Posts categorized Science & Technology

A research team led by chemistry professor William Jones has developed a series of reactions that results in the selective conversion of ethanol to butanol, without producing unwanted byproducts.

Michael Gottlieb ’73M (MD), examines AIDS awareness posters that are part of the AIDS Education Posters Collection, a collection of more than 6,500 AIDS education posters from around the world. Gottlieb, a graduate of the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, was the first to identify the disease that would come to be known as AIDS.

When most people think about pi, they associate the mathematical constant with arcs and circles. Mathematicians, however, are accustomed to seeing it in a variety of fields. But two University physicists were still surprised to find it lurking in a quantum mechanics formula for the energy states of the hydrogen atom.

A team led by professors Steven Manly and Kevin McFarland was honored “for the fundamental discovery of neutrino oscillations, revealing a new frontier beyond, and possibly far beyond, the standard model of particle physics.”

Scientists have been studying curiosity since the 19th century, but combining techniques from several fields now makes it possible for the first time to study it with full scientific rigor, according to the authors of a new paper.

Because sound travels much more slowly than light, we can often see distant events before we hear them. That is why we can count the seconds between a lightning flash and its accompanying thunder. Now researchers in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences have shown that our brains can also detect and process sound delays that are too short to be noticed consciously, and that we use that information to fine tune what our eyes see when estimating distance.

In the movie Back to the Future Part II, “Doc” Emmett Brown convinces Marty McFly to travel 30 years into the future from 1985, arriving on October 21, 2015. We take a look at some of the movie’s technological and cultural predictions for 2015 and see how they stack up with the present day, and find out what the University is doing to help make the future a reality.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $4.24 million to Carmala Garzione and John Tarduno, both professors of earth and environmental sciences, to launch this joint U.S.-China research project.

Much like birds fly in flocks to conserve energy, dolphins swim in pods to mate and find food, and colonies of ants create complex nests to protect their queens, a new Medical Center study shows immune cells engage in coordinated behavior to wipe out viruses like the flu.

Nick Vamivakas, assistant professor of optics, thinks his team’s work will make extremely sensitive instruments for sensing tiny forces and torques possible, and could also lead to a way to physically create larger-scale quantum systems known as macroscopic Schrödinger Cat states.