News

A new paper from the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, University of Houston Chemical Engineering Department, and Chicago Center for the Origins of Life suggests rainwater could have helped create a meshy wall around protocells 3.8 billion years ago, a critical step in the transition from tiny beads of RNA to all forms of life.

Meet the futuristic new materials developed by UChicago scientists that could soon be all around us. In the Chemistry Department, professor Bozhi Tian and his colleagues devised a soil-like material designed to promote microbial growth. 
 

A new study led by researchers from the University of Chicago and the University of Pittsburgh introduced new method for altering vinyl systems, important in drug and materials science. 
 

Chemistry Department and Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering Prof. Giulia Galli has been named the 2024-2025 Joseph O. Hirschfelder Awardee. This yearly prize honors exceptional work in theoretical chemistry.

New reports say that users of GPT-4o form unusual bonds with the software’s voice response feature. Computer science professor Blase Ur comments on the importance of further research on this subject. 

For years, measurements of the universe's expansion rate have been overshooting the prediction. UChicago astrophysicist Wendy Freedman has played a crucial role in the ongoing debate about the Hubble constant, a measure of the universe's expansion rate.

Nearly 400 miles off the coast of Antarctica, the Earth’s largest iceberg—whose sprawling surface covers more than 1,600 square miles—is spinning like a top. UChicago glaciologist Douglas MacAyeal comments on the dynamic between the ocean and the iceberg. 

As new reports reveal evidence of a large underground reservoir on Mars, suggesting that the planet might still have water, challenges in this research area still remain. In a notable new paper, UChicago scientists propose a new methodology to warm Mars’s atmosphere.

Gene Mazenko, Professor Emeritus in UChicago’s Department of Physics, the James Franck Institute, and the College, who focused on phase transitions and hydrodynamics of magnets, fluids, liquid crystals, and glasses, died in Antioch, CA, on July 7. He was 79.

Ava Polzin is one of 50 students selected as a 2024 Quad Fellow. Now in its second year, the Quad Fellowship supports exceptional master's and doctoral students pursuing studies in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in the United States.

Sarah Willson, a chemistry graduate student, has won the 2024 Nellie Yeoh Whetten Award from the American Vacuum Society for her thesis research on superconducting materials. The award is one of the highest honors given to a female graduate student for their doctoral research.

A collaborative study between UChicago, Northwestern, and the University of Central Florida proposes a revolutionary approach towards terraforming Mars. This method, using engineered dust particles, could be 5,000 times more efficient than previous proposals.

Assistant Professor Sarah Sebo secures CAREER grant to develop robots with advanced social skills for improved collaboration and learning in schools and beyond.

In this episode of the Big Brains podcast, computer science professors Ben Zhao and Heather Zheng discuss their programs, Glaze and Nightshade, which are copyright protection tools helping artists fight back against generative AI.

Nobel Laureate Tsung-Dao Lee passed away on August 4th. His research overturned the law of conservation of parity, which had been considered a fundamental law of nature for decades. Lee completed his graduate work at the University of Chicago.