Political experts say U.S. democracy healthier than public thinks
The third Bright Line Watch survey, co-authored by Rochester political scientist Gretchen Helmke, focuses on the health of U.S. democratic institutions and compares the results from thousands of political professionals with the general public.
Generating terahertz radiation from water makes ‘the impossible, possible’
Optics professor Xi-Cheng Zhang has worked for nearly a decade to solve a scientific puzzle.
Firefly researchers mapping ‘world’s second-most interesting genome’
Biologist Amanda Larracuente and her team are the first to successfully sequence the firefly genome.
Quadcast: Rebooting the brain for better vision after a stroke
Krystel Huxlin has developed rigorous visual training that can restore some of the basic vision lost to traumatic brain injury, stroke, or a tumor. Here Huxlin discusses how this therapy teaches undamaged parts of the brain to take over.
Climate change for aliens
For more than 50 years, the Kardashev scale has been the gold standard for classifying hypothetical “exo-civilizations” by their ability to harness energy. A team of researchers led by Rochester astrophysicist Adam Frank have devised a new system that takes into account the impacts of that energy use.
Monkey sees. . . monkey knows?
Monkeys had higher confidence in their ability to remember an image when the visual contrast was high. These kinds of metacognitive illusions—false beliefs about how we learn or remember best—are shared by humans, leading brain and cognitive scientists to believe that metacognition could have an evolutionary basis.
Icy air reveals human-made methane levels higher than previously believed
Professor Vasilii Petrenko and his team are studying the air trapped in ice cores that date back nearly 12,000 years, long before mankind’s use of fossil fuels, to separate man-made from naturally occurring methane sources.
Does guilt make for good parenting?
There isn’t much Judith Smetana doesn’t know about parenting teenagers. Her latest study in a nearly 40-year career as a professor of psychology, looks at the effect of using guilt as a parenting tool.
Undergraduate’s summer research is a glass act
Chemical engineering major Tianhao Yu ’19 has a unique job this summer: testing organic light-emitting diodes that may help improve the screen displays of devices such as cell phones and televisions.
Student work opens the brain to help surgeons remove tumors
Brain research does not take a summer vacation, and neither does Magdalena Granados ’19. The McNair Scholar is working on “awake language mapping” research designed to help neurosurgeons operate with greater precision.