Search for tag: "college of sciences"

Sara Seager - The Hunt for Planet B

For thousands of years, inspired by the star-filled dark night sky, people have wondered what lies beyond Earth. Today, the search for signs of life is a key factor in modern-day planetary…

From  Predrag Cvitanovic 7 plays 0  

Abigail Diering - Sugar Transport in Nitrogen Fixing Plant Bacteria Symbiosis For Biofuel Crops

From  Katie Gentilello 2 plays 0  

Elizabeth Loftus - The Fiction of Memory

For several decades, Elizabeth Loftus has been manufacturing memories in unsuspecting minds. Sometimes these techniques change details of events that someone actually experienced. Other times, the…

From  Katie Gentilello 86 plays 0  

Margaret Kosal - The Geopolitics of the Rare and Not-So-Rare Elements

Chemical elements have played important roles in the geopolitics of modern times and will continue to do so.From Einstein’s 1939 letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt highlighting the need…

From  Katie Gentilello 8 plays 0  

Takamitsu “Taka” Ito - Turning Sour, Bloated, and Out of Breath: Ocean Chemistry under Global Warming

In 1997, the Japanese oceanographer Yoshiyuki Nozaki compiled a periodic table of ocean chemistry, encapsulating the distribution of elements as a function of depth. In this periodic table, many…

From  Katie Gentilello 3 plays 0  

Monica Halka - The Elusive End of the Periodic Table: Why Chase It?

For more than half a century, dedicated and eager groups of scientists have contrived ways to introduce heavier and heavier elements into the universe. Their efforts finally completed the seventh row…

From  Katie Gentilello 6 plays 0  

Gretchen Goldman - Science for the Public Good? Federal Air Pollution and Climate Policy in the Current Political Era

Guest speaker Gretchen Goldman, a Tech graduate and research director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, will discuss Science for the Public Good? Federal…

From  Katie Gentilello 6 plays 0  

Sam Kean - The Periodic Table: A Treasure Trove of Passion, Adventure, Betrayal, and Obsession

Why did Gandhi hate iodine? Why did the Japanese kill Godzilla with missiles made of cadmium? How did radium nearly ruin Marie Curie’s reputation? And why did tellurium lead to the most bizarre…

From  Katie Gentilello 12 plays 0  

Michael A. Filler - Celebrating Silicon: Its Success, Hidden History, and Next Act

The history of silicon is usually told as a history of electronic materials and devices. However, it is better told as a history of manufacturing innovation. This talk will take a journey through the…

From  Katie Gentilello 19 plays 0  

Michael Ford - Implications of Moral Organizational Behavior for Employee Beliefs, Motivation, and Well-Being

Workers are often assumed to construe their organizations as entities and develop a reciprocal social exchange relationship resembling that with other humans. To the extent that this assumption holds…

From  Katie Gentilello 17 plays 0  

Computer Science in Six-Tenths of a Second: What Happens After Hitting ENTER in a Google Search - Lance Fortnow

What is computer science? Ask Google or Alexa, and you'll get an answer like "the study of the principles and use of computers." That doesn't really capture the breadth of the…

From  Katie Gentilello 20 plays 0  

Ordered and disordered motion in dense active materials - Ludovic Berthier

We discuss how the non-equilibrium driving forces introduced by the natural biological activity or by physical self-propulsion mechanisms generically affect the structure, dynamics and phase…

From  Katie Gentilello 53 plays 0  

Local and global avalanches in sheared granular materials - Aghil Abed Zadeh

We perform a stick-slip experiment to characterize avalanches for granular materials. In our experiment, a constant speed stage pulls a slider which rests on a vertical bed of circular photoelastic…

From  Katie Gentilello 53 plays 0  

Exploiting disorder - Sid Nagel

We are taught to understand solids by considering ideal crystals. This approach becomes untenable as the amount of disorder increases; for a glass with no well-defined long-range order, a crystal is…

From  Katie Gentilello 14 plays 0  

The Topological Character of Smectics - Randy Kamien

Though the systematic use of topology to understand defects in ordered matter is now nearly 50 years old, the original work failed to completely characterize systems with broken translational order,…

From  Katie Gentilello 32 plays 0  

Symmetry Breaking during the Synthesis of Nanoparticles - Younan Xia

Symmetry breaking is a ubiquitous phenomenon that occurs spontaneously when a system is subjected to variations in size and/or perturbations in terms of thermodynamic parameters. As a stochastic…

From  Katie Gentilello 67 plays 0