The 1900/01 Boxer Rebellion in China resulted in countless looted objects that eventually ended up in museums and collections across the West. A new workspace exhibition at the Ethnographic Museum now shines a light on these objects. More …

Google and Facebook sell our personal data and earn billions worth of profits by doing that. Economist Gregory Crawford and philosopher Francis Cheneval think that they ought to share the money with us and that we should have ownership rights over our personal data. More …

We are experiencing a moment of world history in which many certainties are being questioned and the ground under our feet feels shaky. But instead of wallowing in pessimism, we need to mobilize positive forces and face the problems head on, say legal scholar Matthias Mahlmann and political scientist Stefanie Walter. More …

Eight Swiss museums, including UZH’s Ethnographic Museum, have come together under the Swiss Benin Initiative (BIS) to work with Nigeria in investigating the provenance of their holdings from the historical kingdom of Benin. Alexis Malefakis, who curates the museum’s African collection, discusses the project, the limitations of provenance research, and the restitution of looted artefacts. More …

Many women and men still work in sex-typed occupations. One important reason for this is that men are selectively leaving occupations that are increasingly taken up by women, a recent study from the University of Zurich has shown. This could explain swings in the sex compositions of jobs and why some specializations within occupations become female or male-dominated. More …

There are now 186 journals in Switzerland providing Diamond Open Access, meaning scientific articles can be published and read free of charge. A new PLATO study has collected data about the open access journals and highlighted the sometimes difficult working and publishing conditions. More …

The newly established Postdoc Team Award allows UZH to recognize outstanding interdisciplinary research. The inaugural award has gone to two teams, both of which are developing innovative approaches in healthcare research, such as linking pupil size to stress resilience or exploring what tweets can reveal about our mental health. More …

Evolution, health, and animal and human behavior were among the topics of the most popular 10 media releases from the University of Zurich in 2022. The communiqué with the greatest reach was about a damaged liver successfully treated outside of the human body and then used in a donor organ transplant. More …

The challenges facing the global community today are complex and manifold: climate crisis, war, poverty, inequality, digitalization, a new political world order. The new issue of the UZH Magazin analyzes some of the problems and points to possible solutions. More …

Swiss people’s interest and confidence in science increased during the pandemic but has now returned to pre-Covid levels, the 2022 edition of the Science Barometer Switzerland has shown. Online sources and instant messaging have become the preferred sources for people seeking information on science topics. More …

Does the history of our languages match the history of our genes? A team of scientists at the University of Zurich and the Max-Planck-Institute have revealed a large number of matches – but also widespread mismatches in around 20 percent of cases, including in Malta, Hungary and Namibia. More …

News media is reaching fewer and fewer people. Young adults consume just seven minutes of news per day on their smartphones. This poses a problem for democracy: news-deprived people are less interested in politics, have lower rates of participation in the political process and have less trust in political institutions. More …

Do people who can read and write understand spoken language better than those who are illiterate? Research carried out by a UZH researcher with collaborators in India has found that handwriting, specifically the type of writing system used for a language, influences how our brains process speech. More …

A workspace exhibition at the Ethnographic Museum examines the commercial collecting practices of Borys Malkin, using objects and contemporary documents that came to Zurich in 1969. More …

Historians Monika Dommann and Marietta Meier are working on cases of abuse on behalf of the Catholic Church. Their project exemplifies how historical scholarship can engage in the public discussion of a controversial topic. More …

While learning new things seems to come naturally to children and young people, the older we get the more difficult we find it to acquire new skills. But it’s like sailing – you can make progress even with a headwind, you just have to know how. More …

Learning is itself a skill that must be learned. The best ways to do this and the requirements for success are current topics of research at UZH. The new UZH Magazin examines how our ability to learn changes over the course of our lives, how good teaching works, and what goes on in our brains when we learn. The current issue is published jointly by the University of Zurich and UZH Alumni. More …

The aging population is a global challenge that requires local solutions – to help people lead healthier lives for longer. In the Healthy Longevity Innovation Cluster, researchers from UZH and the University of Queensland are developing innovative approaches to provide targeted support to older people. More …

Happy couples clash over the same issues as unhappy ones, and have just as many conflicts – but they argue differently, shows a large-scale long-term psychological study from UZH. More …

In times of war, the media fulfill a vital function as information providers. The quality of coverage about the war in Ukraine has been relatively high, a study by the University of Zurich has now shown. Swiss media have been offering reports on the war from various perspectives, providing background information and using images carefully. However, the media depend on external sources and have failed to cover some regions indirectly affected by the conflict. More …