Webinars

Discover how deep learning is reshaping X-ray crystallography—reducing the data needed by up to 90% and accelerating discoveries in materials and drug design. Join our webinar to explore this groundbreaking technology and unlock faster, more accurate structure solutions.

Imagine a future with plentiful clean-energy harvesting to phase out fossil fuels, chemical manufacturing that does not emit harmful pollutants or produce wasteful byproducts, point-of-care diagnostics and sensors, and computers that operate at light speed and consume little energy. Advances in nanophotonics are poised to usher in that future. In this webinar, we describe the underlying physics and several emerging applications. Originally aired May 2024.

This webinar will provide an overview of El Niño and La Niña and their global impacts. We will review the strong El Niño of 2023–24 and the current forecast for the rest of 2024. We will also cover what is understood about ENSO and global warming. Originally aired April 2024.

Stochastic models are ubiquitous in nature. They are applicable to the diffusion of molecules (which, when combined with Albert Einstein’s theory, provided the first proof for the atomistic nature of matter), the way through which random mutations drive evolutionary dynamics, and more…Watch the video to learn more! Originally aired October 2023.

Using only lasers, this research group has accelerated electrons to 5 GeV. The acceleration, which takes place over only 20 cm, is approximately 20% of the acceleration achievable at the Stanford Linear Accelerator over 3 km…Watch the video to learn more! Originally aired October 2023.

A recently uncovered cache of materials that neutrino pioneers Clyde Cowan and Fred Reines collected includes records, keepsakes, and images that were packed away shortly after the electron antineutrino was first discovered in the flux from a reactor in South Carolina in 1956. Notes, images, and invoices offer an intimate glimpse of the efforts that led to first direct detection of neutrinos. Originally aired July 2023.

The problem-solving process of many skilled scientists is based on a consistent set of 29 decisions. These decisions provide guidance for learning both how to become a good physicist and how to train aspiring physicists. I will provide examples for how to provide students opportunities to practice these decisions and for how to provide feedback on how to improve. Originally aired July 2023.

Quantum mechanics has been our most successful fundamental theory of nature since the 1920s, but we still don't fully understand what the theory actually says. Sean Carroll will discuss what the problem is, why it is important, and how a better understanding could help us with other pressing problems in physics. Originally aired May 2023.

Birds flock. Bees swarm. Fish school. These remarkable examples of natural collective behavior inspired researchers to study active matter—matter made not of atoms and molecules but of entities that consume energy to generate their own motion and forces. This unusual class of nonequilibrium systems can exhibit remarkable self-organization…Watch the video to learn more! Originally aired May 2023.

Fundamental elementary particle physics allows pointlike electric charges, such as electrons, and pointlike magnetic charges, sometimes referred to as magnetic monopoles, to exist in our universe. Despite decades of searching, the latter have never been observed in particle experiments. All is not lost, however, because emergent magnetic monopoles are thought to occur in lanthanide pyrochlore magnetic insulators. Originally aired April 2023.