Lake Geneva: more going on under the surface than we know
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Elemo, short for Exploration des eaux lémaniques (exploring Lake Geneva’s waters) got underway Tuesday, with Russian Mir submersibles heading 200 metres down into the canyons and cliffs of Lake Geneva. The project is based at the EPFL, the federal polytechnic in Lausanne.
One of Elemo’s first tests will help researchers to understand how the cliffs, which are essentially unstable heaps of sediment as high as 50 metres at a depth of as much as 200 metres, were formed by the Rhone, through sampling and then dating the sediment. A second will measure the amount of methane released from the deep canyons as organic matter decomposes.
Methane is a greenhouse gas.
Stephanie Girardclos, from the University of Geneva, heads the project with these two studies, for which four researchers going on the dives will be gathering data this week.
Elemo includes 15 other projects, mostly environmental, with researchers looking at micropollutants, biology, geology and the physics of currents. A succession of teams will work throughout the summer on various dive sites, says the EPFL.
Flavio Anselmetti, a researcher for the Swiss aquatic research institute Eawag, who is part of the Elemo team, says new data could help us better understand the lake, including historical events. “A collapse of the canyon could be what caused the tsunami that swept across the lake and destroyed the bridges in Geneva in 563,” he says. “These are extremely rare events, but it’s important to assess the risk.”
The canyons are formed as the Rhone pours into it: the river is colder and sediment-rich from glacier-fed streams and rivers in canton Valais and eastern Vaud. It continues to flow through the lake. “It really is a river at the bottom of the lake, carving out valleys as it meanders along,” says Anselmetti.
The lake remains a mystery in many ways, surprising considering that half of the drinking water for the population of 1.5 million in the region comes from the lake.
Eawag is responsible for four of the projects.
International scientists have access to the submersibles for research purposes thanks to support from Ferring Pharmaceuticals in Saint Prex, canton Vaud, the Russian Federation’s Honorary Consulate in Lausanne and the EPFL. Ferring is financing most of the project and the company’s chairman, Frederik Paulsen, was at the site of the first dives Tuesday. He was joined by Don Walsh, an American oceanographer who was with Jacques Piccard during their famous descent into the Mariana Trench 23 January 1960, the deepest point of the world’s ocean, in the bathyscaphe Trieste. It went down to a record maximum of 10,911 metres.
Background story, GenevaLunch, 1 March 2011
China's Three Gorges dam in 2009
BERN, SWITZERLAND – China and Switzerland signed a letter of understanding Wednesday 1 June for the Alpine nation to provide monitoring services for Chinese dams.
Jiao Yong, China’s vice-minister for Water Resources, and Walter Steinmann, director of the Swiss Federal Energy Office, signed a letter of intent during the six-day meeting in Lucerne of nearly 1,000 of the world’s top specialists in hydraulic dams.
Switzerland has the world’s most dense system of dams, and it has the world’s highest in cement, the Grande-Dixence, 285 metres high. Switzerland relies heavily on hydraulic power, which supplies 55 percent of the country’s electricity, and dams play a crucial role in this system.
China’s construction of the Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze in the past decade drew world attention, but the country’s growing dam system now includes some 26,000 dams that are more than 15 metres high.
This size?
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Computer content and other tech designers now have a helping hand in getting their displays right for an aging population. Iso, the Geneva-based International Standards Organization, 3 February issued new standards that will make life easier for anyone over 50, if the designers read the fine print on the standards.
The first standard is ISO 24502:2010, Ergonomics – Accessible design – Specification of age-related luminance contrast for coloured light.
Iso states in a press release that “it specifies a method of calculation that can be applied to the design of visual signs and displays, so that they are clearly visible to older people, although the luminance contrast can be applied to people aged from 10 to 79 years of age. For example, increasing the contrast (especially for blue light), size and overall visibility of sign displays or integrating features such as oversized monitors or large character display fonts as part of product design can greatly help people with visual difficulties.”
or this size?
The second standard, ISO 24501:2010, Ergonomics – Accessible design – Sound pressure levels of auditory signals for consumer products, “aims to determine an appropriate sound level range of auditory signals, so that all users, including people with age-related hearing loss, can hear them properly against interfering sounds.
Iso produces Guidelines for standards developers to address the needs of older persons and persons with disabilities, available through the Iso store.
PlanetSolar shortly after taking off from Monaco 27 September 2010 (photo ©2010 PlanetSolar)
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - MS Tûranor PlanetSolar has made it across the Atlantic in 26 days, 19 hours and 10 minutes, one of the founders of the Swiss solar boat project, Raphael Domjan, says. The team is seeking official confirmation that it has set a new world record for a solarboat crossing the Atlantic.
It arrived in the bay of Marigot in the early hours of Thursday 18 November and is anchored off the island of St Maarten, in the Caribbean Sea.
This is the first leg of its attempt to sail around the world using only solar power. The crew began its journey in Monaco 27 September.
Swiss military jets leaving streams over the Alps during maneuvers for the World Economic Forum, January 2010
Sion, Switzerland (GenevaLunch.com) – An F-18 fighter jet 7,000 metres high and performing aerial combat maneuvers startled vacationers in the Swiss Alps and residents of the Sion region Monday 26 July when it passed the speed of sound. Military authorities at the Sion air base told ats wire service that although it is uncommon for pilots to do this in the region, there is nothing special or worrisome about it, and the pilot, concentrating on maneuvers, may not even have been aware of crossing that line.
The skies in Valais were noisy with military jets in training Monday but at around 10:20 a large boom that sounded like an explosion occurred, rattling windows.
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The cost of subscribing to a Swiss daily newspaper will rise in 2010, between 1 and 11 percent, to keep in step with increased costs and lower advertising revenues. The rise is even greater in reality in some cases such as the NZZ, when a mid-2009 increase is taken into account, notes ats/TSR. The newspaper’s editor, Markus Spillmann, has written to subscribers saying that “High quality information is an expensive product.”
The traditional income balance has been one-third subscriptions and two-thirds advertising, but with the latter falling dramatically for several months, readers are now being asked to foot a larger share of the bill. Newstand prices are also set to rise.
The rising cost of Swiss papers, according to ats/TSR, includes:
- Le Matin and 24 Heures, CHF379 to CHF389
- Le Temps, 11 percent, from current price of CHF432 for 13 months
- NZZ, from CHF488 to CHF512.
Background, GenevaLunch
Shared Internet news ok, but not on radio and TV
Geneva / Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The merger of TSR, public television in French-speaking Switzerland, and RSR, public radio, is meeting some resistance from cantonal governments, which insist the two editorial teams must remain separate and independent. Vaud and Geneva, in a joint statement released Monday 23 November, say they would also like to see the traditional roles maintained of Lausanne as a radio centre and Geneva as a television centre. The statement was made in advance of today’s presentation of the merger project to the board of SSR, the parent company.
Metal glass (top), traditional magnesium alloy (bottom), © 2009 ETH Zurich
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - A substance that can stabilize broken bones as they heal, then is absorbed by the body when it is no longer needed, has been developed by materials researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (FITZ). The new material, called metal glass, is an alloy of magnesium, zinc and calcium that is cooled extremely rapidly to prevent it from forming the typical crystalline structure of a metal. The team announced the news in the science journal Nature Materials.
© Copyright 2009 ITU/ M.Zouhri
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Geneva plays host next week to the 2009 edition of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) World Telecom 2009 event at Palexpo, 5-9 October. It returns to Geneva after two years in Hong Kong. World Telecom is traditionally one of the most important meetings in the telecoms and internet communications technology world: it is both a forum and an exhibit, with stands from more than 40 countries this year, bringing together chiefs of industry and government ministers with a stake in the telecoms world.
Some 30 heads of state are expected for the 2009 event.
The only exception: DFEA (Swiss foreign affairs) employees can still visit Facebook
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The second most visited web site in Swiss government offices, a January 2009 investigation showed, was the social network Facebook. Government employees were invited to show a bit of restraint in May and they did cut back somewhat, but Facebook remains the fourth most visited site at work – and the volume of downloads has increased in most departments.
Zurich/Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Swiss newspapers’ print versions are seeing their circulations rise, albeit a slight 0.6 percent. The most recent figures from the Remp survey, done by the Swiss advertising media’s independent research organization, shows that 92.4% of Swiss people over age 14 read a newspaper “more or less regularly,” without defining the frequency. Remp notes that figures for the number of readers has remained “remarkably stable” over the past 10 years.
Le Temps and 24 Heures are the winners for growth in French-speaking Switzerland, among the for-pay newspapers.
Don Hewitt, who died in New York at age 86, is a name who might not be known to households across the US, but he’s known to media people as a journalist who had a major impact on the development of US broadcast journalism: he was the creator of “60 Minutes”, arguably one of the most influential news background programmes on television, and when he left his role there in 2004 he became executive producer of CBS News. Hewitt’s career spanned nearly 60 years, most of it with CBS. The “60 Minutes” staff are preparing an hour-long show on his career, to air at 19:00 Eastern US time Sunday 23 August.
Alem Kitmama, Ethiopia: safe water is a major health problem (image: WHO)
Updated 20 August Basel, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Much-touted low-cost, easily applied solar treatments to disinfect water are not reducing diarrhea as expected, says a team at the Swiss Tropical Institute-University of Basel (STI). The group recommends that “Further global promotion of Sodis for general use should be undertaken with care until such evidence is available.” Daniel Maeusezahl and his team have published their findings from studies carried out in Bolivia in PLoS Medicine, a scientific journal.
Their report is a blow to hopes that developing countries can use a readily available, inexpensive solution to the often-deadly problem of diarrhea due to untreated water. Pneumonia, diarrhea and malnutrition account for most of the 10.8 million child deaths that occur annually around the world and an estimated 60 percent of these are preventable according to the STI.
The problem lies not so much in the science as in humans using the solution correctly, it appears. Ed note: a discussion comment on the study, by Zulfiqar A Bhutta, Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan interprets the study somewhat differently: “The failure of some plausible interventions when implemented at scale may also reflect a failure of delivery strategies rather than an ineffective intervention.” (see Frank Stinger comment here)
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Parties involved in the negotiations for a settlement in the UBS court case in Miami, Florida, USA – the Swiss and US governments as well as the bank itself – have agreed to total silence on details of the agreement they are working out while the negotiations continue, in theory to 7 August. But the ban on information is not keeping media from speculating, always citing unnamed sources which are usually called sources close to the negotiations.
Image: © 2009 Fina championships, Rome
Lausanne, Switzerland and Rome, Italy (GenevaLunch) – Swimming records continue to tumble at the Fina World Championships in Rome but the main issue has been “When is a swimsuit “performance enhancing?” Professor Jan-Anders Manson at EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Tecnnology) in Lausanne is leading a group of scientists to provide guidelines on acceptable materials. His group will ultimately decide what is a “textile” and what is not for new rules that ban non-textile swimwear, which go into effect in 2010. The Rome championships are the last major competition where polyurethane swimming suits are allowed, following a decision 28 July by the Fina (International Swimming Federation) to accept recommendations four days earlier by its Congress to change the rules at the start of 2010.
Olympic superstar Michael Phelps has threatened to stop racing until the ban on polyurethane suits is introduced, after seeing Paul Biedermann, an unknown German, beat him into second place and smash his 200-metre freestyle record by almost a second.
Swiss traffic jam, autoroute, 2009: doubling up might help
Update 16:25 Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Paleo Festival Nyon is well and truly over for this year, and we all had very good fun. The festival’s organizers tried even harder this year to encourage public transportation, as GenevaLunch described in its users’ guide to the festival.
Among those efforts was Klaxonne.com, an experiment in “dynamic ride-sharing“, bringing together demand and supply for a ride to a certain place at a certain time, using text messages or sms. Klaxonne was moderately successful at Paleo.
Title: Workshop: Create your own blog and blog fest.
Location: Geneva
Link out: Click here
Description: Learn how to create your own blog, find out which software programs are free and much more. Workshops are free and open to all at different public libraries in Geneva. In French only.
Each Thursday morning from 9:00 to 12:00 until 28 May. Blog fest: 2 to 4 June.
Start Date: 07 May 2009
End Date: 04 Jun 2009
Title: Lift Conference: Inspiring and connecting pioneers, Geneva
Location: Geneva
Link out: Click here
Description: Lift is a series of events built around a community of doers and thinkers who get together in Europe and Asia to explore the social consequences of new technologies.
Each conference is a chance to turn changes into opportunities by anticipating the major shifts ahead, and meeting the people who drive them.
Start Date: 25 Feb 2009
End Date: 27 Feb 2009
