Latest University of Zurich Stories

MUNICH, Nov. 4 /PRNewswire/ -- In the wake of the financial crisis, how can companies regain public trust and safeguard their corporate reputations? That is the subject of a new management book entitled "Reputation Capital: Building and Maintaining Trust in the 21st Century." The editors, Joachim Klewes and Robert Wreschniok of Ketchum Pleon, a leading European public relations consultancy and part of Ketchum, make the case that strategies for building reputation are strikingly similar to...

The Magnetic Resonance Center of the University Children's Hospital Zurich has achieved a world first break through in MR-guided, non-invasive neurosurgery. Ten patients have been successfully treated by means of transcranial high-intensity focused ultrasound. This fully non-invasive procedure opens new horizons for neurosurgery and the treatment of different neurological brain disorders.In the context of a clinical study at the MR Center of the University Children's Hospital Zurich...

If we imagine our immune system to be a police force for our bodies, then previous work has suggested that the Lymph nodes would be the best candidate structures within the body to act as police stations "“ the regions in which the immune response is organized. However, Prof. Burkhard Becher, University of Zurich, suggests in a new paper "“ published in this week's issue of PLoS Biology "“ that lymph nodes are not essential in the mouse in marshalling T-cells (a main immune foot...

Glaciers around the globe continue to melt at high rates. Tentative figures for the year 2007, of the World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, indicate a further loss of average ice thickness of roughly 0.67 meter water equivalent (m w.e.). Some glaciers in the European Alps lost up to 2.5 m w.e.The new still tentative data of more than 80 glaciers confirm the global trend of fast ice loss since 1980. Glaciers with long-term observation series (30 glaciers in...

Swiss researchers said on Tuesday, that the "love" hormone linked to feelings of sexual pleasure, bonding and maternal care also appears to help us recognize familiar faces.Peter Klaver of the University of Zurich and colleagues reported that men given oxytocin more accurately recalled images of familiar faces but the hormone did not help them recognize inanimate objects.Researchers said the hormone somehow strengthens the brain's neural networks involved in social memory and may...

Some primates have evolved big brains because their extra brainpower helps them live and reproduce longer, an advantage that outweighs the demands of extra years of growth and development they spend reaching adulthood, anthropologists from Duke University and the University of Zurich have concluded in a new study.The four investigators compared key benchmarks in the development of 28 different primate species, ranging from humans living free of modern trappings in South American jungles to...

Zurich --  Ghostly haloes of dark matter as heavy as the earth and as large as our solar system were the first structures to form in the universe, according to new calculations from scientists at the University of Zurich, published in this week's issue of Nature. Our own galaxy still contains quadrillions of these halos with one expected to pass by Earth every few thousand years, leaving a bright, detectable trail of gamma rays in its wake, the scientists say. Day to day, countless random...