11

Cargo transport of molecules within cells is essential for life. Developing synthetic strategies for cargo control in living or inanimate thermal systems could lead to powerful tools to manipulate chemical gradients at the microscale and thus drive processes out of equilibrium to realize work. Researchers from Complex Materials and Institute of Food, Nutrition and Health at ETHZ demonstrated a colloidal analog of the complex biological shuttles responsible for molecular trafficking in cells.

The ETH Zurich’s student association (VSETH) has selected Markus Niederberger, head of the Laboratory for Multifunctional Materials, as a recipient of the "Goldene Eule".

The Materials Research Society has chosen Prof. Nicola Spaldin, Head of the Materials Theory group, to receive the Mid-Career Researcher Award for "her new theoretical framework describing multiferroics and service to the materials community" .

Nicola Spaldin, Professor of Materials Theory, gives a Lise Meitner Lecture on Monday 13 November 2017 in the Vienna Physics Colloquium series.

Dense colloidal suspensions can propagate and absorb large mechanical stresses, including impacts and shocks. In this work, the group of Prof. Lucio Isa in collaboration with scientists in the US and France, generated extreme localized deformations in colloidal crystals by exciting a target particle via pulsed-laser ablation. Stress propagation fronts take place, where fast-moving particles (V approximately a few meters per second) are aligned along the symmetry axes of the lattice.

The selective photoreduction of CO₂ to methanol is an energy efficient way to transform a harmful greenhouse gas into a hydrocarbon of great industrial importance. Researcher at the Laboratory for Multifunctional Materials demonstrate that translucent nanoparticle-based aerogel monoliths are promising photocatalysts for such gas phase reactions. Due to the high mechanical fragility of the aerogels, a special flow reactor was developed.