News: 2026

NASA’s latest offering to the stars comes from a legacy of great observatories that enabled decades of discovery and unearthed new mysteries about the universe.

The National Science Foundation is investing over $290 million into eight university-based research institutes as part of its Quantum Leap Challenge program.

Better understanding how a common channel opens and closes may help scientists build better medicines.

When a problem is so complex that solving it requires expertise from academia, industry, government and national laboratories, it becomes a grand challenge.

Please welcome the faculty joining the Physical Sciences Division in the ’26–27 academic year.

The new approach, backed by experimental evidence from an interdisciplinary team at UChicago, including chemical biologist Hening Lin, identified central disease-driving genes, most not previously linked to asthma.

Deep beneath the French-Swiss border, the Large Hadron Collider sends protons crashing together at extraordinary speeds, allowing scientists to study the fundamental building blocks of matter and the forces that shape the universe. Those collisions help researchers investigate questions ranging from the behavior of subatomic particles to the possibility of new physics beyond what is currently known.

In a project selected for funding by the Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and partners from other national laboratories, universities and industry will apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to enable precise and adaptive resonance control in particle accelerators. Their work aims to lower operating costs by millions of dollars each year and improve accelerator performance, driving scientific discovery.

Research outlines a new workflow for design and manufacturing, illustrated by two new methane-fighting materials.

On this day, Aug. 20, 1909, scientists with the University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory accidentally came across the planet Pluto for the first time.

Laura Gagliardi and Mark Levin acknowledged for their outstanding achievements in chemistry across various fields.

Studying the atmospheres of lava worlds offers window to Earth’s earliest history, pathway to habitable worlds.

After years of recycling and environmental consciousness, a UChicago alum turned to an old toothbrush, an engineering background, and new knowledge from UChicago’s MS in Environmental Science to create LOOP, a startup reimagining how people approach oral care.

The U.S. National Science Foundation has renewed the Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Quantum Sensing for Biophysics and Bioengineering (NSF QuBBE) with a $37.5 million, five-year investment to advance quantum sensing technologies that can reveal biological processes difficult or impossible to observe with conventional tools.

 

AI has now been turned to the sky because astronomers have a scheduling problem—Time on a major telescope is rationed.