Combining science and design to measure our exposure to light

Published:12.12.19 — Daylight plays an essential role in sleep, alertness and hormone regulation. EPFL has joined forces with Geneva School of Art and Design (HEAD – Genève) to develop a wearable sensor that measures how much light an individual is exposed to along with the spectral resolution of that light. 

Nominations of EPFL professors

Published:14.12.19 — The Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology has announced the appointment of 7 professors at EPFL.

New material design tops carbon-capture from wet flue gases

Published:11.12.19 — Chemical engineers at EPFL have designed a material that can capture carbon dioxide from wet flue gasses better than current commercial materials. The work is published in Nature.

Predicting a protein's behavior from its appearance

Published:11.12.19 — Researchers at EPFL have developed a new way to predict a protein’s interactions with other proteins and biomolecules, and its biochemical activity, merely by observing its surface. The method, published in open-source format, opens up new possibilities for artificial protein design.

Increasing food intake by swapping mitochondrial genomes

Published:10.12.19 — To uncover the relationship between variation in genes and phenotypic diversity, geneticists use a set of fully sequenced fruit-fly genomes. But little is known about the variation in the mitochondrial genome, for which mutations are linked to an array of diseases. Now, EPFL scientists have created a high-resolution map of mitochondrial DNA variants in the fruit fly, connecting mitochondrial genes to metabolic traits and diseases.

EPFL startup heads a mission to clean up space

Published:09.12.19 — ClearSpace, a spin-off of EPFL’s Space Center (eSpace), has been selected to lead a major European Space Agency (ESA) space debris de-orbiting project with a total budget topping €100 million. The startup and its consortium will develop and fly the first-ever mission to capture and remove a disused ESA asset from Space.

Liquid flow is influenced by a quantum effect in water

Published:07.12.19 — Researchers at EPFL have discovered that the viscosity of solutions of electrically charged polymers dissolved in water is influenced by a quantum effect. This tiny quantum effect influences the way water molecules interact with one another. Yet, it can lead to drastic changes in large-scale observations. This effect could change the way scientists understand the properties and behavior of solutions of biomolecules in water, and lead to a better understanding of biological systems.