Posts categorized Science & Technology

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.

David Williams, widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on human vision, received the $500,000 prize for his transformative breakthroughs in vision research and adaptive optics.

Since 2010, the best estimate of the age of Earth’s magnetic field has been 3.45 billion years. But now the Rochester researcher responsible for that finding has new data showing the magnetic field is far older.

Combined with the current weakening of Earth’s magnetic field, the data suggest that the region of Earth’s core beneath southern Africa may play a special role in reversals of the planet’s magnetic poles.

The best guide to the boundary between our everyday world and the “spooky” features of the quantum world has been a theorem called Bell’s Inequality, but now a new paper shows that we understand the frontiers of that quantum world less well than scientists have thought.