On 28 August 2018, six years after the discovery of the Higgs boson, physicists at CERN unveiled their latest breakthrough. The Standard Model of particle physics predicts that about 60% of the time a Higgs boson will decay to a pair of bottom quarks. CERN has just announced that this decay has at last been […]
Switzerland’s first blockchain marriage
Dispensing with administrative officials, a couple in the Swiss canton of Vaud, recently tied the knot using block chain technology, according to the newspaper 20 Minutes. The official record of their agreement to marry is a blockchain-based smart contract. Once an agreement is in the block chain it is essentially impossible to alter. Such technology […]
Swiss town tests blockchain-based voting
On 25 June 2018, the city of Zug, the town at the heart of Switzerland’s crypto valley, started testing a voting system based on blockchain technology. During the trial, which runs until 1 July 2018, around 200 voters will cast non-binding municipal votes on mock questions in a trial designed to identify any bugs in […]
Tainted tuna uncovered by food fraud investigation
A european food fraud investigation has uncovered tainted tuna. Tuna destined for canning was illegally treated with chemicals to transform it from brown to red, fooling customers into thinking it was fresh. Fresh tuna sells for twice the price of canned tuna. The chemicals used are carbon monoxide and nitrites, the same substances often used […]
Switzerland breaks record for highest number of PhD students
In 2017, there were 31,293 doctoral students at Switzerland’s two federal technical universities, EPFL in Lausanne and ETHZ in Zurich. This record figure is 1,000 more than in 2016 and 10,000 more than 10 years ago. The biggest rise in 2017 was the number in computing (+7.5%) and in science and engineering (+4.1%), both higher […]
The Swiss-made plane that went global and starred in Hollywood films
In 1939, Pilatus, a small aircraft maintenance company for the Swiss Air Force was founded in Stans in the canton of Nidwalden. By 1944 it had produced its first aircraft: the Pilatus SB-2 Pelican. However, it wasn’t until 1959 that Pilatus really took off with the launch of the Pilatus Porter PC-6. The PC-6 was […]
Facebook refused 70% of Swiss government requests for information
From 2013 to mid 2017, Switzerland’s authorities sent 361 data requests to Facebook, most related to suspected terrorist activity. The social network refused to provide information for 253 (70%) of these requests, according to the newspaper SonntagsZeitung. Part of the problem is legal differences between the US and Switzerland. Lulzana Musliu, a spokesperson for the […]
How to ensure you’ll still get Le News posts on Facebook
Facebook is changing what ends up in your feed. If you want to continue to see content from Le News there are three simple things you can do. 1. Go to Le News’ Facebook page, click on the “Following menu” and then click “See First”. 2. Sign up to our weekly email newsletter. Just enter […]
How hot politics in the Balkans slowed the clock on your oven
Switzerland’s power grid is part of a large pool of ebbing and flowing electricity spanning 25 countries, known as the Continental European (EC) power grid. Enough electricity must be fed into it to keep it at a stable frequency. The EC’s magic number is 50 Hz. Maintaining this requires a carefully coordinated trans-national balancing act. […]
CERN gains new insight into a particle responsible for the burning of the sun
After years of subatomic particle busting and number crunching, researchers at CERN now know the mass of the W boson particle1. The findings are part of the ATLAS experiment, which uses CERN’s large underground particle accelerator, known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), to smash subatomic particles into each other at extremely high speeds. The […]
