Archive News

October 10, 2024Members of Eawag's Sandec Department helped organise and participated in the recent Water for Impact (TU Delft) x Eawag Sandec Exchange Day. The aim of the Exchange Day was to enhance mutual understanding of each group’s work, facilitate knowledge exchange, and initiate collaborative efforts for future projects and research.

October 3, 2024Aquatic invertebrates are used as bioindicators to evaluate the quality of Swiss watercourses. However, climate change is also leading to changes in the species composition of these organisms. Eawag has now investigated the impacts of increasing temperatures on water body evaluations on behalf of the FOEN. The findings: the indicators are expected to remain relevant at least for the coming decades.

September 27, 2024A new study led by the Food Packaging Forum provides an overview of chemicals from food contact materials that are present in humans. This research reveals the extent to which chemicals used in food packaging and other food contact articles have been found in human bodies globally, and further highlights significant gaps in Biomonitoring and Toxicity data.

September 20, 2024Last Saturday, numerous visitors flocked to the Eawag and Empa campus in Dübendorf for the Open Day of the two research institutes. Around the Eawag main building, our researchers gave insights into their daily work and at the same time provided information on the pressing issues surrounding water.

September 19, 2024Lenny Winkel (*1975), currently Associate Professor at ETH Zurich and Group Leader at the aquatic research institute Eawag, has been appointed as Full Professor of Environmental Inorganic Geochemistry in the Department of Environmental Systems Science by the ETH Board.

September 9, 2024For the protection of biodiversity, it is crucial to know the reference genome for as many species as possible.

September 4, 2024Monitoring plankton is an important method of controlling water quality. Researchers show how AI could play a role in this in the future (Text in German).

September 3, 2024Biodiversity is not a political programme: Only just 1.6 % of all documents searched at federal level make reference to the term. This is one of the many results that the WSL and Eawag institutes have compiled in the joint research initiative ‘Blue-Green Biodiversity’ and which are being presented today at the Special Info Day to an expert audience from administration, politics, research and practice.

August 22, 2024Microorganisms in biofilms in rivers can break down harmful substances. Some are also able to degrade biocides, including the insect repellent diethyltoluamide (DEET) - or so it is thought. Researchers at the aquatic research institute Eawag have now discovered that DEET is degraded better when the proportion of treated wastewater in the water is high. They attribute this to specific enzymes that occur primarily where wastewater treatment plants return the water to the aquatic environment. However, the enzymes involved are not straightforward to predict.

August 20, 2024Methane-oxidizing bacteria could play a greater role than previously thought in preventing the release of climate-damaging methane from lakes.