April 3, 2014

Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Performance Hall
915 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL, USA

UChicago Science on the Screen

Your middle ear comes from the jawbone of a prehistoric fish. Your skin and hair can be traced to a shrew-like mammal that lived around 195 million years ago. As for your bad back — well, you can thank your primate ancestors for that. How did the human body become the complicated, quirky and amazing machine it is today?

Read more…

April 2, 2014

University of Illinois at Chicago, Behavioral Science Building, Room 250
1007 West Harrison Street, Chicago, IL, USA

Predicting the Technologies of Our Future

Star Trek is a story of exploration that has fascinated us for the last 50 years.

A crucial part of this story are unbelievable scientific and technological advances — warp drive, wormholes beaming technology, holodecks — that make the exploration of the universe possible.

Read more…

March 12, 2014

Illinois Institute of Technology, McCormick Tribune Campus Center, McCloska Auditorium
3241 South Federal Street, Chicago, IL, USA

The safety of the food supply has emerged as an important and complex global public health, social, and political issue. Although accurate statistics on the scope of foodborne illness are lacking, the most recent estimates published by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicate that as many as 48 million cases, 128,000 hospitalizations, and 3,000 deaths are caused by foodborne illness each year in the U.S.

Read more…

February 26, 2014

Northwestern University, Chicago Campus, Hughes Auditorium
303 East Superior Street, Chicago, IL, USA

The Biomedical Applications of 3D Printing

The impact of 3D printing is expected to affect all of our lives at some point in the near future, whether it will be in the products we buy, the educational tools we use, or the medical care we seek.

Read more…

January 30, 2014

Advanced Photon Source Auditorium at Argonne National Laboratory
9700 S Cass Ave, Lemont, IL, USA

From tennis rackets to sunscreen, from stained glass windows to computer memory, the applications of nanoscale materials research are all around us. New television displays, cell phones and other digital devices incorporate nanostructured polymer films known as light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs. Read more…

January 22, 2014

Northwestern University, Chicago Campus, Hughes Auditorium
303 East Superior Street, Chicago, IL, USA

Beverage cans. Jet Engines. Silicon semiconductors. All of these inventions have crystallography, the study of ordered structures, to thank. 100 years ago, the process of X-ray crystallography was discovered, allowing the atomic order of many materials to be determined. Read more…