Materials that look like mosaics of triangular tiles at the atomic level sometimes have paradoxical properties, and quantum physicists have finally found out why.
For early-career astrophysicists, the name David Spergel can be intimidating. He’s a leading figure in the scientific community and co-winner of the 2018 Breakthrough Prize in fundamental physics. He’s a prominent national voice on government funding of science and has frequently testified before Congress. He is the founding director of the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA) and is now the president of the institute’s parent organization, the Simons Foundation.
Collectively clocking in at nearly 60 trillion particles, a newly released set of cosmological simulations is by far the biggest ever produced.
The American Physical Society has named Blakesley Burkhart the winner of the 2022 Maria Goeppert Mayer Award, which recognizes and enhances outstanding achievement by a woman physicist in the early years of her career. Burkhart is an associate research scientist at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has recognized four outstanding neuroscientists supported by the Simons Foundation.
The Blavatnik Family Foundation and the New York Academy of Sciences have named computational chemist Erik Thiede as a finalist for the 2021 Blavatnik Regional Award for Young Scientists in the chemistry category. The award recognizes outstanding postdoctoral scientists from academic research institutions in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. It comes with a $30,000 prize for the winners in each category and $10,000 for finalists.
Black holes aren’t what they eat. Einstein’s general relativity predicts that no matter what a black hole consumes, its external properties depend only on its mass, rotation and electric charge. All other details about its diet disappear. Astrophysicists whimsically call this the no-hair conjecture. (Black holes, they say, “have no hair.”)
The Simons Foundation is delighted to announce that neuroscientist Kelsey Martin will be the next director of the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI). Starting in September 2021, she will helm SFARI’s continuing work to improve the understanding, diagnosis and treatment of autism spectrum disorders by funding innovative high-quality research.
A handful of numbers rule the universe. These parameters determine how the universe behaves and how it looks. They tabulate how much of the universe is matter, the curvature of space and the nature of the dark energy pulling the universe apart. Understanding these numbers is key to understanding the universe.
The Simons Foundation is delighted to announce that astronomer Julianne Dalcanton will be the next director of the Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA) at the foundation’s Flatiron Institute in New York City. Starting in September 2021, she will lead the center’s work creating and leveraging computational tools to tackle important questions in astrophysics.