Environment

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.

EPFL scientists have found that streams and rivers – or “running waters” – emit on average four times more CO₂ at night than during the day. That matters because most estimates of global CO₂ emissions are made using measurements taken during the day, thereby introducing a potential bias into the calculation of the global carbon cycle.