Antimatter trapped and stored - Photo Cern
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – One of the universe’s open questions may be a step closer to being answered thanks to over 30 atoms of antihydrogen that have been trapped and stored by scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, Cern.
This opens the path to new ways of making detailed measurements of antihydrogen, Cern notes in a written statement 18 November. It will allow scientists to compare matter and antimatter, the latter being what annihilates ordinary matter in a single explosive flash of energy.
The finding is related to the re-creation of the mini Big Bang at Cern in early November.
“At the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should have been produced in equal amounts. However, we know that our world is made up of matter: antimatter seems to have disappeared,” says Cern. Investigating a “tiny difference in the properties of matter and antimatter could point towards an explanation of what happened.”
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Tribune de Geneve‘s Wednesday edition carries details of the life of a Canadian man who committed suicide under the windows of Geneva government offices Monday 1 November. The man, an intellectual who recently turned 60 according to the newspaper, had gradually become marginalized and had reached the end of a long battle with the Haute Ecole Internationale and the canton over his academic work. He had been without steady work for years but had refused to sign on for unemployment and in October he was evicted from his apartment in the Old Town.
He had come to Switzerland several years earlier after meeting a Geneva woman. The Montreal taxi driver, passionate about the Alps and about learning, according to the newspaper, undertook several years of research into the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). His educational labours became the focal point of his fight for greater recognition for his work and his skills. Meanwhile, he had cut off links with his family and had gradually become isolated, his lawyer told the Tribune.
Left to right: William Chin, new EPFL/Harvard programme chair, Didier Burkhalter, Harvard, Ernesto Bertarelli, Bertarelli Foundation, Patrick Aebischer, EPFL
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The EPFL in Lausanne has been building a strong research base in bioengineering, including work in neuroengineering, but a grant announced Friday 29 October by the Bertarelli Foundation moves it a firm step closer to being a major international research centre in the area of engineered solutions to help people with neurological impairments.
The field covers a range of healthcare problems for people who have had neurological damage, from birth or from strokes, degenerative diseases and accidents.
The $9 million grant from the Bertarelli Foundation for a joint programme with Harvard in the US brings the two universities together to take neuroprosthetic devices developped at the EPFL to the testing stage at Harvard.
The Bertarelli Foundation in 2009 had already provided some of the initial funding to establish the EPFL’s Neuprosthetics Center, a joint project between the School of Life Sciences and the School of Engineering, where it is housed.
José del R Millán of the centre describes neuroprosthetics as “a rapidly growing discipline that brings together neuroscience and biomedical engineering and seeks to interface the neural system directly to prostheses”.
The centre works with university hospitals in Geneva and Lausanne and with biomedical companies in the Lake Geneva region, but a logical extension of its creation last year is a partnerships to coordinate development work with clinical trials.
Other programmes will be slowed down to accommodate cost cuts, no Cern accelerators to run in 2012
Aerial view Cern - Photo Cern
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will continue to operate at its current budget level, but several other programmes will be slowed at Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in order to save CHF343 million between 2011 and 2015. Member states will contribute CHF135m less than originally budgeted and a “consolidation” of social security systems.The budget plan, presented to Cern’s Council in June, was revised it the council’s request, with cost-saving measures.
“The plan protects the flagship LHC programme, achieving cost savings by slowing down the pace of other programmes,” the organization said in its official announcement. “Cern management considers this a good result for the Laboratory given the current financial environment.”
Cern’s Director General Rolf Heuer, commenting on the cuts, notes that “it reduces spending on research and consolidation through careful and responsible adjustment of the pace originally foreseen in a way that does not compromise the future research programme unduly. The reductions will be painful, but in the current financial environment, they are fair.”
Details of the social security system cost-saving were not published with the announcement.
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Jean-Christophe Leroux, an expert in galenic (natural rather than chemical) studies, was given the CHF100,000 Debiopharm Life Sciences Award at EPFL in Lausanne Tuesday 7 September. Leroux and his team at EPH in Zurich, the other Swiss federal polytechnic university EPFL, are noted for their innovative research on polymer chemistry, nanotechnology and pharmaceutical sciences to yield novel drug therapies, according to Debiopharm, a Swiss-based pharmaceutical company. The award was given as part of an EPFL School of Life Sciences Symposium entitled “Engineering Life”.
Services to expand, open to community
Artist's rendering of new CSS sports and health performance centre in Lausanne
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The CSS (Centre sport et santé), a sports performance centre shared by EPFL and the University of Lausanne, will have a new home in 2012. Lausanne architects Krüger and Kazan have been given the mandate to build the CHF11 million new centre, an extension to the existing Omnisport building, with construction to begin in January 2011.
The project is supported financially by cantonal bank BCV, Vaud’s cantonal sports fund and the Chuv university hospitals.
The new centre will have as its primary focus students at the two universities, but it will be open to the larger community, to others who are interested in measured sports performance at all levels including individuals.
Travel bargains, solar panels, antimatter detectors, flying boats and an all-new old solar system!
Hydroptere.ch unveiled near Lausanne: prototype for world's fastest sailboat (photo ©2010 Gilles Martin-Raget)
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Lake Geneva region has been showing its mettle in science and high tech areas this week. The world’s fastest sailboat project unveiled its new prototype, an entrepreneur has won a major award for his travel bargain’s online database, the region’s largest solar panels park has begun soaking up the sun and an unusual new solar system has been found by a team led by Geneva scientists. And Cern packed off a hulking antimatter detector to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where it will join the final shuttle in the US space programme.
World’s fastest sailboat, Hydroptere, unveils new prototype, soon sailing on Lake Geneva
Alain Thebault, Hydroptere founder, pilot (photo ©2010 Gilles Martin-Raget)
Hydroptere.ch was unveiled 23 August in Ecublens. The sailboat is a water-borne lab that will soon be put into Lake Geneva. It is a prototype for Hydroptère maxi “whose purpose is to beat the most famous oceanic records and to follow Jules Verne’s vision: Flying around the planet”, says Alain Thébault, founder and project pilot. The project is working closely with EPFL, the polytechnic institute in Lausanne.
Hydroptère made sailing milestones in 2009 when the 60-foot trimaran became the fastest sailing craft in the world, beating two absolute sailing speed records: 51.36 knots (95 km/h) over 500 metres and 50.17 knots (93 km/h) over one nautical mile.
Thébault told a press conference early in the week that “The objective of this hybrid sailing boat is versatility. Sailing nearly as fast as Archimedean traditional boats and achieving higher speeds in flight. First on Lake Geneva, then in the Mediterranean and abroad, l’Hydroptère.ch should give answers to precise questions related to flight dynamics and she will be an ambassador of the cross-frontier collaboration.”
Unusual new solar system found sparks “a new era in exoplanet research”
The planetary system around the Sun-like star HD 10180 (artist’s impression)
An international research team led by astronomers at the University of Geneva Observatory in Versoix announced Tuesday 24 August they they have uncovered a new solar system with several intriguing features. It has the smallest exoplanet (a planet that orbits a star other than the Earth’s sun) found to date and it has a configuration of planets never seen before, with five Neptune-like planets.
Vevey, Switzerland (GenevaLunch.com) - Swiss food multinational Nestlé’s research arm is joining forces with a major US hospital research centre to study the the effects of a diet rich in whole grains on body composition and energy metabolism.
A $500,000 gift by Nestlé to the Lerner Research Institute at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, USA, will fund the largest-ever such controlled study.
The Nestlé Research Center near Lausanne will work closely with the Cleveland Clinic centre, with the latter using its MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) experience and the Swiss centre running metabolic analyses on the 40 to 50 people who will participate in the 26-week study.
They will be given meals from the Nestlé Prepared Food Company in Ohio.
In related food news, Migros, Switzerland’s largest supermarket, announced 23 July that it will increase by one-third its purchase of Integrated Production (IP) near-organic grains in 2011.
The IP grains bear the TerreSuisse label used by growers whose farming methods include efforts to aid biodiversity. Details, GenevaLunch food blog, Savouring Switzerland
Links to other sites: Nestlé Research, Nestle announcement of joint study
Kenya in 2009 overtook Sri Lanka as the world’s largest producer of tea, according to the government of Kenya. It says it shipped 342 million kg to 47 markets, accounting for 22 percent of world tea exports, reports AllAfrica. Sri Lanka, long the world’s top exporter of tea, sold 280m kg, according to Kenya’s Tea Board figures. Sicily Kariuki, managing director of the African country’s Tea Board, told AllAfrica that research has played a key role in rising sales, with Kenya now producing some 50 varieties of tea in seven growing regions.
More than strong coffee is needed to treat narcolepsy, often confused with other disorders.
Geneva / Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - A team of doctors and scientists in the Lake Geneva region, working with researchers from France and The Netherlands, have for the first time been able to confirm the “presence of identified and autoreactive antibodies in human narcolepsy.” Nacrolepsy is a sleep disorder characterized by excessive daytime sleepiness and attacks of muscle atonia, or limpness, triggered by strong emotions (cataplexy). The authors of an article published 15 February in the Journal of Clinicial Investigation note that while the medical world has suspected that narcolepsy is an autoimmune disorder, until now there has been no proof.
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – A group of researchers from Australia, Austria and Switzerland have published results of clinical trials which show that fish oil may be a safe and useful preventive treatment for “a range of psychotic conditions, including schizophrenia.”
A far lower proportion of those who took fish oil went on to have psychotic episodes than in the placebo group.
The approval by the US National Institutes of Health of 13 lines of stem cells for use in research means scientists in the United States will have access to embryonic stem cells for the first time in 10 years. The NIH made the announcement Wednesday 2 December, saying that up to 96 lines could be approved under new guidelines. The US eased its restrictions on stem cell research under the direction of President Barack Obama, early in 2009.
Adolf Storms, age 90, has been charged with the murder of 58 people in the final days of the second world war, in northern Germany. A court in Duisberg, western Germany, has brought the charges against the man, a former SS member, who is accused of taking a group of forced labourers to the woods and shooting them 29 March 1945. Storms was found by a student in Vienna who was researching massacres of forced labour workers. The court has not yet decided if it will open proceedings. Die Welt, in a July article about John Demjanjuk, who was brought back to Germany from the US to stand trial as an accessory in the deaths of 27,000 Nazi prisoners during the war, said that Germans have little appetite for more war trials.
Links to other sites: CNN, Independent
A study where a group of 201 African-Americans with narrowing of the arteries were told to take up lifestyle changes or transcendental meditation twice a day for 20 minutes “significantly” reduced heart disease, the BBC reports. The story is based on findings reported at a five-day scientific meeting of the American Heart Association where the latest heart research is being presented.Among other findings reported Monday 16 November: biotech soybeans may prove to be a good alternative to fish oil as a source of heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids and from another study, a telephone-based collaborative care programme speeds recovery and helps coronary bypass patients avoid depression.
Links to other sites: AHA and AHA Science News congress, BBC,
Barry Callebaut supplies chocolate-makers: Salon du Chocolat, Paris, October 2009
Barry Callebaut's chocolate supply samples, Paris Salon du Chocolat, 2009
Zurich / Vevey, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The global economic crisis may have served up stress and more stress to many people, but the Swiss chocolate industry appears to be sailing happily through it: Barry Callebaut sales in 2008-2009 rose 4.1 percent in a world market that contracted by 2 percent last year. The Zurich-based company is the world’s largest supplier of top-quality cocoa and chocolate products. Profits also rose, 18.5 percent for net profits in local currencies, but the strong Swiss franc had a negative impact.The company reported 11 November on its fiscal year, which closed 31 August 2009.
Nestle at the same time has offered chocolate lovers good news from its research laboratory near Vevey: 40 grams of dark chocolate a day, one small square, has been shown in tests to reduce stress levels. The research is published in the Journal of Proteome Research.
Peter Chen, Zurich polytechnic institute (©ETH 2009)
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Peter Chen, head of research at Switzerland’s EPFZ (ETHZ in German) polytechnic institute in Zurich, has resigned effective the end of September, the university has announced. “There are suspicions that scientific data may have been falsified in two publications and a doctoral thesis in 1999 and 2000,” the EPFZ press release says, noting that Chen, a full professor of physical-organic chemistry since 1994, who was the research group leader at the time, called for an investigation. The five-person team has concluded that results were indeed falsified. The research was in the field of basic chemistry.
It is not clear who was responsible for the falsifications, the university states, but “nevertheless, out of respect for ETH Zurich and the function as head of research, Peter Chen has acknowledged his responsibility and decided to step down as vice-president.”
Daniel Borel, Logitech, at the groundbreaking for EPFL's Innovation House (image: ©Herzog, 2009)
innovation houseLausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The groundbreaking ceremony was held Thursday 25 June for Innovation House, a group of five new buildings at EPFL, the Lausanne federal polytechnic institute. It is the latest in a series of major building projects at EPFL designed to turn the school into a full university campus, joining the Rolex Learning Center and student and guest housing, buildings now under construction.
Tolochenaz, Vaud, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Medtronic, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of cardiac stimulators, including pacemakers, is celebrating production of its three millionth device at its Tolochenaz plant. The research centre and manufacturing plant opened in 1996-97 and the first pacemakers made in Switzerland came out in May 1997. The company added a major global training centre in 2002 at the site. Medtronic’s devices also include neurostimulators.
Handling money, or even just thinking about, reduces bad feelings of social exclusion and diminishes the perception of pain. Chinese and American researchers tested volunteers who had handled either money or blank pieces of paper, in a study reported by Nature Magazine in its 14 May issue.They were then asked to participate in an electronic game that simulates tossing a ball between four players, of whom the other three are actually controlled by the computer. Gradually, the human player is excluded from the game. Those who had previously handled money reported feeling less bad than those who had only had blank paper.
In another experiment, volunteers were asked to plunge their hands into hot water. Again, those who had previously handled money reported feeling less pain than those who had only handled pieces of paper. Remembering having spent money, however, reduces the effect.
Lake Geneva region (GenevaLunch) – Medical research work in the region is leading to significant breakthroughs in a number of areas, some of which have made it into the scientific press in recent days. Stewart Cole of EPFL is leading an international team that has identified a tuberculosis (TB)-fighting agent, called BTZ043. Another team at EPFL has worked with Duke University researchers in the US to develop a new treatment for Parkinson’s that stimulates the spinal cord rather than the brain.
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – You can stop blaming your boss for your high stress level: it’s just possible your genes are playing havoc with your brain and helping build that pre-holiday case of anxiety you’ve seen before. Researchers at EPFL, the polytechnic institute in Lausanne, working with others in have turned up evidence that the tendency to suffer from stress may be partly genetic in some cases, or “epigenetic” to be precise: due to genes that have been modified. Read more…
The International Society for Stem Cell Research has issued guidelines for researchers, regulators and patients to combat the growing problem of research to consumer products that are being widely advertised, without scientific testing to back up claims. Reuters
Geneva, Switzerland (swissinfo) – Researchers at the University of Geneva, whose Neurocenter is holding its annual meeting today, have recently made strides in understanding how the brain’s organization is affected by learning and memory functions.
