August 2, 2021
This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to understand how manipulating RNA can allow plants to yield dramatically more crops and increase drought tolerance, explain why planets with oxygenated atmospheres like ours could host alien life, and extol what billionaires mean for the changing arc of aerospace history. And, a Nobel-winning biochemist, Jack Szostak, will join the faculty in 2022.
Voices
- Prof. Chuan He comments, ‘DNA has four bases. Some viruses swap in a fifth’
- Professor Rocky Kolb comments, ‘The billionaire space race could benefit regular people, too’
- Billionaire space flights are changing the arc of aerospace history
- Neubauer Prof. Ben Zhao discusses online privacy and de-anonymization on NBC
Research
- More cell phone data use is negatively affecting Wi-Fi performance, study find
- New measurement may resolve cosmological crisis
- Planets with seasons like ours could host complex alien life, suggests NASA research
- Argonne, UChicago researchers create method to dramatically reduce data processing time for LIGO detections
- To catch deep-space neutrinos, astronomers lay traps in Greenland’s ice
- Event Horizon Telescope takes pioneering image of massive jet spewing from black hole
- RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50% more potatoes, rice
- Chameleon’s HPC testbed sharpens its edge, presses ‘replay’
Education and Community
- Postdoc Kate Smith receives IEEE Early Career Award in Microelectronics
- Paul Alivisatos and Robert J. Zimmer receive named distinguished service professorships
- Largest-ever CDAC Summer Lab adds 55 students, new social impact track
- Duality quantum accelerator accepts six startups into inaugural cohort
- Max Solomon Lewis, rising third-year student in the College, 2001-2021
- llan Naibryf, rising fourth-year student in the College, 1999-2021
- Blase Ur and Daniel Fabrycky recommend summer reading, alongside other teaching award winners
- Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Jack Szostak to join University of Chicago faculty
- Chicago Quantum Exchange adds new international and regional partners