Switzerland today

Greetings from Bern,

Forget about the maxim “I think, therefore I am”. Instead “I have mass, therefore I am” better explains our existence in this cosmos.

Ten years ago, humans were able to confirm this unique insight into the creation of the universe. The discovery of the Higgs Boson at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva helped us understand how particles moving at the speed of light became objects by acquiring mass. What's next?
 

Keystone / Michael Buholzer

In the news: EU payment, pharma facility, Russian bank and gay marriage

• Switzerland signed an agreement to pay over a billion francsExternal link into the EU cohesion fund that will be used to uplift less well-off members who joined after 2004. Seen as a price to pay to access the EU internal market, both the Swiss and the EU have used it as a pawn in their chess game over an overarching framework agreement that fell through last year. Money well spent or leverage squandered?
• The pharma supplier Lonza has announcedExternal link it planning to spend half a billion francs on a new facility in Stein near the border with Germany. It will be dedicated to the specialised tasks of filling vials with vaccine and finishing the packaging for distribution (known as fill and finish in the industry). It is a process that is often outsourced in the pharma sector and known to cause bottlenecks in the availability of new vaccines.
• Financial transactions with anything Russian have taken a beating since sanctions were imposed following the Ukraine war. The Swiss branch of Russian bank Sberbank was no exception and was forbidden from conducting payments and transactions. On Friday, some of the restrictions were partially lifted so that the bank can settle bills with selective creditors for the next few days. The Swiss branch is not allowed to make payments to its parent company in Russia.
• Gay couples in Switzerland could officially tie the knot from today thanks to a successful referendum last year. Registry offices in big cities have reported strong demandExternal link to convert registered partnerships into civil marriages. 

© Keystone / Laurent Gillieron

Large Hadron Collider: A new era begins

On July 4, 2012, the discovery of the Higgs Boson was announced at CERN Geneva. Ten years later the Large Hadron Collider has restarted its bread and butter activity of colliding protons at full tilt after a hiatus of over three years. Scientists will progressively ramp up the energy and intensity of the beams before delivering collisions to the experiments at a record energyExternal link of 13.6 trillion electronvolts (13.6 TeV) next week.

Collisions observed at CERN between 2010 and 2013 brought proof of the existence of the long-sought Higgs Boson particle which, along with its linked energy field, is thought to be vital to the formation of the universe after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. Physicists hope the resumption of collisions will help in their quest for so-called “dark matter” that lies beyond the visible universe.

All this will take a lot of energy: 1.3 terawatt hours of electricity annually which is the equivalent of the annual power consumption of 300,000 homes in the UK. Is it sustainable? Join the debate.