UNLV physicist Ashkan Salamat was one of just 46 university professors nationwide – and the first from UNLV – to earn an Early Career Award from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science.
Read the UNLV News and Publications article here.
The rise of dioxygen is arguably the most important environmental change in our planet’s four-and-a-half billion-year history. This revolution occurred approximately 2.3 billion years ago, roughly at the mid-way point in Earth’s history. It was ultimately driven by a biological innovation: the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis. Oxygen rewrote life’s recipe book, facilitating evolution of the richness we associate with our modern biosphere.
We will present observations from a range of perspectives including genomes, chemistry, and the ancient sedimentary rock record to show how this process emerged two-and-a-half billion years ago. We will also compare and contrast the geological records of Earth and Mars to generate expectations for the occurrence of oxygen (and perhaps life) on planets outside our solar system.
Asst. Astronomy Professor Zhaohuan Zhu, along with Professors Jim Stone of Princeton University and Kengo Tomida of Osaka University, have organized the first ever developer and user meeting for the popular and publicly available general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics (GR-MHD) code Athena++. Over 60 scientists from around the world joined the meeting, which was hosted in UNLV's new Hospitality Hall. The local organizing committee (LOC) consisted of Drs. Zhaohuan Zhu and Daniel Proga, as well as post-doc Dr. Chao-Chin Yang and UNLV alum Dr. Tim Waters (PhD 2017). It is hoped that this is the first of many successful meetings to come. Movies of state-of-the-art simulations presented at the workshop will be hosted on the meeting website.
Revolutionary observational advances mean that extrasolar planetary systems are now two a penny, but few look like our own Solar System. The lecture will describe what we know about how planetary systems form, and highlight recent discoveries that may show planets caught in the act of forming. We will discuss the prospects for first finding, and then characterizing, other planets that could host life.
This talk is intended for a general audience including enthusiasts of all backgrounds and ages.
Dr. Mario Livio, an internationally known astrophysicist and best-selling author will talk about the Golden Ratio.
The number 1.618 known as “The Golden Ratio,” has fascinated scholars since antiquity. Some even considered it to be divine, and others were obsessed with it. In this talk I will describe the incredible history of this number, and its uncanny appearances, true and false, in natural phenomena, in the arts, in mathematics, and in human-created artifacts.
This talk is intended for a general audience including enthusiasts of all backgrounds and ages.
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| Turbulent accretion disk density. |
Qiang Zhu published an article, Predicting Phase Behavior of Grain Boundaries with Evolutionary Search and Machine Learning, in Nature Communications. The study of grain boundary phase transitions is an emerging field until recently dominated by experiments. Zhu, along with collaborators at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, developed a computational tool based on evolutionary algorithms that performs efficient grand-canonical grain boundary structure search. Its application to a model system of symmetric tilt boundaries in Cu uncovers an unexpected rich polymorphism in the grain boundary structures. The results demonstrate that the grain boundaries within the entire misorientation range have multiple phases and exhibit structural transitions, suggesting that phase behavior of interfaces is likely a general phenomenon.