A call for better governance of climate engineering technologies

Published:19.06.20 — In a study for the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment EPFL’s International Risk Governance Center (IRGC) has brought together a group of global experts to point the way forward for international policymakers grappling with the risks and benefits posed by Carbon Dioxide Removal and Solar Radiation Modification.

Capturing moving subjects in still-life quality

Published:18.06.20 — Researchers at EPFL’s Advanced Quantum Architecture Laboratory and the Wision Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a technique for building crystal-clear images of moving subjects. The team will present its paper at the prestigious SIGGRAPH 2020 conference in August.

Graphene with sodium could make better batteries

Published:18.06.20 — Graphene doped with sodium can be a key player in making cheap batteries and spintronic devices, EPFL scientists discover.

Shoot(s) for the Moon!

Published:17.06.20 — Using robotics to grow and harvest plants without human intervention? That’s the aim of GrowBotHub, an EPFL project under the auspices of the IGLUNA 2020 initiative, in which teams of students work together on technologies that can be used to design a space habitat. Final projects will be presented online in July.

“I kept thinking about those researchers cut off from their families”

Published:17.06.20 — As soon as the lockdown instructions were issued, a still silence took hold behind the large bay windows in the Campus Biotech building in Geneva. When the research projects were uprooted and taken to people’s homes, the sudden isolation was particularly unsettling for some of the new recruits. Talia Salzmann couldn’t just leave them to fend for themselves.

“Huge forest fires put our health at risk”

Published:16.06.20 — After Australia, Siberia is burning, indicating that the frequency of such events is on the rise, with myriad dire consequences: devastated ecosystems, risk of desertification, CO2 emissions, toxic particles, further climate impacts... An expert in atmospheric processes at EPFL, Athanasios Nenes shares his views about it.

Multicolor super-resolution imaging made easy

Published:16.06.20 — Scientists at EPFL have developed robust and easy-to-implement multicolor super-resolution imaging. The approach is based on the simultaneous acquisition of two spectral channels followed by spectral cross-cumulant analysis and unmixing. They exploit fluorophore blinking and spectral crosstalk for the generation of additional color channels with super-resolved images.