Italian Renaissance frescos of the gods and goddesses of air, water, fire and earth enliven the ceiling and four walls of the Room of the Elements in Florence’s famed Palazzo Vecchio, but without structural engineers’ work to preserve such historic buildings, the world could eventually lose these masterpieces.
José Avalos has been named a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar “for spatial and dynamic control of engineered metabolism for microbial chemical production."
An all-Princeton research team has identified bacteria that can detect the speed of flowing fluids.
When a drop of sea spray lands on a rock and starts to evaporate under the midday sun, the salt solidifies and falls out of the water as a crystal—helping to power the Earth's atmosphere and leaving a delicious kernel of spice for dinner.
New computational research from a CBE team has shown that process to include an extra step, a finding that has implications for everything from climate models to the production of medicine.
Lithium, the light silvery metal used in everything from pharmaceutical applications to batteries that power your smart phone or electric car, could also help harness on Earth the fusion energy that lights the sun and stars. Lithium can maintain the heat and protect the walls inside doughnut-shaped tokamaks that house fusion reactions, and will be used to produce tritium, the hydrogen isotope that will combine with its cousin deuterium to fuel fusion in future reactors.
The National Academy of Sciences has elected four Princeton faculty members to join its ranks. They are among 100 new members and 25 foreign associates who were selected in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Those elected bring the total number of active members to 2,347 and the total number of foreign associates to 487. Foreign associates are nonvoting members of the academy, with citizenship outside the United States.
When the landmass that is now the Indian subcontinent slammed into Asia about 50 million years ago, the collision changed the configuration of the continents, the landscape, global climate and more. Now a team of Princeton University scientists has identified one more effect: the oxygen in the world’s oceans increased, altering the conditions for life.
The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge announced today that Manjul Bhargava and Gregory Scholes are two of the 62 scientists who have become fellows or foreign members of the Royal Society.
Curiosity about the natural world and practical concerns guided Máté Bezdek’s research into the chemical bonds of nitrogen and hydrogen that make up ammonia.
Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have discovered valuable information about how electrically charged gas known as “plasma” flows at the edge inside doughnut-shaped fusion devices called “tokamaks.” The findings mark an encouraging sign for the development of machines to produce fusion energy for generating electricity without creating long-term hazardous waste.
