Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS March Meeting 2015
Volume 60, Number 1
Monday–Friday, March 2–6, 2015; San Antonio, Texas
Session M46: Invited Session: Physics for Everyone |
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Sponsoring Units: DMP Chair: Michael Flatte, University of Iowa Room: 217A |
Wednesday, March 4, 2015 11:15AM - 11:51AM |
M46.00001: Soft Electronics for the Human Body Invited Speaker: John Rogers Biology is soft, curvilinear and transient; modern silicon technology is rigid, planar and everlasting. Electronic systems that eliminate this profound mismatch in properties will lead to new types of devices, capable of integrating non-invasively with the body, providing function over some useful period of time, and then dissolving into surrounding biofluids. Recent work establishes a complete set of materials, mechanics designs and manufacturing approaches that enable these features in a class of electronics with performance comparable to that of conventional wafer-based technologies. This talk summarizes the key ideas through demonstrations in skin-mounted `epidermal' monitors, advanced surgical tools and bioresorbable electronic bacteriocides. [Preview Abstract] |
Wednesday, March 4, 2015 11:51AM - 12:27PM |
M46.00002: The Physics of Food Invited Speaker: David Weitz This talk will describe some experiences gained from an introductory physics course at Harvard University, developed several years ago as part of the general education courses. The course is entitled ``Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science,'' and has become a popular course for non-science majors. It has also been successful in outreach, to help develop interest in science for the general public. This talk will describe how the course uses cooking to teach concepts of soft matter science. It will include a description of course and the learnings about how to excite non-science majors in science through the use of a theme in which they are interested. It will also include some demos used in the course and in outreach lectures for the general public. [Preview Abstract] |
Wednesday, March 4, 2015 12:27PM - 1:03PM |
M46.00003: Picasso at the Nanoscale: The Art of Using Cutting-Edge Science to Understand Cultural Heritage Invited Speaker: Volker Rose Scientists are using high-energy X-ray instruments to solve mysteries behind art masterpieces, including artwork by Picasso. Learn how Argonne National Laboratory is working with major art institutions, such as The Art Institute of Chicago and Smithsonian Institute, to unlock groundbreaking information about art, the artist, and our cultural heritage. A deep connection to our past and shared cultural heritage must be preserved to foster a balanced society where all humanity can thrive. This talk will describe analysis of paint materials used by Pablo Picasso at the nanoscale, as only possible at the brightest synchrotron sources. It will highlight how new imaging techniques can reveal the invisible, bringing to light underlying compositions of old masters' paintings. This in turn enables the writing of new art history and provides important material clues that can assist with attribution and authentication. We will explain how the use of new technology can lead to new discoveries, which, in turn, can change the public's and the specialists' perception of great works of art. In collaboration with scientists from The Art Institute of Chicago we have teamed up to study the chemical make up of zinc oxide pigments used in artworks by Pablo Picasso. We will show how highly focused X-ray beams with nanoscale spatial resolution and trace element sensitivity have helped to determine that Picasso has used conventional house paint in some of his paintings. Surprisingly, the study gives also new insights into the pigment material zinc oxide, which has also great potential in a variety of applications such as in spintronics or as transparent electrodes in solar panels. [Preview Abstract] |
Wednesday, March 4, 2015 1:03PM - 1:39PM |
M46.00004: A molecular compass for bird navigation Invited Speaker: Peter Hore Migratory birds travel spectacular distances, navigating and orienting by a variety of means, most of which are poorly understood. Among them is a remarkable ability to perceive the intensity and direction of the Earth's magnetic field. Biologically credible mechanisms for the sensing of such weak fields (25-65 microtesla) are scarce and in recent years just two proposals have emerged as frontrunners. One involves biogenic iron-containing nanoparticles; the other relies on the magnetic sensitivity of short-lived photochemical intermediates known as radical pairs. The latter began to attract attention following the proposal 15 years ago that the necessary physics and chemistry could take place in the bird's retina in specialised photoactive proteins called cryptochromes. The coherent dynamics of the electron-nuclear spin systems of pairs of photo-induced radicals is conjectured to form the basis of the sensing mechanism even though the interaction of an electron spin with the geomagnetic field is six orders of magnitude smaller than the thermal energy. The possibility that slowing decohering, entangled electron spins could form the basis of an important sensory mechanism has qualified radical pair magnetoreception for a place under the umbrella of ``Quantum Biology.'' In this talk, I will introduce the radical pair mechanism, comment on the roles of entanglement and quantum coherence, outline some of the experimental evidence for the cryptochrome hypothesis, and summarize what still needs to be done to determine whether birds (and maybe other animals) really do use a chemical compass to find their way around. [Preview Abstract] |
Wednesday, March 4, 2015 1:39PM - 2:15PM |
M46.00005: The Physics of Data: Can your degree in condensed matter theory get you a job at Google? Invited Speaker: Jeff M. Byers All around us data is being collected by governments, corporations and individuals in staggering amounts. Entire industries are emerging to collect and process this Big Data with the expectation that more is better. But is more better and what can actually be learned? Interestingly, physics confronted this problem more than 150 years ago and developed many important concepts and computational tools within statistical mechanics to address these issues. A great deal of this apparatus has been exported into statistics and computer science to form a heterogeneous conglomeration called machine learning that is leading the charge into the Big Data problem. A brief tour through this world shows how statistical mechanics has been abstracted from its physical origins and transformed into a collection of powerful data processing tools. However, machine learning has interesting things to tell physics as well and can amply re-pay its intellectual debts. The reason for this emerges from the different relationships of physics and machine learning to their respective data. In physics, data is collected by arguably the best experimentalists in the world that attempt to isolate the physical processes so that a direct theoretical analysis is possible. In machine learning, the data is usually an uncontrolled accretion of nearly random instances with limited knowledge of the underlying structure that generated it. Poor data quality forces the analysis tools to acquire powerful new capabilities not usually required in physics. These analysis strategies, in turn, can be valuable to physicists tackling complex phenomenon not amenable to traditional approaches. Examples from biology and astronomy will be used to illustrate the point. [Preview Abstract] |
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