised Jan Hesthaven, Academic Vice President of EPFL, in the press release. ...

The discovery of a new planet challenges theoretical models of planet formation. The planet is far too big for its star, according to a new study by an international research team with Swiss participation.

The newly discovered planet, which orbits a so-called M-dwarf star called LHS 3154 with a 3.7-day orbit, is about 13 times more massive than Earth, according to the study published Thursday in the journal Science.

“Such a star, only 0.11 times the mass of the Sun, has never been observed before," wrote astronomer Frédéric Masset of the National University of Mexico in a commentary on the study published in the same journal.

According to the study's authors, including a researcher from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ), current theories of planet formation cannot explain how such a massive planet could have formed around LHS 3154.

An M dwarf star is the smallest and coolest type of star. The theories say that M dwarfs do not produce particularly large planets. Stars form from large clouds of gas and dust. The material left over from the star formation process forms a disc around the star in which planets are later born.

On October 30, Meta announced it would begin offering people in the EU, the European Economic Area, and Switzerland a choice between paying a subscription fee to opt out of any personalized advertising or consenting to ad targeting to continue accessing Facebook and Instagram for free.

Scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) and Wageningen University in the Netherlands have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model that recognises plastic objects floating on the water in satellite images. This could make it possible to eliminate this waste using ships.

The accumulation of waste at sea is certainly visible on Sentinel 2 satellite images from the European Space Agency (ESA). But since we are talking about terabytes of data, they need to be analysed automatically using AI models, EPFL said in a press release on Thursday.

Scientists have developed an AI-based detector that estimates the probability of the presence of marine debris for each pixel of Sentinel-2 satellite images. The detector remains accurate even in difficult conditions, such as when cloud cover and haze prevent existing models from accurately identifying debris. ...

Researchers in Switzerland have developed a technique that uses a robot to trigger auditory hallucinations in healthy people. They want to investigate the causes of this common problem among people with psychiatric illnesses in order to develop possible treatments

Scientists have “no idea what happens in the brain when people have auditory hallucinations”, explains neuroscientist Pavo Orepic from the University of Geneva.

Together with a team of researchers from the Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) and the University of Geneva, he published a study on this subject in October in the medical journal Psychological Medicine. ...

The software company Concevis has been the victim of a cyber attack. Once again, federal government data is involved. The cybercriminals are threatening to publish the data on the darknet.

According to available information, the stolen data probably contains old operational data from the Federal Administration. In-depth analyses are still underway, writes the Federal Department of Finance in a statement on Tuesday.

After stealing the data, the cybercriminals encrypted all the company's servers. After Concevis refused to be blackmailed, the cybercriminals threatened to publish the data on the darknet. The Basel-based company has filed a criminal complaint. ...

A mass spectrometer designed at the University of Bern will be used for chemical analysis of moon rocks.

The Laser Ablation Ionization Mass Spectrometer (LIMS) will be heading to the moon as early as 2027 as part of the NASA Commercial Lunar Payoad Services (CLPS) initiative, the university announced on Thursday.

Landing in the south polar region of the moon will enable LIMS to carry out stationary measurements on site. According to researchers, this region is particularly interesting because certain elements occur there whose isotopes make it possible to determine the age of the material. ...

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Neuroscientists from Lausanne and France presented a neuroprosthetic on Monday that corrects the mobility disorders associated with Parkinson's disease. Once confined to his home, the first patient to receive the implant is now able to walk confidently and without falling.

Walking disorders occur in around 90% of people with advanced Parkinson's disease. Up to now, there have been no treatments available in the majority of cases.

Marc, who is in his 60s, has been living with Parkinson's disease since 1996. Dopamine and then deep brain stimulation, which he underwent in 2004, helped treat his tremors and stiffness. But he also developed severe walking difficulties.

“I could hardly walk without frequent falls, several times a day,” explained Marc, the subject of the study, at an online press briefing organized by the Lausanne University Hospital CHUV and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). He also suffered from “freezing”, a blockage that caused him to be stopped in front of an obstacle, such as an elevator shaft, and be unable to move. ...

No human-like robot is able to outperform humans in a range of tasks but robots are catching up, according to a new study by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zurich.

“For example, there is a robot called Cheetah that can jog faster than humans. But it has a high energy consumption, and when it comes to sprinting, humans are still faster,” Robert Riener from ETH Zurich told the Keystone-SDA news agency.

Together with two other researchers, Riener compared the best humanoid robots (those with human-like features) with humans. The robots were compared on the basis of functions such as locomotion and their underlying structures, such as muscles and motors. The results were published on Tuesday in the journal “Frontiers in Robotics and AI”.

For Riener, the surprising thing about the results of the comparison was not that robots can't hold a candle to humans. “What surprised me was that the individual technical components are already better than those of humans,” said Riener.

Cameras beat eyes, microphones beat ears and motors beat muscles. “Apparently, however, we have not yet managed to assemble these components in such a way that a robot functions better than a human in terms of movement and perception,” said Riener. ...