News: Research

‘Rubble pile’ asteroids are loose collections of material, which can split apart as they rotate. Science News covered physicist Melody Lim's March 15 presentation at the American Physical Society in Chicago on her experiment to understand the inner workings of such asteroids by levitating plastic beads that form collections, spin and break up.

Great Lakes scientists, including some from the University of Chicago, recently took part in the first coordinated sampling effort of the lakes in winter to understand what disappearing ice might mean for one of the largest freshwater systems on the planet.

Rebecca Maxcy, director of The Financial Education Initiative at UChicago, comments on access and quality in personal finance instruction in high schools. Her group’s tool kit for evaluation of instructional materials and classroom advocacy is recommended.

A new research initiative at the University of Chicago called the Data & Democracy Initiative aims to ignite interdisciplinary research on the digital challenges facing democracies around the world.

For Women’s History Month, The Washington Post profiles prominent women in atmospheric science history and includes Bernice Ackerman who received a bachelor's, master's, and PhD from UChicago between 1948 and 1965.

Astrophysicist Prof. Emeritus Don Lamb is co-author on a new paper that may solve a decades-long mystery—why is gas in galaxy clusters still hot even after billions of years? Focusing 196 lasers on a target the size of a dime, scientists simulated conditions in a galaxy cluster and found solid evidence that hot and cold spots come from the impact of magnetic fields on the cooling of the hot gas.

The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) today announced they have awarded IDOM, a renowned engineering and architecture firm based in Spain, a contract to complete the telescope enclosure design by 2024. UChicago is a founding member of GMT.

Jacob Bean, associate professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, is co-leading a team that plans to use James Webb Space Telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) to look at sub-Neptune planets and better model atmosphere composition and circulation.

A team of University of Chicago chemists and biologists including Prof. Yamuna Krishnan developed a tiny device made out of DNA intended to locate tumor cells and force them to reveal themselves to patrolling immune cells.

Students and researchers in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences participated in the recently launched “Winter Grab,” a first of its kind, week-long collection event for regional researchers studying Great Lakes’ winter conditions.

Following the release of the national plan for developing a quantum workforce, educators and leaders in quantum information science came together to discuss the future of quantum education in the US. Computer science professor Diana Franklin was a featured speaker.

A nuclear reactor at an Illinois energy plant is helping University of Chicago scientists learn how to catch and understand the tiny, elusive particles known as neutrinos. Prof. Juan Collar said, “This is the closest that neutrino physicists have been able to get to a commercial reactor core.”

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to read out a qubit on demand and set a record for preserving quantum states for more than five seconds, to revolutionize the field of 2D materials with a technique to cut and stack fragile sheets of nanomaterials, and to demonstrate ultracold atoms can segregate into separate domain states.

Seymour Goodman Professor of Computer Science Fred Chong comments on a new programming language called Twist that can help scientists discover which qubits in their machines become entangled when working on a problem, and then take specific actions, like only accepting data from an unentangled qubit.

More than a dozen Black scientists made key contributions to the Manhattan Project but their stories have often been overlooked. One of them was Moddie Taylor, SM’39, PhD’43, who worked in the Metallurgical Laboratory—the arm of the Manhattan Project based at UChicago—and went on to lead Howard University chemistry.