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Researchers at ETH Zürich have built a quadcopter called FlexiQuad that replaces a rigid frame with a flexible ring-shaped fuselage. The design lets the drone bounce off obstacles like tree trunks, squeeze through narrow gaps, and continue flying instead of crashing to the ground.
A new report from the Swiss Glacier Monitoring Network and the Swiss Commission for Cryosphere Observation found glaciers lost 5.5% of their ice volume in the first eight months of 2026 alone, bringing cumulative losses since 2021 to 19.4%. Glaciologist Matthias Huss of ETH Zurich said some glaciers are now collapsing from internal meltwater cavities rather than just surface melt, and mean glacier thickness dropped 2.5 to 4 meters this year. Separately, MeteoSwiss reported the April-to-September period was the hottest and driest since records began in 1864.
Researchers at ETH Zurich's Soft Robotics Lab have built a robotic hand detached from any arm or body, capable of crawling across surfaces and balancing its own weight using its five fingers. The device manipulates objects and moves using only its digits, without the wrist and arm assembly typical of conventional robotic hands.
A team at ETH Zurich's Soft Robotics Lab has built an off-the-shelf anthropomorphic robotic hand that can walk on its fingertips across multiple surfaces and type on a keyboard while supporting its own weight. The researchers say they largely avoided modifying the hand's fingers or built-in position controller, instead training the robot's behavior, though some physical modifications were needed for it to operate independently.
The Ig Nobel Prizes, awarded annually by Improbable Research since 1991, were handed out this year in Zurich to ten offbeat studies. Winners included researchers who crafted a cross-species scientific definition of kissing, a team linking higher social class to unethical behavior, and a chemistry study on the nutritional value of cockroach milk. Other honored work reportedly examined nose-blowing techniques and used buried underwear to gauge soil health.
The developer behind the PJON networking protocol spent two months building TERMy, a natural-language terminal assistant that avoids using large language models entirely. The project began as an attempt to train small transformer models from scratch on aging consumer hardware, including a GTX 1050 Ti and an i7-4790K, but those experiments produced incoherent or unsettling text outputs.
The 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes, which recognize offbeat but scientifically valid research, were awarded for studies including a splash-free urinal design, using mosquito mouthparts to print tiny nozzles, decomposition rates of buried underwear, and the physics of blowing one's nose. For the first time in 35 years, the ceremony left Boston and was held in Zurich, Switzerland, with future events planned for Antwerp in 2027 and returning to Zurich in even-numbered years after.
Researchers at the University of Zurich recruited 1,000 volunteers to bury cotton underpants in soil across Switzerland for two months as part of a citizen science project called 'Proof by Underpants.' After digging them up, scientists measured how much fabric had decomposed to gauge microbial activity and overall soil quality, publishing the results in Plants People Planet.
Apple TV announced a new heist thriller titled '12 12 12,' premiering November 13 with its first two episodes, followed by weekly releases through December 25. The series stars Anthony Mackie as a disgraced FBI agent and Jamie Dornan as a career criminal, structured around three timelines—12 months of planning, 12 hours of the heist, and the 12 days after—centered on a vault robbery beneath Zurich.