#ethz

This game was developed by students at ETH, in Zurich. It looks lovely and the soundtrack is beautiful. Worth a try.

Maybe some actual pictures coming tomorrow.

GENEVA: The Swiss weather service said Monday a heat wave has driven the zero-degree Celsius level to its highest altitude since recordings on it in Switzerland began nearly 70 years ago, an ominous new sign for the country’s vaunted glaciers.MeteoSwiss says the zero-degree isotherm level reached 5,298 meters (17,381 feet) above sea level over Switzerland overnight Sunday to Monday. All of…

The Federal War Office for Alimentation was founded after the First World War, which in time became today’s National Economic Supply (NES) organization, part of the Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research. In its contemporary form, it is a uniquely Swiss solution for safeguarding the country against bottlenecks in vital supplies.

Five of the NES specialist divisions – Foodstuffs, Therapeutic Products, Energy, Information and Communications Technology (ICT), and Logistics – are responsible for ensuring the integrity of these essential supply processes. The Industry Division, on the other hand, is concerned with the provision of industrial material and equipment required by the other specialist divisions, such as packaging. The divisions responsible for Energy, ICT, and Logistics supply processes also indirectly serve as interfaces with other units and are therefore of relatively greater importance, since failures of these processes would have immediate effects on other aspects of supply. For instance, a sustained lack of electricity would also have severe impacts on all other supply processes.

(...) Until the late 1980s, the activities of NES focused on three main application scenarios: War, power-political threats, and severe shortages. With the end of the Cold War, the relevance of the first two cases for the supply situation was diminished in the 1990s, causing the raison d’être of the NES to be questioned from various quarters. 

Silicone 3D printing startup Spectroplast spins out of ETHZ with $1.5M

3D printing has become commonplace in the hardware industry, but because few materials can be used for it easily, the process rarely results in final products. A Swiss startup called Spectroplast hopes to change that with a technique for printing using silicone, opening up all kinds of applications in medicine, robotics, and beyond.

Silicone is not very bioreactive and of course can be made into…

Robots learn to grab and scramble with new levels of agility

Robots are astonishing things, but outside of their accurate domains they are incredibly limited. So flexibility — not physical, but mental — is a regular location of research. a trio of brand-new robotic setups demonstrate ways they can evolve to accommodate novel situations: using both “hands,” getting up after a descend, and understanding visual instructions they’ve never seen before.

The…