Toys that beep. Toys that light up and sing. All adapted by engineering students for children with special needs. For parents visiting the University of Rochester Medical Center, taking home a toy their child can play with themselves is “really awesome.”

Rochester researchers have created particles with negative mass in an atomically thin semiconductor, using a device that creates an optical microcavity.

Two University faculty members—William Jones of the Department of Chemistry and Xi-Cheng Zhang of the Institute of Optics—have received prestigious Humboldt Research Awards.

Hussein Aluie, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, has been awarded an additional 90 million hours of computer time in 2018 by the US Department of Energy to produce detailed simulations of fluid instabilities that hinder fusion “ignition.”

The Toys for All Tots student organization hosts workshops to teach other students and community members how to adapt battery-powered toys so that children with limited mobility can activate them on their own.

A safer lithium-ion battery that reduces the risk of fire in electric vehicles, developed by a University chemical engineer and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been named one of R&D Magazine’s 100 inventions of the year.

Astra Zhang ’18, a double major in electrical and computer engineering and in studio arts, and Ivan Suminski ’18, a mechanical engineering major who is earning a dual degree in violin performance will share this year’s Wells Award.

Many people think of data science in terms of analysis of datasets. But as Columbia University’s Jeannette Wing stressed to an audience at the Goergen Institute for Data Science recently, data science entails a lot more than that.

As a teenager, Wayne Knox ’79, ’84 (PhD) “sometimes filled the house with smoke” while building short wave radios and other electronic gadgets from scratch. Now the optics professor is among this year’s NAI fellows.

For more than 30 years, researchers have been creating quantum dots—nanoscale semiconductors with remarkable properties. But quantum dot synthesis has occurred largely by trial and error. Thanks to the work of two Rochester chemists, that may be about to change.