Planets Around Nearby Stars
Modern science began with Copernicus speculating that the Earth is a
planet and that all the planets orbit the Sun.  Bruno followed up by
speculating that the Sun is a star, that other stars have planets, and
other planets are inhabited by life.   …Read more.

Nanoparticles in liquid crystals, and liquid crystals in nanoparticles.
 
Liquid crystals are remarkably sensitive to interfacial interactions. Small perturbations at a liquid crystal interface can in fact be amplified over relative long distances, thereby providing the basis for a wide range of applications. …Read more.

Active Brownian particles: From individual to collective behavior
Single self-propelled particles as well as ensembles of self-propelled particles are examples of non-equilibrium states and a topic of the interdisciplinary research at the borderline between physics and biology. …Read more.

Active Matter: from colloids to living cells
Collections of self-propelled entities, from living cells to engineered microswimmers, organize in a rich variety of active fluid and solid states, with unusual properties. …Read more.

Origins, Evolution and Biophysics: an Ephemeral Golden Braid
Douglas Hofstradter’s celebrated 1979 book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (“GEB”), presented “a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll.”  In this talk we likewise seek to explore implicit themes and hidden connections that unite origins and evolution (in a broad sense) with biophysical principles underlying modern biochemistry and molecular genetics. …Read more.

Dark Matter Bound States and Indirect Dark Matter Signals
Most of the mass density in our universe is not composed of the familiar particles that make up atoms. Rather it is something different that goes by the name dark matter. …Read more.

Can theoretical physics help cancer biology? The case of metastatic spread
In order to spread from the primary tumor to distant sites, cancer cells must undergo a coordinated change in their phenotypic properties referred to as the “epithelial-to-mesenchymal” transition.   …Read more.

An Uncooperative Universe: Large Scale Anomalies in the CMB
The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation is our most important source of information about the early universe. Many of its features are in good agreement with the predictions of the so-called standard model of cosmology — the Lambda Cold Dark Matter Inflationary Big Bang Theory. …Read more.

A Cosmic Ray Astrophysicist’s Approach to the Optical Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence
 
For decades scientists have been searching the skies for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations using large radio telescopes.  …Read more.

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Harsh Mathur on the prize in Physics; Michael Hinczewski on the prize in Chemistry; and Alan Tartakoff on the prize in Physiology or Medicine. Followed by a reception. 
Abstracts

The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2016 was awarded to David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz for the discovery of states of matter and transitions between these states of matter that could not be understood in terms of the conventional Landau paradigm. …Read more.

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Quantum Spin Liquids
The search for truly quantum phases of matter is one of the center pieces of modern research in condensed matter physics. Quantum spin liquids are exemplars of such phases. …Read more.

Nitride Semiconductors: Beyond the Binaries
The binary nitride semiconductors and their alloys have led to transformations in both lighting and power electronics. They have also given us new physics such as polarization-induced topological insulators. …Read more.