2022
Surprise finding suggests ‘water worlds’ are more common than we thought
September 8, 2022

A new study suggests that many more planets in distant solar systems have large amounts of water than previously thought—as much as half water and half rock.
Argonne to establish center on climate change impact in Chicago
September 8, 2022

The DOE has awarded Argonne and a team of academic and community leaders, including UChicago, $25 million over five years to advance urban climate science by studying climate change effects at local and regional scales. It will establish a center called the Community Research on Climate and Urban Science or CROCUS.
UChicago/Argonne researchers will cultivate AI model “gardens” with $3.5M NSF grant
September 8, 2022

The Garden Project led by Prof. Ian Foster has been awarded a $3.5 million grant from NSF for researchers from materials science, physics, and chemistry, to create “Model Gardens” that publish and curate AI models, link them with data and computing resources, and make it simple for users.
Internet disconnect: CS and social science join forces to plumb the digital divide
September 8, 2022

A UChicago Magazine feature on the Internet Equity Initiative that uses existing data to explore the digital divide and develops new ways of measuring internet activity.
UChicago/Argonne computer scientist Ian Foster receives ACM/IEEE Ken Kennedy Award
September 8, 2022

Ian Foster, a pioneer in cloud and high-performance computing, was named the 2022 recipient of the Ken Kennedy Award, bestowed annually by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
PSD in the News - August 2022
September 6, 2022

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to predict an extreme heat belt coming to the US, understand universe expansion from black hole collisions, and detect carbon dioxide on a faraway planet using the new James Webb Space Telescope.
U.S. Department of Energy Awards $12.5 million to UChicago for new Energy Frontier Research Center
August 29, 2022

The new Catalyst Design for Decarbonization Center will investigate the mechanisms behind sustainably generated hydrogen fuel
Scientists announce first detection of carbon dioxide on a faraway planet with James Webb Space Telescope
August 25, 2022

James Webb Space Telescope has allowed a team co-led by Prof. Jacob Bean to capture definitive evidence for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet about 700 light-years away from Earth, the first indisputable evidence for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting a distant star.
Scientists prepare to send a balloon to search for ‘messengers from outer space’
August 23, 2022

NASA has awarded $4.3 million for the final phase of construction and flight of the Extreme Universe Space Observatory on a Super Pressure Balloon (EUSO-SPB2) experiment led by Prof. Angela Olinto, Dept. of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Sending a scientific balloon to 110,000 feet above Earth will enable a search for tiny, ultra-high-energy cosmic ray particles and neutrinos.
Fellowship helps College student launch career in aerospace industry
August 22, 2022

Third-year Audrey Scott is one of 51 undergrads to earn a competitive Brooke Owens Fellowship. Read about her summer research at Ball Aerospace in Boulder, CO.
Here’s why Earth just had its shortest day on record
August 22, 2022

Geophysical sciences graduate student, Sasha Warren, writes in Scientific American how wind, ice, and rock may have combined to give our planet its shortest day.
Black hole collisions could help us measure how fast the universe is expanding
August 18, 2022

In a new study, astrophysicists Prof. Daniel Holz and Jose María Ezquiaga, a NASA Einstein and KICP Fellow, laid out a method for how to use pairs of colliding black holes to measure how fast our universe is expanding.
To map the human brain, researchers first look to the octopus
August 17, 2022

Prof. Peter Littlewood, Dept. of Physics, and his collaborators at Argonne National Laboratory used supercomputing power to image the neuronal architecture of the octopus in an attempt to reverse-engineer its brain and understand how it functions.
Prof. Nakamura comments, The U.S. could see a new ‘extreme heat belt’ by 2053
August 16, 2022

Prof. Noboru Nakamura, Dept. of the Geophysical Sciences, comments on a new report that uses hyperlocal data and climate projections to show that cities as far north as Chicago could have many more days of extreme heat each year.
Meteorite provides record of asteroids ‘spitting out’ pebbles
August 15, 2022

Research led by Prof. Philipp Heck, the Robert A. Pritzker Curator of Meteoritics at Chicago’s Field Museum, and geophysical sciences graduate student, Xin Yang, explains strange particle ejection behavior seen in 2019 on the Bennu asteroid.