Student Meeting: “Famelab Catania 2018”

Posted on 12/04/2018 by YM Webmaster

Famelab is a science communication competition with the aim of entertain by talking science. Since its launch in 2005 in Cheltenham (UK) Famelab has become the world’s biggest communication contest for scientists, and today the event includes more than thirty countries. This challenge is open to young researchers, university students and anyone involved in science who loves talking about a scientific topic in an effective way. In fact, the competitors have only three minutes to tell the object of their research activity or a fascinating scientific topic to a heterogeneous public (researchers, university and high-school students, families…), only with the help of their communication skills and small objects of everyday life. In each local contest, the “famelabers” are judged by a selected jury (scientists, communicators, journalists…). The jury choose the two winners who will participate to the “masterclass”, a three-days training event with professional science communicator, and then to the national and, eventually, international competition.

Since 2017 Catania is one of the italian selection sites for Famelab, and for the second year EPS Young Minds team has been directly involved in the organization of the event as major sponsor, providing also technical support services. In particular, based on the big success of the 2017 edition in terms of participants and feedbacks from the public, in 2018 the YM section proposed a new three-days format for the local event: two semi-finals and the final contest. In each day, the YM section and invited a high-profile scientist to be part of the jury, and to do a seminar about frontier research topics at the end of contest. The three invited high-level scientists were:

Barbara Mazzolai, Director of the Center for Micro-BioRobotics of the IIT (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia), who talked about bioinspired robotics and the future of robotics.
Luigi Cattivelli, Director of the Genomics Research Center of the Agrigultural Research Council, who presented his research activity on genetics and molecular biology of cereals.
Eugenio Coccia, Rector of the Gran Sasso Science Institute and one of the authors of the discovery gravitational waves and of the first observation of black holes, who talked about the born of a new astronomy with gravitational waves.

At the beginning and at the end of the three presentations, the speakers did not lose the opportunity to acknowledge the YM section and in general the YM philosophy. A great participation of scientists and students was appreciated not only during the contest but also during the presentations, and there were also strong interactions with the three speakers, moderated and catalysed by the YM members.

Night events with DTU-Lys

Posted on 21/01/201814/03/2018 by YM Webmaster

On November 28th 2017 in the evening, our student chapter DTU-Lys held a competition in the board game KHET, which is a complicated form of Chess, but with laser beams. Our student chapter owns 4 of these board games – a perfect number for hosting a competition with both group stages and knock-out rounds! The winner of the tournament was on beforehand promised a DTU-Lys t-shirt, which we had recently acquired a number of for outreach purposes. In total, this evening event numbered around 30 participants, with a good mix of Master students and PhD students.

The evening started out with a 15 min introduction to our student chapter DTU-Lys, who we are, what we have done, and what plan to do. With the event taking place only half a month from our annual meeting and election in December, it was our hope, and plan, to lure in new potential active board members of DTU-Lys. Our current board now counts 4 new members who all participated in this event.

After the introduction, we divided people into four groups who were to play each other in order to decide who advanced from the group-stage and into the knock-out stage. We used chess-clock apps on our phones to make sure that the games did not continue in all eternity (this was an issue in the beginning) and to add an extra stress factor. During the night people had free access to beers and sodas, and after 1½ hour of playing everyone sat down and had pizza together.

All-in-all it was a very fun and social evening, and many of the participants urged us to organize a similar event in the spring 2018 – which we will certainly do!

Visit to the Scottish Dark Sky Observatory

Posted on 21/01/201814/03/2018 by YM Webmaster

On November 18th, SCOPE organised a night trip to the Scottish Dark Sky Observatory (SDSO) located in the edge of the Galloway Forest in Ayrshire.

During this visit twelve of our members had the chance to visit the SDSO centre and enjoy their indoors exhibition together with an astonishing sky observation outdoors allowed by the clear skies during the visit.

The observation was guided by two members of the SDSO staff that were operating two telescopes, one of which was inside an impressive 5 metre dome. With the mentioned equipment, we were able to observe some of the major objects in the Northern Hemisphere night sky including major constellations such as Cassiopeia, Orion or Pegasus, some galaxies like Andromeda, and even the planet Uranus.

During the observation we also received interesting explanations not only regarding the astronomical objects we were looking at but also about the process of observation itself. Moreover, we had the chance to practice night photography with some of our cameras and the help of the members of SDSO and their tripods.

After this, we visited the exhibition inside the SDSO centre that included some models of planets, astronaut missions and some Physics demonstrations.

We consider that this trip was a fantastic opportunity for SCOPE members to learn about Astronomy and the local facilities that currently exist in Scotland for this purpose. Moreover, we gained awareness about issues like light pollution that obstruct observation.

Finally, we would like to mention that this activity was also aimed to show SCOPE members that there are many career possibilities with a background of physics outside Academia, such as outreach in Astronomy.

Get-Together-Meeting, Researchers Night and much more

Posted on 21/01/201821/01/2018 by YM Webmaster

At the beginning of 2017, our newly formed section organized a Get-Together-Meeting, inviting the local SPIE and OSA chapters to present its proposed activities for 2017 and to extend an invitation to join the INFLPR YMS.

In February, our section has been invited by the Former President of the Romanian Physical Society to attend the meeting organized by the EPS-EC and EPS-CEI, taking place in Bucharest. This event presented great occasion for our section to be introduced to the public. The President and Vice-President of our section participated at the meeting, presenting the 1st Announcement of the sections’ international student conference, thus delivering the information to many EPS Member Societies.

Throughout the year, the INFLPR YMS organized laboratory visits at the National Institute for Laser, Plasma and Radiation Physics for kindergarten, primary, middle and high school pupils, thus providing participants an insight of the current scientific work carried out in the institute, and in the same time encouraging them to choose a career in research or academia. The President of the section also arranged small physics experiments, providing simple and concise explanations regarding fundamental physics phenomena in a funny and interactive way. It also has to be mentioned that in 2017, for the first time, INFLPR opened its doors for foreign students and their teachers from Germany.

Furthermore, a representative of the INFLPR YMS had the chance to attend the 6th Young Minds Leadership Meeting, organized in Naples, Italy, during 12-13 May 2017. He had the opportunity to make new connections and to advertise our student conference.

The INFLPR YMS was proud to organize together with the local OSA and SPIE chapters IONS® Balvanyos 2017, representing on one hand a huge commitment and responsibility, while on the other hand an incredibly worthwhile experience. IONS® Balvanyos was a memorable conference for all of us with high quality scientific program, opportunities to meet and discuss, as well as a truly enjoyable woodland experience. The conference was held at a geographically unique and vibrant resort in the heart of Transylvania’s Eastern Carpathian Mountains, near Lake Saint Ana, the only volcanic lake in Romania. IONS® Balvanyos brought together 65 participants from 10 different countries. Our generous partners and sponsors, including EPS as well, allowed us to offer Travel Grants to 18 students. The event didn’t lack of social activities, such as icebreaking games, field trip, playing Frisbee and campfire. The most courageous attendees also could take part in “bear watching”.

Moreover, the INFLPR YMS participated at Researchers Night in Bucharest, involving physics related experiments and providing visitors with funny and friendly explanations. Another aim of our participation was to promote and bring into the public attention the section and its activities.

Last but not least, at the beginning of 2018 our section launched a photo contest. Youngsters are asked to capture the beauty of science. With the help of the photo contest, our section will try to address people with various background and interests, showing the intertwining fabric of science and arts.

Pizza Event!!!

Posted on 21/01/2018 by YM Webmaster

With this title we started an event called “Welcome Young Minds” through which we invited undergraduate students from Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University after finishing their training at National Institute of Laser Enhanced Sciences (NILES) – Cairo University.
They didn’t hear about society and Cairo Young Minds Section before, so it was a great opportunity to welcome them in a short seminar about the goals of our section, and the activates we attend to do . This all happened during a “PIZZA PARTY” yummy yummy!!!!!
This event started with introduction about each member then presentation which contained our goals, methods to reach these goals, and ended by eating PIZZA during good discussion about what we can collaborate to do with them in the next time.

Kidutopia Event

Posted on 21/01/201821/01/2018 by YM Webmaster

img-20180115-wa0007 EPS Cairo young minds section contributed to an inspiring event for innovative kids called “Kidutopia”. About fifty kids (from five to sixteen years old) attended this event which is the first event that combines sciences, sports and educational consultations for kids in Egypt. This event had many non-governmental organizations that cooperated with us to give these kids an outreaching in different activities. The YM Cairo section organized and implemented simple experiments relating to various motivating physical phenomenon through enjoyable activates. These experiments included optical illusion, water lens and light refraction in addition to some simple optical activities using a laser kit game. This event had a positive impact on the kids through the participation of the children in performing these experiments. Moreover, this event was very exciting to the section members as it served an extremely important part of the community: Kids

Physics Café 2

Posted on 20/01/201821/01/2018 by YM Webmaster

20171127_185826 During the winter semester of 2017, a follow-up of the previous semester’s Physics Café was organised as one of the Prague EPS Young Minds events. This time, the aim of the Physics Café project was to further enhance the achievements gained during the first volume of Physics Café i.e. to provide a platform for informal meetings of university students and (senior) scientists and people from academia, with a strong emphasis on informality, and to promote physics and physics related scientific fields among the students.

This semester’s Physics Café was more challenging than ever before. There were major difficulties to find an appropriate venue since the previous one was not suitable for holding the events anymore, and we also struggled to persuade the senior scientists to join (mainly due to their workload). In the end, we managed to organise one event within the Physics Café project. The event called For Science to the Edge of the World was a compilation of short presentations of researchers (mainly from the Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and NPI AV CR) who travelled the world to do science, physics in particular. To keep the presentations brief and entertaining, we asked each presenter (9 people in total) to make a Pecha Kucha styled presentation (20 slides, each per 20 seconds). The event, held in the popular Skautský Institut Café in the centre of Prague, attracted around 50 people, making it our most successful Physics Café event ever. During the evening, presenters shared their experience of their research stays, internships, and conferences, all of it in the nippy and fun pace. After the presentation part was finished, a non-moderated discussion involving both the presenters and the audience followed.

It can be concluded that even though we organised not as many Physics Café events as we planned for, we met the expectations for the event quality wise. Physics cafe with its varying programme is getting more and more popular among students and scientists in Prague.

Physics pizza party season 5

Posted on 20/01/201821/01/2018 by YM Webmaster

One of the main goals of EPS Young Minds project is to connect young scientists among different physics fields. Therefore, Prague section is organizing students’ colloquiums named Physics Pizza Party: Students 4 students, where young scientists from different universities and research fields presented their research activities. These events prove to be very successful in winter semester in 2017.
Totally, we organized four colloquiums this semester, where different physics fields were presented by Ph.D. and master students from our faculty. Topics such as luminescent nanocrystals, mechanics of free fall in practice and modeling of quasicrystals were presented at the colloquiums. For most of invited speakers, it was their first experience to present their research activities in front of the audience which had not been familiar with the topic. Despite of this fact, each talk was perfectly prepared, and therefore it wasn’t difficult to understand given topic. Each event was scheduled for about 90 minutes with half of the time dedicated for the presentation and other half for the discussion, but due to the big interest from the audience and their questions during and after presentation, average time of colloquiums was about 2 hours. According to the speakers it was very rewarding experience for them.

Event promotion was made in form of posters placed in school buildings. It was also advertised on our social webpages, such as Facebook and Instagram, for the purpose of inviting as many participants as possible. Due to this advertisement and students’ high interest, our colloquiums had attendance around 40 students per one colloquium.

The Prague EPS Young Minds Section found these colloquiums rewarding as the “students for students” style of presentations is still rare in our country and is not frequently done by any other organisations. Based on the warm reaction and positive feedback received from colloquiums’ participants, we assume that they were successful. The high number of regular as well as occasional participants motivates us to continue with this activity.

NASA Space Apps Challenge 2017

Posted on 20/01/2018 by YM Webmaster

artboard-1-100 Since its inception in 2012, the International Space Apps Challenge, a part of NASA’s Earth Science Division, has become the world’s largest global hackathon, engaging thousands of citizens each year across the globe to work with NASA in building innovative solutions challenges we face on Earth and in space using open source data. Space Apps inspires local innovation communities in cities across six continents to convene, ideate and build. Diverse and collaborative teams of technologists, scientists, designers, entrepreneurs, and others work together in a 48-hour sprint to develop answers to some of the most pressing challenges facing planet Earth using NASA data. Over 25,000 citizens from 69 countries and in 187 cities around the world participated in the 2017 International Space Apps Challenge.

With this, we decided to host the very first NASA Space Apps Challenge in Canary Islands, with 30 participants over the course of two days of work and fun with science and data from NASA and other open repositorires.

This year, the challenge focused on a certain topic, Earth, divided in five different categories:
– The Earth and Us, which mainly consisted in combining NASA Earth Science data with other sources to obtain some short of human-environment interactions.
– Planetary Blues looked for visualizations and analysis of the hydrosphere and cryosphere in novel ways.
– Warning! Danger Ahead! was all about natural disasters through data.
– Our Ecological Neighborhood focused on studies about ecological systems.
– Ideate and Create! asked participants to use data in new creative ways as a more open challenge.

The participant where divided in three teams where each focused on one category, creating a wide variety of results. Yugarta Project focused on the display of whales migration routes and created an app to explain their journey and raise awareness. Rambo is on Fire designed a monitoring system for forest fire which mixed satellite data with drone monitoring on the field, creating a more efficient and effective system. Finally, Guardians of the Earth decided to take their own lead and develop different formulas to reduce pollution with two active systems for the reuse of combustion byproducts, mainly CO2.

Sadly, none of the projects done in this venue was able to reach the global finals. However, the participants were really pleased at the end of the event and asked for more editions in the future.

Thanks to the support of the EPS we were able to pay for food, beverage, office supplies and promotional materials. The local Science Museum of Tenerife hosted the event and Dorada donated some extra beverages.

A report and a explanatory video of each team can be found on the website of the event:

https://2017.spaceappschallenge.org/locations/tenerife/
You can find the full album of the event on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/Space-Apps-Tenerife-1272997179416727/

2017 IEEE International Young Scientists Forum on Applied Physics and Engineering (YSF-2017)

Posted on 18/12/201718/12/2017 by YM Webmaster

The 2017 IEEE International Young Scientists Forum on Applied Physics and Engineering (YSF-2017) was successfully held on October 17-20, 2017 in one of the most beautiful cities of Ukraine, in magnificent Lviv. The event was hosted by the Scientific Library of Ivan Franko National University of Lviv.
The event was co-organized by the O.Ya. Usikov Institute for Radiophysics and Electronics NAS of Ukraine and its Young Scientists Council; Ivan Franko National University of Lviv; Karpenko Physico-Mechanical Institute NASU, IEEE IRE NASU-Kharkiv AP-S, ED-S, MTT-S, IA-S, SSC-S Student Branch Chapters, and Kharkiv EPS YM Section. It was held in collaboration with Ukrainian Physical Society, endorsed by EPS Physics for Development Group and has been recognized as a Europhysics Conference by EPS.
The YSF-2017 gathered together over 150 young scientists, engineers, and invited speakers (including more than 40 IEEE members) from all over the world: the geography of participants included 29 cities of 10 countries including USA, UK, Spain, Poland, Estonia, Turkey, Italy, Hungary, Egypt, and Ukraine. The technical program included presentations on a broad range of topics including Biological and Medical Physics; Optics and Photonics; Computational and Experimental Electromagnetics; Microwave and Teraherts Electronics; Nano- and Metamaterials; Information Systems and Nondestructive Testing; Power Electronics and Industry Applications; Solid State Physics; Nuclear and Plasma Physics; Multiwavelength Astronomy; Geoscience and Remote Sensing.
The list of invited speakers of the Forum included two IEEE distinguished lecturers of GRS and NPS societies: Dr. Valery Zavorotny (NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, USA) and Dr. Patric Muggli (Max Planck Institute for Physics, Germany), respectively; IEEE Industry Applications Society president – Dr. Tomy Sebastian (USA); OSA chief scientist – Prof. Gregory Quarles (USA); Dr. Carlos Roncero-Clemente (University of Extremadura, Spain); DSci. Valeriya Trusova (Ukraine), and EPS invited speaker Dr. Leonid Ponomarenko (Lancaster University, UK) who gave a talk on “Graphene Heterostructures: Electronic Properties and Potential Applications”.
The event was supported by EPS, Kharkiv EPS Young Minds Section, IEEE East Ukraine Joint Chapter, IEEE Ukraine Section Women in Engineering Affinity Group, EuMA and enabled the organizers to provide 50 participants with the travel grants.
The unique feature of the event, which traditionally gains interest among the participants, is a successful combination of a scientific program with various soft skill trainings. This year Forum offered workshops on scientific writing in English, improving skills of public speaking, grant proposal writing as well as insights into the grant programs of the European Union, NATO, DAAD and other organizations.
On the October 21, 2017 the YSF-2017 satellite event, the CS-oriented workshop “Microscope, Money, and Two Useful Nails”, was organized at the Ukrainian Catholic University. It was aimed at collaboration between young scientists and Ukrainian IT companies.
Last, but not least, the YSF has always been not just a scientific platform for the career development of young scientists, but also a place for effective communication. The fascinating social program of this year’s Forum prepared by the organizers was an integral part of the event and included welcome and farewell parties, library excursion, and city tour.