News

Enabled by a U.S. Department of Energy program, a collaboration of scientists from Fermilab, UChicago, NOIRLab, and other institutions demonstrated that skipper-CCD detectors can be utilized to improve cosmology research.

A CBS Saturday Morning video discusses a farmer participating in an unusual experiment to help a farm thrive in rising temperatures. GeoSci Asst. Prof. Clara Blättler comments, starting at 2:25.

Lab heralds ‘new era of scientific discovery’ for everything from batteries to biology at Advanced Photon Source.

Researchers at UChicago Pritzker Molecular Engineering and UChicago Physics plan to use a $1.5 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to develop an entirely new method of engineering superconductors for quantum computers and other high-tech applications.

In this Scientific American article, mathematicians, including associate professor Ewain Gwynne, picked the most dazzling, thought-provoking, and compelling equations they know.

Brave research program or potentially dangerous foray into solar geoengineering? UChicago President Alivisatos and numerous PSD professors discuss the topic in this Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article.

The tool, called AudioSeal, could eventually help tackle the growing use of voice cloning tools for scams and misinformation. Computer scientist Ben Zhao discusses the system in this MIT Technology Review article. 

David Ballantyne Rowley, Professor Emeritus in UChicago’s Department of the Geophysical Sciences, who specialized in paleoaltimetry, paleogeography, and tectonics, is remembered for noble contrarianism, gregarious curiosity, and love of nature. 

 

The Giant Magellan Telescope and architecture and engineering firm IDOM announced that the telescope’s enclosure, set to be one of the world’s largest astronomical facilities, passed its final design review and is now ready for construction in Chile. The review marks a major milestone for the telescope, which is now 40% under construction and on track to be operational by the early 2030s.

The prestigious award recognizes pioneering work in nanoscale materials for medical applications. Alivisatos, University President and the John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Chemistry, is widely known as a pioneer in nanoscience, the study of how materials behave at extremely tiny scales.

Multinational research team, including GeoSci Associate Prof. Pedram Hassanzadeh, will investigate the ocean’s carbon, oxygen, and heat cycles.

A new algorithm developed at UChicago, drawing inspiration from a famous experiment involving shadows in ancient Alexandria, could help quantum computers more efficiently simulate molecular systems with high accuracy.

New Yorker staff writer Rivka Galchen discusses UChicago class Are We Doomed?, cotaught by astrophysicist Daniel Holz. It’s in the interdisciplinary field of existential risk, which studies the threats posed by climate change, nuclear warfare, and artificial intelligence. Listen to the podcast and read the story.

Led by UMass Amherst, goal is to explore grid decarbonization and reduce carbon in computing.

Malfunction of the proteins that sense voltage changes in our nerve cells underlies a number of human diseases throughout the body. A University of Chicago team used an Anton 2 supercomputer developed by D. E. Shaw Research and hosted at PSC to simulate a voltage-sensing protein from a primitive animal to learn how the sensor part of the protein behaves.