Posts Tagged research finding

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.

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.

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.