Science & Technology

As NASA retires its Spitzer Space Telescope, the Rochester scientists who were involved in its development, look back on the project.

Simon Narang, a senior from Pittsford Sutherland High School, was recently named a Scholar in the prestigious Regeneron Science Talent Search, for a research project he carried out at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics.

Professor John Tarduno has analyzed zircon crystals collected from sites in Australia—the oldest known terrestrial materials—to construct a timeline of Earth's magnetic field, finding that the field was stronger than previously believed.

Amid growing alarm over the plastic that pollutes our environment, biomedical and optics researchers are devising ways to quickly detect microplastics in drinking water to better understand their potential impacts on human health.

Rochester scientists at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics and their colleagues in California and France have directly demonstrated for the first time how laser beams modify the conditions of a plasma.

Rochester’s newly formed cosmology group is at work to create the most detailed 3-D map of the universe ever seen.

Inspired by diving bell spiders and rafts of fire ants, Rochester researchers have created a metallic structure that is so water repellent, it refuses to sink—no matter how often it is forced into water or how much it is damaged.

During a recent master class, four-time Grammy Winner and Skywalker Sound director Leslie Ann Jones was impressed to find that nearly half of the University of Rochester students gathered were women.

In a video for WIRED University alumna and Nobel Prize recipient Donna Strickland ’89 (PhD) explains the inner-workings of lasers to five different people: a child, a teenager, a college student, a graduate student, and, finally, to an expert: Mike Campbell, director of the Laboratory for Laser Energetics.

The University of Rochester astrophysicist recently received the American Physical Society’s 2020 Joseph A. Burton Forum Award and his latest book Light of the Stars was awarded the 2019 Phi Beta Kappa Award for Science.

Jessica Goodman and Alec Salminen each took first place at two recent University of Rochester research competitions that limited contestants to brief presentations geared toward general audiences.

The renewed NNSA agreement brings record funding to the Laboratory for Laser Energetics—$409.9 million for fiscal years 2019–23—and demonstrates the agency’s long-term support of LLE's mission.