News: Research

A new UChicago-led analysis measures universe expansion rate and finds the 'Hubble tension' may not exist. 

For decades, UChicago’s historic Accelerator Building has served as a hub for innovative research, accommodating particle accelerators known as atom smashers, as well as facilities for medical services. The center will be demolished this year to make way for a new building for today’s researchers in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the Chicago Quantum Exchange.
 

A new paper from the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, University of Houston Chemical Engineering Department, and Chicago Center for the Origins of Life suggests rainwater could have helped create a meshy wall around protocells 3.8 billion years ago, a critical step in the transition from tiny beads of RNA to all forms of life.

Meet the futuristic new materials developed by UChicago scientists that could soon be all around us. In the Chemistry Department, professor Bozhi Tian and his colleagues devised a soil-like material designed to promote microbial growth. 
 

A new study led by researchers from the University of Chicago and the University of Pittsburgh introduced new method for altering vinyl systems, important in drug and materials science. 
 

For years, measurements of the universe's expansion rate have been overshooting the prediction. UChicago astrophysicist Wendy Freedman has played a crucial role in the ongoing debate about the Hubble constant, a measure of the universe's expansion rate.

As new reports reveal evidence of a large underground reservoir on Mars, suggesting that the planet might still have water, challenges in this research area still remain. In a notable new paper, UChicago scientists propose a new methodology to warm Mars’s atmosphere.

A collaborative study between UChicago, Northwestern, and the University of Central Florida proposes a revolutionary approach towards terraforming Mars. This method, using engineered dust particles, could be 5,000 times more efficient than previous proposals.

In this episode of the Big Brains podcast, computer science professors Ben Zhao and Heather Zheng discuss their programs, Glaze and Nightshade, which are copyright protection tools helping artists fight back against generative AI.

A team of scientists from the University of Chicago and MIT may have solved the decades-old mystery. A new breakthrough study reveals why the moon has a (very thin) atmosphere.

Chameleon, an experimental testbed for computer science research, has been awarded $12 million to operate a facility to support computer science research on edge, cloud, and AI. Led by Senior Scientist Kate Keahey from Argonne National Laboratory, Chameleon has been a cornerstone of CS research and education for nearly a decade.

Assistant Professor Aloni Cohen, second-year PhD student Gabe Schoenbach, and postdoc Alexander Hoover recently posted a paper that extends the theory of watermarking outputs of language models. One of the main goals of watermarking language models involves embedding detectable signals within the outputs of language models such as ChatGPT.

Researchers from UChicago and Northwestern developed a new ultrasensitive DNA-based test that can detect cancer from small fragments of DNA circulating in the blood. Among this team of scientists is John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor of Chemistry Chuan He, a leading expert in the field of epigenomics.

UChicago researchers set out to use computer simulation to better understand what happens to actin filaments under tension and how they recruit proteins to repair damage when it occurs. This led to a discovery that changes our understanding of the fundamental properties of the actin cytoskeleton.

David Keith, UChicago Geophysical Sciences Professor and Founding Faculty Director of the Climate Systems Engineering initiative, has a proposal to slow global warming: he wants to spray a pollutant into the sky to block some sunlight. He says the benefits would outweigh the danger.