Description
Since 2012 astronomer José Francisco Salgado has been photographing the Northern Lights from Canada, Alaska, and Iceland, as part of his work communicating science through the arts. So far, his Northern Lights films set to music have been presented with orchestras in 13 cities in four countries and have reached a combined audience of 130,000 people. Continue reading “In Awe of the Northern Lights”
Over the past two decades, technology has had huge impacts on almost everything we do — everything except participate in our democracy. When it comes to the voting booths, things look a lot like they did in 1996, and changing that scene is really hard to do. Come talk about the role technology plays in our democracy: from campaigns to voter registration to election day, this space is ripe for innovation. The time is now. Continue reading “Technology and Politics”
Chicago’s Potemkin Village: Why Chicago’s innovation economy has failed, and how we can grow an innovation economy built around invention, technology transfer, and entrepreneurship
Since 2012, Chicago has built an estimated 1.5 million square feet of coworking spaces, and about 80 or 90 incubators and accelerators. Continue reading “Chicago’s Potemkin Village: Why our innovation economy has failed, and how to fix it”
The discovery that a microorganism produced penicillin in 1928 ushered in an unprecedented global effort to mine for new antibiotics from the environment, in particular from microorganisms that live in soil. It remains one of the most impactful scientific discoveries in our species’ history, as it resulted in nearly doubling our life span. Continue reading “Antibiotic Hunters: Discovering Drugs in the Ocean”
A healthy athlete dies of complications from heatstroke during training. The medical examiner finds a legal botanical dietary supplement played a “significant role” in the death. How are regulatory agencies able to respond? What are dietary supplements and how are they regulated in the United States? How do I find information about dietary supplements I want to take? Continue reading “Dietary Supplements: Stories of Regulation, Safety, and Evidence”
How do fish and other marine species find forever homes? How long do they remain drifters?
Adults spawn and release eggs that hatch into larvae that temporarily join the drifting communities of the open ocean, plankton. What happens from there is not easy to study–larvae are tiny; almost invisible, and the ocean is huge. Continue reading “Tales From the Sea: How do Baby Fish and Other Marine Species Find Forever Homes?”