Research News

A new study of ancient DNA by a team of international researchers, including Patrick Geary, Professor Emeritus in the Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Historical Studies, provides insight into the development of and social structures within European rural communities following the fall of the Roman Empire. Some of these communities, about the formation of which little was previously known, would eventually become the basis for many modern European countries.

Sebastian Mizera, Member in the School of Natural Sciences, and his collaborators, have used computational algebraic geometry to study predictions for particle physics experiments, such as those at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The team’s results were published in Physical Review Letters in March. 

Patrick Geary, Emeritus Professor in the School of Historical Studies, together with Hungarian, Austrian, and German research groups, has published a paper in Nature, revealing the social dynamics of Avar-period steppe descent populations that settled in Europe's Carpathian Basin in the 6th century.

In a paper published today in Nature, Sihao Cheng, Martin A. and Helen Chooljian Member in the Institute’s School of Natural Sciences, and his collaborators have proposed a new theory that explains why a puzzling population of white dwarf stars stopped cooling for ten billion years. 

The new AI Democracy Projects, co-founded by Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science, engaged state and local election officials, journalists, and AI and election experts in some of the first testing and publicly available results of leading AI models’ safety regarding election information.

How has past climate variability contributed to human migrations and other forms of population movement? Nicola Di Cosmo, Luce Foundation Professor in East Asian Studies, is part of an interdisciplinary group, including historians, climatologists, and archeologists, that has developed a new tool, the “dahliagram,” to explore this question.

George Wong, Frank and Peggy Taplin Member in the School of Natural Sciences, and astrophysicists from Princeton University and Vanderbilt University have determined conclusively that energy close to the event horizon of M87’s central black hole is pushing outward, not inward—as one would normally assume with black holes.

Lia Medeiros, current Member in the School of Natural Sciences, has led a group of researchers from the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration in producing a groundbreaking new image of the M87 black hole, using machine learning algorithm PRIMO to achieve the full resolution of the array for the first time.

Measuring the mass of a galaxy cluster is difficult—clusters cannot be “weighed” by placing them on a scale. Digvijay Wadekar, current Member in the School of Natural Sciences, has worked to develop an AI program to identify new variables that might make inferring the mass from other observable quantities more accurate.