Online or at Arnold Arboretum, 125 Arborway, Boston
The birds that populate the Arnold Arboretum rarely have to go far to find water. In the deserts of Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa, it's a different story, and the sandgrouse that lives in these arid environments has developed a fascinating adaptation to stay hydrated: these birds have a unique ability to absorb and hold water inside of their feathers. The chicks can't yet fly the long distance from their nests to the watering hole, so adult males make the long journey with the lifesaving water secreted away in their feathers. But how do their feathers hold water so efficiently? Dr...
Join curator Jen Thum for an exploration of works in the exhibition Seeing in Art and Medicine. Thum will share insights about the museums’ medical humanities program for radiologists—on which the exhibition is based—and what can be gleaned through close looking.
Join curator Jen Thum for a tour of the exhibition Seeing in Art and Medicine. Thum will share insights about the museums’ medical humanities program for radiologists—on which the exhibition is based—the curatorial process, and what can be gleaned through close looking.
At Radcliffe, Mahyar is investigating innovative techniques to integrate situated visualization, augmented reality, and civic technology to design and build a mobile platform that simulates the localized impact of climate change, thereby providing Boston residents with an immersive experience of climate change visualizations and empowering them to contribute comments and ideas on climate change issues.
The platform will benefit the movement towards more equitable resilience by creating new opportunities for the public, especially the underserved communities, to raise their...
Harvard Museums of Science & Culture—Online or at Haller Hall, 24 Oxford St., Cambridge
In Soil to Foil (Columbia University Press, 2023), Saleem Ali tells the extraordinary story of aluminum. He reveals its pivotal role in the histories of scientific inquiry and technological innovation as well as its importance to sustainability. He highlights scientists and innovators who discovered new uses for this remarkable element, ranging from chemistry and geoscience to engineering and industrial design. Ali argues that aluminum use exemplifies broader lessons about stewardship of nonrenewable resources: its seeming abundance has given rise to wasteful and destructive...
Klarman Hall, Harvard Business School, Kresge Way, Boston
This talk features astonishing aerial images of Earth from Colonel Terry Virts' book and takes of life from the edge of the atmosphere.
Colonel (USAF retired) Terry Virts has spent over seven months in space during his two spaceflights, piloting the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 2010 and commanding the International Space Station in 2014/2015. He served in the US Air Force as a fighter pilot, test pilot, NASA astronaut, and is a graduate of the US Air Force Academy, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, and Harvard Business School General Management Program.
Lecturer Jean Dalibard (Professor, Collège de France): "At zero temperature, a Galilean-invariant Bose fluid is anticipated to be completely superfluid. When translational (and thus Galilean) invariance is broken, A.J. Leggett demonstrated in the 1970s that the superfluid fraction must be strictly less than one. Here, we examine both theoretically and experimentally how the presence of an external 1D periodic potential quenches the superfluid fraction of a dilute Bose-Einstein condensate and compare it to Leggett's bound. We show that the anisotropy of sound velocity...
Lecturer Jean Dalibard (Professor, Collège de France): Solitons are nonlinear wave packets that maintain their shape during free propagation. In quantum gases, bright and dark solitons are observed for attractive and repulsive interactions, exhibiting relatively simple behavior. However, mixtures of gases result in a much more complex physics, with the emergence of dark-bright and magnetic solitons. Here, we examine some non-intuitive phenomena in this context, including the following experimental observation: a magnetic soliton exposed to a constant force...
Lecturer Jean Dalibard (Professor, Collège de France): "Scale invariance, a concept initially introduced in high-energy physics, has gained numerous applications in the physics of quantum fluid. It is applicable to strongly interacting Fermi gases, two-dimensional Bose gases, as well as few-body systems that exhibit the 'Efimov effect.' In the presentation, I will illustrate how scale and conformal invariance emerge in cold atomic gases. I will use various examples ranging from thermodynamics to soliton physics to specific structures with periodic time evolution...
A presentation from 2023–2024 Radcliffe fellow Donna L. Maney
Much of Maney's current work focuses on how sex differences are discovered and reported in biomedical research and how these differences influence public policy. At Radcliffe, she is collaborating with scientists at Harvard University and the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health to develop resources to help make biomedical research more sex/gender inclusive.
A presentation from 2023–2024 Sally Starling Seaver Professor Fernanda Viégas
During her fellowship, Viégas is excited to explore new modes of human/AI interaction that draw from her roots in data visualization and human-computer interaction. She is interested in the possibility of leveraging advances in AI interpretability (usually aimed at experts) to help drive improvements in lay user agency and control of AI systems. She looks forward to working with colleagues from various departments at Harvard to uncover creative and useful ways of empowering a wide range of...
Talking more than turkey: This lecture will celebrate the plants that bring Thanksgiving to life. From stuffing, to cranberry sauce, to potatoes, cloves, carrots, celery, lettuce and sage. Come and explore the biology of this annual feast with Dr. Pamela Diggle, professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut.
Oaks are one of the most recognizable trees in New England, and one of the most ecologically important. Join Horticulturist Ryan Devlin for a Tree Mob on the Arboretum's oak collection on Peters Hill and get a closer look at this common but fascinating genus. Learn about oak reproduction, different oak species, mast years, and more through this short landscape talk.
Harvard College Observatory Plate Stacks, 47 Concord Ave., Cambridge
During Massachusetts STEM Week, join us for an evening celebrating remarkable women in astronomy from across the galaxy. Enjoy a dynamic lecture on exciting applications of astronomy, explore a captivating exhibition in the Great Refractor, engage in family-friendly STEM activities, and cap off the night with fall refreshments and stargazing.
Remarks from ProfessorLisa Kewley, Director, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
Welcome remarks from Lt. Governor Kim Driscoll, highlighting...