Physicists from Brown and 16 other institutions in the United States and Europe are almost ready to begin data collection using the world's most sensitive dark-matter detector. The detector, nearly a mile underground in South Dakota, is sitting inside a stainless steel tank of ultrapure water and undergoing tests. Data collection should begin early in 2013.
Space weathering — a darkening of lunar surfaces by solar wind and metal nanoparticles from vaporized meteorites — appears to happen differently on Vesta, the second-largest body in the asteroid belt. The discovery, from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, has planetary geologists returning to their lunar data for another look and further analysis.
What if the Ph.D. research becomes too complex for words? Dozens of candidates turned to the language of dance in the fifth annual national contest sponsored by Science Magazine. Diana Davis, a graduate student in mathematics, won the first-ever “Dance Your Ph.D.” prize in pure mathematics.
President Obama designated October as National Cyber Security Awareness Month. We asked John E. Savage, the An Wang Professor of Computer Science, to share his views on what can and should be done to ensure cybersecurity at the national level. Savage is active in cybersecurity from both a policy and technology point of view, having spent the 2009-10 academic year in the U.S. Department of State as a Jefferson Science Fellow.
Platinum works well as a catalyst in hydrogen fuel cells, but it has at least two drawbacks: It is expensive, and it degrades over time. Brown chemists have engineered a cheaper and more durable catalyst using graphene, cobalt, and cobalt-oxide — the best nonplatinum catalyst yet. Their report appears in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition.
As datasets expand and new generations of faster computers arrive, users urgently require more powerful algorithms to make sense of Big Data. Brown computer scientists have received a $1.5-million award from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health to conduct research on new analytical tools for Big Data.
The Brown University Department of Physics will celebrate the recent discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson at an event to be held Tuesday, Oct. 9, at 7 p.m. in the Salomon Center for Teaching on the University’s campus in Providence.
Through a new Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) awarded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Brown will lead an effort to study new optical materials and their interactions with light at the quantum scale. The initiative, which includes six other top universities, will receive $4.5 million over three years, with a possible two-year extension.
Surface-dwelling algae adjust their biochemistry to surface temperatures. As they die and sink to the bottom, they build a sedimentary record of sea-surface temperature across millennia. Brown’s work on surface temperatures, coupled with work from Texas A&M on rainfall and weather patterns, has helped chart the wetter, lake-filled geological history of the currently arid American West.
Computers are good at speed, numbers, and massive amounts of data, but understanding the content of a simple drawing is more difficult. Researchers at Brown and the Technical University of Berlin have produced a computer application that can identify simple abstract sketches of objects almost as often (56 percent of the time) as human viewers (73 percent).
