News: Research

Scientists, including Rafael Luque and Jacob Bean, have discovered a rare sight in a nearby star system: Six planets orbiting their central star in a rhythmic beat. The planets move in an orbital waltz that repeats itself so precisely it can be readily set to music. A rare case of an “in sync” gravitational lockstep, the system could offer deep insight into planet formation and evolution.

Image by Roger Thibaut (NCCR PlanetS)

APS Ramsey Prize winner David DeMille describes his groundbreaking ACME experiment and how it puts the Standard Model to the test.

Phys.org article reviews a paper describing the most distant black hole ever seen in X-rays, on which Astro Asst. Prof. Irina Zhuravleva is an author.

New York Times article highlights CS Prof. Ben Zhao's "Nightshade," a tool that aims to “poison” A.I. models by allowing artists to upload their images with code intended to mislead A.I. art generators.

Fourth-year student Anika Vyas utilized her time in Computer Science Asst. Prof. Raul Castro Fernandez’s ethics in data science course to investigate the successes and failures of the Chicago Police Department’s crime surveillance technology; the research suggests citizens aren’t getting the full story.

Computer Science Assistant Professor Ken Nakagaki and a group of undergraduate students from the University of Chicago displayed three research prototypes at this year’s Ars Electronica Festival. The work played off of the festival’s theme, “Who Owns the Truth?”.

For years, if you asked the people working to create new pharmaceutical drugs what they wished for, at the top of their lists would be a way to easily replace a carbon atom with a nitrogen atom in a molecule. But two studies from chemists at the University of Chicago, published in Science and Nature, offer two new methods to address this wish. The findings could make it easier to develop new drugs.

The National Science Foundation has awarded $3.7 million to the University of Chicago for the first year of a grant that may provide up to $21.4 million for the final designs for a next-generation set of telescopes to map the light from the earliest moments of the universe—the Cosmic Microwave Background.

Climate scientist Tiffany Shaw will study whether climate predictions were right, for the right reasons.

In an MIT Technology Review article, CS Prof. Ben Zhao discusses his new tool "Nightshade," which messes up training data in ways that could cause serious damage to image-generating AI models. 

New UChicago, Field Museum study finds lunar crystals formed at least 4.46 billion years ago.

The moon’s surface formed at least 40 million years earlier than previously thought, according to a new study of an ancient crystal embedded in rock collected by Apollo 17 astronauts. Washington Post article features GeoSci alumna Jennika Greer and professor Philipp Heck.

The Chicago region has been named an official US Regional and Innovation Technology Hub for quantum technologies by the Biden-Harris administration, a designation that opens the door to new federal funding and recognizes the growing strength of an ecosystem poised to become the heart of the nation’s quantum economy.

New Scientist highlighted the work of former Dept. of the Geophysical Sciences PhD student and postdoc James Franke on shifting agricultural regions under climate change (with Prof. Liz Moyer), and Moyer was quoted.

A qualitative research study conducted by faculty and students at the University of Chicago and University of Maryland revealed key tensions and breakdowns in the sociotechnical infrastructure of emergency remote learning that contributed to elementary school children’s privacy and data being compromised.