News: Research

UChicago Magazine catches up with Dave Fischer, AB’87, who works for the Japanese company Astroscale launching solutions to help declutter the 100 million pieces of human-made debris floating in space.

For the first time in history, a spacecraft has touched the Sun. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has now flown through the Sun’s upper atmosphere—called the corona—sampling particles and characterizing magnetic fields in this dynamic environment. The new milestone marks one major step for the probe named for Professor Emeritus Eugene Parker—and one giant leap for solar science.

A new book by photographer Jessica Wynne called Do Not Erase: Mathematicians and Their Chalkboards (Princeton University Press, 2021) features 110 images of chalk-based investigations by mathematicians around the world—several affiliated with UChicago—alongside their reflections on blackboards as a medium.

Argonne scientists Lindsey Bleem, PhD’13, and Asst. Prof. Clarence Chang, Dept. of Astronomy and Astrophysics, talk about what it’s like to look for signals from the early universe onsite at Antarctica's South Pole Telescope.

The Midwest Center for Computational Materials (MICCoM) is one of five centers in the US where scientists focus on developing software to help predict materials for energy conversion technologies and quantum information science. The team of 34 scientists, led by Professor of Chemistry Giulia Galli, has been recognized with several prestigious awards this year.

The Smithsonian Magazine explores T.C. Chamberlin Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences Darryl Seligman’s idea to send a spacecraft near Jupiter to join up with a chunk of rock and ice as it is flung toward the sun.

A gathering hosted by the University of Chicago and the University of California, Santa Barbara, brought together experts from industry, government, and academia for panels and conversations around internet equity and access.

Most meteorites are made of tiny beads of glass that date back to the earliest days of the solar system, before the planets were even formed. Scientists in the Dauphas Origins Lab have published an analysis laying out how these beads, which are found in many meteorites, came to be—and what they can tell us about what happened in the early solar system.

University of Chicago chemistry professor and director Greg Engel discusses the potential of the new $25 million Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Quantum Sensing for Biophysics and Bioengineering (QuBBE)—ranging from tracking a drug through the membrane and across the cytoplasm of a single cell, to precise demarcation of tumor margins during surgery.

By examining fossilized clams scientists including David Jablonski, the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Service Professor of Geophysical Sciences, and postdoctoral researcher, Nick Crouch, found that a commonly used protocol hides the true extent of how species live and die through major extinctions. Clams previously assumed to originate before the last great extinction actually originated in a burst of diversification in the aftermath.

A new wearable technology designed by researchers in the Human Computer Integration laboratory at UChicago Computer Science can fool fingertips, changing the user’s perception of an object’s softness. The research describing the project, led by predoctoral student Yujie Tao, received a Best Paper Award at the 2021 ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology and the Best Demo Award from the UIST Jury.

Eight current University of Chicago Physical Science Division faculty were named in Web of Science's 2021 report of highly cited researchers. Researchers on the list have demonstrated significant and broad influence in the past decade, with highly cited papers ranking in the top 1% by citation for a chosen field or fields.

With a $5 million LARGE grant from NSF, computer science professors Haryadi Gunawi, Shan Lu, and Hank Hoffmann will lead a group of researchers to develop a new pipeline of tools, software, and systems that allow software developers to write robust new software for massive clusters, even without direct access to these expensive systems, thus building foundations for correctness checkability and performance predictability at scale.

How and when did the Earth and moon form? The latest entry in the UChicago News "Core Knowledge" explainer series explores these origins, and other questions scientists are still asking.

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to invent chemical haptics, to detect internet censorship in real time, and to extract water from the air of even the driest deserts.