News: Research

Computer scientist, Ben Zhao, explains how artificial intelligence can break crucial systems and be broken itself on Big Brains, a UChicago podcast. Listen and subscribe.

A new study by University of Chicago scientists catalogued rivers to conclude that significant river runoff persisted on Mars later into its history than previously thought.

A new finding by UChicago research group, EPiQC, promises to improve the speed and reliability of current and next generation quantum computers by as much as ten times.

The Event Horizon Telescope, a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes, including the UChicago-run South Pole Telescope, captured the first ever image of a black hole. The black hole is at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster.

In a paper published by Nature on April 3, researchers at the University of Chicago report that atoms can exchange information using intermediary particles. This is the first time the phenomenon has been observed in a cold atom system, where atoms are maintained at temperatures close to absolute zero to reveal their quantum mechanical properties. 

A new UChicago research center focused on theoretical chemistry will expand the study of chemical systems by examining the fundamental origins of reactivity, electronic behavior, and complex organization.

The University of Chicago has named Edward 'Rocky' W. Kolb as director of its Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, a leading center dedicated to deepening our understanding of the origin and evolution of the universe and the laws that govern it.

Although NASA's Kepler space telescope ran out of fuel and ended its mission in 2018, citizen scientists, including UChicago graduate student Adina Feinstein, have used its data to discover an exoplanet 226 light-years away in the Taurus constellation.

This past year brought us the launch of NASA's Parker Solar Probe, named after Prof. Emeritus Eugene Parker, the next generation South Pole Telescope, metal-organic nanoflowers to treat cancer, and more. Here is a look back at ten highlights in research and innovation in the PSD.

October marks the 20th anniversary of the Flash Center for Computational Science. The center is the home of FLASH, a community code with applications in fields ranging from astrophysics to engineering and biology.

Researchers at the University of Chicago and University of Kent in the United Kingdom have discovered critical information about the behavior of the influenza A M2 protein, which facilitates the release of infectious particles, called virions, from the infected host cell. This discovery could lead to drugs that inhibit M2, thus blocking the virus from infecting other cells.

A team of researchers at the University of Chicago used broadband 2D IR spectroscopy to reveal proton behavior when acids like HCl dissociate in water. Although general chemistry textbooks typically teach that the proton associates with water as a hydronium ion H3O+, they discovered that the proton is strongly bound between two water molecules and that the structures are predominantly asymmetrical.