Anyone who owns a smartphone, uses social media or drives a “smart” car unwittingly reveals a lot about themselves. Even data that doesn’t seem sensitive today could in future allow unforeseen conclusions to be drawn about a person’s health, as ethicist Christophe Schneble of the Institute for Biomedical Ethics of the University of Basel explains in this interview.
The company Artidis, a University of Basel spin-off, has announced that it developed a test procedure that can detect breast cancer with a very high sensitivity. This is demonstrated by a clinical trial that investigated whether a nanomechanical biomarker of tissue samples is suitable for the diagnosis of breast cancer.
How can we protect communications against “eavesdropping” if we don’t trust the devices used in the process? This is one of the main questions in quantum cryptography research. Researchers at the University of Basel and ETH Zurich have succeeded in laying the theoretical groundwork for a communication protocol that guarantees one hundred percent privacy.
A survey conducted at the University of Basel and the Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Basel has investigated how sleep has changed during the Covid-19 lockdown. The 435 individuals surveyed – most of whom were women – reported sleeping longer while sleep quality deteriorated. The results of the study were published in the scientific journal Current Biology.
Researchers have developed a strategy that has the potential to improve vision in patients with macular degeneration in the future. Using a gene therapy, they sensitized blind retinas of mice and human organ donors to near-infrared light. The team based at the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel (IOB) has published its results in the journal Science.
Atomically thin layers of the semimetal tungsten ditelluride conduct electricity losslessly along narrow, one-dimensional channels at the crystal edges. The material is therefore a second-order topological insulator. By obtaining experimental proof of this behavior, physicists from the University of Basel have expanded the pool of candidate materials for topological superconductivity. The findings have been published in the journal Nano Letters.
From itching, abdominal pain and exhaustion to unconsciousness: the drug midostaurin can help alleviate these symptoms and improve quality of life in patients with mastocytosis. This has been proven by a research group at the University of Basel.
The Botnar Research Centre for Child Health (BRCCH) is supporting 11 research projects on Covid-19. Within the framework of the “Fast Track Call for Acute Global Health Challenges” (FTC), Fondation Botnar is financing the projects at the BRCCH's partner institutions with a total of around CHF 15 million over two and a half years.
For the first time, researchers have succeeded in creating strong coupling between quantum systems over a greater distance. They accomplished this with a novel method in which a laser loop connects the systems. In the scientific journal Science, the physicists from the University of Basel and University of Hanover reported that the new method opens up new possibilities in quantum networks and quantum sensor technology.
