Research News

Scientists from RIT have discovered a newborn massive planet closer to Earth than any other of similarly young age found to date. The baby giant planet lies only about 330 light years from our solar system. The discovery, published in the Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society, provides researchers an exciting new way to study how gas giants form.

Biomedical engineering students Brandon Buscaglia and Marcus D’Aguiar are helping physicians see the invisible. The undergraduates developed a motorized stage and tracking prototype that works in conjunction with digital microscopes. The students’ ideas are being incorporated into a company’s tech offerings today, providing the potential to make an impact in health care applications tomorrow.

Waste Dive talks to Nabil Nasr, associate provost, founding director of the Golisano Institute for Sustainability and CEO of the Reducing EMbodied-Energy And Decreasing Emissions (REMADE) Institute, about REMADE's efforts to reduce energy usage and carbon emissions in manufacturing.

Contemporary Greenland is the subject of a new collection of photographs and essays by RIT photography professor Denis Defibaugh, who spent more than a year on the island. North by Nuuk: Greenland after Rockwell Kent, published by RIT Press, documents scenes from daily life and from nature, such as an Inuit hunter and his sled dogs, stark landscapes and portraits of the people who live in remote communities.

Print media graduate student Emily Shriver headed a project to assess how individuals recognize manipulated images used in news. She found that most people are skeptical about images seen in print or online news, but only half can tell which images actually are altered.

The National Science Foundation is bringing in RIT Professor Zoran Ninkov, an expert in imaging and astrophysics, to help the government agency evaluate future research opportunities.

A team from RIT and the Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía (IAR) upgraded two radio telescopes in Argentina that lay dormant for 15 years in order to study pulsars, rapidly rotating neutron stars with intense magnetic fields that emit notably in radio wavelengths. The project is outlined in a new paper published in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

A graduate culture is taking root at RIT with more Ph.D. students on the main campus than ever before, and the Office of Graduate Education is building on the momentum.

A team of RIT researchers is helping launch an experiment above the atmosphere to better understand extragalactic background light, which traces the history of galaxies back to the formation of the first stars in the universe.

RIT is seeking individuals diagnosed with metabolic syndrome to participate in a national clinical trial. The study will evaluate a wellness program designed to reverse conditions leading to heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and stroke.

Scientists have reported detecting gravitational waves from 10 black hole mergers to date, but they are still trying to explain the origins of those mergers. The largest merger detected so far seems to have defied previous models because it has a higher spin and mass than the range thought possible. A group of researchers, including RIT Assistant Professor Richard O’Shaughnessy, has created simulations that could explain how the merger happened.

WROC-TV talks to Moumita Das, associate professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy, about her work with neurons and an NSF-funded project to build synthetic neurons.