Youth And Teen

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.

Students in the Yale Pathways to Science Summer Scholars program will discover the invisible Universe at Wright Lab and interact with Wright Lab researchers. The program includes a brief presentation on the science behind Wright Lab’s exploration of the invisible Universe and two hands-on activities; including detecting cosmic rays with “Cosmic Watches” and making bracelets and keychains with beads that change color when exposed to the invisible wavelengths of ultraviolet (UV) light.

Building upon two decades of edge-finding archaeological research, the Yale Ancient Pharmacology Program continues to refine a transdisciplinary approach that seamlessly blends ethnography, materiality, and technology. Nucleating at the Yale Peabody Museum has allowed YAPP to work across its divisions and vast collections to push our knowledge of ancient organic materials through the fusion of ethnohistory, phytochemistry, and data science.

In this talk, Professor Paseau will describe some of his work on inference within mathematics and more generally. Inferences can be usefully divided into deductive or non-deductive. Formal logic studies deductive inference, the obvious question here being: which formal logic correctly captures it? His view, defended in his recent monograph One True Logic (Oxford UP, co-authored with Owen Griffiths), is that any such logic must be highly infinite. In this Inference Project event, he shall explain what this means and sketch some arguments for it.

In Life’s Edge, Carl Zimmer explores the nature of life and investigates why scientists have struggled to draw its boundaries. He handles pythons, goes spelunking to visit hibernating bats, and even tries his hand at evolution. Zimmer visits scientists making miniature human brains to ask when life begins, and follows a voyage that delivered microscopic animals to the moon, where they now exist in a state between life and death. From the coronavirus to consciousness, Zimmer demonstrates that biology, for all its advances, has yet to achieve its greatest triumph: a full theory of life.