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.

Climate Storytelling 101

• Monday, March 27, 12 to 2 pm.
• Online (register here) and in-person (Fayerweather 513).
• “The Good Energy project presents a tailored version of their “Climate Storytelling 101” workshop. Participants will have the chance to learn about diverse approaches to climate storytelling and take part in a mock writers’ room.” More information here.

Cooling the hydrogen atom without actually cooling it

• Monday, March 27, 12:30 to 1:30 pm.
• Center for Theoretical Physics (Pupin Hall 8th Floor).
• “Recent progress in laser cooling atoms and molecules have brought increasingly complex molecular systems into the ultracold regime. This has enabled new opportunities in studying quantum many-body phenomena and exploring the limits of fundamental physics. The hydrogen atom still remains the holy grail of AMO physics because of its simplicity. It is the smallest atom composed of only one proton and electron and this allows for theoretical calculations with unprecedented precision. However, laser cooling the hydrogen atom has eluded physicists for decades due to its light mass and the large recoil of the photon. In this talk, I will describe how we are attempting to circumvent the difficulty of cooling the atom by cooling instead the diatomic hydride molecule – CaH. I will summarize the exciting recent developments in the field of AMO physics that have made it possible to cool CaH and show how we plan on achieving the goal of an ultracold and trapped gas of hydrogen atoms.” More information here.

Emergence of space and time in holography

• Monday, March 27, 2:10 to 3 pm.
• Center for Theoretical Physics (Pupin Hall 8th Floor).
• “In holographic duality, a higher dimensional quantum gravity system is equivalent to a lower dimensional conformal field theory (CFT) with a large number of degrees of freedom. In this talk, I will introduce a framework to describe how geometric notions in the gravity system, such as spacetime subregions, different notions of times, and causal structure, emerge from the dual CFT.” More information here.

Financing the Future: Investors and the Climate Crisis

• Monday, March 27, 6 to 7 pm.
• Online event, register here.
• “The consequences of our changing climate are exacting devastating and expensive damage to societies around the world. Decarbonizing our society is necessary and urgent. To get there will demand ingenuity but also investment. What are practical and actionable plans for investors to follow to alter the course of climate change? What are the potential risks and rewards? Speakers will present the latest information on the financial implications and opportunities of decarbonizing our world.” More information here.

Medical ultrasound imaging using artificial intelligence and domain knowledge in ultrasound physics

• Tuesday, March 28, 11 am to 12 pm.
• Uris Hall.
• “Medical ultrasound imaging using artificial intelligence and domain knowledge in ultrasound physics represents a recent paradigm shift in the field. Its success and great future potential stem from its unique capability to represent complex acoustic phenomena in human bodies. This talk discusses several recent advances in the field, including 1) vector flow velocity imaging of human hemodynamics using neural networks and angle-resolved ultrasound, and 2) physics-informed neural network models for nonlinear ultrasound propagation. The talk will also provide examples of clinical applications of these technologies.” More information here.

Climate Tech: Why It Needs the Humanities and Social Sciences

• Tuesday, March 28, 4:15 to 6:15 pm.
• Online (register here) and in-person (Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room).
• “Climate tech — technologies to respond to climate change — gathered over $50 billion of startup funding in recent years and billions more in public support… This talk makes a case for why humanities and social science practitioners should bother to engage with the development of these emerging technologies. Speakers will discuss what forms and methods generative engagement could take, how to avoid the pitfalls of instrumentalization by capital, and what’s at stake if these fields continue to be on the sidelines of climate tech investment and debate.” More information here.

Can Flying Be Green?

• Tuesday, March 28, 6 to 7 pm.
• Online event, register here.
• “A conversation exploring what it will take for a new generation of travelers to fly guilt-free. Learn about the inventors, visionaries, and entrepreneurs who are at the frontier of new technologies that will transform aviation as he searches for a way to fly green.” More information here.

Talking Science to Non-Scientists

• Tuesday, March 28, 6 to 8 pm.
• Online and in-person (Buell Hall, East Gallery), register for both here.
• “Editors of science journalism publications will talk about what they do and what they are looking for in the stories that they print.” More information here.

Correlated Atomic Displacements in Proteins

• Thursday, March 30, 4:30 to 5:30 pm.
• Havemeyer 209.
• “Correlated motions in proteins arising from the collective movements of residues have long been proposed to be fundamentally important to key properties of proteins, from catalysis and allostery to evolvability. Recent breakthroughs in structural biology have made it possible to capture proteins undergoing complex conformational changes, yet the subtle and intrinsic fluctuations within a single conformation remain one of the least understood facets of protein structure. For many decades, the analysis of diffuse X-ray scattering held the promise of animating crystal structures with such correlated motions. With recent advances in both X-ray detectors, this long-held promise can now be met. In this talk, I’ll describe our recent work in interpreting this signal and discuss how it can be used to probe structural fluctuations that give rise to fundamental protein properties.” More information here.

Decarbonization, Climate Resilience and Climate Justice Conference

• Friday, March 31, 9 am to 7 pm.
• Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room. Register here.
• “Investigating the relationship between climate justice, resilience, and decarbonization, this conference seeks to address pressing and often-times transdisciplinary questions by spotlighting the expertise of Columbia scholars working on these topics.” More information here.

The Molecular Chemistry of Extended Solids

• Friday, March 31, 4:30 to 5:30 pm.
• Havemeyer 209.
• “My group is invested in bringing the synthetic design rules common to molecular chemistry to extended ionic solids by understanding the physical and electronic effects of changes to composition, connectivity, and dimensionality. We seek to improve technologically important materials as well as to design fundamentally new materials with unprecedented properties. I will share our current understanding of members of the halide perovskite family, whose technologically relevant properties are highly amenable to synthetic design. I will also introduce new architectures that allow us to increase the complexity of the metal and ligand composition and the accessible electronic structures. We recently reported a synthetic strategy for the self-assembly of layered perovskite–non-perovskite heterostructures into single crystals in solution, using organic groups as structure-directing agents. I will present various layered heterostructures that form as an interleaving of perovskite slabs with a different inorganic lattice and describe the electronic and optical phenomena that occur at the interfaces.” More information here.

Header image via Bwarchives