Asking young girls to “do science” leads them to show greater persistence in science activities than does asking them to “be scientists,” finds a new psychology study by researchers at New York University and Princeton Continue Reading →
Princeton University researchers have demonstrated a new way of making controllable “quantum wires” in the presence of a magnetic field, according to a new study published online today in the journal Nature. The researchers detected channels Continue Reading →
By Scott Lyon If you have ever poured hot coffee into a cheap plastic cup, you may recall that sinking feeling as the cup seems to wilt. Not quite solid, not quite liquid, the cup Continue Reading →
By Kevin McElwee Only about 10 percent of the human genome are actually genes. The other 90 percent? Once called “junk DNA,” researchers now know that this genetic material contains on-off switches that can activate Continue Reading →
By Catherine Zandonella Outside Eve Ostriker’s office door stretches the universe, dotted with orange galaxies against the black backdrop of space. The mural lines the hallway in Princeton’s astrophysical sciences building, where it inspires Ostriker Continue Reading →
By Kevin McElwee In 2001, off India’s coastal state of Goa, the shrimp catch dropped by 80 percent in just a few years. The die-off was later traced to a dip in the ocean’s oxygen Continue Reading →
By Kevin McElwee When it comes to green living, nobody does it better than plants. When plants convert light into fuel through photosynthesis, not a single particle of light is wasted. If we could unlock Continue Reading →
By Kevin McElwee “When the horns started to blow and we saw the Statue of Liberty, I thought I was in heaven. Really. She’s up there and saying, ‘Come on in. From now on you Continue Reading →
By Adam Hadhazy Clifford Brangwynne, whose research explores the hidden order within cellular liquid, has been named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Brangwynne, an associate professor of chemical and biological engineering at Princeton University, Continue Reading →
By Yasemin Saplakoglu WE ARE CONCERNED, rightly so, about the amount of carbon dioxide accumulating in the Earth’s atmosphere. But to most plants, which use carbon for photosynthesis, the amount we have is not enough. Continue Reading →
By Yasemin Saplakoglu GETTING A TIRED and hungry 12-year-old to hike another mile up a steep mountain is a daunting task. But John Pardon’s parents quickly figured out a simple solution that saved many of Continue Reading →
By Yasemin Saplakoglu DESPITE THEIR CHARM AND ALLURE, diamonds are rarely perfect. They have tiny defects that, to assistant professor Nathalie de Leon, make them ever so appealing. These atom-sized mistakes have enormous potential in Continue Reading →
By Yasemin Saplakoglu MOLECULAR BIOLOGIST MIKE LEVINE likes to recall his childhood when he talks about the reason he came to Princeton. “I grew up near Hollywood and I always loved movies as a kid, so Continue Reading →
By Yasemin Saplakoglu A collaborative approach to sociology aims to target fundamental and perhaps overlooked issues to improve policies that affect the lives of disadvantaged children. The effort, called the Fragile Families Challenge, brings together Continue Reading →
By Sharon Adarlo A new solar cell technology could make it inexpensive to create and install smart windows that automatically vary their tint to augment lighting, heating and cooling systems in buildings. The new transparent Continue Reading →
By Pooja Makhijani A new study has identified genetic changes that are linked to dogs’ human-directed social behaviors and suggests there is a common underlying genetic basis for hyper-social behavior in both dogs and humans. Continue Reading →
By Yasemin Saplakoglu We might think we have control of the mix of decisions we make during the day. But it turns out that our brain gives us subconscious nudges, preferring some choices over others. Continue Reading →
By Yasemin Saplakoglu When Daniel D. Liu first encountered the world of research, he saw giants in white lab coats shaking flasks and squirting liquids into small vials. He was 4 years old, and his Continue Reading →
By John Greenwald Fusion — the energy-producing reaction that powers our sun and most stars — can be a safe, clean and virtually limitless source for generating electricity on Earth, ending reliance on fossil fuels and Continue Reading →
By Bennett McIntosh THE COLDEST SPOT on the Princeton campus is a cluster of a few thousand atoms suspended above a table in Waseem Bakr’s laboratory. When trapped in a lattice of intersecting lasers at Continue Reading →
STRIP AWAY ELECTRONS FROM THEIR ATOMS and you get a plasma — a collection of negatively charged electrons and positively charged ions. But at high energies around compact cosmic objects such as black holes, quasars Continue Reading →
ELECTRONS DART within and between atoms far too quickly for current imaging techniques to observe their motion. To capture fast-moving objects without a blur, a photographer can use a camera flash to light up a Continue Reading →
SOMETIMES, TO SURVIVE, our cells destroy their own ribonucleic acid (RNA), the part of our genetic instruction code that helps turn genes into proteins. Cells do this as part of the first line of defense Continue Reading →
Robert Cava weaves physicists’ dreams into exotic new materials By Bennett McIntosh ROBERT CAVA PULLS A LONG CURVED steel blade from its ornate sheath, revealing a rippling pattern of light and dark metal. The sword Continue Reading →
Innovations in building materials, design, water systems and power grids are helping to make cities more livable, say researchers in Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science By Bennett McIntosh Cities. They sprawl and tangle, Continue Reading →
How the psychology of human behavior is helping tackle society’s biggest problems By Wendy Plump SUPPOSE someone approaches you on the street with the following proposition: You can receive either cash on the spot or Continue Reading →
By Bennett McIntosh One hundred years ago, Italian chemist Giacomo Ciamician predicted a future society that would run on sunlight. In a paper presented in 1912 to an international meeting of chemists in New York Continue Reading →
Some drugs cannot be delivered via a normal pill or injection because they cannot readily dissolve in water. About 40 percent of new pharmaceuticals have this hydrophobic (water-fearing) character, and like a globule of oil Continue Reading →
ON NEW YEAR’S DAY 2015, A BALLOON-BORNE SPACECRAFT ascended above Antarctica and snapped crisp photos of space, unobscured by the humidity of Earth’s atmosphere. Meanwhile, a telescope located 4,000 miles to the north, in the Continue Reading →
FUSION — the energy-making process that powers the sun — could provide us with a near limitless source of energy, ending our dependence on fossil fuels for making electricity. This summer, after a nearly three-year Continue Reading →
TO EXPLORE HOW THE BRAIN controls behavior, researchers have for the first time captured the whole-brain activity of a freely moving animal, in this case a nematode worm called Caenorhabditis elegans. Using an imaging system Continue Reading →
INSIDE OUR CELLS, TINY FACTORIES convert nutrients from food into a form of energy that cells can use. Failure of these factories, known as mitochondria, can lead to metabolic disorders that are difficult to diagnose Continue Reading →
DRUG DEVELOPMENT OFTEN INVOLVES modifying the chemical structure to get the right combination of properties, such as stability and activity. Working in the laboratory of John Groves, the Hugh Stott Taylor Chair of Chemistry, undergraduate Continue Reading →
BACTERIA SPEAK TO ONE ANOTHER using a soundless language known as quorum sensing. In a step toward translating bacterial communications, researchers have revealed the structure and biosynthesis of streptide, a signaling molecule involved in the Continue Reading →
THE MEASLES VIRUS can lead to serious disease in children by suppressing their immune systems for up to three years, according to a study published in the journal Science on May 8, 2015. The study Continue Reading →
SEISMIC WAVES CAUSED BY EARTHQUAKES can tell us a lot about the makeup of the Earth’s crust and mantle. Yet we lack seismic readings from the regions under the world’s oceans, which cover 70 percent Continue Reading →
IN THE PAST YEAR, PRINCETON PHYSICISTS have detected two particles that were predicted decades ago to exist but had not been found until now. Both particles were detected using a scanning-tunneling microscope to image the Continue Reading →
By Takim Williams RED-HOT RIVERS OF MOLTEN COPPER and aluminum alloys streamed from one receptacle to another. As an undergraduate watching the demonstration in a materials science class, Clifford Brangwynne was reminded of cells migrating Continue Reading →
By Catherine Zandonella TOWERING ABOVE THE ARCHES AND IVY, 13-story Fine Hall is home to the Department of Mathematics and to some of the deepest thinkers on campus. “Our goal as a department is to Continue Reading →
AT 60 HUDSON ST. IN LOWER MANHATTAN, a fortress-like building houses one of the Internet’s busiest exchange points. Packets of data zip into the building, are routed to their next destination, and zip out again, Continue Reading →
IN APRIL 2014, INTERNET USERS WERE SHOCKED to learn of the Heartbleed bug, a vulnerability in the open-source software used to encrypt Internet content and passwords. The bug existed for two years before it was Continue Reading →
Princeton’s Department of Computer Science has strong groups in theory, networks/systems, graphics/vision, programming languages, security/policy, machine learning, and computational biology. Find out what the researchers have been up to lately in these stories: Armchair victory: Computers Continue Reading →
