Research Findings

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Chemistry major Austin Bailey ’18 (T5) has spent his summer developing a special polymer to attach other molecules to nanotubes, and his work could have significant applications for creating renewable energy sources.

A mechanical engineering student visiting from the University of Maryland, Ricardo Cardoza stretched himself—and the shape-memory polymers he worked with—in Mitchell Anthamatten's chemical engineering lab this summer.

Spectrometers are used in a variety of applications, from environmental monitoring to astronomy to healthcare diagnostics. A new design using freeform optics upends more than a century of optical design.

Two undergraduates are spending their summer analyzing a recording that was first released nearly four decades before they were born.