Science & Technology

A team of University and Adobe researchers is outperforming other approaches to creating computer-generated image captions in an international competition. The key to their winning approach? Thinking about words – what they mean and how they fit in a sentence structure – just as much as thinking about the image itself.

David Cameron, a visiting scientist in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, has discovered a new comet – the first to be discovered by an astronomer associated with the University or with the Rochester area in over a century, his colleagues believe.

Polymers that visibly change shape when exposed to temperature changes are nothing new. But a research team led by chemical engineering professor Mitch Anthamatten has created a material that undergoes a shape change that can be triggered by body heat alone, opening the door for new medical and other applications.

“There’s an explosion of insect genome sequencing right now,” said Jack Werren, a professor of biology and a member of the research team. “But the bed bug is particularly interesting because it’s a human parasite, a major pest, and has a unique biology.”

Part of Professor Timothy Dye's work as director of biomedical informatics is to combine global health with big data to improve the lives of people around the world. “But there is also incredible risk that this same data will be misused in ways that disadvantage communities and nations," says Dye.

One of the earliest images of the 19th-century abolitionist is on loan at the River Campus Libraries through February. While here, the 1848 portrait will feature in a larger exhibition about the University's work on researching and preserving daguerreotypes.

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.