All Ages

Is AI as revolutionary as fire in changing the world? Or is that hype? But can it be hype when AI has such obvious benefits in some research fields? How can we leverage the astonishing potential of AI in a rational, practical and responsible way? Is AI a moral panic, a sales job, a generational opportunity, a threat of apocalypse? How can we think clearly and deeply about a topic that is so obscured by glitz, money, and noise? How can we as scholars at Yale collectively understand AI in our academic setting, and how should our research and teaching respond to advances in AI?

Carl Zimmer, science columnist for the New York Times and adjunct professor of Molecular Biophysics, will present his new book, “Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe.” He will be in conversation with Brandon Ogbunu, assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the Yale School of Medicine.

In addition to being the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne and the only person ever to have won Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry, Marie Curie welcomed other women into her lab. It was her lab from the untimely death of her husband, Pierre, in 1906, till her own death in 1934. She ran it, enlarged it, moved it into the imposing new Radium Institute, and peopled it with an international assembly of scientists, more than forty of whom were women, including her daughter Irène, the second woman to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Now in science operations, NASA’s Webb Telescope is the most powerful telescope ever built. Science results are now pouring in from Webb like a waterfall. In this talk, Dr. Riby will summarize what this Webb is, how it works, and the breadth and the depth of its science program, from planets in our own solar system to galaxies seen when the Universe was young. She will touch on the power of using Webb in combination with cosmic telescopes, also known as gravitational lenses.

Built by the US government to house the Hanford nuclear site workers who manufactured weapons-grade plutonium for the Manhattan Project, Richland, Washington is proud of its heritage as a nuclear company town and proud of the atomic bomb it helped create. RICHLAND offers a prismatic, placemaking portrait of a community staking its identity and future on its nuclear origin story, presenting a timely examination of the habits of thought that normalize the extraordinary violence of the past.