For more than a century, the Euler Committee of the Swiss Academy of Sciences has been publishing the works and correspondence of the mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707–1783). The publication of the final printed volume at the end of October also marks the beginning of the digital age, explains Prof. Dr. Hanspeter Kraft, President of the Bernoulli-Euler Society.
The new technology platform is operated jointly by the Universities of Basel and Zurich and the ETH Zurich and offers researchers around Switzerland access to cutting-edge technology in the field of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy.
For a long time, antibiotics were considered a silver bullet against bacterial infections. Over time, many pathogens have adapted to resist antibiotics, so the search for new drugs is becoming increasingly important. An international team of researchers including scientists at the University of Basel, has now discovered a new antibiotic by computational analysis and deciphered its mode of action. Their study is an important step in the development of new effective drugs.
The cerebellum is known primarily for regulation of movement. Researchers at the University of Basel have now discovered that the cerebellum also plays an important role in remembering emotional experiences. The study appears in the journal PNAS.
How did teaching staff cope with the sudden switch to online teaching during the coronavirus pandemic? Researchers from the University of Basel investigated this in collaboration with Eucor – The European Campus. Their conclusion: generally well, albeit with mixed feelings.
Nikon has selected the Department of Biomedicine’s microscopy facility as its first “Center of Excellence” in Switzerland. There are only a few of these centers in the world, including one at Harvard. Co-director of the facility Pascal Lorentz explains what this means for Basel as a center of research.
How is the outlook regarding Covid-19 for the coming weeks? Professor Richard Neher at the Biozentrum, University of Basel, who has been studying the evolution of the virus since the pandemic started, answers some pressing questions.
The Swiss Accreditation Council has institutionally accredited the University of Basel with no conditions. The auditors responsible for the assessment rated the university as outstanding, mentioning a palpable “team spirit” within a “cooperative working environment”.
Neural networks are learning algorithms that approximate the solution to a task by training with available data. However, it is usually unclear how exactly they accomplish this. Two young Basel physicists have now derived mathematical expressions that allow one to calculate the optimal solution without training a network. Their results not only give insight into how those learning algorithms work, but could also help to detect unknown phase transitions in physical systems in the future.
