Events Archive

Oct
30
2013
Analyses of the Remora Adhesion System
Remoras (echeneid fish) reversibly attach and detach to marine hosts, almost instantaneously, to “hitchhike” and feed. The adhesion mechanisms that they use are remarkably insensitive to substrate topology and quite different from the latching and suction cup-based systems associated with other species at similar length scales.  Remora adhesion is also anisotropic; drag forces induced by the host’s swimming increase adhesive strength, while rapid detachment occurs when the remora reverses this shear load.  In this presentation, an investigation of the adhesive system’s...
Oct
29
2013
Global Phase Space Study of Coherence and Entanglement in a Double-Well Bose-Einstein Condensate
Oct
28
2013
Soft matter, food and cooking
Have you ever wondered why an egg solidifies at high temperature while most pure substances, like water, do not? Or why materials solely made of liquids can exhibit solid-like properties? Or why adding a tiny amount of certain additives to water dramatically changes the way water flows? This talk will touch on some of these aspects. It will start by discussing what soft condensed matter is and why soft materials are indeed soft. It will then briefly discuss viscous flow, to end introducing the significance of phase transformations in manipulating food. The aim of the...
Oct
28
2013
The Fermi Pasta Ulam (FPU) Problem and The Birth of Nonlinear Science
Oct
23
2013
Drinking, Clapping, and Bouncing fluids
I will discuss three fluid-mechanics problems: fluid motions related to drinking, clapping, and bouncing, which you might have experienced or observed once during daily activities....
Oct
21
2013
2012 Physics Nobel Laureate: Superposition, Entanglement, and Raising Schrödinger’s Cat
Oct
21
2013
Single-atom optical clocks*
With the availability of spectrally pure lasers and the ability to precisely measure optical frequencies, it appears the era of optical atomic clocks has begun.  At the expense of signal-to-noise ratio, in one project at NIST we have used single trapped atomic ions because uncertainties in systematic effects are smallest, reaching Df/f0 = 0.8 x 10-17.  At this level, many effects, including those due to special and general relativity, must be calibrated and corrected for.
Oct
16
2013
Platinum-based spintronics
Oct
16
2013
Automated patch clamp electrophysiology of neurons in the living brain
Whole-cell patch clamp electrophysiology of neurons in vivo enables the recording of electrical events in cells with great precision, and supports a wide diversity of cellular morphological and molecular analysis experiments. However, high levels of skill are required in order to perform in vivo patching, and the process is time-consuming and painstaking. An automated in vivo patching robot would not only empower a great number of neuroscientists to perform such experiments, but would also open up fundamentally new kinds of experiment enabled by the resultant high throughput. We discovered that...
Oct
15
2013
Dynamic Organization of Biomembranes

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