Posts categorized Featured

Using brain scans of children and adults watching Sesame Street, cognitive scientists are learning how children’s brains change as they develop intellectual abilities like reading and math.

From rock ‘n’ roll to pop and hip hop, popular music may be, well, popular. But it is rarely understood as a musical form. Now that’s about to change. The new Institute for Popular Music, led by founding director John Covach, will treat the study of popular genres as seriously as classical music.

Rochester researchers are part of a collaboration named in Physics World magazine’s list of top 10 breakthroughs for 2012. The group was chosen for being the first to demonstrate communications using neutrinos – nearly massless particles that travel at almost the speed of light.

Eleven undergraduate members of the University of Rochester’s all-female a cappella group Vocal Point have been invited to the White House to perform classic and contemporary holiday songs on the morning of Saturday, Dec. 8.

If you think having your phone identify the nearest bus stop is cool, wait until it identifies your mood. Rochester engineers are developing a new computer program that gauges human feelings through speech, with substantially greater accuracy than existing approaches.

Blind mole rats and naked mole rats—both subterranean rodents with long life spans—are the only mammals never known to develop cancer. Biology professors Vera Gorbunova and Andrei Seluanov have discovered the separate mechanisms that cause these two species to be cancer-free, and those discoveries could lead to new cancer therapies in humans.

In honor of her innovative methods and influence, Nancy Fried Foster will receive the Martin E. Messinger Libraries Recognition Award for 2012.

An experiment to look for one of nature’s most elusive subatomic particles is underway in a stainless steel tank nearly a mile underground beneath the Black Hills of South Dakota. And among the dozens of scientists involved in the research is physics Professor Frank Wolfs.

These meteorites, or pallasites, were likely formed when a smaller asteroid crashed into a planet-like body about 30 times smaller than earth.

The University is partnering with nine peer institutions to establish a consortium to explore a new, for-credit, online course program called “Semester Online.”