Plastic waste is piling up, with projections estimating 25 billion tons by 2050—most of it ending up in landfills or the environment. Traditional mechanical recycling falls short, with only a tiny fraction of plastics truly recycled into similar products. This Town Talk challenges us to...
Natalie Shustova, University of South Carolina Photochromic materials are quietly woven into the fabric of our daily lives, yet they are also driving some of the most exciting frontiers in science and technology. One familiar example is transition lenses for glasses which darken in...
Josh Schaidle To enable secure, resilient, and domestic supply chains, Dr. Josh Schaidle and his colleagues of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado are pursuing innovative routes to diversify the feedstocks utilized in production of the fuels, chemicals, and materials that we use in...
Rohit Pappu, Washington University in St. Louis What are the unifying themes in neurodegeneration in the context of ALS and other dementias, success of heart transplantation, the onset and progression of an assortment of cancers, and stress responses of plants? In all these cases, the...
Guillermo AcunaFriborg University A scientific revolution is happening at the smallest of scales—one where we fold DNA, the molecule of life, into intricate nanoscale shapes. This field, called DNA origami, turns DNA into a programmable building material, allowing us to craft structures just billionths of a...
Kade Head-Marsden, University of Minnesota There is an exponential cost to obtaining molecular information pertinent to important processes such as catalysis, photosynthesis, and energy transfer and storage. While quantum computing showed early promise for reducing the scaling of these problems, practical realization of this promise...
Milan Delor, Columbia University Moore's law - the long-standing trend of computer chips getting constantly faster and cheaper by doubling the number of transistors on a chip every two years - is coming to a worrying end. The hunt for new materials and processes that...
Ann McDermott, Columbia University For proteins, aka “the building blocks of life”, shape is ultimately important. Shape, more than other properties, confers function, information about protein shapes is coveted in the development of new medicines and diagnostics. Most proteins are somewhat flexible, and there are...
Lucy Hutyra, Boston University Our city trees offer well-known benefits—from cooling overheated neighborhoods to sequestering carbon—but the story is far from simple. This talk examines how trees grow in the challenging urban environment and the ecological trade-offs they face. We’ll explore how cities might balance...
