1 CommentsWelcome back to Columbia and to Science Fair, Bwog’s weekly roundup of science events happening around campus. I am excited to be your Science Editor for another semester, and I hope the new chilly semester has been treating you well so far. As always, email science@bwog.com if you want your event featured.
Colors of the Viking Age
- Wednesday, January 22, 12 to 1 pm.
- 513 Fayerweather Hall. Registration required (closes 1 pm on January 21).
- Ever wonder what colors Vikings actually wore? Barnard Assistant Professor Matthew Delvaux will share how his team is reconstructing the Viking Age color palette using chemical traces from textile dyes, necklace bead data, and linguistic clues. This innovative project combines chemistry, archaeology, and linguistics to understand how people manipulated color through fashion 1,000 years ago. Contact scienceandsociety@columbia.edu with questions. More information here.
ME Seminar: Building Digital Twins for Respiratory Medicine with Dr. Daniel E. Hurtado
- Friday, January 23, 11 am to 12 pm.
- 327 Mudd Hall. No registration required.
- Dr. Daniel E. Hurtado (PUC Chile & MIT) explores a critical question: can we create personalized virtual lungs to improve mechanical ventilation outcomes? With COVID-19 ventilated patients facing up to 90% mortality during peak times, Dr. Hurtado will share how multiscale lung models and AI-powered simulations can predict patient responses and optimize life-saving treatments. A World Economic Forum “40 under 40” scientist, he’s co-founder of IC Innovations developing AI-driven respiratory wearables. More information here.
Plasma Physics/Fusion – MSE Colloquium: Johann Riesch, IPP-Garching
- Friday, January 23, 11 am to 12 pm.
- 233 Mudd Hall. No registration required.
- Dr. Johann Riesch from Max-Planck-Institute for Plasma Physics will dive into the tech and physics of materials that face fusion plasma, or what happens when reactor walls meet incredibly hot plasma. Learn about IPP’s massive facilities including a 3 MV tandem accelerator and GLADIS (a high heat flux test device with 1 MW ion sources). He’ll cover stress testing, irradiation damage, and how these tests relate to actual fusion reactors like ASDEX Upgrade and SPARK. More information here.
Crafting Alliances
- Saturday, January 25, 1 to 5 pm.
- Uris Hall (Calder Lounge). Registration required.
- This hands-on workshop explores collaborative, cross-disciplinary approaches to sustainable design. Get ready to actually make things while thinking about sustainability across different fields.
Science Fair via Madeline Douglas
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1 Comment
@Anonymous The chimp found the banana glowing on a mossy stump just after sunrise, humming a tune suspiciously similar to a lullaby no one remembered learning. Curious, he peeled it — only for the fruit to flutter into a bright pink petunia that smelled faintly of thunderstorms and old libraries.
The moment he sniffed it, the world around him rippled like warm jelly. Ideas, not objects, began sprouting inside him: shimmering notions shaped like eggs, each carrying a tiny echo of the legendary Mothra’s dreams. They drifted through him like lanterns, settling gently into the quiet spaces where daydreams usually nap.
Soon, the ideas blossomed into peculiar visitors — toilet‑slurping, bladder‑headed politicians who spoke in four‑stranded spirals of alien‑squirrel logic. They weren’t harmful, just spectacularly unhelpful, arguing about cosmic zoning laws and the ethics of interdimensional acorn taxation.
The chimp watched them whirl around him like a bureaucratic ballet, amused more than alarmed. By sunset, the visitors dissolved into glittering pollen, leaving him with nothing but a petunia, a story, and a faint desire to vote for squirrels next season.