The American Philosophical Society has elected astrophysicist and Simons Foundation president David Spergel as one of the newest members of its ranks.
From its orbit hundreds of thousands of kilometers above Earth, the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft has observed and mapped our galaxy’s stars with unprecedented detail since its launch in 2013. Today, ESA will release the latest batch of the mission’s data: data release 3 (DR3). For this release, the Flatiron Institute has joined the ESA as a partner data center and will host the full DR3 dataset for the public to access.
The staff of Quanta Magazine, notably senior editor Natalie Wolchover, have won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory writing “for coverage that revealed the complexities of building the James Webb Telescope, designed to facilitate groundbreaking astronomical and cosmological research.”
Unless you’re a math whiz, “cohomology” is a word you’ve probably never heard. An oversimplified (though still hard to understand) explanation is that cohomology is a tool to extract the algebraic structure from complicated geometric spaces.
Eleven researchers affiliated with the Simons Foundation have been elected as 2022 members of the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. The new members include Michael Shelley, director of the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Biology.
Eleven Simons Foundation grantees and one board member are among the latest cohort of prominent artists, scholars, scientists and leaders elected as fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The academy is one of the oldest and most prestigious learned societies in the United States. It convenes leaders from across disciplines to address critical challenges facing society. In 2022, the academy inducted 261 new members.
They’re the questions that keep scientists up at night: Why did life begin? Are space and time fundamental or emergent properties of the universe? Why do women usually outlive men? Why do we have to sleep? In “The Joy of Why,” a new podcast by Quanta Magazine, mathematician and author Steven Strogatz interviews leading scientists and mathematicians about some of the universe’s biggest unanswered questions.
On April 13, NASA has awarded Simons Foundation president David Spergel its Exceptional Public Service Medal, in a virtual ceremony telecast. The award cites Spergel’s “outstanding leadership of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s science teams during its initial mission concept and formulation period.” This medal is awarded to recipients whose “record of achievements sets a benchmark for other nongovernment contributors to follow.”
The future relies on chemistry. Advancements in computation mean that theoretical chemistry — which has long played second fiddle to experimental chemistry — is now poised to complement or even surpass what’s achievable with modern experiments. As a result, the burgeoning field of computational physical chemistry has the potential to spur unprecedented advances in batteries, medicine, desalination and even environmentally friendly insecticides.
On March 8, the Flatiron Institute celebrated the opening of its Center for Computational Neuroscience (CCN). The center, led by neuroscientist Eero Simoncelli, develops and implements computational models to understand how brains work.