ICAM is proud to announce the public unveiling of a unique, interactive, online science center—emergentuniverse.org—which brings the excitement and mysteries of emergent phenomena in matter to the Millennial generation, ages 15-30. A visitor to the site can wander from one exhibit area to another, as one does in a science museum, exploring a given topic in greater or lesser depth.
Two years ago, the ICAM Board of Governors approved funding for the creation of this site and contracted with Dr. Suzi Tucker, an exhibit designer with a background in theoretical chemistry, to be its Director and Chief Designer. Read more »
Madan Rao’s group, NCBS
ICAM extends a warm welcome to a new node in its global network—the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) of Bangalore, India. NCBS, founded in 1991, is a division of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and one of a cluster of scientific research institutes in north Bangalore which, while independent, operate in an open, collaborative atmosphere. Its Director is K. VijayRaghavan, and its Dean is Satyajit Mayor. Together with the newly established Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, NCBS has set up a Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platform Technologies (C-CAMP) which will grow to comprise about 100 groups and focus on stem cell research, biomaterials, and health science translation. Read more »
For advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and recent postdocs in photonics, one of the hottest summer programs around is I-CAMP, the inter-continental advanced materials for photonics summer school. It is “inter-continental” because it combines education at the interdisciplinary frontiers of photonics with an introduction to a different culture each year. This year, the host country was China. Read more »
The next annual meeting of ICAM-I2CAM will be held January 10-13, 2010 on the campus of the University of California – Davis. It will mark the eleventh anniversary of the founding of ICAM. Read more »
In June David Pines’s contributions to theoretical physics and international science were honored when the University of St. Andrews conferred on him an honorary Doctor of Science degree. St. Andrews, which is Scotland’s first university and the third oldest in the world (founded in 1413), has strong programs in several areas of physics and in interdisciplinary science. Professor Andrew Mackenzie, who introduced ICAM’s Co-Director to the Vice-Chancellor in the traditional Laureation, described both his theoretical work and his tireless advocacy for international cooperation in science. “Visionary” and “unstoppable” were the two words used by Professor Mackenzie to sum up David’s long and still ongoing career. Read more »
The graphics processor units (GPUs) used in playstations for games like Mortal Kombat are engineered to stream fast calculations in parallel to display pixels on TVs or computers. In fact, for certain applications, they run (per GPU) at least 15-20 times as fast as the CPUs that drive our laptops and parallel computing machines! Why not use them for running science applications? Read more »
The Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter invites applications for postdoctoral and senior faculty fellow appointments tenable at ICAM branch member institutions for the academic year 2010-2011. These awards are intended to catalyze research and research collaborations on complex adaptive matter, by supplementing existing postdoctoral appointments or sabbatical leave support. Read more »
