Science and Technology

A University of Kansas researcher is leading National Science Foundation-funded work to understand how managed retreat — where communities at risk from floods and fires relocate to safer areas — is approached across geographies, nations and cultures.

In a study appearing in Advanced Materials, researchers in the lab of Wai-Lun Chan, associate professor of physics & astronomy at KU, have discovered a microscopic mechanism partly explaining the outstanding performance of new carbon-based organic solar cells.

A team of KU engineering students successfully launched a small satellite, called a CubeSat, aboard a NASA-sponsored Firefly Aerospace rocket. The university’s first satellite, known as “KUbeSat-1” reached orbit late in the evening July 3 when it was launched through NASA’s ELaNa 43 mission.

A computational scientist with the School of Engineering and Institute for Information Sciences (I2S) is part of a team of researchers that received $283,686 from the National Science Foundation to develop a scientific computing platform for characterization and monitoring of cardiac tissue ablations.

A partnership between scientists at KU and collaborators in Europe, including war-torn Ukraine, will result in computer models of biological cells likely to hasten health breakthroughs by simulating molecular interactions inside cells with near experimental accuracy at vastly longer timescales than similar efforts.

Rafe Brown, professor of ecology & evolutionary biology, has received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to travel to the Philippines to study biodiversity. Brown will spend a year in the Philippines conducting fieldwork to sample amphibians and reptiles. The research studies the biodiversity of a rare stretch of pristine tropical forest that extends from a volcanic peak to the sea.

New findings from an astronomer at the University of Kansas offer new understanding of the makeup of exoplanets and their star systems generally.

A University of Kansas researcher has published a description of a spider with up-armored legs found in an Illinois fossil deposit that's 308 million years old. The ancient critter recently was described in a new paper published in the Journal of Paleontology

A study of body size in leaf-nosed bats of the Solomon Islands that involved evolutionary biologists from the University of Kansas — who collected specimens, conducted genetic analysis and co-wrote research in the journal Evolution — reveals surprising genetic diversity among nearly indistinguishable species on different islands.

A survey of orchid bees in the Brazilian Amazon state of Rondônia, carried out in the 1990s, is shedding new light the impact of deforestation on the scent-collecting pollinators, which some view as bellwethers of biodiversity in the neotropics.