On Monday, a referendum in Switzerland aiming to ban the use of all synthetic pesticides was launched. The popular vote, which collected the required 100,000 signatures in 2016, is scheduled for 2020, according to RTS. The pesticides that would be banned include glyphosate and neonicotinoids, a group of chemicals known to kill bees. Vote organisers […]
CERN in contact with Elon Musk about new super-sized collider
Elon Musk has been in communication with the director of CERN about the construction of a tunnel for the proposed super collider under discussion at the Geneva-based organisation. Elon Musk’s Boring Company has been busy boring a hole under Los Angeles, making him a logical person to contact if you have plans to dig a […]
CERN unveils plan for new super-sized collider
Over the next two years the possibility of a new particle collider will be discussed, according to a recent press release from CERN. The new particle accelerator would dwarf the existing one. 100km in circumference, it would form an underground circle containing an area more than three times the size of the canton of Geneva, […]
Swiss driving licences might soon store driver data
Discussions around high tech driving licences containing chips have started in Bern, according to the newspaper Tribune de Genève. Recently, national councillor Franz Grüter (UDC/SVP) put forward a motion to have current Swiss driving licences replaced by high tech ones, a motion supported by around 40 other councillors, mainly from his own party. The new […]
CERN makes a big breakthrough
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 […]
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 […]
