New York Governor Andrew Cuomo joined Simons Foundation co-founders Jim and Marilyn Simons on September 6 to dedicate the foundation’s new Flatiron Institute, an intramural research division of the Simons Foundation that tackles big data sets — and big scientific questions — by developing cutting-edge computational methods.
The Simons Foundation is pleased to announce a new research group within the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA). Led by astrophysicist Yuri Levin, the Compact Objects group will explore the physics underlying gravitational waves and relatively compact astronomical objects, such as neutron stars and supermassive black holes.
The Simons Foundation has assembled an international group of theoretical physicists to tackle one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in science: What exactly went down at the dawn of the universe around 13.8 billion years ago.
Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian-born mathematician and the first and to-date only female winner of the Fields Medal, died on July 14 after a years-long battle with breast cancer. She was 40 years old.
The Simons Foundation has established a new collaboration investigating the mysteries of nature’s smallest communities. Called the Simons Collaboration on Theory of Microbial Ecosystems, or THE-ME, it is an at least five-year undertaking that will investigate how microbial ecosystems in the oceans form and function.
When Neil Armstrong took humanity’s first otherworldly steps in 1969, he didn’t know what a nuisance the lunar soil beneath his feet would prove to be. The scratchy dust clung to everything it touched, causing scientific instruments to overheat and, for Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt, a sort of lunar dust hay fever. The annoying particles even prompted a scientific experiment to figure out how fast they collect, but NASA’s data got lost.
Picked up by Universe Today, Science News, ABC News, SEN, French Tribune, and others.
The quest for evidence of life on Mars could be more difficult than scientists previously thought. A scientific paper published today details the investigation of a chemical in the Martian soil that interferes with the techniques used by the Curiosity rover to test for traces of life. The chemical causes the evidence to burn away during the tests.
Smart as the Mars Curiosity mission has been about landing and finding its own way on a distant world, the rover is pretty brainless when it comes to doing the science that it was sent 567 million kilometers to carry out. That has to change if future rover missions are to make discoveries further out in the solar system, scientists say. The change has now begun with the development of a new camera that can do more than just take pictures of alien rocks – it also thinks about what the pictures signify so the rover can decide on its own whether to keep exploring a particular site, or move on.
Picked up by Wired.com, Space.com, Yahoo News, CBS News, The Daily Mail, Huffington Post, RedOrbit, and others.
Smartphones are a great way to check in on the latest weather predictions, but new research aims to use the batteries in those same smartphones to predict the weather. A group of smartphone app developers and weather experts created a way to use the temperature sensors built into smartphone batteries to crowdsource weather information. These tiny thermometers usually prevent smartphones from dangerously overheating, but the researchers discovered the battery temperatures tell a story about the environment around them.
Picked up by Washington Post, Wired.co.uk, Discovery News, MIT Technology Reviews, Slash Gear, CBS News, Telegraph, Gizmag, and others.
A lot of people mix up the ozone hole and global warming, believing the hole is a major cause of the world’s increasing average temperature. Scientists, on the other hand, have long attributed a small cooling effect to the ozone shortage in the hole. Now a new computer-modeling study suggests that the ozone hole might actually have a slight warming influence, but because of its effect on winds, not temperatures. The new research suggests that shifting wind patterns caused by the ozone hole push clouds farther toward the South Pole, reducing the amount of radiation the clouds reflect and possibly causing a bit of warming rather than cooling.
Picked up by LiveScience, Yahoo! News, Huffington Post, Nature News, NBC News, and others.