Adventskalender: Schweizer Innovation

Cellophane was invented in 1908 by Swiss chemist Jacques E. Brandenberger. Inspired by seeing a wine spill on a restaurant's tablecloth, he decided to create a cloth that could repel liquids rather than absorb them. In 1912 he built a machine to manufacture the film called Cellophane, from cellulose and diaphane (the French word for transparent). 

En 2017 Jacques Dubochet a reçu le prix Nobel de chimie pour avoir développé la technique de cryo-microscopie électronique utilisée pour déterminer la structure à haute résolution des protéines en solution. La cryo-microscopie électronique est une technique de préparation d’échantillons utilisée en microscopie électronique.

When this work was published most economic models routinely assumed that material self-interest is the sole motivation of all people engaging in economic activities. In such models fairness considerations or preferences for cooperation don’t play a role when researchers analyze the outcome of economic interactions. However, there is evidence suggesting that some people care about fairness or have a preference for cooperation.

Hook-and-loop fasteners, hook-and-pile fasteners or touch fasteners, commonly known as Velcro, is the brainchild oftheSwiss engineer George de Mestral.

The Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) images material surfaces at the atomic level. It was developed by Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer at the IBM Research Laboratory in Rüschlikon, Zürich in 1981. They were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for this invention in 1986. For the STM to work, the measured sample must conduct electricity i.e. be a metal or semiconductor. The STM is particular useful for studies in the field of e.g. nanoelectronics.

Formulated by Jacob Bernoulli from Basel, the Bernoulli Distribution describes events having exactly two outcomes e.g. if a flipped coin will come up heads or not, if a rolled dice will be a 6 or another number, or whether you do or do not click the "Read more" link in this post!

Friedrich Miescher war Mediziner und Professor für Physiologie an der Universität Basel. Er ist bekannt als Entdecker der Nukleinsäuren als saure Bestandteile des Zellkerns – der Grundstein zur Entdeckung der DNA und damit zum Verständnis der Vererbung im 20. Jahrhundert.

In 1905, Albert Einstein determined that the laws of physics are identical for all non-accelerating observers, and that the speed of light in a vacuum is independent of the motion of all observers. This is referred to as the Special Theory of Relativity. It introduced a new framework for all of physics and proposed an interweaving of space and time into spacetime. A building block of his theory is that of mass-energy equivalence, defined by the most famous equation in physics, E=mc2.

In 1915, Einstein added the effects of gravitation (acceleration) to form the General Theory of Relativity.

In fluid dynamics, Bernoulli's principle, a particular example of the conservation of energy, states that an increase in the speed of a fluid occurs simultaneously with a decrease in pressure or a decrease in the fluid's potential energy. The principle is named after Basel based mathematician Daniel Bernoulli who published it in his book Hydrodynamica in 1738. Bernoulli is regarded as the founding father of fluid dynamics. A consequence of his principle is that if the velocity increases then the pressure falls. This is exploited by the wing of an aircraft, which is designed to create an area of fast flowing air above its surface. The pressure of this area is lower and so the wing is pulled upwards

Kurt Wüthrich, a biophysicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zürich was awarded the 2002 Nobel prize in Chemistry ”for his development of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy for determining the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution”. He showed how to extend NMR to image biological molecules e.g. proteilns.

Die Computer Programmiersprache Pascal wurde von Niklaus Wirth 1968-69 entworfen, während er als Professor für Informatik an der ETH in Zürich, Schweiz, tätig war und wurde 1970 veröffentlicht. Pascal entwickelte sich weiter über mehrere Stationen via Modula-2 zu Oberon, dessen erste Version 1986 erstellt wurde. Dieser Blogbeitrg ist nur in Englisch verfügbar.

Ab 1989 entwickelten Tim Berners-Lee und sein Team am CERN, dem europäischen Kernforschungszentrum in der Schweiz, das Hypertext Transfer Protocol, zusammen mit den Konzepten URL und HTML, womit die Grundlagen des World Wide Web geschaffen wurden. Dieser Protokoll ist bis heute die Grundlage des "World Wide Webs".