Test Tube Babes
A (fairly) light-hearted explanation of the process of in vitro fertilisation in humans. Winner of the Kroto Prize for Innovative Use of Technology in Science Learning 2016.
More details | Watch nowThe Enlightenment is Under Threat and Lindau Alumni for Humanitarian Action (LAHA) Can Save It
Kant, in possibly his most celebrated essay, defined the Enlightenment as: Man’s emergence from his self-imposed period of immaturity. This immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. Without the freedom t....
More details | Watch nowWhat About Redefining Time Using a Stable Laser?
Several laser-based Atomic Clocks now have an accuracy potential of ~2 x10-18, a hundred-fold better than the best achieved after more than 60 years' experience with rf resonances in Cs atoms. Still, this long attention span documents that the Cs Fou....
More details | Watch nowGamma Ray Bursts: Windows on the Universe
Gamma-Ray Bursts are the most powerful explosions in the universe. They happen about once per day in the visible universe. Their fantastic engines pump out as much energy in a matter of seconds as all the stars in a galaxy do in a billion years. This....
More details | Watch nowThe International Year of Light: Celebrating Fifty Years of Laser Revolution in Physics
The year 2015 has been named the International Year of Light, to mark milestones in the science of light which occurred 1000, 200, 150, 100 and 50 years go. I was a young student in physics in 1965, when the cosmic radiation background was discovered....
More details | Watch nowLight Quanta and Their Idiosyncrasies
Maxwell's electromagnetic theory (now 150 years old) seemed in its comprehensive way to be capable of answering all of the questions one might ever pose about the theory of light. But that spell was broken in 1900 by Planck's discovery that light bea....
More details | Watch nowScience with Combs of Light
The spectrum of a frequency comb, commonly generated by a mode-locked femtosecond laser, consists of several hundred thousand precisely evenly spaced spectral lines. Such laser frequency combs have revolutionized the art of measuring the frequency of....
More details | Watch nowaskFSU 1 : speed of light, tachyons, solar sails, and black holes
Joining Philip Schlenoff is Dr. Jeff Owens, from the Physics department at Florida State University, to answer some physics and astrophysics-related questions!
More details | Watch nowNanoscopy – allowing molecules to be examined inside living cells
Eric Betzig shared the 2014 Chemistry Nobel prize with fellow American William E. Moerner and Romanian-German Stefan W. Hell for revolutionising science through the development of super-resolved fluorescence to exceed the accepted limits of tradition....
More details | Watch nowFun with Light and Single Molecules
More than 25 years ago, single molecules were first detected optically, but how do we really detect a single molecule today, and what good is it? It is an amazing fact that you can even detect single molecules with your own eyes. When a new regime of....
More details | Watch nowElectron Transfer Theory in Single Molecule Studies of Intermittent Fluorescence of Quantum Dots and in Initial Steps in Dye Sensitized Solar Cells
Intermittently fluorescing single molecule systems are found in many materials, including semiconductor quantum dots (QD), dyes on crystalline or nanoparticle film surfaces, and biological systems. The QD's show a ~ -3/2 power law for the distributio....
More details | Watch nowQuasi-Periodic Crystals
Quasicrystals - or, as Shechtman would prefer, quasi-periodic materials - now have scientists thinking about matter in a new light, but they also have many possible practical applications. Because of their uneven structure, quasicrystals do not have ....
More details | Watch nowOptical Microscopy – the Resolution Revolution
Throughout the 20th century it was widely accepted that a light microscope relying on conventional optical lenses cannot discern details that are much finer than about half the wavelength of light (200-400 nm), due to diffraction. However, in the 199....
More details | Watch nowSolar Energy
Can nanocrystals stop the climate change?
Fossil resources are limited and their CO2 emission strongly contributes to the global warming which is mainly responsible for the increasing appearance of natural catastrophes. Renewable biomass which can be converted into various forms of usable en....
More details | Watch nowGreen Fluorescent Protein: Lighting up Life
The accidental discovery of this wonderful tool has changed the face of biology.
More details | Watch nowScience – Lost in Translation?
This presentation explores the way in which the ideas and advances of people like Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler to Newton and Leibniz laid the foundations of Science. The Enlightenment was a byproduct of this philosophical breakthrough and right f....
More details | Watch nowCommunicating with light
Most of the data we generate and receive (whether emails, tweets, videos or mobile calls) are now carried by optical fibres, which use light to transmit vast quantities of information over trans-oceanic distances. The use of hundreds of wavelengths ....
More details | Watch nowHIV, a Discovery Highlighting the Global Benefit of Translational Research
The fantastic progress made in medicine led the scientific community to hope about the complete eradication of infectious diseases in the middle of the 20th century. The sudden emergence of AIDS in the early 80's cruelly reminded us that this dream ....
More details | Watch nowThe Individuality of Light Quanta
Light quanta are the fundamental units of radiant energy. When propagating freely they travel at the fastest attainable speed and live forever. These properties recommend them as the ideal messengers for communication of all sorts. Ordinary light ....
More details | Watch nowThe Beginning and Development of the Universe
By careful investigation of relic left on the cosmic scene we have very good evidence and constraints on what has occurred since the beginning of the Universe. This talk reviews the evidence including images and information from the very first light....
More details | Watch nowCold Atomic Gases: the Intersection of Condensed Matter and Atomic Physics
During the past decade laser cooling and evaporative cooling of atoms have produced quantum degenerate gases both of bosons (Bose-Einstein condensates) and of fermions (gases with temperatures below the Fermi temperature). Such gases can provide ana....
More details | Watch nowMolecules Against Cancer or for Long-Term Memory Storage
For cancer diagnosis and therapy, we are developing activatable cell-penetrating peptides (ACPPs), synthetic molecules with a novel amplifying mechanism for homing to diseased tissues. ACPPs are polycationic cell-penetrating peptides whose cellular ....
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