STEAM Newsletter Vol. 51

"Scientists have translated nanoscale experimental and computational data into precise 3D representations of bacteria, yeast and human epithelial, breast, and breast cancer cells in Minecraft, a video game that allows players to explore, build, and manipulate structures in three dimensions. The innovation will allow researchers and students of all ages to navigate biological cells, puncturing through the membranes of organelles to view their interiors or wandering across the cytoplasm to see how the various structures are distributed within the cell. Click to watch Normal Breast Cell."

CraftCells: A Window into Biological Cells is the first broadly accessible tool allowing users to get an accurate picture of whole cells in 3D, said Zaida (Zan) Luthey-Schulten, a professor of chemistry and of physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who led the work with Illinois bioengineering professors Stephen Boppart and Rohit Bhargava, graduate student Kevin Tan, postdoctoral researchers Zane Thornburg and Seth Kenkel, and study lead author Tianyu Wu, a biophysics graduate student at the U of I. Their work is described in the journal The Biophysicist.

“I have dedicated the last 10 years of my life to developing representations of the three dimensions of space plus time in models and 4D simulations of cells,” Luthey-Schulten said. “I think it is of fundamental importance to move away from the 2D images that you see in textbooks to get into the 3D world and see how these cells are organized.”

"Sky Scouts is the brainchild of Ashish Sharma, climate and urban sustainability lead at DPI, who leads the DPI Climate Hub and has a joint appointment in the Environmental Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. His daughter Ishika is a fourth-grader at Nancy Young Elementary School in Aurora, Illinois. Sharma collaborated with Rajesh Kumar, a project scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Kumar’s son Ansh, a fifth-grader at Silver Creek Elementary School in Thornton, Colorado.

The project aims to make climate science — and science in general — fun for young students by helping them see the correlations between scientific data and their own observations.

Sharma and Kumar piloted the program during the summer of 2024, installing ambient weather stations in their backyards in the suburbs of Chicago and Denver, respectively. The weather stations monitor both meteorological conditions and indoor/outdoor air quality.

Ishika and Ansh watched the daily weather changes — both through the weather station readings and by looking at the environment around them — and recorded their experiences through handwritten notes, drawings, and pictures. As they began to understand the relationship between the weather station readings and the conditions they experienced, their awareness of weather patterns and climate systems grew."

"Imagine a world where quantum computing pushes the frontiers of progress, from tackling complex problems that would take classical computers trillions of years, to solving new cryptographic challenges. The University of Chicago’s Department of Computer Science is at the forefront of turning this promise into a reality. A groundbreaking new study that will be presented at this year’s Quantum Information Processing Conference, the most prestigious conference on the theory of quantum computation, delves into the heart of quantum circuits, uncovering secrets about their behavior that could propel us closer to this transformative future.

Cracking the Code of Computation

For decades, classical computers have been the backbone of technological progress. However, classical computers have many well understood limitations. The new frontier? Quantum computing—a paradigm shift in how we process information. Quantum computers harness unique quantum mechanical properties, like the wave-particle duality, quantum interference, and quantum entanglement to achieve exponential advantage in the solving of certain complex problems, marking a new era in computational power.

“Even though the quantum computers that are currently being built have only a modest number of qubits and suffer from the effects of noise, they still exhibit many of these uniquely quantum-mechanical properties, making them very hard to simulate using classical computers,” says Soumik Ghosh, one of the co-authors of this study and a Ph.D. student working with Professor William Fefferman. “One such property is the rapid rate at which quantum circuits scramble information. This is especially true for quantum circuits chosen at random. They take some information and scramble it as fast as any physical process in nature.”"