Archive News

December 13, 2018Michael Berg, Stephan Hug, Annette Johnson (in memoriam), Andreas Voegelin and Lenny Winkel from the Department of Water Resources and Drinking Water (W +T) at Eawag have been selected for the “Sandmeyer Award” from the Swiss Chemical Society (SCG) for their many years of work researching contamination of drinking water resources with geogenic elements.

December 12, 2018Antibiotic resistance genes are not completely eliminated by wastewater treatment. While some resistance genes are present in the influent, many others are found in activated sludge bacteria. A recent Eawag study shows that, rather than merely passing through, resistance genes are active and evolve within treatment plants.

December 3, 2018Amphipods in Swiss waters are exposed to insecticides, pharmaceutical residues and other trace substances, and accumulate these in their bodies. However, when water-treatment plants are upgraded, practically no trace substances are found in these organisms according to a new study carried out by Eawag researchers.

November 26, 2018When a population grows quickly and farms intensively, the environment often suffers. This is not only true today, but was also the case as early as Roman times. Evidence of this has been found by Eawag researchers in sediments in Lake Murten.

November 21, 2018Once again, an Eawag doctoral candidate is awarded the Otto-Jaag Water Protection Prize: Wenfeng Liu was honoured for his dissertation "Modelling Global Water-Food-Environment-Trade Nexus in the Context of Agricultural Intensification". The Otto Jaag Water Protection Prize honours outstanding dissertations and master's theses at ETH Zurich in the field of water protection and hydrology.

November 20, 2018There’s a new face at the fishing advisory office (FIBER) in Kastanienbaum: Philip Dermond is taking over from Sébastien Nusslé and is thus the new co-director with Corinne Schmid. Philip Dermond transferred in October from the Fish Ecology and Evolution department at Eawag to FIBER.

November 16, 2018Scientists at Eawag and Zurich University have synthesised for the first time the amounts of carbon transported between many different ecosystems. According to this global synthesis, spatial flows of carbon can be very large – and their significance has previously been underestimated.

November 13, 2018Many infectious viruses are transferred to humans from water or other liquids. A microbiologist at Eawag has now investigated how high the risk of infection is when someone comes into contact with polluted water.

November 12, 2018Michael Berg, head of the Eawag Water Resources and Drinking Water department, has been appointed adjunct professor with the School of Civil Engineering and Surveying at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ). His appointment is linked to becoming one of the members of the “UNESCO Chair on Groundwater Arsenic”, which is based at the USQ.

November 8, 2018It is common among many species for individuals to move around during their lifetime in order to settle in better adapted habitats, a process known as dispersion by ecologists. In order to improve scientific predictions of the future of biodiversity in the face of global changes it is very important to understand the mechanisms of dispersion.