News

The US Department of Defense has invested $2.4 million over two years in deepfake detection technology from a startup called Hive AI. UChicago Prof. Ben Zhao comments on the potential efficacy of this tool.

Internet service providers offer a wide range of speeds in their plans. However, the speed customers pay for is not always consistent with what they experience. Computer Science Prof. Nick Feamster comments on factors that might contribute to varied internet speeds.

California is making so much solar energy that large commercial operators are increasingly forced to stop production, raising questions about the state’s costly plan to shift entirely to carbon-free sources of electricity. Computer science Prof. Andrew Chien comments.

The term “dark energy” was coined by the UChicago astrophysicist Michael Turner in 1998. Since then, details about this phenomenon have remained a mystery to scientists. Prof. Joshua Frieman comments on why it is likely that dark energy was not prevalent during the initial inflation of the Big Bang.

Sneha Vasudevan, who grew up in Chennai, India, and now lives in the Bay Area, earned her Master’s in Applied Data Science (formerly the Master’s in Analytics) in 2022. She is a Lead Technical Project Manager at Uplight, a technology company that “enables energy providers, ecosystem partners, and consumers to conserve, deploy, manage, and monetize energy resources.” We interviewed Sneha about her experiences at UChicago and her career path since.

Scientists and companies increasingly support blocking some sunlight to avoid the worst impacts of global warming. David Keith, head of UChicago's Climate Systems Engineering initiative, is leading the movement in favor of geoengineering experimentation. 

A collaboration between computer engineers and AI specialists at Microsoft and UChicago resulted in the creation of a new language that allows large language models (LLMs) to communicate more efficiently.

University of Chicago President Paul Alivisatos has been named one of this year’s winners of the Enrico Fermi Presidential Award—one of the most prestigious science and technology honors bestowed by the U.S. government—the White House announced Dec. 19.

A pioneering figure in the field of nanoscience, Alivisatos shares the honor with Prof. Héctor D. Abruña of Cornell University and John H. Nuckolls, the former director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. 

The Giant Magellan Telescope announced that Northwestern University has joined its international consortium to construct the $2.54 billion observatory.

As a new partner, Northwestern joins a distinguished group of American institutions driving one of the largest public-private partnerships in science, which includes the University of Chicago, the University of Arizona, Carnegie Science, The University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, Harvard University, the Smithsonian Institution, and Arizona State University. 

Image courtesy of GMTO

John Jumper, SM’12, PhD’17, currently with Google’s DeepMind, received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Dec. 10 in Stockholm, Sweden. Watch his Nobel lecture, "Building chemical and biological intuition into protein structure prediction." His talk begins at 1:09:38.
 

Coating the interior of superconducting radiofrequency (SRF) cavities with a Nb3Sn film can drastically enhance the efficiency and performance of particle accelerator infrastructure. However, imperfections in the deposited Nb3Sn coating limit its implementation as a next-generation SRF material. A study by the Sibener group, in collaboration with Cornell University and Brigham Young University, explores how imperfections form and how they can affect SRF performance. 

On Saturday, November 16, the University of Chicago Chapter of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE UChicago) hosted the SHPE Chicagoland Día de Ciencias at the William Eckhardt Research Center. The STEM outreach event aimed to inspire Hispanic students and their families through hands-on learning, mentorship, and practical resources for academic success.

Congratulations to Wendy Freedman for being named one of Nature’s 10! She is recognized for her pioneering work on Hubble constant measurements. 

Congratulations to Chemistry Department alumni Jiuyun Shi, PhD’23 (Bozhi Tian Group), and Nan Li, PhD’23 (Sihong Wang Group), for being named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list!

A new study uses data collected by the South Pole Telescope to deepen our understanding of how the universe was born and evolved.