Today, the University of Basel and ETH Zurich co-founded the Botnar Research Centre for Child Health (BRCCH) in Basel. They bring together top scientists and clinical researchers from a variety of disciplines in order to develop new methods and digital innovations for global use in paediatrics. The BRCCH is funded by a CHF 100 million contribution from Fondation Botnar in Basel.
Distributed ledger technology with decentralized transaction systems has the potential to fundamentally change the world of finance. To strengthen research in this area, the University of Basel’s President’s Board has appointed the economist Fabian Schär as an assistant professor. The endowed professorship will be financed by Credit Suisse Asset Management (Switzerland) Ltd.
A new technique makes it possible to obtain an individual fingerprint of the current-carrying edge states occurring in novel materials such as topological insulators and 2D materials.
Academics on social media: some call it a trivialization of science, others an opportunity for direct dialogue with the public. In reality, there is much more to this trend than a simple dichotomy. Three scientists at the University of Basel show that communicating about research can not only be complicated or trivial, but also humorous and relatable. With several thousand followers, they have successfully established themselves as micro-influencers on various social networks.
Blood vessel formation relies on the ability of vascular cells to move while remaining firmly connected to each other. This enables the vessels to grow and sprout without leaking any blood. In the current issue of “Nature Communications”, scientists from the Biozentrum at the University of Basel describe how this works.
Silvia Arber and Botond Roska, both professors at the University of Basel, have been selected as co-recipients of the 2018 W. Alden Spencer Award in recognition of their outstanding contributions to understanding developmental and functional mechanisms of motor and visual system circuitry respectively.
Between April and August this year, Switzerland and central Europe have experienced the driest summer season since 1864. Especially the forest seems to suffer from this dry spell: As early as August, trees began to turn brown this year. A current study by the University of Basel indicates now that native forest trees can cope much better with the drought than previously expected. It is, however, too early to give the all-clear as a consistently warmer and dryer climate might still put our native forests at risk.
Physicists at the University of Basel are working on using the spin of an electron confined in a semiconductor nanostructure as a unit of information for future quantum computers. For the first time, they have now been able to experimentally demonstrate a mechanism of electron spin relaxation that was predicted 15 years ago. The scientists also succeeded in keeping the direction of the electron spin fixed for almost a minute – a new record.
Scientists have demonstrated that the motor cortex is necessary for the execution of corrective movements in response to unexpected changes of sensory input but not when the same movements are executed spontaneously. Signatures of differential neuronal usage in the cortex accompany these two phenomena.
