February

We would like to warmly thank Prof. Alayar Kangarlu, Director of the physics and engineering group at NYSPI MRI research center at Columbia University, for his visit to the ISTP and his interesting talk on ultra-​high field magnetic resonance imaging and their importance in medicinal research and diagnostics.

Facts & not fiction. Cattle are still responsible for primary forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon. Professor Rachael Garrett’s recent inaugural lecture on deforestation - causes and necessary policy changes to combat proximity to a tipping point (of no return) - was a real tour de force.

Dr David Garcia is a computational social scientist who focuses on explaining social phenomena through computational models of human behaviour. He is currently a group leader at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna and Medical University of Vienna, Austria. We would like to warmly thank Dr David Garcia for his visit to the ISTP and his interesting and insightful talk.

Electric mobility - still a privilege? Electric mobility is not suitable for mass use yet. This can be partially attributed to the lack of public charging stations. The number of Electric Vehicle (EV) charging stations that are located in public parking lots within cities, is indeed modest, as a recent survey conducted among the ten largest cities in Switzerland by the Swiss Daily Newspaper Tages-Anzeiger indicates.

In collaboration between ETH Zurich and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science & Technology (KNUST), a Summer School on solid waste management in Kumasi, Ghana has been planned. 20 students from ETH Zurich and 40 students from KNUST, all of diverse academic backgrounds and cultures, will be able to benefit of an intensive three-​week learning experience submerging them into the topic of waste.

ETH Zurich has been trying for years to increase the percentage of women in its ranks, not least among its students. So far, these efforts have not met with huge success. Why is that? And what is ETH doing to attract more female students? We asked Rector Sarah Springman. (Re-​post from ETH News)