As a new year begins at the University, the future of technological and scientific discoveries remains promising, with scientists coming closer to making revolutionary discoveries.
None of these discoveries would be possible, however, without the foundation and groundwork that has been laid from the year before.
Last year alone, University scientists contributed and participated in studies and projects that ranged from the creation of the universe to the implementation of revolutionary techniques in the study of DNA. In fact, several University scientists were showcased in Science Magazine as the top one and two research “Areas to Watch” based on scientific developments that were made last year.
Two of those researchers, University physics and astronomy professor Jim Brau and University experimental particle physicist David Strom, were hand-picked along with 10,000 engineers and scientists from more than 100 countries to study and conduct experiments on the predictions of high-energy physics, including the Big Bang Theory, at the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, in Geneva. During its first full year of operation last year, Brau, Strom and several collaborating graduate students celebrated the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider’s first successful head-on collision of seven trillion electron volts on March 30, which was hailed as a new world-record for the highest energies ever achieved by a man-made particle accelerator.
“It’s very exciting after waiting so many years,” Brau, who is also the University’s Center for High Energy Physics director, said in an interview with the Emerald in March. “It’s exciting to be on the threshold of discovery.”
In an interview with the Space Odyssey last month, Brau said the Large Hadron Collider’s central role is to analyze fundamental interactions of heavy-ions, such as lead, in hopes of understanding what happened in the first split seconds proceeding the Big Bang, which scientists say led to the creation of the universe nearly 14 billion years ago. In addition, the experiments are also expected to shed more light on the ambiguous elements of particle physics, including the existence of antimatter and Higgs boson, a hypothetical particle that scientists theorize gives mass to particles as well as other objects and creatures in the universe.
“The collisions produce particles that have not been produced since the Big Bang,” Strom said in an Emerald article in March.
Last year, Strom was elected by the ATLAS Institutional Board to the deputy trigger coordinator position for the A Toroidal LHC Apparatus (ATLAS) experiment , one of seven experiments currently being done by the Large Hadron Collider.
In another research area that was highlighted by Science Magazine, University biologists William Cresko and Eric Johnson were hailed for developing a technique that uses Restriction-site Associated DNA (RAD) tag sequencing, a process of isolating the DNA into smaller components for genetic mapping. Using their newly developed technique, Cresko and Johnson were able to isolate 20 billion pieces of DNA in 100 small fish in February, which allowed them to analyze how many genomic regions allowed for ocean-dwelling fish to adapt to fresh water in several fish populations that evolved independently of each other. In a University press release in February, Cresko said the findings are already stimulating research efforts in other organisms around the world.
Cresko said in the press release that the technique allows researchers to “look across entire genomes and ask new questions” to determine if certain genomic regions were altered by the process of natural selection and how many of those regions were changed in comparison to a completely evolved population.
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