The Hard Drive - science geeks in Zurich
What is a scientist? what is a science geek? what do they do, and why do we finance them to do it? And do people in Zurich realize that their city hosts possibly the highest density of geeks-pro-capite in Europe -- perhaps the world?
The hard drive is where geeks store their work, music, books, emails -- essentially their entire life. It is also the mysterious drive that leads them to choose a steep and difficult path towards a permanent sense of incompleteness and dissatisfaction.
"The Hard Drive" explores the everyday life of Zurich scientists, from prize-winning enthusiasts traveling all over the world to frustrated graduate students spending the best years of their life in dark underground labs. Lapo Boschi, himself a geek from the ETH, interviews his colleagues, forcing them to explain what they do in a way that even a normal person can manage to understand.
jeden zweiten Samstag im Monat

The Hard Drive - science geeks in Zurich 
Today we talk about: what does programming have to do with physics?what does scientific computing try to accomplish? what is "parallel computing"? Does Google run on supercomputers? And: who are we, where are we going, and what really is there, up in the sky? With: Peter Messmer (NVIDIA) and Christine Corbett Moran (Institute of Theoretical Physics, Uni Zurich)."The Hard Drive" explores the everyday life of Zurich scientists, from prize-winning enthusiasts traveling all over the world to frustrated graduate students spending the best years of their life in dark underground labs. Lapo Boschi, himself a geek from the ETH, interviews his colleagues, forcing them to explain what they do in a way that even a normal person can manage to understand.
jeden zweiten Samstag im Monat

The Hard Drive - science geeks in Zurich 

A special installment of the hard drive with an entirely academic family: Grit Hein, the wife; Cristoph Henning, the husband, and their very little son Leonard. Grit is a neuroscientist who looks into people's brain to see if they are good or evil. Christoph is a philosopher concerned with how to attain happiness. Leonard was sleeping for the entire duration of the interviewing.
"The Hard Drive" explores the everyday life of Zurich scientists, from prize-winning enthusiasts traveling all over the world to frustrated graduate students spending the best years of their life in dark underground labs. Lapo Boschi, himself a geek from the ETH, interviews his colleagues, forcing them to explain what they do in a way that even a normal person can manage to understand.

jeden zweiten Samstag im Monat

The Hard Drive - science geeks in Zurich
What is a scientist? what is a science geek? what do they do, and why do we finance them to do it? And do people in Zurich realize that their city hosts possibly the highest density of geeks-pro-capite in Europe -- perhaps the world?
The hard drive is where geeks store their work, music, books, emails -- essentially their entire life. It is also the mysterious drive that leads them to choose a steep and difficult path towards a permanent sense of incompleteness and dissatisfaction. 
"The Hard Drive" explores the everyday life of Zurich scientists, from prize-winning enthusiasts traveling all over the world to frustrated graduate students spending the best years of their life in dark underground labs. Lapo Boschi, himself a geek from the ETH, interviews his colleagues, forcing them to explain what they do in a way that even a normal person can manage to understand.
Bruno Vaz is a veterinarian, Alessandra a neuropharmacologist, but they both use biology to study rare diseases of genetic origin, whose mechanism is not yet clearly understood: cockayne syndrome and familial hemiplegic migraine. Bruno looks at cells, Alessandra experiments on mice. It quickly becomes clear that your reporter is completely ignorant of biology, genetics and all that, but he tries very hard to understand.
jeden zweiten Samstag im Monat

The Hard Drive - science geeks in Zurich
After the mysterious disappearance of one of the two expected guests, we are left with Joakim Reuteler, who, already as a high school kid, developed his first fuel cell (read: the battery of the future) while his friends were only thinking about football and sex. Now a doctoral student in material science at ETH, Joakim's specialty is to take a very little piece of ceramic, put it in a microscope, take a picture of its microstructure (listen to the show if you want to know what microstructure is!) and do a lot of fancy processing on it, to see if he can predict how well the ceramic is going to conduct electricity.
jeden zweiten Samstag im Monat

The Hard Drive - science geeks in Zurich
The geomagnetist Jerome Noir fills large spheres with liquid metal, sets them in fast rotation, and looks at the mangetic field that they generate: from that he tries to figure out how the Earth's (and other planets') magnetic fields work. The cryptographer Elisa Gorla tells us about the world's biggest numbers, and gives us some surprisingly practical related advice on how to choose, manage and use our passwords. And remember: don't give your password to people you don't know! Email Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist vor Spambots geschützt! Zur Anzeige muss JavaScript eingeschaltet sein! if you want to tell us about your research, or if you would like us to talk about something in particular.
jeden zweiten Samstag im Monat

The Hard Drive - science geeks in Zurich
As cold weather creeps in, the environmental geophysicist Lasse Rabenstein tells about ice, or more precisely about the thickness of the shell of ice covering the Arctic ocean: are we causing it to melt? what will happen to all the polar bears? The other guest is the pain researcher Amrei Wittwer who will pay to torture you and look at your reactions.
jeden zweiten Samstag im Monat

The Hard Drive - science geeks in Zurich
A "popular science" radio show focused on the cosmpolitan scientific community of Zürich.
this week guests are: Zamin Kanji, who can make a cloud and put it in a box (or in other words, an atmospheric chemist who studies the role of dust and other pollutants in the formation of ice clouds, hence climate change); and Martino Giorgioni, who by looking at a rock can tell you what kind of air the dinosaurs were breathing 100,000,000 years ago (or in other words, a geologist who studies the surface remnants of Tethys, an old oceanic plate that sank between Africa and Europe).
jeden zweiten Samstag im Monat

The Hard Drive - science geeks in Zurich
A "popular science" radio show focused on the cosmpolitan scientific community of Zürich.
the two guests today are
-Naveen Kuppuswamy a graduate student in robotics from the Artificial Intelligence Lab of the University of Zurich. His robot Octopus will explain why most animals are soft and not hard. He knows that the robots he builds are not supposed to harm human beings (Asimov's laws of robotics), so nothing to worry about for innocent civilians in Zurich.
-Luca Ballan , from the Institute of Visual Computing at the ETH. Luca teaches machines to see and understand motion, contributing to cutting edge videogame technology. He can also take 1,000 mobile phone videos of the latest
U2 show and turn them into one 3-D movie.
jeden zweiten Samstag im Monat

The Hard Drive - science geeks in Zurich
A "popular science" radio show focused on the cosmpolitan scientific community of Zürich.
the two guests today are:
- Ivana Schoepf, a grad student from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich. More succinctly, a zoologist who spent most of the last 2-3 years in a research station in a remote semi-desertic region of South Africa to study the behaviour of striped mice, and what makes them decide to go look for a mate, or stay home with their parents.
- Alvaro Foletti, aerospatial engineer, former master's student at EPFLausanne and graduate student at ETH Zurich, now working in a project to help reforestation of his native Honduras. An avid reader of science fiction, Alvaro helped designing a tiny satellite (1 liter in volume) with a camera to take pictures of a mysterious atmospheric phenomenon known as "night glow".
jeden zweiten Samstag im Monat