Research Findings

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.

A new 30-year longitudinal study shows that the quantity of social interactions a person has in their 20s—and the quality of the social relationships they have in their 30s—can benefit his or her well-being later in life. The study participants, now in their 50s, took part in the Rochester-Interaction Record (RIR) study as college students in the 1970s and again as 30-year-olds in the 1980s.

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.

A series of studies with infants 5 to 7 months old has shown that the portion of babies' brains responsible for visual processing responds not just to the presence of visual stimuli, but also to the mere expectation of visual stimuli.

Our brains track moving objects by applying one of the algorithms your phone’s GPS uses, according to researchers at the University of Rochester. This same algorithm also explains why we are fooled by several motion-related optical illusions, including the sudden “break” of baseball’s well known “curveball illusion.”

Children living in low-income households who endure family instability and emotionally distant caregivers are at risk of having impaired cognitive abilities according to new research from Rochester's Mt. Hope Family Center.

As social creatures, we tend to mimic each other’s posture, laughter, and other behaviors, including how we speak. Now a new study from brain and cognitive sciences researchers shows that people with similar views tend to more closely mirror, or align, each other’s speech patterns. In addition, people who are better at compromising align more closely.

Until now, optically active quantum dots have not been observed in materials consisting of a single layer of atom, also known as 2D materials. Rochester researchers have shown how the 2D material tungsten diselenide can be fashioned into an atomically thin semiconductor that serves as a platform for solid-state quantum dots.

Researchers in the Institute of Optics have shown that a microplasma created by focusing intense laser pulses in air emits not only visible light, but also electromagnetic pulses at terahertz frequencies that can be used to detect complex molecules, such as explosives and drugs.

Sir Sidney Poitier became a cultural icon in the 1950s as the first black actor to break racial barriers in film. But as art and art history professor Sharon Willis argues in her new book, his image on screen creates a false sense of equality that continues to appear in the popular media and remains damaging to race relations today.