Millennium Café

The occurrence of workplace accidents is described within the context of self-organized criticality, a theory from statistical physics that governs a wide range of phenomena across physics, biology, geosciences, economics, and the social sciences.  Workplace accident data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reveal a power-law relationship between the number of accidents and their severity as measured by the number of days lost from work.  This power-law scaling is indicative of workplace accidents being governed by self-organized criticality, suggesting that nearly all workplace accidents have a common underlying cause, independent of their severity.

Crystalline oxide and chalcogenide thin films offer functionalities beyond their bulk counterparts. Growing these thin films is not always straight forward and defects frequently mask the properties of interest. In this talk I will highlight selected examples where molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) has enabled the growth of new thin films with unique functionality.

Roman Engel-Herbert | Materials Science & Engineering

The primary objective of the NASA Mars Science Laboratory Mission is to investigate the potential habitability of ancient Mars. During this mission, the Curiosity Rover has traversed hundreds of meters of mudstone representing a long-lived series of ancient lakes. Characteristics of the sandstone and conglomerate deposits studied along the traverse indicate that those lakes were sustained by rivers and deltas. Additionally, the mission has found extensive evidence for water having flowed through fractures in the bedrock at a later time of Martian history. Further, the preserved rocks, and their associated minerals, show considerable evidence for different reduction/oxidation states, an important prerequisite for habitability.

Chris House | Geosciences

Size and shape are important properties of particulate samples. These can influence a wide range of characteristics, such as: texture and feel of food ingredients, flowability of metal powders, and packing density/porosity of ceramics, to name a few. This talk will highlight capabilities and applications of two new particle characterization instruments currently available at Materials Characterization Lab, the Mastersizer 3000 for measuring particle size distribution and the Morphologi G3 SE for imaging size and shape of individual particle.

Katya Bazileskaya | Materials Characterization Lab

Poor understanding of heat transfer across solid-liquid interfaces bottlenecks the development of nanocomposite materials for applications in thermal interface materials, energy generation, catalysis, and thermotherapeutics. Thermal engineers have identified the main parameters governing interfacial heat transfer; however, the interplay among these parameters is rather complex. This talk calls for anybody interested in the topic to develop a proper understanding of interfaces before addressing the problem of heat transfer across interfaces.

Punishment, or the threat of punishment, is a critical component for the establishment and maintenance of social system governed by norms. We would like to create robots that obey social norms. Do we then need a means for punishing our robots and, if so, how do punish a robot? This talk examines these and related questions.

Alan Wagner | Rock Ethics Institute | Aerospace Engineering