Researcher Katerina Aifantis is probing mechanical processes at the nanoscale with a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.
Katerina Aifantis, whose father was teaching her about negative numbers when she was 3 years old, started college at 16, earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering at 19 and a master’s degree in materials engineering at 20. (more…)
UD’s Rosenthal receives postdoctoral award in environmental chemistry
Chemist Joel Rosenthal, whose work in renewable energy focuses on the use of solar energy to convert carbon dioxide into synthetic liquid fuels, has been awarded a highly competitive grant to add a postdoctoral researcher to his lab.
The assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Delaware has been selected to receive a Dreyfus Postdoctoral Award in Environmental Chemistry, which provides $120,000 to support a researcher for two years. This year’s award was given to eight scientists across the country, including researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and California Institute of Technology, where recipient Robert Grubbs is a 2005 Nobel laureate. (more…)
UChicago’s Angela Olinto leads U.S. collaboration on international project
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has awarded $4.4 million to a collaboration of scientists at five United States universities and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center to help build a telescope for deployment on the International Space Station in 2017.
The U.S. collaboration is part of a 13-nation effort to build the 2.5-meter ultraviolet telescope, called the Extreme Universe Space Observatory. UChicago Prof. Angela Olinto leads the U.S. collaboration. The telescope will search for the mysterious source of the most energetic particles in the universe, called ultra high-energy cosmic rays, from the ISS’s Japanese Experiment Module. The source of these cosmic rays has remained one of the great mysteries of science since physicist John Linsley discovered them more than 50 years ago. These cosmic rays consist of protons and other subatomic scraps of matter that fly through the universe at almost light speed. (more…)
To Paul Tough, his recent visit to the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy was “a nice homecoming.”
During the two years of research for his new book, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character, Tough spent time at UChicago and in its surrounding neighborhoods.
“The nerve center of my journalistic enterprise was a small dorm room in International House,” he joked Oct. 18 in a speech at Chicago Harris, saying that many of the ideas in the book drew from work in the Department of Economics, the Economics Research Center, the Crime Lab and from the Consortium on Chicago School Research. (more…)
*Berkeley Lab Researchers Developing Promising Treatment for Safely Decontaminating Humans Exposed to Radioactive Actinides*
The New York Times recently reported that in the darkest moments of the triple meltdown last year of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Japanese officials considered the evacuation of the nearly 36 million residents of the Tokyo metropolitan area. The consideration of so drastic an action reflects the harsh fact that in the aftermath of a major radiation exposure event, such as a nuclear reactor accident or a “dirty bomb” terrorist attack, treatments for mass contamination are antiquated and very limited. The only chemical agent now available for decontamination – a compound known as DTPA – is a Cold War relic that must be administered intravenously and only partially removes some of the deadly actinides – the radioactive chemical elements spanning from actinium to lawrencium on the periodic table – that pose the greatest health threats. (more…)
*How Bob Vince changed the world*
Where does it begin, the act of becoming a scientist? Perhaps with a bowling ball, its finger holes packed with explosives, which when detonated, launch the ball into the air, cracking the otherwise pristine concrete walkway of your childhood home in four places, much to the consternation of your father. Or maybe with an explosion of homemade rocket fuel in your basement chemistry lab that scares your mother half to death. And all this before the troublesome teen years.
Bob Vince can’t be sure where his becoming a scientist began. But where it led changed the world. (more…)
*Brian P. Schmidt, who graduated from the UA in 1989 with a double major in astronomy and physics, shares this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics with two colleagues for a discovery that has rocked our understanding of the cosmos: The universe is expanding at an ever-faster pace.*
In the last years of the 20th century, two teams of researchers set out to race each other to measure the rate of the universe’s expansion, and by extension, unveil how the universe most likely will end.
University of Arizona alumnus Brian P. Schmidt, now a professor of astronomy at Australian National University who headed one of the teams, shares the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter from the University of California, Berkeley, and Adam G. Riess from Johns Hopkins University and Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. (more…)
Geophysical Sciences Professor David Archer polled the 200 students in one of his Global Warming classes about whether they believed that humans have had an impact on climate. Approximately 90 percent of the students responded “yes,” reflecting the lessons of climate simulations that Archer had shared earlier with the students.
Those computer simulations are able to reproduce the trend toward rising temperatures, but only when they include data on rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. Simulations that omit the CO2 data do not accurately reproduce the changes. Archer says the link helps reveal carbon dioxide emissions as “the smoking gun” behind global warming and climate change. (more…)
