Science Communication is a 2-way Street

Sarah McAnulty is a PhD candidate at UConn and is something of a SciComm powerhouse. She founded the successful Skype a Scientist program, which connects classrooms and researchers all over the world, she regularly gives general audience science talks and hosts science trivia nights, and she does an amazing job communicating her science through social media (she has 8,679 twitter followers). Sarah  will come to OIST and give a talk or workshop about SciComm.

[Topology and Geometry Seminar] "Stable Homotopy and Differential Topology" by Tirasan Khandhawit

Stable homotopy and differential topology

Thursday Teatime

Thursday Tea time- a sign that the weekend is just around the corner. Pop-in at Grano at 4.00pm  today to meet and greet friends over cupfuls of hot tea.

[Seminar] Comparative Transcriptomic and Epigenomic Analyses of Retinal Müller Glia during Different Damage Paradigms in Zebrafish, Chick, and Mouse by Professor David R. Hyde

[Seminar]

Title: Comparative Transcriptomic and Epigenomic Analyses of Retinal Müller Glia during Different Damage Paradigms in Zebrafish, Chick, and Mouse

Speaker: Professor David R. Hyde

Institution: University of Notre Dame

Seminar Venue: B503, Center Building

[Seminar] "Constraining Quantum Gravity from the Bottom-up" by Dr. Scott Melville

Gravity on large scales is relatively well understood. For galaxies, planets and apples: we have Einstein’s General Relativity with which to make accurate predictions. But on small scales, where quantum mechanics becomes important, gravity is more difficult to understand, and as a result we lack precise descriptions of various natural phenomena (such as black holes).

One way to make progress in in our search for quantum gravity is to start from the large scale theory we know and love (at the ‘bottom’), and look for ways in which it may be modified and improved as we zoom in to smaller scales (going ‘up’ to a more fundamental theory).

Recent progress in ‘Effective Field Theory’ may shed some light on the connections between large and small scale physics. By exploiting certain physical properties of scattering probabilities (e.g. that they are unitary, causal and local), one can derive an infinite number of constraints which any large scale theory must satisfy in order to admit a sensible small scale completion.

In this talk, I will provide an overview of these new ‘positivity constraints’, and discuss their implications for quantum gravity.        

QG group meeting - the complex action of GR and black hole entropy

QG group meeting
Speaker: Yasha Neiman
Title: "The complex action of GR and black hole entropy"

Mountain Day 2018

National holiday.

Student Assembly Meeting

All OIST students are welcome to attend this event.

OIST Presidential Lecture - "Origami - Mathematics, Science and Technology" by Prof. Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan

Origami, the exquisite craft of folding paper into three-dimensional shapes, has been practiced for millennia by artists and lay people. Prof. Mahadevan will discuss some physical aspects of rigid and soft origami associated with the weak and strong deformations of thin sheets of any material. The efficient packing properties of folded matter suggest that it ought to occur naturally in physical and biological systems, and he will show that they do indeed appear on a range of scales, e.g. in drying gels, wings, leaves and even your gut as a self-organized pattern. These physical manifestations of origami suggest the question of how to design the number, location and orientation of folds to create complex shapes. Prof. Mahadevan will finish his talk with a description of attempts to solve this inverse problem, and its generalizations.

[Topology and Geometry Seminar] "Solving Word Problems in finitely presented groups" by Robert Tang

[Topology and Geometry Seminar] "Solving Word Problems in finitely presented groups" by Robert Tang