News

The University of Maryland has announced seven New Directions awards to support research across the College Park campus. The projects span a broad range of disciplines and topics, ranging from the documentation of community heritage to the discovery of atomic catalysts.

For days, architect Larysa Kurylas ’80 had weighed her safety working in Kyiv against the advice of her American ex-pat and Ukrainian friends who were skeptical of a Russian advance on the capital. But in the early hours of Feb. 11, unable to sleep in her apartment, she tuned into “PBS NewsHour” and learned of the rising possibility of President Vladimir Putin ordering an invasion. Within hours, she had a train ticket to Lviv—40 kilometers from the Polish border—the fate of her parents’ home country, many friends and her research all uncertain. 

There is nothing permanent except change. This is perhaps never truer than in the fickle and fluctuating world of quantum mechanics. The quantum world is in constant flux. The properties of quantum particles flit between discrete, quantized states without any possibility of ever being found in an intermediate state. How quantum states change defies normal intuition and remains the topic of active debate—for both scientists and philosophers.