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.

Epigenetic regulation by Histone H3 Methyltransferases and Demethylases in Schizosaccharomyces pombe

• Monday, April 10, 12 pm.
• 601 Fairchild.
• “The organization of eukaryotic chromatin into silenced heterochromatin and active euchromatin regions plays a critical role in regulating gene expression by controlling the accessibility of DNA. In Schizosaccharomyces pombe, Set1 is the primary H3 lysine (K) 4 methyltransferase, enriched at the promoters of actively transcribed genes. In contrast, Clr4/SUV39h methyltransferase targets H3K9 and is a hallmark of heterochromation. The H3K4/H3K9 demethylases, Lsd1 and Lsd2, are highly conserved, but their functional crosstalk with methyltransferases remains poorly understood. Our recent results suggest that Lsd1 and Lsd2 function to repress heterochromatic transcripts at heterochromatic regions, partially through a mechanism independent of amine oxidase-related demethylation activities.” More information here.

Dismantling the Nuclear Doomsday Machine: Scientists, the Bomb, and the Challenges of Nuclear Disarmament

• Monday, April 10, 12:30 to 1:30 pm.
• Center for Theoretical Physics (Pupin Hall 8th Floor).
• “Today, there are nine nuclear armed states and over 13,000 nuclear weapons in the world. The nuclear-armed states are developing or modernizing their arsenals, easing constraints on when these weapons might be used, and pursue policies that risk accidental nuclear war. The hard-won international arrangements intended to halt, reverse and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons programs are unraveling. Russia’s leader has made nuclear threats in the context of the war against Ukraine. One potentially hopeful development, the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, has elicited opposition rather than support from the nine nuclear-armed states. This talk will look at what role scientists have played in the past and can play today in helping address the challenge of reducing and eliminating the threat from nuclear weapons in the United States and globally, it also will introduce the new Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction.” More information here.

Actual Causality in Reactive Systems

• Monday, April 10, 2 to 3 pm.
• Online (email msantolu@barnard.edu for Zoom link) and in-person (Milstein 516).
• “Counterfactual reasoning is an approach to infer the cause of an observed effect by comparing a given scenario in which the suspected cause and the effect are present, to the hypothetical scenarios where the suspected cause is not present. The seminal works of Halpern and Pearl have provided a definition of counterfactual causality for finite settings. In this talk, we propose an approach to check causality for reactive systems, i.e., systems that interact with their environment over a possibly infinite duration. First, we focus on finding causes for violations of hyperproperties. Hyperproperties, unlike trace properties, can relate multiple traces and thus express complex security properties. Here, the suspected cause is represented by a finite set of events occurring on the set of traces. Then, we lift Halpern and Pearl’s definition to the case where the causes themselves (as well as effects) are omega-regular properties, not just sets of events. Given the causality algorithms, our tool HyperVis generates interactive visualizations of the given model, specification, and cause of the counterexample.” More information here.

Partial differential equations and graph-based learning

• Tuesday, April 11, 2:45 to 3:45 pm.
• 214 Mudd.
• “Graph-based learning is concerned with applying machine learning (e.g., classification, clustering, or regression) to graph-structured data. A graph structure encodes interdependencies among constituents, such as social media users, images, videos, or physical or biological agents, and provides a convenient representation of high dimensional data that has proven to be highly effective in machine learning. In this talk, we will show how machine learning problems on graphs can be interpreted as numerical schemes for solving partial differential equations (PDEs). This connection between PDEs and graph-based learning allows us to utilize theoretical and computational tools from the field of PDEs to study machine learning problems and develop new algorithms. This talk will focus in particular on our recent work on active learning, where we will show how a PDE-based analysis leads to a new algorithm with rigorous performance guarantees, and on robust approximations of graph distance functions via Hamilton-Jacobi equations on graphs.” More information here.

Exploring Difference in the Biology Classroom: What Genetic Ancestry Tests Mean (and What They Don’t)

• Tuesday, April 11, 6 to 7:30 pm.
• Online event, register here.
• “In this session, experts in genetics and anthropology will share their perspectives on genetic ancestry testing and address questions that students commonly have. Attendees will gain insight on the process of estimating a person’s ancestry, understand some known limitations of the science, and learn how test results can be interpreted (or misinterpreted) as a source of information about racial and ethnic identities, familial relationships, and population history.” More information here.

Housing Contingency: Industrial Networks, Land Creation and Multi-Story Mansions in Hong Kong, 1950s–1970s

• Tuesday, April 11, 6:30 to 8 pm.
• 930 Schermerhorn.
• “Constructed on reclaimed land across the coasts of Hong Kong during the lag period between two different building ordinance rationales, the mid-century composite building—multi-story and mixed-use—attributes its existence to the post-war exigencies of transitional colonial governance, contingent planning, and housing resettlement. This talk traces the global history of Hong Kong’s urban development through the I-Feng Mansions built between 1967 and 1972 on the I-Feng Enamelling Company factory site on reclaimed land in East Kowloon. The five-block composite building, with over four thousand inhabitants, is described simply as a high-density type in architectural analyses and remains overlooked in the housing, industrial, and labor histories of Hong Kong. Investigations of how I-Feng Mansions is imbricated in a Cold War ecosystem of circulations of people, goods, and ideas attend to the assemblages of capital, social relationships, labor, and architecture that coalesced along the South China Sea, Indian Ocean, and West Pacific.” More information here.

Ninety-Nine: Towards an Ethnography of God

• Wednesday, April 12, 4:10 to 6 pm.
• 963 Schermerhorn Extension.
• “According to the Islamic tradition, the quintessential human flaw is not sinfulness but forgetfulness. One tool for overcoming this forgetfulness is dhikr, the repeated recitation of God’s ninety-nine names. Yet, the ninety-nine names figure also in other ways: believers actively put them to use, calling on specific attributes of God, such as Healer or All-Powerful, to invite divine intervention, or seeking to emulate God’s attributes to become more God-like. Drawing on fieldwork in Egypt in the post Arab Spring era, this talk reflects on Allah’s ninety- nine names, on the possibility of approaching God ethnographically, and on the question of what it is to be human.” More information here.

Multispectral Analysis and Deep Learning for Life Science and Biomedical Research

• Thursday, April 13, 11 am to 12 pm.
• Online and in-person (Milstein LL017).
• “This talk presents a texture transfer framework that reconstructs invisible (or faded) appearance properties in organic materials with complex color patterns. I will motivate the project with a study that computes surface orientation (normals) at different material layers as a function of emission wavelength for effective scientific analysis in life science. Key contributions include a novel ultraviolet illumination system that records changing material property distributions, and a color reconstruction algorithm that uses spherical harmonics and principles from chemistry and biology to learn relationships between color appearance and material composition and concentration. Finally, I will explain a novel algorithm that extends the effective receptive field of a convolutional neural network for multi-scale detection of cancerous tumors in high resolution slide scans. The results permit efficient real-time analysis of medical images in pathology and biomedical research fields.” More information here.

The Path Towards Communication Breakthroughs: Maxwell Plus Shannon!

• Thursday, April 13, 2 to 3 pm.
• Shapiro CEPSR.
• “My research group in NYU WIRELESS seeks to close the gap between physics and communication theory. Physics-based communication models can result in unprecedented communication systems as well as brand-new problems in information theory. Current research projects include Wireless Communication in Resonant Chambers, Wireless Communication via Conductive Heat Transfer, and Super-Directive Wireless Power Transfer. Traditionally engineers learn electromagnetic theory the way a physicist learns the subject: vector and scalar potentials, the method of separation of variables, and special functions in cylindrical and spherical coordinates. To educate my students better I have developed a new graduate course ‘A Linear System Approach to Wave Propagation’ where we solve Maxwell’s equations in Cartesian coordinates via space/time Fourier transform.” More information here.

Systemic racial disparities in research funding

• Thursday, April 13, 4 to 5 pm.
• Online and in-person (Faculty House), register here.
• “What science is worth funding? And who decides and benefits? In this talk, Dr. Chen will present recent findings of racial disparities in funding rates at the National Science Foundation. From 1999 to 2019, white applicants were consistently funded at higher rates than most non-white applicants, and at rates that have relatively increased in recent years. The funding advantage for white applicants was greater for research proposals and persisted regardless of STEM discipline. Because similar patterns have been observed at the National Institutes of Health, NASA, and various philanthropic funders, these disparities are likely widespread. These trends undermine not only efforts to diversify STEM faculty and leadership, but also the integrity of scientific knowledge as a public good for all. Eliminating inequalities in STEM and academia will require a reorganization of what causes inequality in the first place: unequal access to social prestige and material resources.” More information here.

The Decoupling of Binaries from Their Circumbinary Disks

• Thursday, April 13, 4:05 to 4:35 pm.
• 1402 Pupin.
• “We have investigated, both analytically and numerically, accreting supermassive black hole binaries as they inspiral due to gravitational radiation to elucidate the decoupling of binaries from their disks and inform future multi-messenger observations of these systems. Our numerical studies evolve equal-mass binaries from initial separations of 100GM/c2 until merger, resolving scales as small as ∼0.04GM/c2, where M is the total binary mass. Our simulations accurately capture the point at which the orbital evolution of each binary decouples from that of their circumbinary disk, and precisely resolve the flow of gas throughout the inspiral. We demonstrate analytically and numerically that timescale-based predictions overestimate the binary separations at which decoupling occurs by factors of ∼3, and illustrate the utility of a velocity-based decoupling criterion.” More information here.

Synthetic mucins: from new chemical routes to engineered cells

• Thursday, April 13, 4:30 to 5:30 pm.
• 209 Havemeyer.
• “Mucus is essential for life and serves as a barrier to hydrate, lubricate, and protect tissues. Mucin glycoproteins are the major component of mucus. There are 20+ mucin genes with variable expression patterns, splicing, and post-translational glycosylation that result in structures with discrete biochemical functions. Mucins play roles in infection, immunity, inflammation and cancer. Such diversity has challenged study of structure-function relationships. The Kramer lab is developing scalable methods, based on polymerization of amino acid N-carboxyanhydrides, to synthesize glycoproteins that capture the chemical and physical properties of native mucins. We are utilizing these synthetic mucins to engineer the glycocalyx of live cells to shed light on the role of glycans in health and disease. Areas of focus for our lab are progression of epithelial cancers, and infection processes in cystic fibrosis and COVID-19.” More information here.

Unraveled: The Loose Threads of Fast Fashion

• Thursday, April 13, 7:30 to 9 pm.
• Low Memorial Library, register here.
• “’Unraveled: The Loose Thread of Fast Fashion,’ is a sustainable fashion show that highlights the environmental, social, and economic impacts of fast fashion. Through showcasing eco-friendly and conscious fashion designs and spotlighting scientific experts, the show aims to inspire a movement towards a more sustainable future in the fashion industry. Sustainable fashion is not simply a trend but a necessity. Join us as we unravel the negative effects of fast fashion that entangle us all and pave the way toward a better tomorrow.” More information here.

Designing Dynamic In Vitro Models of Pancreatic Cancer and Lymphatic Vasculature

• Friday, April 14, 11 am to 12 pm.
• 501 Schermerhorn, register here.
• “Tissue engineering strategies can be used to design in vitro models that capture complex changes in pathological tissue microenvironments. We are primarily interested in fibrosis, which causes significant extracellular matrix (ECM) remodeling that impacts disease progression and treatment, specifically in pancreatic cancer and conditions affecting lymphatic vasculature. This remodeling is dynamic and produces altered bulk and local ECM biophysical properties (e.g., stiffness, microstructure, biodegradability), and our current focus is to control progressive ECM stiffening of methacrylated type I collagen to mimic fibrosis in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma and fibrotic tissue surrounding lymphatic vessels. We investigate the overall impact of temporal changes in ECM stiffness on invasive cell phenotypes, malignant transformation in pancreatic cells, cell-cell interactions and crosstalk, and lymphatic capillary growth and function. With controlled manipulation of biomaterial properties, we aim to improve in vitro model design to increase understanding of fibrosis in disease for improved patient care.” More information here.

Origami-Inspired Design for Compliant and Reconfigurable Robots

• Friday, April 14, 11 am to 12 pm.
• 233 Mudd.
• “Recent years have seen a large interest in soft robotic systems, which provide new opportunities for machines that are flexible, adaptable, safe, and robust. In this talk, I will share efforts from my group to use origami-inspired design approaches to create compliant robots capable of executing a variety of shape-changing and dynamical tasks. I will show how the kinematics and compliance of a mechanism can be designed to produce a particular mechanical response, how we can leverage these designs for better performance and simpler control, and how we approach these problems computationally to design new robots with capabilities such as hopping, swimming, and flight.” More information here.

Header via Bwog Staff