The Simons Foundation is pleased to announce that 12 outstanding early-career scientists have joined the Simons Society of Fellows as the program’s latest class of Junior Fellows. All based in the New York City area, the Fellows come from a diverse range of fields, including biochemistry, climate science, quantum physics and theoretical computer science.
Quanta Magazine announces the return of “The Joy of x,” its must-listen science podcast about the pursuit of the unknown, the thrill of discovery, and the heartbreak and frustration along the way. In each of the show’s episodes, host and mathematician Steve Strogatz shares an intimate conversation with one of the world’s leading scientists. Topics range from the promise of quantum computing to hearing you’ve won a Nobel Prize while still dripping wet from a shower.
Blakesley Burkhart, an associate research scientist at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics, has been awarded a 2021 Sloan Research Fellowship by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. These fellowships “recognize and reward outstanding early-career faculty who have the potential to revolutionize their fields of study.”
The American Astronomical Society (AAS) has inducted Rachel Somerville as a legacy fellow. The honor recognizes her “contributions toward the society’s mission of enhancing and sharing humanity’s scientific understanding of the universe.” Somerville leads the Galaxy Formation group at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA) in New York City.
The Simons Foundation is delighted to announce the launch of the Center for Computational Neuroscience (CCN) within the foundation’s Flatiron Institute in New York City. The new center, led by computational neuroscientist Eero Simoncelli, will use and develop computational models to understand how brains work. The CCN joins existing Flatiron Institute centers devoted to computational problems in astrophysics, biology, mathematics and quantum physics.
Egg cells are among the largest cells in the animal kingdom. If moved only by the random jostlings of water molecules, a protein could take hours or even days to drift from one side of a forming egg cell to the other. Luckily, nature has developed a faster way: cell-spanning whirlpools in the immature egg cells of animals such as mice, zebrafish and fruit flies. These vortices enable cross-cell commutes that take just a fraction of the time. But until now, scientists didn’t know how these crucial flows formed.
On November 19, 2020, the Dutch Research Council awarded 1.1 million euros to the PTOLEMY project, which hunts for the barrage of neutrinos emitted a second after the universe began. Those elusive Big Bang particles should be everywhere but haven’t yet been detected. The project is supported in part by a grant from the Simons Foundation.
The Simons Foundation today announces that David Spergel, an accomplished astrophysicist and winner of the prestigious Breakthrough Prize, will be the foundation’s next president, effective July 1, 2021. Spergel currently serves as director of the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute in New York City.
People with diabetes — especially the 20 to 40 percent with diabetic kidney disease — are among the most at risk for serious complications and death from COVID-19. A new study of gene expression utilizing machine learning peered inside the kidney cells of COVID-19 patients and diabetic kidney disease patients and made a surprising discovery: Similar molecular processes were activated in both sets of patients, revealing potential avenues of viral vulnerability. The researchers report their findings in Kidney International.
You can’t understand the universe unless you understand the galaxies that comprise it. Galaxies are home to stars, black holes, dark matter halos and clouds of gas and dust. But insights into these galactic phenomena aren’t easily obtained. Astrophysicists have long struggled to develop a complete view of galaxies that spans the entire cosmic scale, from single stars to superclusters of thousands of galaxies.