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.

Life ascending: adaptation of Andean mammals living at extreme elevations

• Monday, April 17, 12 pm.
• 601 Fairchild.
• “In the highest mountain ranges in the world, uncertainty about the upper elevational range limits of alpine animals represents a critical knowledge gap regarding the environmental limits of life and presents a problem for detecting range shifts in response to climate change. Here I report results of mountaineering mammal surveys in the Central Andes which led to the discovery of multiple species of mice living at extreme elevations (including the summits of >6700 m [>22,000’] volcanoes) that were previously thought to be completely uninhabitable by mammals. Population genomic analysis of leaf-eared mice distributed across a >6700 m elevational gradient, from the crest of the Andean Cordillera to the coastal desert of northern Chile, identified numerous candidate genes for hypoxia adaptation that we are using to guide functional experiments. Results of our high-altitude Andean surveys contribute to a new appreciation of the elevational limits of mammals and their ability to survive and function in exceedingly hostile environments.” More information here.

Engineering GPCR-based Living Yeast Diagnostics for Infectious Diseases

• Monday, April 17, 12 to 1 pm.
• Schapiro CEPSR 415.
• “In this talk, I will describe how GPCR-based yeast diagnostics function and can be developed for infectious fungal and viral pathogens. First, I will discuss the progress towards establishing a living yeast biosensor as a diagnostic for the pathogenic fungus Aspergillus fumigatus in clinical patient samples. Additionally, I will cover our efforts in the development of a yeast diagnostic for the multi-drug resistant fungus Candida auris to improve biosensing performance and validate the biomarker from clinical isolates. Finally, I will present engineered living yeast as a diagnostic tool for viral infections by tailoring the GPCR recognition element to sensing any amino-acid based biomarker of choice. Specifically, I will describe altering the binding specificity of the Scheffersomyces stipitis mating GPCR to detect the full-length SARS-CoV-2 Nucleocapsid protein via directed evolution.” More information here.

Inward Bound: Horizon-Scale Modeling of Black Holes

• Monday, April 17, 12:30 to 1:30 pm.
• Center for Theoretical Physics (Pupin Hall 8th Floor)
• “Recent developments have ushered in a new era in the field of black hole astrophysics, providing our first direct view of the remarkable environment near black hole event horizons. These observations have enabled astronomers to confirm long-standing ideas on the physics of gas flowing into black holes with temperatures that are hundreds of times greater than at the center of the Sun. In this talk I will describe the successes and challenges of theoretical models of black holes accretion on event horizon scales in the context of these observational advances. I will conclude with ideas on how the interplay of theory and observations can be used to test the long-standing prediction that the rotational energy of black holes can be extracted to power astrophysical jets.” More information here.

Misinformation, Harassment, and Violence through a Cybersecurity and Privacy Lens

• Tuesday, April 18, 11 am to 12 pm.
• Online (register here) and in-person (Milstein LL016).
• “Technology companies play a central role in mediating online discourse and monitoring people’s actions. Unfortunately, these products are spreading misinformation, harassment, and enabling violence. Currently, technology companies have struggled to mitigate these problems. In this talk, I will discuss how we use robust cybersecurity, data science, and independent data collection techniques to better understand these issues. I will show how this approach can illuminate the systemic incentives and design choices that likely contribute to unsafe technology products that are vulnerable to attacks. In addition, I will show how we can leverage those insights to design safer technology systems and improve resources for those targeted by these attacks. In cases where companies’ interests are not aligned with their users, effecting changes that result in safer technology products often requires independent data collection and engaging with civil society, journalists, regulators, and policymakers.” More information here.

Life Worlds of Middle Eastern Oil

• Tuesday, April 18, 12 to 2 pm.
• 207 Knox.
• “How did oil’s demiurgic powers mold the social and cultural life of the Middle East in the twentieth century as the largest petroleum producing region in the world? This lecture focuses on some of the visible/invisible manifestation of petroleum in the Arab World in the 1950s and 1960s, and on oil’s power to mediate the social and cultural life of the region. Taking a visual approach, this talk explores how the oil industry created new national and social imaginaries, and visual and artistic practice through the production and circulation of propaganda materials for local audiences that portrayed Arab workers, cars as marvelous ‘oil machines’, and petroleum infrastructure through images and stories that naturalized petroleum’s new technical and corporate worlds.” More information here.

The Geometry of Molecular Conformations in Cryo-EM

• Tuesday, April 18, 2:45 to 3:45 pm.
• Mudd Hall.
• “Cryo-Electron Microscopy (cryo-EM) is an imaging technology that is revolutionizing structural biology. Cryo-electron microscopes produce many very noisy two-dimensional projection images of individual frozen molecules; unlike related methods, such as computed tomography (CT), the viewing direction of each particle image is unknown. The unknown directions and extreme noise make the determination of the structure of molecules challenging. While other methods for structure determination, such as x-ray crystallography and NMR, measure ensembles of molecules, cryo-electron microscopes produce images of individual particles. Therefore, cryo-EM could potentially be used to study mixtures of conformations of molecules. We will discuss a range of recent methods for analyzing the geometry of molecular conformations using cryo-EM data and some new issues that arise.” More information here.

Food Systems Transformation- Why We Are All Responsible

• Tuesday, April 18, 4 to 6 pm.
• Online and in-person (Faculty House), register here.
• “Ertharin Cousin currently serves as the CEO and Managing Director of Food Systems for the Future, a nutrition impact investment fund; a Distinguished Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs; a Bosch Academy, Robert Weizsäcker Fellow; and as a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford University, Center on Food Security and Environment. From 2012 until 2017, Cousin led the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP). As Executive Director, Cousin guided the 14,000-member WFP team feeding more than 80 million people each year; while, she identified and championed longer-term, more sustainable solutions for global food insecurity and hunger.” More information here.

Infrastructure for Climate Resilience

• Tuesday, April 18, 5:45 to 7 pm.
• Online and in-person (513 Fayerweather), register here.
• “George Deodatis addresses the threat posed by the combination of sea level rise and storm-induced flooding to interdependent infrastructure, including its above- and below-ground components. The ultimate objective is to establish optimal adaptation/mitigation strategies within a prescribed budget. Strategies in this context include, but are not restricted to, building sea-walls or other artificial and natural protective mechanisms, as well as strategic retreat… Thaddeus Pawlowski will then delve into the crucial topic of climate adaptation in New York City, where he’ll share invaluable insights learned from the devastating impact of Hurricane Sandy on housing displacement and neighborhood recovery. He will explore why addressing the climate crisis is not just a matter of environmental concern, but also an urgent call to redesign urban systems that perpetuate social vulnerability, and pave the way for a more resilient and sustainable future.” More information here.

Data Science Day 2023

• Wednesday, April 19, 8 am to 5 pm.
• Roone Arledge Auditorium, Lerner Hall (register here).
• “Data Science Day provides a forum for innovators in academia, industry, and government to connect. The in-person conference will host keynote presentations from leading voices in data-driven innovation, lightning talks from Columbia University researchers, and interactive poster and technology demonstrations.” More information here.

Precision measurements of the Balmer series

• Wednesday, April 19, 12 to 1 pm.
• 705 Pupin.
• “Precision experiments in the hydrogen atom have a long tradition and extensive studies of transitions between low lying n ≤ 12 states were carried out. These measurements can be used to test quantum electro dynamics and to determine values of the Rydberg constant and the proton rms charge radius. I will present a new experimental approach to perform measurements of transition frequencies between the metastable 2s 2S1/2 (F=0, 1) state of H and highly excited Rydberg states with principal quantum number n ≥ 20.” More information here.

Climate Change Impacts on Fertility

• Wednesday, April 19, 12 to 2 pm.
• Online (register here) and in-person (301 Forum).
• “Climate change has already affected human health and wellbeing. It is thus also possible that it may directly or indirectly affect reproductive health and fertility. Few existing studies on the impact of climate variability or extreme climatic events on fertility focusing on a single country/location case study present inconsistent findings with negative climatic conditions leading to an increase in fertility on the one hand, and fertility decline on the other… In order to address this issue, this study aims to produce a database of total fertility rate and age-specific fertility rate at the subnational level on a monthly and annual basis.” More information here.

The Path to a Next Generation Gamma-Ray Observatory

• Wednesday, April 19, 1 to 2 pm.
• 705 Pupin.
• “The Compton Gamma-ray Observatory was a one of the four original NASA Great Observatories and changed our view of the high energy universe. Its successors (INTEGRAL, Swift, and Fermi) have expanded this view and are still contributing in new and exciting ways. There are also many efforts underway in R&D (CZT, pixel detectors, Glowbug, …), ballooning (compare, GRAPE, …), SmallSats (BurstCube to StarBurst), missions of opportunity (MoonBEAM, LEAP, …), small explorers (COSI) and medium explorers (AMEGO-X) that are pushing the field forward. The time for planning a new Gamma-ray Observatory is now and I’ll present the scientific case and a path to developing a community backed plan for our next Gamma-ray flagship mission.” More information here.

An Overview of Stellar Evolution and Pollution in AGN Disk (SEPAD) and their Implication on the Stellar Dynamics in the Galactic Cente and around other Super-Massive Black Holes

• Wednesday, April 19, 4:05 to 5:05 pm.
• 1402 Pupin.
• “Extended regions of accretion disks around supermassive black holes in bright AGNs are prone to gravitational instability, star formation and stellar dynamical evolution with feedback to the disks’ structure. Spectroscopic data provide vital clues on the stellar and residual black hole populations. Their dynamical interaction with each other, their natal disks, and other massive companions in active and dormant galactic nuclei is remarkably analogous to that in the context of planet formation, evolution, and solar system dynamics. These processes contribute to the observed brightness and spectral-energy distribution of AGN disks and the kinematic properties of the nuclear cluster in the Galactic Center. They also lead to the prolific production and coalescence of black holes as candidates for some gravitational wave events.” More information here.

Human-centric Natural Language Processing for Social Good and Responsible Computing

• Thursday, April 20, 11 am to 12 pm.
• Online (register here) and in-person (Milstein 912).
• “In this talk, I will give a brief overview of my lab’s research around NLP for social good and responsible computing (e.g., misinformation detection, NLP for education and public health, building NLP technologies with language and culture diversity in mind). I will highlight key innovations on theory-guided and knowledge-aware models that allow us to address two important challenges: lack of training data, and the need to model commonsense knowledge. I will also present some of our recent work on human-AI collaboration frameworks for building high-quality datasets for various tasks such as generating visual metaphors or modeling cross-cultural norms similarities and differences.” More information here.

Direct formation of supermassive black holes in high-redshift galaxy mergers

• Thursday, April 20, 4:05 to 4:35 pm.
• 1402 Pupin.
• “Multi-scale simulations of gas-rich major mergers between massive high-z disk galaxies have shown that gas inflows can be triggered that damp mass in the cores at more than a 1000 Mo/yr, forming nuclear supermassive disks (SMDs). We report on the first cosmological simulations that follow a merger between two early forming massive disk galaxies, comparable to the present-day Milky Way, occurring at redshift just below 8, which combine the zoom-in technique and particle splitting to reach pc scale resolution. An SMD only 4 pc in size forms which has super-solar metallicity due to the highly biased environment, yet it hardly fragments due to the high turbulence of the ISM. The SMD is self-gravitating and bar-unstable We use an analytical model to study the later evolution of the SMD due to internal transport of angular momentum resulting from the bar instability, showing that it reaches the conditions for the general relativistic radial instability in less than a million years, forming a supermassive black hole with mass up to 100 million solar masses. This mechanism skips the stage of BH seed formation, and provides a natural explanation for the bright high-z QSOs.” More information here.

Harnessing Radicals and Carbenes To Enable Unconventional Reactivity

• Thursday, April 20, 4:30 to 5:30 pm.
• Online (click here to join Zoom) and in-person (209 Havemeyer).
• “Radical and carbene chemistry can afford opposite or orthogonal reactivity to classic two-electron pathways. By developing radical chaperone strategies that merge open (1e-) and closed shell (2e-) processes, we have harnessed this complementary reactivity and imparted new types of chemo-, regio-, and stereo- selectivity for remote, double, or reversed C-H and C-O functionalizations of alcohols, amines, and carbonyls. These radical chaperoning tools are continually being developed to streamline the synthesis of complex, medicinally relevant molecules and heterocycles. This seminar will highlight our newest, most exciting chemistry and the mosaic of champions behind these discoveries.” More information here.

Embracing Uncertainty: The Power of Curiosity and Exploration in Learning

• Thursday, April 20, 6:30 to 7:45 pm.
• Online event, register here.
• “Today’s world is filled with immediate information. While it is a welcome haven from the discomfort of uncertainty, that discomfort might hinder the process of deep thought. Why is the feeling of uncertainty so aversive? Could it somehow be harnessed into a source of motivation to improve how we learn and think critically? In this pair of talks, two experts in distinct but related fields will combine approaches from psychology and neuroscience to discuss the importance of letting the mind take risks, make mistakes and wonder.” More information here.

Chemical Biology of Novel Covalent Protein Modification

• Friday, April 21, 1 to 2 pm.
• 209 Havemeyer.
• “Our understanding of how the biology of various diseases relates to the central dogma that DNA encodes RNA, which encodes protein has been buoyed by rapid technological advances in DNA and RNA sequencing and has led to some of the first advances in personalized medicine. However, characterization of the final and arguably most actionable element of the central dogma, protein, has lagged behind.” More information here.

LGBTQ+ in STEM: Resolving Disparities Using Demographic Data

• Friday, April 21, 1 to 2:30 pm.
• Buell Hall, register here.
• “This panel will focus on the role that universities play in building inclusive excellence, cultivating community and belonging for LGBTQ+ people in STEM and higher education, and resolving the increasingly documented challenges and disparities LGBTQ+ people are facing in STEM. The panel will feature a conversation about how LGBTQ+ challenges in STEM could be remedied by harnessing SOGI data collection and how U.S. universities could move toward SOGI data collection to achieve inclusive excellence and resolve disparities.” More information here.

Computing &: A conversation series on computation and storytelling

• Friday, April 21, 2 to 6 pm.
• The Brown Institute, Pulitzer Hall (register here).
• “Framed around the theme of ‘Computing &’, we will rotate through three crucial subtopics, each representing an area where computation directly impacts vulnerable communities and the stories told about them. The discussions will highlight the oppressive and surveillant aspects of technology, as well as the innovative ways individuals and groups have leveraged technology and journalistic reporting to counteract these effects.” More information here.

Black hole via Bwog Staff