If you want to get the greatest benefit from a beam of light – whether to detect a distant planet or remedy an aberration in the human eye – you need to be able to measure its beam front information. Now a University of Rochester research team has devised a much simpler way to measure…

Nitrogen is essential to marine life and cycles throughout the ocean in a delicately balanced system. Living organisms–especially marine plants called phytoplankton–require nitrogen in processes such as photosynthesis. In turn, phytoplankton growth takes up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and helps regulate global climate. According to new research by Thomas Weber, an assistant professor of…

Greg Madejski held his breath as he looked into the microscope, trying to weld two fingernail-sized chips together: a tiny chip containing a nanofilter on top of another chip with a DNA sensor. It was frustrating work. The chips weren’t making good contact with each other. Madejski gently poked at the chips, then peered over…

Tiny micro- and nanoscale structures within a material’s surface are invisible to the naked eye, but play a big role in determining a material’s physical, chemical, and biomedical properties. Over the past few years, Chunlei Guo and his research team at the University of Rochester have found ways to manipulate those structures by irradiating laser…

A new beam pattern devised by University of Rochester researchers could bring unprecedented sharpness to ultrasound and radar images, burn precise holes in manufactured materials at a nano scale — even etch new properties onto their surfaces. These are just a few of the items on the “Christmas tree” of possible applications for the beam…

A team of geologists at the University of Rochester has discovered a new species of bird in the Canadian Arctic. At approximately 90 million years old, the bird fossils are among the oldest avian records found in the northernmost latitude, and offer further evidence of an intense warming event during the late Cretaceous period. “The…

A team of chemists including Daniel Weix from the University of Rochester has developed a process for identifying new catalysts that will help synthesize drugs more efficiently and more cheaply. The trick was to do something that has not been attempted before, to examine libraries of drugs to find the cure for bad chemistry: new…

Researchers at the University of Rochester have moved beyond the theoretical in demonstrating that an unbreakable encrypted message can be sent with a key that’s far shorter than the message—the first time that has ever been done. Until now, unbreakable encrypted messages were transmitted via a system envisioned by American mathematician Claude Shannon, considered the…