Researchers from ETH Zurich have developed a novel technology that produces liquid hydrocarbon fuels exclusively from sunlight and air. For the first time worldwide they demonstrate the entire thermochemical process chain under real field conditions. The new solar mini-refinery is located on the roof of ETH’s Machine Laboratory building in Zurich. Carbon-neutral fuels are crucial…

Drones are going to change the film industry in a major way. Tobias Nägeli, for one, is sure of that. The computer scientist, who recently finished his doctoral thesis with Otmar Hilliges, a professor of computer science and head of the Advanced Interactive Technologies Lab, was able to show about a year ago that spectacular,…

A new, smart medium-voltage transformer developed at ETH Zurich features cutting-edge semiconductor technology, making it extremely compact and energy efficient. Future applications are ranging from locomotives to fast charging stations for electric vehicles and from power supplies for data centres to use in future power grids. ETH Zurich electrical engineers have developed a smart electronic…

Trained rescue dogs are still the best disaster workers — their sensitive noses help them to track down people buried by earthquakes or avalanches. Like all living creatures, however, dogs need to take breaks every now and again. They are also often not immediately available in disaster areas, and dog teams have to travel from…

Physics students spend many years learning to master the often counterintuitive laws and effects of quantum mechanics. For instance, the quantum state of a physical system may be undetermined until a measurement is made, and a measurement on one part of the system can influence the state of a distant part without any exchange of…

There will soon be nothing that cannot be produced with 3D printing. However, the materials used for this process are still “dead matter” such as plastics or metals. A group of ETH researchers led by Professor André Studart, Head of the Laboratory for Complex Materials, has now introduced a new 3D printing platform that works using living…

The manufacture of cement, bricks, bathroom tiles and porcelain crockery normally requires a great deal of heat: a kiln is used to fire the ceramic materials at temperatures well in excess of 1,000°C. Now, material scientists from ETH Zurich have developed what seems at first glance to be an astonishingly simple method of manufacture that…

Researchers from the Institute for Biomedical Engineering, which is operated jointly by ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich, have succeeded in measuring tiny changes in strong magnetic fields with unprecedented precision. In their experiments, the scientists magnetised a water droplet inside a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner, a device that is used for medical…

The present-day chemical industry is based on oil: many chemical products – from plastics through to detergents and solvents to medication and crop protection products – have their origins in oil and its constituents. Since oil reserves are finite, scientists have been looking for ways to manufacture these products from sustainable materials. An international research…

Researchers at ETH Zurich and Disney Research Zurich have developed a new technique called Computational Thermoforming. It enables them to manufacture plastic replicas of digital 3D models, in which the shape and colour are reproduced in detail. This technique extends the range of digital fabrication methods and represents an efficient and cost-effective alternative to colour…

A new 3-D microprinting process allows scientists to easily manufacture tiny, complex metal components. The used technology was designed by ETH researchers years ago for biological research and has now been further developed for a completely different application. Scientists at ETH Zurich have developed a new method of 3D microprinting. This can be used to…

If you travel by plane in the coming months, you might witness a wintry aviation ritual in which ice and snow are cleared off the wings with a special liquid. That is necessary since tiny water droplets in the air may freeze to ice in certain weather conditions when settling on the aircraft’s wings. That,…

ETH material engineers found that the performance of ion-conducting ceramic membranes that are so important in industry depends largely on their strain and buckling profiles. For the first time, scientists can now selectively manipulate the buckling profile, and thus the physical properties, allowing new technical applications of these membranes. “Ionics, ion-based data processing and energy…

Most magnetic materials have a structure that is somewhat more complicated than a commercially available domestic magnet: they not only have a north and south pole, but a variety of sectors, often only a few nanometres in size, in each of which the magnetic axis points in a different direction. These sectors are referred to…

Professor Otmar Hilliges and his staff at ETH Zurich have developed a new app enabling users to operate their smartphone with gestures. This development expands the range of potential interactions with such devices. It does seem slightly odd at first: you hold the phone in one hand, and move the other in the air above…

ETH Zurich researchers from the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE) in Basel have developed an implantable device that precisely monitors acid build-up in the body for people with diabetes and produces insulin if acidosis becomes a risk. Many human metabolic functions only run smoothly if the acid level in the body remains neutral…

D-Wave – a special computing machine with this name has been getting computer scientists and physicists talking for a number of years now. The Canadian technology company of the same name is advertising the machine as a quantum computer. However, whether or not the machine does in fact use quantum effects is the subject of…