Signals, in order.

Professor Arno Schlüter of ETH Zurich argues that air conditioning should be used only in special cases, as passive measures such as shading, night‑time ventilation, and fans can already provide effective cooling while reducing energy consumption and heat island effects. He notes that AC units are noisy, energy‑intensive, and use harmful refrigerants, and that efficient building systems like ground‑coupled heat pumps and free cooling can offer sustainable alternatives. The article emphasizes the need for coordinated, selective measures to protect vulnerable populations without compromising cl…

Source: ETH Zurich News

A study from EPFL’s Natural Language Processing Laboratory introduced STING, an automated testing framework that simulates how attackers can gradually persuade large language model agents to carry out harmful tasks over multiple interactions. The researchers tested 176 harmful scenarios across models such as GPT, Gemini, and Claude, finding that multi‑turn attacks were up to twice as likely to succeed compared to single‑prompt tests, and that harmful task completion rates were similar across seven languages tested. The work highlights the need for proactive safety testing in the rapidly evolv…

Source: EPFL News

Researchers from ETH Zurich used a single fibre‑optic cable laid on the Gorner Glacier in Valais to detect internal crevasses with high spatial resolution. The study found that more than eight percent of the ice volume in the measured area consists of ice‑ and air‑filled fractures, higher than expected. The method offers a cost‑effective alternative to deploying hundreds of seismometers.

Source: ETH Zurich News

Luca Thommen, a Pioneer Fellow at ETH Zurich, has built a prototype solar thermal collector that concentrates sunlight to heat air or water up to 150 °C, suitable for industrial processes such as pasteurisation and CO₂ capture. The collector uses inexpensive materials and a simple design to achieve target temperatures, demonstrating feasibility for replacing fossil‑fuel heat in food, chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Industry partners, including Climeworks, have expressed interest in the technology.

Source: ETH Zurich News

EPFL researchers contributed to the creation of the most comprehensive catalogue of human transcription factor DNA‑binding motifs, the Codebook, by performing 4,800 experiments and identifying 177 previously poorly characterized factors. A companion study from the same lab introduced meSMiLE‑seq, a microfluidic assay that compares transcription factor binding to methylated versus unmethylated DNA, revealing that DNA methylation can alter binding affinity for 48 factors. Together, the studies expand the known DNA sequence vocabulary and show how epigenetic marks modulate gene regulation, offer…

Source: EPFL News

Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen used tensor tomography at the Swiss Light Source to reveal that the narwhal tusk contains two counter‑rotating helices of collagen and mineral crystals, giving the tooth exceptional stability. The study, published in Nature Communications, shows how nanoscale building blocks determine the macroscopic spiral shape. The work was conducted in collaboration with synchrotron facilities in Sweden and France.

Source: Swiss Federal Government

Bruker Corporation entered into an expanded strategic collaboration with Atinary Technologies Inc. , the pioneer of Self-Driving Labs technologies and AI-driven R&D with applications in pharmaceuticals, chemicals, energy, and materials.

Source: Startupticker

Published intelligence from the original source record.

Source: Startupticker

ETH Zurich, EPFL and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) released Apertus 1.5, a fully open large language model trained on the Alps supercomputer. The model adds multimodal understanding, improved reasoning, and tool use support, and is available under an Apache 2.0 license for research and commercial use. The release includes a mini suite of 16 compact models and a CSCS inference service for Swiss users.

Source: ETH AI Center

EPFL researchers built a bilayer graphene antidot that acts as a sensitive charge meter, detecting quasiparticles with charges of one‑third, two‑thirds, and other fractions of an electron in various quantum Hall states. The device revealed one‑third and two‑thirds charges at state 8/3 and confirmed predictions for states 4/3, 5/3, 7/3, 2/3, and 3/5. This simple, tunable setup offers a practical method to study topological quantum matter.

Source: EPFL News