Science Spotlights

TESS: Searching Closer to Home

Dec 12, 2011

In the ongoing hunt for planets beyond our own solar system, spacecraft in coming years will focus their telescopes on the nearest stars – those in our immediate neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, in development at MIT, is being designed to search for the most promising exoplanet targets for next-generation studies.

The Brain on Trial

Dec 7, 2011

The Kavli Foundation holds a roundtable to explore how advances in neuroscience are posing serious challenges for the judicial system, as well as possible solutions for the treatment of criminals. Participants in the discussion are Alan Leshner, Jay Giedd and Martha Farah.

One Promising Puzzle Piece for Confirming Dark Matter Now Seems Unlikely Fit, Researchers Find

Nov 23, 2011

New research adds doubt that a prominent European astrophysics experiment may have found evidence of dark matter. In an interview, Stanford's Stefan Funk and Justin Vandenbroucke talk about their findings, as well as how they tricked a telescope into searching for particles it wasn't designed to detect.

Disturbing the Nanosphere

Oct 17, 2011

Cornell University researchers, including KIC’s J.C. Séamus Davis and post-doctoral fellow Mohammad Hamidian, deliberately create atomic-level disorder in order to probe the workings of heavy fermion compounds. In an interview, Hamidian discusses how this work, and a new tool created at Cornell, may be a significant step toward revolutionizing 21st century technology.