Fifty students from ETH Zurich and other Swiss universities want to revolutionise transport. For a race set up by Elon Musk, they have developed a zero emission capsule that could in future transport people and goods through a vacuum tube at almost the speed of sound. Read more 

The ETH Board just appointed eight new professors at ETH Zurich, among them physicist Steven Johnson of the Institute for Quantum Electronics. Read more 

The 'planet-finder instrument' of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), which has partially developed and built at ETH Zurich, has discovered its first exoplanet. HIP 65426b is some 385 light-years from us  — and it turns out that it is a particularly interesting exoplanet. Read more 

Lavinia Heisenberg is a theoretical physicist. She is reluctant to accept that General Relativity can be used to describe the universe only on the assumption of exotic materials and energy sources. Her goal is thus to update Einstein’s theory. Read more 

Studying climate change on a computer, building solar cells, looking at material surfaces using novel microscopes, determining the age of samples using the radio-carbon method: Some 30 high-school students explore each year during the ETH study week different topics at the Department of Physics — a great opportunity for establishing contacts to the world of research and for gaining insights into labs and scientific work. Read more 

Ursula Keller, Professor at the Institute for Quantum Electronics, received today one of the two 2017 Weizmann Women & Science Awards "for pioneering and seminal contributions to ultrafast lasers technology and important breakthroughs in attosecond science". Read more 

In its June issue, the Horizons magazine of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) takes a look at the automation of research, and reports on several examples where ETH physicists use Artificial Intelligence. Read more 

Numerous studies and anecdotal accounts support the notion that scientific work performed by women is treated differently from that of their male peers. Seeking to quantify such gender bias, three ETH PhD students have performed a systematic study of more than 200,000 astronomy publications. The result is unequivocal: papers with female lead authors received on average some 10% fewer citations than similar papers with male lead authors. Read more 

Accurate measurements of the frequencies of weak electric or magnetic fields are important in many applications. Researchers at ETH Zurich have now developed a procedure whereby a quantum sensor measures the frequency of an oscillating magnetic field with unprecedented accuracy. Read more 

The latest episode of the Discovery programme on the BBC World Service is dedicated to quantum computation. BBC journalist Roland Pease met some of the experts, including ETH physicist Jonathan Home, and explored the technology behind the "next information revolution". Read more