News: 2023

Discover Magazine asks Prof. Daniel Holz how Santa might use physics tricks to deliver presents across the world. Holz says that wormholes are theoretically possible and would be the optimal strategy for Santa, but notes that wormholes do require a form of matter that probably doesn’t exist.

Image by Milles Studio/Shutterstock

UChicago scientists have developed a new "hook and slide" method where they can insert atoms within an already existing carbon framework. The innovation comes from a paper recently published in Science, by Rui Zhang, a fifth-year graduate student with the Guangbin Dong Lab. This new strategy developed by Zhang, with assistance from undergraduate Tingting Yu, promises to optimize medicinal chemistry.

Image by Skrypnykov Dmytro/Shutterstock

Chemists Daniel Gibney, David Mazziotti, and Jan-Niklas Boyn invented a new way to allow computers to simulate certain quantum mechanical effects in complex electronic materials with far less effort.

UChicago teaching award winners, including Michael Gladders, ​​Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics and Quantrell Award winner, share their selections for the holidays.

Prof. John Carlstrom discusses funding for CMB-S4, which, he says, would scrutinize the cosmic microwave background for evidence that the newborn universe underwent an exponential growth spurt called inflation.

Of a moratorium on building nuclear power plants in Illinois coming to an end, Prof. Robert Rosner says in a Chicago Tribune article, "There’s no one waiting here to start building a nuclear power plant as soon as the law changes."

P5 report includes UChicago, Fermilab experiments to study neutrinos, cosmic microwave background.

Students can better prepare themselves for a career in a data and A.I.-driven world with the school’s new joint MBA and MS-ADS degree program.

Jet streams circulate around the world. A new study by GS Prof. Tiffany Shaw and National Center for Atmospheric Research scientist Osamu Miyawaki finds fast jet stream winds (those in dark red in the figure) will get even faster over time as climate change accelerates.

Research by UChicago scientists, including Chemistry Prof. Chuan He, suggests that the nutrient called TVA could have potential as a nutritional supplement to complement clinical treatments for cancer.

Together, a startup co-founded by CS Assoc. Prof. Ce Zhang creating open-source generative AI and AI model development infrastructure, announced that it closed a $102.5 million Series A funding round.

Scientists are fascinated by cosmic rays because they can tell us about space—where they came from and what they encountered along the way—as well as the makeup of the galaxy and the universe. Read the UChicago Explainer Series to learn all about cosmic rays.

Mark Levin has been announced as the winner of the 2023 Dream Chemistry Award. Organized by IOCB Prague, a leading institution in the Czech Republic, the award was established to support “young talents in pursuing their scientific dreams.” Levin won for his project, "Skeletal Editing: Enabling Synthesis that Matches Design."

The 2024 Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition is awarded to Benson Farb and Dan Margalit for their Princeton Mathematical Series book A Primer on Mapping Class Groups.

According to the citation, “The authors are leading researchers in group theory as well as allied areas of topology and geometry. Their expertise shines through with masterful and clear expositions of the combinatorial, algebraic, geometric and analytic viewpoints that mapping class groups enjoy...."

Research led by postdoctoral scholar Hojin Kim, Prof. Stuart Rowan in Chemistry and PME, and Prof. Heinrich Jaeger in Physics and JFI on the science behind non-Newtonian fluids could lead to applications ranging from clump-free paint to wearable protective gear.