MSN NEWS - A team of US astrophysicists has produced one of the most precise measurements ever made of the total amount of matter in the Universe, a longtime mystery of the cosmos. The answer, published in The Astrophysical Journal on Monday, is that matter accounts for 31.5 percent -- give or take 1.3 percent...
A gift made anonymously to the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UC Riverside has helped the College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences, or CNAS, in which the department is housed, meet and surpass its goal of raising $100 million toward the $300 million Living the Promise campaign, the university’s first ever comprehensive fundraising campaign...
WALL STREET JOURNAL - It's too hot to bake yet another peach pie and too late in the season to start a victory garden, but it is a prime time to ponder the night sky. More than 60 places around the country have been designated as exemplary stargazing sites by the International Dark-Sky Association, which...
As the coronavirus pandemic continues across the U.S., many are finding that discovering and engaging in creative hobbies offers a welcome outlet for stress and anxiety. But sustaining the motivation to create during times of high stress can be challenging. Members of the UCR community share the ways they have been exploring their own creativity...
The John Templeton Foundation has supported research on a diverse range of subjects including creativity, forgiveness, and free will. Dark matter — nonluminous material in space that is understood to constitute 85 percent of the matter in the universe — can now be added to the list. The foundation has awarded UC Riverside physicist Hai-Bo...
INSIDE SCIENCE - Forget showing your true colors -- plants are green precisely because they don’t appreciate the type of energy that falls within the green spectrum. Researchers have long understood that plants use sunlight to photosynthesize carbon dioxide and water into food. But they didn’t know exactly why photosynthesizing organisms such as plants appear...
Yunjin Choi, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Riverside, is a recipient of the 2019-20 M. Hildred Blewett Fellowship awarded by the American Physical Society, or APS, to enable women to return to physics research after having had an interruption in their careers. Choi, who works with Shan-Wen Tsai, an associate professor in the Department of...
Last year, physicist Nathaniel Gabor was one of two UC Riverside professors awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government for scientists and engineers at the beginning stages of their careers. The award to Gabor includes a $1 million research budget from the Air Force...
Kenneth Barish, chair of the UCR Department of Physics and Astronomy, has been named one of two deputy spokespersons for the STAR Experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, at the Brookhaven National Lab. The Solenoid Tracker at RHIC, known as STAR, is the only major experiment currently operating at RHIC and tracks...
Nanoscale technology has greatly improved our daily lives with products such as computers, phones, and solar cells. To develop the next-generation nanotechnology, new classes of materials need to be explored. Two-dimensional “valley semiconductors,” such as monolayer molybdenum disulfide (MoS 2) and tungsten diselenide (WSe 2), have remarkable properties and novel applications. When these materials absorb...
