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Sarah Heilshorn: Protein Engineering: A Novel Approach to Creating New Biomaterials 4/3/2003
[56k modem] [broadband] [cable/DSL] 47 minutes
Sarah Heilshorn is a graduate student in chemistry and chemical engineering at Caltech. Cardiovascular disease is a leading cause of death in industrialized nations. Currently, the most commonly used materials for synthetic, arterial bypasses do not support cell growth, and often fail within three years of being implanted. In response, protein engineering is being used to design an optimum replacement biomaterial.
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Ian Swanson: Tangled Physics: Superstring Theory and the AdS/CFT Conjecture 4/24/2003
[cable/DSL] [broadband] [56k modem] 36 minutes
Ian Swanson, a graduate student in physics at Caltech, discusses the quantum field theory is known as the Standard Model of particle physics, providing the most accurate physical predictions in the history of science. Physicists must now unite the Standard Model with the tenets of general relativity, and string theory is arguably the most promising candidate of the last 50 years.
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Eitan Grinspun: Multiresolution in Graphics and Simulation: From Wrinkles in Valentines Day Balloons to Folds in the Brain 5/22/2003
[56k modem] [cable/DSL] [broadband] 52 minutes
Eitan Grinspun, a graduate student in computer science at Caltech, discussed that by bringing together the fields of graphics and simulation, they develop novel multi-res simulation techniques that apply uniformly to a broad class of problems, and most importantly, that the ideas and implementation are simple.
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Insights into the Origins of Human Brain Tumors 2/18/2004
[56k modem] [broadband] [cable/DSL] 41 minutes
Houman Hemmati, a graduate student in biology at Caltech, discussed the recent advances in leukemia research that have identified bone marrow-derived stem cells as a source for brain-tumor cancers. Based on this work, scientists have taken a novel approach to identifying the origins of brain tumors. Their findings suggest that targeting tumor-derived stem cells is a promising approach to treating brain tumors.
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Melinda Kellogg: Stalking the Exciton Condensate 3/11/2004
[56k modem] [broadband] [cable/DSL] 50 minutes
Melinda Kellogg, a graduate student in physics at Caltech, discussed the creation of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of stable excitons in neighboring layers of two-dimensional electron gases embedded in highly engineered semiconductor crystals. Observing the superfluid-like flow of these excitons was evidence that the long-sought exciton condensation had finally been achieved.
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Shane Ross: The Interplanetary Transport Network 5/5/2004
[56k modem] [broadband] [cable/DSL] 39 minutes
Shane Ross, graduate student in control and dynamical systems at Caltech, discussed how to identify and traverse a vast array of low-energy passageways that winds around the sun, planets, and moons that is created by the competing gravitational pull between celestial bodies. Space travel along these corridors would slash the amount of fuel needed to explore and develop our solar system.
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Tanja Bosak: Were Microbes the Architects of Ancient Shorelines? 3/3/2005
[broadband] [cable/DSL] 41 minutes
Tanja Bosak, graduate student in geological and planetary sciences, discusses how microbes may have contributed to the formation of stromatolities, the cones and domes that dominated cabonate reefs for much of Earth's history and perhaps the oldest macroscopic record of life on Earth. Insights into how microbes shape rocks are critical to the search for microbial biosignatures on the early Earth and other planets.
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Benjamin Lev: The Atom Chip 4/4/2005
[broadband] [cable/DSL] 48 minutes
Benjamin Lev, graduate student in physics, talks about the atom chip, a device reminiscent of a computer circuit board but designed for cold neutral atoms, and how it is an important new addition to the toolboxes of quantum physics and nanotechnology. Quantum computer hardware and atom laser manipulation are but a few promising atom chip applications.
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Nelly Khidekel: The Sweeter Side of Cell Signaling 5/5/2005
[broadband] [cable/DSL] 40 minutes
Nelly Khidekel, graduate student in chemistry, talks about her study of chemical modifications of proteins, modifications that play a critical role in regulating their cellular functions. Current investigations concern the dynamic regulation of O-GlcNAc in the brain, in an attempt to understand its role in nerve cell function and neurodegeneration.
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D. Allan Drummond: Darwin's Dumpster: How cellular sloppiness governs the rate of evolution 3/1/2006
[56k modem] [broadband] [cable/DSL] 47 minutes
In an Everhart lecture, Caltech graduate student D. Allan Drummond discussed how the cellular machinery that synthesizes proteins from genes is sloppy, how defective proteins cost dearly, and how the speed of a gene's evolution depends on how costly it is to change. At a time when challenges to Darwinian evolution abound, Drummond's attack on this controversial issue provides an eye-opening view of how evolution science really works.
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Ming Hsu: Decisions, Decisions: The Ellsberg Paradox and the Neural Foundations of Decision Making under Uncertainty 5/10/2006
[56k modem] [broadband] [cable/DSL] 63 minutes
In an Everhart lecture, Caltech graduate student Ming Hsu discussed using data from functional brain imaging and patients with focal brain damage to study the Ellsberg paradox (in which people's choices violate the axioms of standard decision theory). Hsu's study shows that standard decision theory (which precludes agents from taking into account uncertainty about probabilities) is wrong on both the behavioral and neural levels.
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James Chin-wen Chou: The Quantum Internet: How Einstein's objection to quantum mechanics leads to a whole new field in physics 4/10/2006
[cable/DSL] [broadband] 51 minutes
In an Everhart lecture, Caltech graduate student James Chin-wen Chou gave an introduction to the concepts of quantum entanglement and teleportation and talked about the effort his group has made to realize a quantum repeater architecture for large-scale quantum networks. Although Einstein never did accept quantum mechanics, quantum entanglement turns out to be the key resource in the new science of quantum information.
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Samantha Daly: Metals with Memory 2/22/2007
[56k modem] [broadband] [cable/DSL] 46 minutes
Samantha Daly, Caltech graduate student in engineering and applied science, presented an Everhart Lecture called "Metals with Memory: How These Amazing Materials Remember Their Shape." She discussed how as the science of materials has evolved, scientists have gained the ability to make unusual alloys that do not exist in nature but have properties that make them useful for practical applications, particularly in biomedical and small-scale applications.
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Tracy Teal: Stayin' Alive: How Bacteria Survive in Biofilm Communities 4/11/2007
[cable/DSL] [broadband] [56k modem] 39 minutes
Bacteria have ruled the planet for billions of years, yet only in the last few years have scientists learned that these organisms spend much of their lives as surface-associated communities, or biofilms. In an Everhart Lecture on April 11, Tracy Teal, a graduate student in computation and neural systems at Caltech, explained how biofilms are resilient to changes in environmental conditions and resistant to antibiotics and antimicrobial agents, allowing bacteria to survive in diverse environments.
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Hubert Chen: The High-Energy Universe in Focus: A New Telescope of High-Energy X-Rays 5/24/2007
[56k modem] [broadband] [cable/DSL] 48 minutes
Supernovae, black holes, and neutron stars are just a few examples of the many exotic celestial phenomena that produce X-rays. Hubert Chen, Caltech graduate student in physics, presented an Everhart Lecture in which he discussed the significance of high-energy X-rays in observational astronomy and described new technologies for focusing high-energy X-rays, including the High Energy Focusing Telescope (HEFT), which was launched for the first time in May 2005 by Chen and his colleagues.
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Jennifer Dionne: A Pinch of Light and a Dash of Negative Refraction: Recipes for Making a Perfect Lens and a Cloak of Invisibility 3/5/2008
[cable/DSL] [broadband] [56k modem] 53 minutes
In an Everhart Lecture called "A Pinch of Light and a Dash of Negative Refraction: Recipes for Making a Perfect Lens and a Cloak of Invisibility," Jennifer Dionne, a Caltech graduate student in applied physics, explained the theory and implementation of negative index materials, drawing on advances enabled by the emerging field of plasmonics, and discussed progress toward a sub-diffraction limited optical microscope and an electromagnetic cloak.
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Ari Stern: Symmetry and Simulation: How Geometry Affects Scientific Computing from the Solar System to your Microwave Oven 4/2/2008
[56k modem] [cable/DSL] [high resolution] 61 minutes
Ari Stern, a Caltech graduate student in applied and computational mathematics, discussed how scientists model change in physical systems. He explained how solving differential equations allows researchers to make predictions about the future, or even the past. However, since it is impossible or impractical to obtain exact solutions in most complex systems in science and engineering, we must rely on numerical simulation to compute approximate answers.
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Ding-shyue Yang: Seeing Is Believing: Visualization of Condensed-Matter Structures 5/1/2008
[56k modem] [cable/DSL] [high resolution] 63 minutes
In an Everhart lecture on May 1, Ding-shyue (Jerry) Yang, a Caltech graduate student in chemistry, described recent achievements in the development of time-resolved electron diffraction for the direct probing of structural dynamics in condensed matter. In a talk called "Seeing Is Believing: Visualization of Condensed-Matter Structures," Yang explained how scientists have made use of ultrafast crystallographic snapshots to uncover concealed transitional structures.
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Adrienne Erickcek: Looking Beyond the Cosmological Horizon 3/10/2009
[cable/DSL] [56k modem] [high resolution] 63 minutes
Everhart lecturer Adrienne Erickcek, a Caltech graduate student in theoretical astrophysics, presented a brief history of the universe, focusing on evidence for a cosmic growth spurt called inflation. She and her collaborators have shown that structure outside the horizon may generate a puzzling asymmetry in the cosmic microwave background, which can be interpreted as a signature of pre-inflationary remnants lurking beyond the cosmological horizon.
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Joshua Spurgeon: Rolling Out the Solar Carpet: Microwire Solar Cells in Flexible Polymer Layers 4/28/2009
[56k modem] [cable/DSL] [high resolution] 55 minutes
Joshua Spurgeon, a Caltech graduate student in chemical engineering, discussed how solar energy has enormous potential as a carbon-free energy resource. The high cost of solar power in comparison to coal has prevented its widespread implementation, but Spurgeon explained an innovative scheme with the potential to enable the economic, roll-to-roll processing of wire array solar cells by incorporating inorganic semiconductor material grown on a recyclable substrate into an inexpensive, flexible organic layer.
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