Science Sundays

Contemporary humanity enjoys mobility levels that are unprecedented in history. While this has benefits, it also has enormous social, health and environmental costs. Resolving these costs is crucial if civilization is to survive the 21st century — a world that will see 10 billion people, most of whom will crowd into cities. This lecture will describe the concept of sustainable transportation and how new, data-driven science allows scholars and practitioners to address these essential issues.

Quantum mechanics — the fundamental theory that describes nature at the smallest scales of atomic and subatomic energy levels — seems to be everywhere, from superhero movies to Fortune 500 companies. But what makes quantum mechanics so different and special? How can it be used (and can objects really pass through barriers)? This talk will bridge the divide between popular imaginations of quantum and real quantum mechanical devices, covering the basics of quantum mechanics and how it creates both limits and promise for computer processing.

What are the social interactions and responses that explain the stunning behavior of flocking birds, schooling fish and swarming honeybees? How do performance instructions shape a collaborative improvisation when dancers make compositional choices on the fly? How should we design decision-making for a team of robots to perform environmental monitoring and search and rescue? In this episode, Naomi Leonard presents a unifying framework to explore these and related questions on the dynamics of groups.

Mitochondria — the so-called “powerhouse of the cell” — hold a special place in eukaryotic (nucleus-containing) cells. Evidence accumulated over the past half century strongly points to an origin of the mitochondrion from a free-living bacterium closely related to a specific group, the Alphaproteobacteria. However, the actual processes by which this endosymbiotic bacterium was integrated into its host cell remain controversial. So, what do we really know?

Over billions of years, nature has developed materials, objects and processes that function from the macroscale to the nanoscale. Many organisms and objects — including bacteria; plants; animals; and seashells — possess properties of commercial interest. The emerging field of biomimetics allows scientists to mimic biology or nature to develop eco-friendly nanomaterials, nanodevices and systems with desirable properties. This talk will present an overview of the field of biomimetics and biologically inspired surfaces.

Citizens and scholars alike worry about the health of representative democracy around the world today. They worry about resurgent nationalism across the globe as well as accusations of “democratic deficits” against technocrats. In the United States, public approval of Congress remains near its all-time low, with populist challenges roiling both major parties. This talk explores some realistic reform proposals based on Neblo's research into what ails democratic politics in the U.S. today.

Trumpery: worthless nonsense, something that is, simultaneously, deceitful and showy. Cairo explains how to fight fake data, fake facts, fake visualization, demonstrating how choices a data-visualization designer makes have significant impact on how an audience perceives data. He shares strategies to improve rational thinking and understand probability and uncertainty as ways to fight back against a deluge of misinformation.

Archimedes — remarkable physicist, engineer, inventor, astronomer — built a heat ray to burn attacking ships’ sails; designed machines predicting motions of planets and eclipses; estimated how many grains of sand it would take to fill the universe. Kahle discusses a few of these amazing inventions and insights, including one that anticipated calculus by thousands of years.

Consumers have many lay beliefs about how the world works. But are these beliefs always correct? Reczek explains how our non-professional theories about food, including the relationships between health and taste; and cost and health, drive our food choices that can sometimes lead us away from making healthy decisions.

Particle physics, the quest to understand the smallest objects in the universe, depends on operating powerful colliders, like those at Fermilab and CERN. Surprisingly, the answers we get also shed light on the largest objects, such as the universe itself. Lykken outlines deep theoretical questions, exciting experimental programs and how they connect.