All posts tagged: University of Toronto

Canadian radio telescope (CHIME) is turning hydrogen into a map of cosmic expansion

Canadian radio telescope (CHIME) is turning hydrogen into a map of cosmic expansion

Published by Jenni Sidey

A faint radio signal emitted when the universe was roughly 5 billion years old has emerged from beneath layers of cosmic and human-made noise. The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, or CHIME, has detected the large-scale clustering of neutral hydrogen using only its own radio observations. Earlier CHIME results had depended on comparing its maps with galaxies or other structures already identified by separate surveys. The measurement, published in The Astrophysical Journal, represents an important milestone for a telescope originally designed to map hydrogen across enormous portions of the universe. It could eventually give cosmologists another way to reconstruct cosmic expansion and investigate dark energy, the still-unexplained phenomenon associated with the universe’s accelerating expansion. “This is a completely new technique for probing the cosmos, delivered by an instrument that was conceived, built and funded by Canadians,” said co-author Dr. Mark Halpern, professor in the UBC department of physics and astronomy and CHIME principal investigator. “It’s a bold new step in the global cosmology program and a Canadian success story.” CHIME detected ancient hydrogen using only …

Scientists design new RNA therapy to bypass mutations behind thousands of genetic diseases

Scientists design new RNA therapy to bypass mutations behind thousands of genetic diseases

Published by Jenni Sidey

Scientists engineered transfer RNA to bypass premature genetic stop signals and restore production of full-length proteins in cystic fibrosis models. A single chemical modification increased some engineered tRNAs’ activity, while a custom lipid nanoparticle delivered the therapy to key airway cells. Because the same premature stop signals appear across many genes, the approach could eventually provide a common treatment strategy for multiple genetic diseases. A small error in genetic instructions can bring protein production to an abrupt halt. Instead of building the complete molecule a cell needs, its machinery encounters a premature stop signal and produces a shortened protein, or sometimes almost none at all. Scientists at the University of Toronto have now developed an RNA-based approach designed to get past those faulty stop signs. By chemically modifying transfer RNA, or tRNA, and packaging it inside specially designed lipid nanoparticles, the researchers restored full-length proteins in laboratory, animal and patient-derived models of cystic fibrosis. The study focuses on so-called nonsense mutations, which account for about 11% of inherited genetic disorders. Because the same types of …

Scientists observe ‘negative time’ for the first time in a quantum experiment

Scientists observe ‘negative time’ for the first time in a quantum experiment

Published by Jenni Sidey

A photon enters a cloud of atoms and emerges on the other side. When physicists calculate how long the atoms remained excited because of that transmitted photon, the answer falls below zero. University of Toronto researchers have turned that apparently impossible result into a laboratory measurement. Their experiment found a negative weak value for the time transmitted photons left atoms excited. It does not show light traveling backward through time, but it does show that a negative delay can govern a measurable physical interaction. The work was released in September 2024 by Daniela Angulo, Kyle Thompson, Vida-Michelle Nixon, Andy Jiao, Howard M. Wiseman and Aephraim M. Steinberg. Most worked through the University of Toronto, while Wiseman contributed from Griffith University in Australia. The experiment drew worldwide attention because it appeared to give physical meaning to a quantity often treated mainly as wave reshaping. On April 13, 2026, the work passed peer review and appeared in Physical Review Letters. The study, led by Professor Aephraim Steinberg at the University of Toronto, ignited considerable debate. (CREDIT: University …

White hydrogen found in billion-year-old Canadian rock could fuel clean energy production

White hydrogen found in billion-year-old Canadian rock could fuel clean energy production

Published by Jenni Sidey

Deep beneath northern Ontario, some of Earth’s oldest rocks are quietly giving off hydrogen. At Kidd Creek mine near Timmins, geochemists tracked gas seeping from boreholes drilled two to nearly three kilometers below the surface. What they found was not a one-off puff or a short-lived flare. The hydrogen kept coming, in measurable amounts, over months. In some cases, it lasted for more than a decade. That matters because hydrogen already plays a central role in modern industry, especially in fertilizer, methanol, and steel production. Yet most of it still comes from fossil fuels or other energy-intensive processes. The new work suggests some of that supply might instead come straight from the crust. This would be possible in places where the right rocks already lie under active mining districts. Researchers from the University of Toronto and the University of Ottawa report that all 35 boreholes they analyzed at Kidd Creek released hydrogen. Across the dataset, the average discharge came to 0.008 tonnes per borehole per year. When extrapolated across the mine’s 14,801 boreholes, that works …

The coldest ever hunt for dark matter has begun deep underground

The coldest ever hunt for dark matter has begun deep underground

Published by Jenni Sidey

Two kilometres underground near Sudbury, Ont., a machine has reached a temperature so low it barely seems real. Inside SNOLAB, scientists have cooled the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, or SuperCDMS, to just tens of milliKelvin above absolute zero, roughly a hundred times colder than outer space. That number matters because the experiment’s detectors cannot truly come alive until they reach it. “Reaching this base temperature now allows us to turn on the detectors, make sure they are all working and start collecting data that potentially is coming from dark matter particles hitting our detectors,” says Miriam Diamond, a co-principal investigator in the international collaboration and an assistant professor in the University of Toronto’s department of physics in the Faculty of Arts & Science. For the team behind SuperCDMS, hitting base temperature marks a turning point. The project is no longer mainly about construction and installation. It is moving into commissioning and, soon after that, science operations. Scientists have reached a critical milestone in their efforts to detect dark matter – the mysterious substance that …