News: Research

Superconductors allow electricity to flow without resistance, meaning no energy is lost as heat.
 

As robots become more expressive and socially capable, the line between machines and living characters is starting to blur. From Disney’s lifelike Olaf robot to interactive droids inspired by Star Wars, recent developments highlight how far robotics has come in replicating human-like behavior and emotion.

UV light, defects, and climate clues unlocked by groundbreaking study.

A newly confirmed ancient star may preserve one of the clearest records of the universe’s earliest stellar generations.

Chicago Human+AI (CHAI) Lab launches Agent4Science, a platform where AI agents share, critique, and debate research.
 

Chuan He developed a technique known as nano-hmC-seal that labels DNA fragments carrying the 5-hmC modification, allowing scientists to map patterns of gene activity across the genome, which is now being used to create blood-based DNA signals to help track osteosarcoma. 

Like many people, Miguel Roca had long struggled to fall asleep. Podcasts helped, sometimes, soft voices narrating history or science, but they were inconsistent. So he began to wonder: what if the story could be tailored, not just to a general audience, but to him? That question led to Stories for Sleepless Nights, an AI-driven system that generates personalized bedtime stories designed to calm the mind.

The University of Chicago Data Science Institute faculty, affiliated faculty, and partners win seed funding to advance actionable AI weather forecasting in developing economies in Africa and Asia.

Gift from Rika and Joe Mansueto launches a nearly $200 million initiative to recruit and retain leading scholars across disciplines.
 

On trip to Chilean telescope, UChicago undergrad class sheds new light on evolution of earliest stars.

As AI floods academic publishing, Chenhao Tan's lab argues AI can be part of the fix.
 

A new system from Yun Ho, Romain Nith, and Pedro Lopes combines AI and electrical muscle stimulation to physically guide users through unfamiliar tasks—marking a leap toward general-purpose, context-aware embodied assistance.
 

An analysis of hundreds of thousands of chats between AI chatbots and human users who experienced AI-tied delusional spirals found that the bots frequently reinforced delusional and even dangerous beliefs.

New research from the University of Chicago suggests that computers make better tutors when they are not so thoroughly programmed to pretend to be human.

Dark matter is a substance that has gravity—it holds galaxies together—but cannot be directly seen with any instrument yet created. Scientists are trying many different approaches to find the nature of this mysterious substance.