The human brain largely remains a black box: How the network of fast-moving electrical signals turns into thought, movement and disease remains poorly understood. But it is electrical, so it can be hacked—the question is finding a precise, easy way to manipulate electrical signalling between neurons. A University of Chicago study shows how tiny, light-powered wires could be fashioned out of silicon to provide these electrical signals.

Scales are the material of choice for animals from pangolins to fish: They’re customisable, water-friendly, strong but flexible, and easy to fix when damaged. Scientists would like to recreate this unique structure—they can imagine uses from medical implants to flexible electronics—but it’s proved difficult using non-organic materials. But researchers with the University of Chicago have published a concept to use a na...

Using health insurance claims data from more than 480,000 people in nearly 130,000 families, researchers at the University of Chicago have created a classification of common diseases based on how often they occur among genetically-related individuals. Researchers hope the work, published in Nature Genetics, will help physicians make better diagnoses and treat root causes instead of symptoms.

A research team based at the University of Chicago has overcome challenges that have limited gene therapy and demonstrated how their novel approach with skin transplantation could enable a wide range of gene-based therapies to treat many human diseases. In the journal Cell Stem Cell, the researchers provide "proof-of-concept." They describe a new form of gene-therapy - administered through skin transplants - to treat...

Scientists at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory have discovered a new way to precisely pattern nanomaterials that could open a new path to the next generation of everyday electronic devices. The new research, published in Science, is expected to make such materials easily available for eventual use in everything from LED displays to cellular phones to photodetectors and solar cells.

Liquid crystals are used in everything from tiny digital watches to huge television screens, from optical devices to biomedical detectors. Yet little is known of their precise molecular structure when portions of such crystals interact with air. Research led by Juan de Pablo, the Liew Family Professor at the Institute for Molecular Engineering, uncovers previously unknown features that develop from the interface between air and certain widely stu...

Although scientists have been able to levitate specific types of material, a pair of UChicago undergraduate physics students helped take the science to a new level. Third-year Frankie Fung and fourth-year Mykhaylo Usatyuk led a team of UChicago researchers who demonstrated how to levitate a variety of objects—ceramic and polyethylene spheres, glass bubbles, ice particles, lint strands and thistle seeds—between a warm plate and a ...

Research provides scientists looking at single molecules or into deep space a more accurate way to analyse imaging data captured by microscopes, telescopes and other devices. The improved method for determining the position of objects captured by imaging systems is the result of new research by scientists at the University of Chicago.

New research suggests scientists could eventually help create materials that resist breaking or crack in a predictable fashion. Using both a simulation and artificial structures called metamaterials, scientists at the University of Chicago, New York University and Leiden University found material failure can be continuously tuned through changes in its underlying rigidity.

Research conducted at the University of Chicago has confirmed a decades-old theory describing the dynamics of continuous phase transitions. The findings, published in Science, provide the first clear demonstration of the Kibble-Zurek mechanism for a quantum phase transition in both space and time. Prof. Cheng Chin and his team of UChicago physicists observed the transition in gaseous cesium atoms at temperatures near absolute zero.

A chemistry graduate student at UChicago, Di Liu devised a way to make tiny knotted and interlocked chemical structures that have been impossible for chemists to fabricate until now, and he invented a way that those knots might be used to quickly screen hundreds of chemicals for fighting cancer. Many chemicals have knots or links as part of their structure. But synthesising new substances that tie themselves in knots at the molecular scale i...

In the campy 1966 science fiction movie "Fantastic Voyage," scientists miniaturise a submarine with themselves inside and travel through the body of a colleague to break up a potentially fatal blood clot. Right. Micro-humans aside, imagine the inflammation that metal sub would cause. Ideally, injectable or implantable medical devices should not only be small and electrically functional, they should be soft, like the body tissues with which they i...