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 […]
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 […]
A high-speed pod that could one day get you from Zurich to Geneva in 15 minutes
A bunch of brainy students at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (Einstein was a student there) designed a prototype of a passenger pod that might one day carry commuters through a vacuum tube in magnetically levitating cars at more than 1,000 km/h. At this speed a trip between Zürich and Geneva could take 15 […]
Swiss government moves closer to personal digital IDs
The idea of digital IDs in Switzerland has been kicked around since 2002 when the government decided it was a good idea. Since then it has been hotly debated. Following a process of consultation, the government met on 15 November 2017, and announced it’s aiming to have some form of digital or e-ID written into Swiss […]
What one Swiss university learned by following student smartphone wifi signals
Researchers followed students on the EPFL campus in Lausanne, Switzerland, for ten days, by tracking their mobile wifi signals. Thanks to help from IT services at the university, researcher Antonin Danalet was able collect information on the movements of 2,000 individuals via their wifi signals over a period of ten days. By linking wifi access point […]
