Welcome back to Science Fair, Bwog’s weekly roundup of science events happening around campus. As always, email science@bwog.com if you want your event featured.

Biology Seminar – Jean-Louis Bessereau

  • Monday, September 12, 2022. 12 pm.
  • 601 Fairchild.
  • “At chemical synapses, spatial congruence between neurotransmitter release sites and post-synaptic receptor clusters is a key-parameter that shapes synaptic transfer function. Using a combination of pharmacological and visual genetic screens in C. elegans, we identified a series of synaptic proteins with unforeseen domain composition that control the identity of postsynaptic domains.”…“I will provide an overview of this unanticipated molecular diversity and discuss it from an evolutionary perspective.” More information here.

Physics Colloquia: Monika Schleier-Smith (Stanford) – Atoms Interlinked by Light: Quantum Engineering Meets Fundamental Physics

  • Monday, September 12, 2022. 12:30 to 1:30 pm.
  • Center for Theoretical Physics, Pupin Hall – 8th Floor.
  • “The power of quantum information lies in its capacity to be non-local, encoded in correlations among entangled particles. Yet our ability to produce, understand, and exploit such correlations is hampered by the fact that the interactions between particles are ordinarily local.  To circumvent this limitation in the laboratory, we let distant atoms “talk” to each other with the aid of photons that act as messengers”…“I will touch on implications for quantum-enhanced sensing, quantum computation, and simulating quantum gravity.” More information here.

Theory Seminar: Ramy Brustein – Black Hole Love Story

  • Monday, September 12, 2022. 2:10 to 3:00 pm.
  • Center for Theoretical Physics, Pupin Hall – 8th Floor.
  • “The response of a gravitating object to an external tidal field is encoded in its Love numbers, which identically vanish for classical black holes in 4 spacetime dimensions. I will explain why for quantum black holes, generically, the Love numbers should be nonvanishing and negative, and show that their magnitude depends on the lowest lying collective excited levels of the quantum spectrum of the black hole”… and much much more about black holes and computation! More information here.

Ben Recht – Steampunk Data Science

  • Monday, September 12, 2022. 7 to 8 pm.
  • Online and in-person; Brown Institute, Pulitzer Hall (First Floor). Registration required.
  • “How did scientists make sense of data before statistics and computing? This talk will explore this question by focusing on the discovery of vitamins, which occurred in the early 20th century just before the advent of modern statistical methodology.” More information here and here.

The Good and the Ugly: How Robots and AI Affect Human Behavior

  • Tuesday, September 13, 2022. 2 to 3 pm.
  • Online and Davis Auditorium, 4th Floor Schapiro Center for Engineering and Physical Science Research (CEPSR).
  • “People tend to overtrust sophisticated computing devices, especially those powered by AI. As these systems become more fully interactive with humans during the performance of day-to-day activities, ethical considerations in deploying these systems must be more carefully investigated”…“In this talk, we will discuss various forms of human overtrust with respect to these intelligent machines and possible ways to mitigate the impact of bias in our interactions with them.” More information here.

High Energy Particle Seminar: Nicholas Kamp

  • Wednesday, September 14, 2022. 12 to 1:30 pm.
  • 705 Pupin Hall.
  • “This talk will discuss recent experimental and phenomenological developments regarding the long-standing MiniBooNE low-energy excess of electron neutrino candidate events. I will first present MicroBooNE’s initial results probing the nature of the MiniBooNE excess, with a particular focus on the exclusive search for CCQE-like electron neutrino interactions containing one electron and one proton in the final state (1e1p)”…and much more, including neutrinos, modeling, data analysis, experimental discussion, and current and next steps. More information here.

Moving Closer to a Detection of nHz-frequency Gravitational Waves with NANOGrav

  • Wednesday, September 14, 2022. 4:05 to 5:05 pm.
  • Pupin 1402.
  • “Millisecond Pulsars (MSPs) have become reliable and extremely stable workhorses of modern astronomy and physics. The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, or NANOGrav, has been observing growing numbers of these systems for over 16 years, and the data look great.”…“Our observations provide a wide variety of astrophysics, such as new neutron star mass measurements and constraints of the dense matter equation of state.” More information here.

Sacred Nature

  • Friday, September 16, 2022. 7 to 8 pm.
  • New York Historical Society (Robert H. Smith Auditorium), 170 Central Park West, New York. Registration required.
  • “Join bestselling author Karen Armstrong in an in-person conversation with Brian Greene, exploring humankind’s evolving relationship with the Earth, life, and the cosmos. To save ourselves and the planet, do we need to reestablish our sense that nature is sacred?” More information here.

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