Date:

Wednesday 22 April 2009

Title:

Looking for Dark Matter through the Bottom of a Wine Glass
 

Speaker:

Evelyn Gates

What is the Universe made of?

New data insist that normal matter  –  everything you were ever taught in chemistry class  –  makes up only about 5% of the total amount of matter and energy in the Universe. Dark Matter, an exotic new form of matter that has never been directly detected, accounts for about 23%, while the remaining 72% is not matter of any kind, but some strange new substance, dubbed Dark Energy, that is fueling an accelerated  expansion of space itself. The search for dark matter and dark energy is complicated by the fact that they cannot be seen directly with even our most powerful telescopes. Instead, cosmologists are using the warps and dimples in space-time described by Einstein in his theory of  General Relativity as giant "cosmic lenses".  Gravitational lensing – also known as Einstein’s Telescope – allows us to probe the dark Universe in an entirely new way:  to search for black holes and planets within our own Galaxy, map out the dark matter that dominates a galaxy or cluster of galaxies, and detect the imprint of dark energy on the web of dark matter that winds across the cosmos.

Background urls: http://einsteinstelescope.com/
& http://kicp.uchicago.edu
 

Date:

Monday 12 January 2009

Title:

The Brain, the Broken Brain & the Neural Biology of Language

Speaker:

Steven Small

My laboratory focuses on understanding how the human brain produces and comprehends language, and how the motor functions of the hands and mouth achieve goal-directed actions, such as speech and gesture. By  investigating the neural bases of language and hand motor function  using a variety of methods, such as computational modeling, functional  and structural brain imaging, and cognitive assessment, we have been  able to understand better the biology of language and to develop novel  treatment approaches for language disorders.

Volunteer to be a research subject at www.stroketherapy.net/

Download a poster for this cafe here (pdf)

Café Email list https://cfcpwork.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/cafe

Date:

Monday 9 March 2009

Title:

Chasing Cosmic Bullets

Speaker:

Angela Olinto

The most energetic particles in the universe are ultra-high energy 
cosmic rays. They are strange beasts: millions of times more powerful than anything produced by man-made accelerators, concentrated (e.g., one can pack the energy of a fastball into a subatomic particle), and very rare (they occur once/sq km/century). The nature and origin of  these cosmic bullets has been a scientific mystery for a century. Recently, an international collaboration of 17 countries joined forces to solve this mystery by building the Pierre Auger Observatory, which is spread over 3,000 square kilometres in the Pampas of Argentina. Auger has captured enough of these rare particles to find the first clues to their origins, which seems to be  from nearby galaxies that host super massive black holes. Auger scientists continue to study these most extreme particles to learn where they come from, what they are made of, and how they are accelerated to such enormous energies.

Background urls:
http://www.auger.org/
& http://research.uchicago.edu/highlights/item.php?id=6