One PlayStation can play a game, but 100 Play Stations can peer into the secrets of the universe .

The black holes of Einstein's theory of relativity can be completely described by just three properties — how heavy they are (mass), how fast they rotate (spin rate), and how much charge they possess. Since two black holes that share these properties cannot be distinguished, regardless of how they were created, black holes are said to have no hair, i.e. they have no additional attributes that can be used to tell them apart. In recent work, our CSCDR faculty Dr. Khanna and his collaborators show that nearly extreme black holes attempt to grow hair .. but ultimately fail! Read more about this new black-hole phenomena here .

Sigal Gottlieb, CSCDR co-founder and faculty member, was recognized by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) with their top honor. The SIAM Fellowship is an international award and fellowship that recognizes outstanding members of the applied mathematics community. In the award announcement, she was recognized for her contribution to strong-stability-preserving time discretizations and other schemes for hyperbolic equations, and for her professional services including those to SIAM and women in mathematics.

Associate Professor Robert Fisher (Physics) was part of an international team that recently published a research article in Nature that discovered how light reacts after a unique type of supernova. The team, consisting of researchers from Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Queen’s University Belfast, University of Birmingham, University of Edinburgh, University of New South Wales, Trinity College Dublin, and the American Museum of Natural History and Space Telescope Science Institute found that light does not simply disappear after the cosmic explosion of stars. (see here)

The Fisher Computational Astrophysics Group was recently awarded a director's discretionary time allocation on the world's fastest supercomputer, Summit. Summit was developed by IBM and is operated by the Department of Energy Office of Science at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This award will enable investigations of merging white dwarfs as a possible channel of Type Ia supernovae.

CSCDR faculty, Firas Khatib, gives an interview a computer game he co-developed, called “Foldit,” that offers players the opportunity to search for cures of various diseases through protein building. Since then, more than 50 protein structures designed by the gamers. Read the full interview here or published journal paper.

CSCDR student, Connor Kenyon, published a paper in IEEE HPEC on overcoming the limitations of GPU computing in scientific applications. A preprint may be found here

Scott Field, Gaurav Khanna, and Sigal Gottlieb were awarded $275,000 through National Science Foundation's Division of Mathematical Sciences to develop high order numerical methods for gravitational wave computations.

Associate Professor Mehdi Raessi (Mechanical Engineering) and his collaborator, who were awarded a $460,000 National Science Foundation grant for support of their project entitled Collaborative Research: Integrated Experimental and Computational Investigations of Exogenous Surfactant Distribution in Conducting Zone Lung Airways”. Dr. Raessi will use the advanced computing facilities at the UMASS Dartmouth’s Center for Scientific Computing and Visualization Research (CSCDR) to perform computational simulations

CSCDR faculty member Firas Khatib and his colleagues encoded their specialized knowledge into the computer game Foldit, allowing citizen scientists to successfully design synthetic proteins for the first time. The initial results of this unique collaboration appear in the June 5 issue of Nature. By playing Foldit, citizen scientists are now able to help create novel vaccines, cancer therapies and more!

Dr. Bucci publishes paper in mBio on how microbiome affects Alzheimer's disease via immune regulation of anti-inflammatory pathways. Shakti Bhattarai an EAS/CSE PhD student in Bucci lab is co-first author and main data analyst. The paper can be found here.

Dr. Khanna publishes a Rapid Communication on the “singularity” as depicted in the Interstellar movie. His work shows that inside realistic black holes falling astronauts will encounter an “outflying singularity that is an effective shock wave in spacetime. The paper can be found here and the APS blog post here."

Masters physics student Gabriel Casabona has received the DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, a highly-prestigious four-year graduate fellowship awarded to approximately 25 recipients nationwide each year. The fellowship carries a generous stipend of $36,000 annually, paid tuition and fees at any Ph.D. granting-institution in the US, an annual academic allowance for professional development and computer equipment, and a 12-week practicum at a DOE national laboratory. Gabriel studies turbulence-driven detonation of thermonuclear supernovae with CSCDR faculty member Robert Fisher.

CSCDR faculty member, Scott Field, gave an ICERM Public Lecture on Discovering Black Holes and Gravitational Waves: Algorithms and Simulation. The event, which was attended by about 120 people, summarized the 100 years of work leading up to the recent Nobel-prize-winning gravitational wave detection. The talk especially focused on key contributions from mathematicians and computational scientists. The video can be viewed here.