News: Faculty

University of Chicago professor David A. Mazziotti, and grad students LeeAnn M. Sager-Smith and Anna O. Schouten, explained how they discovered the link and what it could mean for the future of how we power our homes and cities.

Physicists will resume their hunt for astrophysical monsters: black holes and neutron stars going bump in the dark and emitting ripples in space called gravitational waves. But one of the three detectors that have spotted such waves—Virgo, near Pisa, Italy—has run into technical problems that will delay its restart, 3 years after all the facilities shut down for maintenance and upgrades. 

Stimulating nerves on the back of your hand makes it feel like you are grasping things in VR without needing to have your palms covered in material.

Update: NASA's super pressure baloon mission terminated due to anomaly - May 14

On May 12, NASA launched an experiment built by a PSD-led international team to send a scientific balloon to 110,000 feet above the Earth. The project, termed Extreme Universe Space Observatory on a Super Pressure Balloon or EUSO-SPB2, is searching for messengers from outer space: tiny, highly energetic particles that hit the Earth on their way from elsewhere in the universe.

Photo by NASA/Bill Rodman

A team led by scientists from UChicago and the University of Maryland used the Webb telescope to observe GJ 1214b’s atmosphere by measuring the heat it emits while orbiting its host star. The exoplanet is too hot to be habitable, but likely contains water vapor.

A new way to gauge the universe’s expansion rate has delivered a confusing result that may conflict with previous related measurements.

New observations and sharper tools are fueling the debate over a long-sought measurement of how fast the universe is expanding.

Profs. Wendy Freedman and Matthew Stephens have been elected to the Royal Society, a fellowship of many of the world’s most eminent scientists and the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence. This year, 59 scientists from around the world were elected Fellows or Foreign Members of the Society for their outstanding contributions to science.

The National Science Foundation has awarded $52.66 million to upgrade the Simons Observatory, a set of telescopes high in the Chilean desert that looks for traces of light from the earliest epochs of the universe.  Improvements include upgraded receiver, solar panels to power the observatory and data processing pipeline

New Scientist features a mechanical backpack developed by Prof. Pedro Lopes and his colleagues. JumpMod can enhance the sensation of virtual reality by sliding a weight up and down.

U.S. News & World Report released the 2023 rankings for the top science schools for graduate education in the United States. The Physical Sciences Division at the University of Chicago was well-represented in top rankings for graduate programs and specialties.

A University of Chicago study found links at the atomic level between photosynthesis and exciton condensates—a strange state of physics that allows energy to flow frictionlessly through a material. The finding is scientifically intriguing and may suggest new ways to think about designing electronics, the authors said.

Modern science suggests that we and all our achievements and memories are destined to vanish like a dream. Is that sad or good?

Leading scholars, tech developers, and entrepreneurs discussed how A.I. and machine learning are being used for scientific discovery at the inaugural University of Chicago and Caltech Conference on AI+Science, sponsored by the Tom and Margo Pritzker Foundation. The event, hosted in late March, brought together dozens of leading researchers in core AI and domain sciences to lead conversations and drive partnerships that will shape future research priorities, industry investment and entrepreneurial opportunities. 

Radiocarbon dating, also known as carbon-14 dating, is a method to determine the age of organic materials as old as 60,000 years. First developed in the 1940s at the University of Chicago by Willard Libby, the breakthrough technique ushered in the “radiocarbon revolution” and impacted fields from archaeology to climate science—forever changing our picture of human history.