Rice Brain Awareness Week

This week, a new campus organization BRAiN: Building Rice Academics in Neuroscience is hosting Rice’s first annual Brain Awareness Week.  From Tuesday 3/9 to Saturday 3/13 there will be events each day focused on the variety and depth of neuroscience research taking place in the Texas Medical Center community and the benefits this basic research will have on each of our lives.  The schedule of events is as follows:

Tuesday March 9, 2010

Lab tour to Dr. David Eagleman’s Neuroimaging Lab at 4pm.

The tour can only accommodate 12 people on this tour. We will meet at the Sid Rich lobby at 3:30 pm and head over to BCM. If you know for sure you would like to come, please email brainclub09@gmail.com.

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Come buy BRAiN T-shirts at the RMC from 12pm – 2 pm! They are really awesome and are $10!

Wednesday March 10, 2010

Trivia Night: Brainiacs

8 pm at Kelly Lounge

Test your brain and win some fun prizes! There will be snacks!

Thursday March 11, 2010

Ethics of the Brain: The brain in a coma, persistent vegetative state, and locked in syndrome

8 pm Farnsworth Pavilion

Speaker: Dr. Joseph Kass; BCM assistant Professor of Neurology and Chief of Neurology Service at Ben Taub General Hospital

Guest Speaker: Dr. Jennifer Swindell; BCM Assistant Professor of Medicine and Medical Ethics with the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy

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Come buy BRAiN T-shirts at the RMC from 11 am – 1 pm!

Friday March 12, 2010

Movie Night: Requiem for a Dream (rated R)

8 pm at Herring 100

Learn about the biological and social basis of drug addiction and watch an amazing film! There will be snacks!

Saturday March 13, 2010

1st Annual Brain Awareness Week Lecture Series: Frontiers of Neuroscience

11 am – 2:30 pm at Farnsworth Pavilion (Please register here to guarantee free lunch)

Speakers:

- Dr. Michael Friedlander

Chair of Neuroscience Department at BCM

Individual cellular differences in plasticity behaviors within the visual cortex

- Dr. Mariella De Biasi

Neuroscience Department at BCM

Unveiling the mechanisms of nicotine addiction

- Dr. Joanna Jankowsky

Neuroscience and Neurology Department at BCM

How transgenic mice may help Generation Z avoid Alzheimer’s disease

- Dr. Wei Ji Ma

Neuroscience Department BCM

When perception goes wrong, and what it teaches us about the brain

- Dr. Steve Cox

Computational and Applied Mathematics, Rice University

Finding Hebbian Cell Assemblies in Large Neuronal Circuits

- Special Presentation by TaTGAP High School Students

This looks to be an exciting and informative week for students interested in learning more about neuroscience in general, or getting to know other students and faculty who also enjoy thinking about the brain.  As this is the first year these events are hosted at Rice, it is especially important to have a large amount of student involvement so that the administration is encouraged to continue pursuing options for a more concrete academic neuroscience program at Rice.

If you have any questions, please email brainclub09@gmail.com.  I will be in attendance at all these events, and I look forward to seeing you there.

(Full disclosure, I am a co-president of the organization hosting this event.)

Rice Science in the News

So the other point of Catalyst blog is to detail interesting things going on with science and engineering and several interesting things happened this month within the hedges. I never meant to wait this long, but finals and holidays derailed any hope of nonessential work. So much belatedly, two cool things I’ve been meaning to write about.

First, one of Rice’s own just got major recognition. Dr. James Tour was ranked one of the ten most prolific chemists of the last decade by Times Higher Education.  The ranking was based on how many papers Dr. Tour has published and how often papers he was an author on are cited by other researchers.   With an average 62.76 citations per paper, Dr. Tour’s research is highly regarded.  Much of Dr. Tour’s research focuses on nanotechnology and crosses several disciplines; Tour is mainly a chemistry professor, but is also a professor of computer science and a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science (in fact, many professors who do research in nanotechnology have an additional appointment in materials science if they are from another department).   Nanotechnology seems to be a recurring theme in the Times list.  Counting Dr. Tour, four of the top ten chemists do research in nanotechnology, and another two do work in materials chemistry/science.  Once again, congratulations Dr. Tour. 

From the physics department, we have a surprising but predicted result from the physics department.  Dr. Randy Hulet’s atom cooling group has come up with experimental support for an interesting bit of quantum theory.  In the 1970s, Russian physicist Vitaly Efimov (a professor at the University of Washington) predicted that there could be quantumer trimers: systems where three particles are bound together in a quantum state.  Like the commonly referenced example of Borromean rings, the particles can only be bound if all three are present.   Hulet’s research page says that this happens because the interactions between two particles are so strong that the third particle actually causes the system to achieve a new equilibrium point.  Until this blogger takes quantum mechanics, that’s all I can really say about the nature of the system.  Efimov’s theory has two other interesting consequences.  One is that the trimer can form over a large range of sizes, with the particles ranging from quarks to atoms, and being able to scale all of those orders of magnitudes is pretty impressive in the world of quantum mechanics.  The other cool thing is that the effect repeats itself.  Efimov predicted that if you find a stable trimer, you would find another one by scaling the energy up or down a factor of 22.7… and you could do this forever.  There is no other word to describe this but awesome.

Unfortunately for the theory, experimentalists have had a hard time proving it.  Early work by nuclear physicists failed to find the trimers because the systems had too much kinetic energy from heat.  Using laser cooling, physicists have been able to remove so much energy from the atoms that quantum effects would start to show.   Dr. Hulet’s group used another quantum effect, called Feshbach resonance, to manipulate how cooled lithium atoms would interact with each.  They found the predicted scaling of the trimers and also found a predicted tetramer state of four particles close to each trimer.  In a fitting end to this story, Hulet announced the results at a meeting in Rome that Efimov was also attending.  Efimov, excited for proof of his theory after so long, gave Dr. Hulet a high five after the meeting ended.