Environment

In the Alps, it is getting warmer and warmer and spring is starting earlier and earlier. Many species living there can adapt their behaviour as well as their choice of habitat accordingly. But as it is shown in an overview study led by the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) and the CNRS in France, which also includes numerous results from citizen science projects, these adaptations usually do not take place quickly enough.

Biodiversity on Earth is declining dramatically. Eawag has always had a great tradition of supporting research on biodiversity. With modern research approaches and a highly interdisciplinary environment, which is almost the only one of its kind worldwide, it also wants to contribute to ensuring that politics, economy and society have the necessary foundations to understand and preserve biodiversity.

EPFL scientists are beginning to understand why corals in the Gulf of Aqaba, along with their symbiotic algae and bacteria, resist higher temperatures particularly well.

The images leave no one cold: giant vortices of floating plastic trash in the world's oceans with sometimes devastating consequences for their inhabitants – the sobering legacy of our modern lifestyle. Weathering and degradation processes produce countless tiny particles that can now be detected in virtually all ecosystems. But how dangerous are the smallest of them, so-called nanoplastics? Are they a ticking time bomb, as alarming media reports suggest? In the latest issue of the journal Nature Nanotechnology, a team from Empa and ETH Zurich examines the state of current knowledge – or lack thereof – and points out how these important questions should be addressed.

GenoRobotics is an interdisciplinary EPFL project to develop a portable, automated device for extracting and sequencing DNA in any type of environment. The project team hopes their invention will make it easier and faster to map our planet’s biodiversity.