Curated News: Scientific Meetings

• share
• favorite_border

Astronomers using the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) have found a pulsar speeding away from its presumed birthplace at nearly 700 miles per second, with its trail pointing directly back at the center of a shell of debris from the supernova explosion that created it. The discovery is providing important insights into how pulsars — superdense neutron stars left over after a massive star explodes — can get a “kick” of speed from the explosion.

• share
• favorite_border

EB 2019, to be held April 6–9 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, is the annual meeting of five scientific societies, bringing together more than 12,000 scientists and 25 guest societies in one interdisciplinary community.

• share
• favorite_border

UW researchers have developed a robotic system that can feed people who need someone to help them eat.

• share
• favorite_border

Mathematician Shankar Venkataramani’s research group recently discovered a lot of new, powerful geometries involved in frilly surfaces, which he will describe at the 2019 APS March Meeting. For mathematicians, frilly is plain language for an inflected nonsmooth surface -- one that changes the direction in which it bends, such as with kale or coral. Venkataramani’s group developed the mathematics to describe these surfaces, and the combination of new geometry insights and age-old slugs might just be the right combination for a new generation of flexible, energy-efficient soft-bodied robots.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers have created tiny functional, remote-powered, walking robots, developing a multistep nanofabrication technique that turns a 4-inch specialized silicon wafer into a million microscopic robots in just weeks. Each one of a robot’s four legs is just under 100-atoms-thick, but powered by laser light hitting the robots’ solar panels, they propel the tiny robots. The researchers are now working on smart versions of the robots that could potentially make incredible journeys in the human body.

• share
• favorite_border

A new APS report, “The Impact of Industrial Physics on the U.S. Economy,” shows the significant role of physics, which contributed an estimated $2.3 trillion (12.6 percent of U.S. GDP) in 2016 alone. Industrial physics encompasses the application of physics knowledge and principles to the design and manufacture of products and services. Many people working within this field have job titles other than physicist, so this report includes all aspects of industrial physics contributions.

• share
• favorite_border

The Treatment Plenary at the International Conference on Eating Disorders to address the evidence for short-term treatments for eating disorders

• share
• favorite_border

The latest data from the giant planets has sent researchers back to the drawing board. Cassini orbited Saturn for 13 years before its dramatic final dive into the planet’s interior, while Juno has been orbiting Jupiter for two and a half years; the data collected has been “invaluable but also confounding,” said David Stevenson from Caltech, who will present an update of both missions at the 2019 APS March Meeting in Boston. Innovative design that protected the instruments from fierce radiation and powered the mission on solar energy alone has reaped plenty of surprises.

• share
• favorite_border

Solar cells offer a clean source of energy, but the efficiency of a fixed solar system is limited: The sun moves, but solar cells do not. Beth Parks has devised an astonishingly simple way to overcome this limitation -- a bucket of water. As she will describe at the 2019 APS March Meeting, she developed a frame that holds the solar cell with a bucket suspended on either end. By controlling the leak of water from one of the buckets, the solar cell shifts, tracking the arc of the sun throughout the day.

• share
• favorite_border

Knitting may be an ancient manufacturing method, but Elisabetta Matsumoto believes that understanding how different stitch types determine shape and mechanical strength will be invaluable for designing materials for future technologies, and a more detailed understanding of the knitting “code” could benefit manufacturers around the world. Members of the Matsumoto group are delving through the surprisingly complex mathematics that underlies tangles of yarn -- work Matsumoto will describe at the 2019 APS March Meeting.

• share
• favorite_border

An ultra-low power hybrid chip inspired by the brain could help give palm-sized robots the ability to collaborate and learn from their experiences.

• share
• favorite_border

Humans have a knack for finding patterns in the world around them. Researchers are building a model that shows how this ability might work, which they will describe at the 2019 APS March Meeting. The brain does more than just process incoming information, the researchers say. It constantly tries to predict what’s coming next. The new model attempts to explain how people can make such predictions.

• share
• favorite_border

Engineers are developing an educational toolkit to bring integrated photonics into the college engineering and science curriculum. The kit is designed to teach students practical skills in integrated photonics and equip them to meet the growing demand for technicians and engineers in the industry.

• share
• favorite_border

A new frontier in the study of magnetic materials, femtomagnetism, could lead to ultrafast magnetic storage devices that would transform information processing technologies. Now, researchers report a tabletop method to characterize such a faster magnetic storage using high-harmonic generation of laser light in iron thin films. Their work, which Guoping Zhang will present at the 2019 APS March Meeting, has the same vision as quantum technology.

• share
• favorite_border

Princeton researchers are exploring how cooperation arises in human societies, where people tend to cluster into various group types -- political, religious, familial, professional, etc. -- which they will describe at the 2019 APS March Meeting. Within such groups, people can cooperate or “defect” and receive payoffs based on those exchanges. Cooperation, they observed, is most favored when allowing for the existence of “loners” -- people who are temporarily not members of any group.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers have analyzed the real-time effect of a large-scale hack on automobiles in a major urban environment. Using percolation theory, they analyzed how a large, disseminated hack on automobiles would affect traffic flow in New York City, and they found that it could create citywide gridlock. However, based on these findings the team also developed a risk-mitigation strategy to prevent mass urban disruption -- work they will describe at the 2019 APS March Meeting.

• share
• favorite_border

Theory suggests that metallic hydrogen should be a superconductor at room temperature; however, this material has yet to be produced in the lab. Metal superhydrides are packed with hydrogen atoms in a configuration similar to the structure of metallic hydrogen. Models predict they should behave similarly. Samples of superhydrides of lanthanum have been made and tested, and at the 2019 APS March Meeting in Boston, Russell Hemley will describe his group’s work studying the material.

• share
• favorite_border

Because cracks propagate quickly, studying the fracturing process -- which can tell us a lot about the materials and the physics involved -- currently requires expensive high-speed cameras. A new imaging method known as the virtual frame technique allows ordinary digital cameras to capture millions of frames per second for several seconds, requiring only a short and intense pulse of light. At the 2019 APS March Meeting, researchers will describe how the virtual frame technique would allow direct imaging of fracturing and other material surface processes.

• share
• favorite_border

Medical practitioners commonly treat organs in isolation, but Boston University physicist Plamen Ivanov wants to usher in a new paradigm. As he will describe at the 2019 APS March Meeting, “It’s time to view health and disease not only from the perspective of individual organs but from the point of view of their integration,” he said. “We need to show how the different systems communicate with each other and stay in sync.” Ivanov calls the field he’s pioneering “network physiology.”

• share
• favorite_border

ICED Sociocultural Plenary to address eating disorders in the LGBTQ+ community