For 80 years, scientists have puzzled over the way galaxies and
other cosmic structures appear to gravitate toward something they
cannot see. This hypothetical “dark matter” seems to outweigh all
visible matter by a startling ratio of five to one...
What causes split-second blasts of radio waves that appear in
the sky from billions of light years away? Astronomers, including
Shrinivas Kulkarni,
Member (1993–94, 1998) and Visitor (2007) in the School of Natural
Sciences, find that a discovery...
New research by Frederick Hamann, and former School of Natural
Sciences Members Nadia
Zakamska, Donald
Schneider, Jenny Greene,
and Michael Strauss,
describes the discovery of a unique new population of extremely red
quasars. The findings were...
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, a multinational
effort involving more than 100 researchers, including School of
Natural Sciences Members Dimitrios Psaltis (2001–03),
Feryal Özel (2002–05), and
Ramesh Narayan (1987–88,
1994, 2001 and...
Quantum physicist Carl M.
Bender, Member (1969–70) in the School of Natural Sciences, has
been awarded the 2017 Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical
Physics, one of the highest distinctions available to scientific
investigators in that field. In...
Freeman Dyson, Professor Emeritus
in the School of Natural Science, looks at recent books on space
travel and visions of life beyond Earth in a review for the New
York Review of Books:
Almost all the current discussion of life in the universe...
Jay M. Pasachoff, Member
(1989–1990) in the School of Natural Sciences and Field Memorial
Professor of Astronomy at Williams College, has received the
Richtmyer Memorial Lecture Award from the American Association of Physics Teachers.
Pasachoff is...
Doctors and scientists from disparate fields are joining forces
to find a breakthrough for tough-to-treat pancreatic cancer, one of
medicine’s most lethal malignancies. What insight might an expert
on black holes bring to the war on cancer? The...
String theory has so far failed to live up to its promise as a way to unite gravity and quantum mechanics, but at the same time, it has blossomed into one of the most useful sets of tools in science.
