Millennium Café

Every object at a finite temperature emits thermal radiation, ranging from sunlight, incandescent lighting, to blackbody radiation from human bodies which can be detected in thermal cameras. Nanostructured materials allow new kinds of light-matter interaction, allowing for tailoring various properties of thermal radiation. Controlling thermal radiation holds the key to new energy applications. This talk will briefly introduce our group’s passion on tailoring thermal radiation for energy applications, ranging from heat-to-electricity conversion across a nanoscale gap, utilization of the coldness of the outer space for passive cooling, to active refrigeration using light, enabled by nanocalorimetry, nano devices, and photonic design.

Tom Lauerman | School of Visual Arts

Five years ago, I started building custom clay 3d printers in collaboration with a team of students from the College of Engineering's Learning Factory program. Countless iterations later the process has evolved to become my primary tool in the creation of sculpture that combine ancient craft techniques and contemporary design tools. Presently at a crossroads with my research, I am exploring clay printing in a multidiciplinary classroom and research environment. 

Josh Lambert | Food Science

Cocoa is a popular food ingredient most commonly used to make chocolate. Chocolate is viewed as indulgence food that contains high amounts of fat and sugar, and is likely to adversely affect your health. In short, it tastes too good to be good for you. If you look at the nutrition label on cocoa, however, it looks like a health food. My talk will give a brief overview of how cocoa and chocolate are made, some highlights from the available human data on chocolate and chronic disease risk, and a short synopsis of research activities on cocoa in the Lambert Lab.

Do you know how many kWh your home uses every day or the energy content of a gallon of gasoline? How do those amounts of energy relate to 2000 Calories you eat every day, and the amount of CO₂ you emit? The world needs to reduce CO₂ emissions by ~ 1000 gigaton (Gt) of carbon over the next 30 years, but what can you do about that on your own? How does a Gt even make sense in your own life in terms of your energy sources and consumption? The first step understanding these numbers is to quantify the energy you use every day for your home, commute to work, entertainment, and travel.  The second step to make this relevant to climate change is to translate that energy use into CO2 emissions that have meaning to you. In this talk I show how we can easily frame all these numbers based on a bottom line: the energy in food we eat for one day, and how much CO2 we release from eating that food. When energy is expressed using these numbers, we can see how important using a gallon of gasoline is relative to energy use for our home, travel, and all the energy use and carbon emissions that go into just putting that food on the table. 

During the last decades, biomimetics has attracted increasing attention from basic and applied researchers from various disciplines and industries to include building construction. Novel methods for analyzing and simulating the form-structure-function-relation on various hierarchical levels allow fascination insights in multi-scale mechanics of biological materials systems, and new production methods enable for the first time the transfer of many outstanding properties of the biological role models into innovative biomimetic products for reasonable costs. This is shown for three examples based on plant motion, including bio-inspired self-repairing materials and façade shading systems.

Rachel Brennan  |  Environmental Engineering

Reversing global warming through Drawdown strategies provides a unifying and motivational theme under which faculty, staff, students, and community members can work together across traditional boundaries, providing inherent opportunities for transdisciplinary collaboration in a variety of sustainability contexts. In this talk, learn how Penn State is infusing Drawdown into research, education, and outreach programs across the university and around the world through our Water-Energy-Food (WEF) Nexus strategic initiative. The presentation will conclude with an overview of the Drawdown Scholars Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program, and share how faculty, staff, and students can become involved in 2021.