Physics pizza party season 5

Posted on 20/01/201821/01/2018 by ggunaratnam

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 ggunaratnam

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/

Face2phase conference

Posted on 14/01/201814/01/2018 by ggunaratnam

The face2phase conference was organized by Optics group on 9-11 October 2017 in TU Deflt. The main topics which were covered during the conference, were holography, computational imaging and lensless imaging. It was an international academic platform where eminent scientists present their ongoing work and new development in the fields. 3 days of conference was completely scheduled with presentations, poster session, holography exhibitions and social evenings. The conference was attended by more than 100 attendees from all over the world. The attendees were students, professors, scientists and employee of prestigious universities and industries.
EPS Delft Young Minds Section and SPIE student chapter Delft were also a part of this conference in organizing a session called SPIE Focus. The primary objective of the SPIE Focus session was leadership skills. The talks given during the SPIE Focus session were mainly focused on the importance of patent and system design in industrial innovation. The session was targeted to the students present at the conference. After this session, we had “talk with experts” session. During this session, we had provided snacks and drinks to the attendees and gave students enough time to interact with the experts and try to have some insight.
The main funding sources for this conference was Photonics NL, Dutch Optics Centre, SPIE Focus and EPS Delft YM section. The conference and the SPIE Focus session were successful and it received large attention within scientific community. Furthermore, we managed to utilize the resources provided by EPS at its maximum potential.

Let’s make fun with science: Sun, light and colored shadows

Posted on 14/01/2018 by ggunaratnam

According to the spirit of the “Let’s make room for science!” project, aimed at discovering the concepts of gravity, energy and light, the EPS Young Mind Section of Rome developed new activities concerning the same topics also in the last months of 2017. These activities were partially founded by the 2017 Activity Grant.
Thanks to the collaboration with the Physics Department of the University of Roma Tre, we started organizing guided observations of the Sun using the solar telescope of the Department. The observations were dedicated to children and young kids from local schools, but they also gave us the opportunity to involve undergraduate students of the Department, who immediately proved not only to be curious about the telescope, but also to be ready to tell themselves what they knew about the Sun to the younger children. During these observations, we also used little globes that could be oriented in order to simulate the illumination state of our Earth, so that participants could learn about the apparent motion of the Sun in the sky during the day, the seasons, equinoxes and time zones.
The concept of light was investigated also with a new exhibit: the “Colored shadows”. We started with three lightbulbs of red, green and blue light, aiming them all at a white screen. A pencil placed in front of the lights would then have not just one, grey shadow, but three and more colored shadows! Turning off one of the colored lights, it was then possible to notice how the color on the screen changed. This simple exhibit allows to deal with different concepts. First of all: the way in which our eyes are able to perceive colors (we have only three types of receptor called cones, that can see the red, green and blue light – from their combination, we are able to perceive millions of different colors). But then it is possible to talk about how the light travels in a straight line. And obviously, how the colors mix to form new shades.
The “Colored shadows” exhibit was used during the European Researcher’s Night 2017 at Roma Tre University. It drew the attention of lots of children who enjoyed watching their ever-changing shadows, but also the young students who were curious to discover the reasons why they were seeing those particular colors.
At the end, the “Let’s make fun with science: Sun, light and colored shadows” project had more than 300 participants between primary, secondary schools students and general public.

School for Young Physicists

Posted on 14/01/201814/01/2018 by ggunaratnam

This semester, SYP (School for Young Physicists) kicked off its 8th season in style. In September, the main topic was military physics, and the session was very special. For starters, the topic garnered great interest from students, and a capacity number of 320 (!) students attended, which was a monumental increase over the previous record of 250 people. Managing such a large crowd is a great challenge, but our organizing team did a splendid job in making sure everyone was attended to.

However, this was not the only extraordinary thing to happen – after the popular lectures, the experimental part had students doing all kinds of military related things, for example – decoding messages and working with electronic sonar detectors, but the main attraction was shooting with paintball guns and analyzing the trajectory of the paintballs experimentally and theoretically.

For the last in-depth lecture we had a representative from the Latvian Army and two Canadian army officers – one a PhD in physics – who gave lectures about their everyday work and the role of physics in it. This event caught enough attention that the Army sent over a reporter crew to film the entire process, which was a first for SYP.

After the first session, attendance rates remained very high, stabilizing at 250 attendees for every session until December. In later sessions, we looked at radioactivity and nuclear physics, at chemical physics and at thermal physics. In all cases, students learned something outside of the school curriculum. Highlights include a popular lecture introducing students to the topic of quantum physics in chemistry and an experiment with colored ice cubes visually demonstrating the effects of convection in a glass of water.

This semester, our team has not only facilitated the ever-growing sessions in Latvia’s capital, Riga, but also slightly expanded our reach across the country. Previously, we only held sessions in Valmiera, Kuldiga and Ventspils, but now a new city has joined the fold – we will also hold sessions in the regional center Rezekne.

The schools that we’ve visited thus far have all shown willingness to continue to work together, and have asked if classes for younger students than Grade 10 are available. As a consequence, our team also occasionally hosts tailor-made sessions for the younger students, involving them as well.

We’ve also done numerous projects that are directly not connected with our sessions – our team has constructed a physics prop (a large scale wave pendulum) for a TV show and taken part in creating exhibitions for museums (specifically, an interactive stand about the working principles of a light bulb, a phone and communications systems). Slowly but surely, SYP is garnering a reputation for being able to present physics in an interesting, educational and simple manner not only to high school students, but to people of all ages and walks of life.

Altogether, the first semester of SYP’s 8th season has been a record-setting one, and we look forward to keeping the upward trend going in 2018.

Researcher’s night

Posted on 14/01/2018 by ggunaratnam

In 2017, as always we organised Researcher’s Night for the physics institution of Eötvös Loránd University. This event is held nation-wide and takes place in several universities, museums and research institutes. It’s main goal is to educate mostly children, or anybody visiting in a fun, yet informative way to show them interesting aspects of science that they most likely won’t see in school.
The event started mid-afternoon. Visitors could choose from numerous different themes of physics, we had five desks full of various experiments. The themes of these were mechanics, hydrodinamics, electricity, optics and thermodinamics. Parts of the experiments were especially interesting for the younger audience, since they could touch new materials or hold unfamiliar tools and also for teenagers and adults. We purchased varied tools from the grant, such as prisms and lasers, which all were highly popular among the guests. The more dangerous things were handled by demonstrators, who were students at the university.
The other major section of the night were the lectures. These were designed to be clear and interesting, suitable both for young children and their parents. One was held by a university student, the vice president of BYMS. He talked about the structure of the universe. Our other lecturer was an associate professor at our physics institution. He presented the Big Bang Theory, the quark-gluon plasma and the experiments currently going on in CERN.
A few people from different research institutes were visiting us to see the event. Since they all liked our program, it is very likely we will be able to work together with them in the following years to make the event bigger.

You can find more pictures in:
https://1drv.ms/f/s!AnNl0GK68LZFkU9sL54mtxNCyTac

Conference – OPTO 2017

Posted on 14/01/2018 by ggunaratnam

In July 2017 Warsaw University of Technology Student Chapter, together with University of Warsaw Student Chapter and students from Military University of Technology organized an international conference on optics and photonics: OPTO 2017. The event takes place annually in Poland and is organized by students for students. This year – eleventh edition gathered 150 scientists from 25 institutions around the world. Main purpose of the event was to provide students and young researchers from (mainly) mid-eastern Europe a chance to present and discuss their latest scientific achievements. For many students, it was the first conference they attended and we wanted to be as inclusive as it is possible and enable everyone a possibility to attend. We were extremely happy to provide travel grants for students with a difficult situation for example from Ukraine.
Professional development plays a crucial role in the education of young researcher our conference started off with a whole day of workshops devoted to these issues. Attendees had a possibility to learn how to protect inventions during the lecture given by local patent agency JWP Patent & Trademark Attorneys. Later on, Nathalie Debaes from Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) talked about technology transfer from university research teams to industry and how photonic innovations can impact companies. After those workshops, we held a special poster session – for scientific chapters. All of the optical chapter representatives from different Universities could present their activities and ideas. This exchange of experience inspired us to create new projects and cooperate with other sections. The next panel introduced students to the subject of effective communication of science and was lead by dr Carlos Lopez-Mariscal. The last presentation of the day was given by dr Danuta Sampson, who told us about the importance of ethics in science.
Next three days of the conference were related to optics and photonics. We aimed to establish a high scientific standard of the conference by inviting notable scientists from all over the world as Invited Speakers. This year, we had a pleasure to listen to lectures given by: prof. Małgorzata Kujawińska (Warsaw University of Technology, Fellow SPIE, 2005 SPIE President), prof. Paolo Villoressi (University of Padova – Italy), prof. Zeev Zalevsky(Fellow SPIE & OSA, Israel – Bar Ilan University), prof. Roberto Morandotti (Fellow SPIE, Fellow OSA Canada – Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique—Énergie, Matériaux et Télécommunications), prof. Allard Mosk (Utrecht University – Netherlands), dr F. Ömer Ilday (Turkey – Bilkent University), dr Alberto Amo (France – CNRS-Laboratoire de Photonique et de Nanostructures). Each of our guests told us about the newest accomplishments in their research field, which was incredibly educational and fascinating. During the meeting, young researchers got a chance not only to broaden their knowledge by attending interesting lectures but also to gain a very valuable experience in presenting their research and discussing it with specialists. Students gave 50 very innovative presentations and presented 60 posters during poster session. We were amazed by the professionality of presentations as well as by the range of fields of optics. Our conference also gathered local optical companies, so students could find out more about possibilities of employment or internships.
Our conference gathered young scientists passionate about the same field, so we believed that it was a great opportunity for networking. To help that happen every day we organized an evening event during which attendees had a chance to talk in unofficial atmosphere. As a welcome party, we invited everybody for bowling and pool. Next day we encouraged everyone to take part in our famelab and enjoy the company in a local pub. Because our conference took place in our beautiful city of Warsaw we also organized a guided tour of the capital of Poland. To officially close the conference we held a reception in the Polonia Hotel in the city center. During the banquette, we had a chance to award the best presentations, posters and chapter activity. It was also a great opportunity to summarize the meeting while enjoying a great atmosphere.
Although, we closed the official – scientific part of the conference we had a social day ahead of us. We chose to visit Copernicus Science Center and had fun with science whole day – because what’s a better way to finish the conference than flying on a magic carpet?

We believe that our conference was a great success, mostly because we managed to organize it entirely on our own. For us – organizing team it was a unique learning opportunity to work on this big project without a lot of prior experience. It taught us also a lot about teamwork and cooperation, especially as the event was co-organised by 3 chapters, each with its own ideas. Nevertheless, we know that by working together we were able to achieve much more and prepare better event. Now, that we know each other so well, we hope to collaborate on many projects in the future.
The success of the conference wouldn’t be possible without the help of all our sponsors and universities. Thank You!
More information about the conference at: www.opto2017.com

European Researchers’ Night 2017 in Naples

Posted on 14/01/201814/01/2018 by ggunaratnam

On September 29th, for the second time PONYS joined the European Researchers’ Night (ERN) 2017 by participating to an outreach event in Naples. The main organizer was Frascati Scienza, who managed the events in more than 10 cities of Italy.
The event we joined has been organized in the Municipio Metro Station thanks to the network with the Section of Naples of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) and the Azienda Napoletana Mobilità (ANM), the local public transport company.
For the second time, we chose a daily life place, in order to reach a higher number of people and talk with them about science. Everyone who had to take or took the metro, made a stop to the PONYS exhibit, where they have been involved in easy scientific demonstration. In each exhibit, PONYS volunteers showed scientific experiments with everyday material: a lamp, a guitar and microwave oven turned out to be useful in explaining the fundamentals laws of optics and acoustics, with common examples.
Ponys’ exhibits weren’t the only attraction of the ERN in Naples. Actually, the Metro station itself is a touristic place, since the building is very ancient and it is well integrated with the archeological ruins found during the construction of the metro and also with the walls of one of the most ancient castle, called Maschio Angioino which stands out against the square. Thanks to the INFN-Section of Naples, one of the lateral facade of the Castel, was animated with a projection of short science video. In order to facilitate the communication with people, the short videotape was composed by cartoon bubbles, which describe many physics and optics applications. It has been a fundamental experience of professional growth for PONYS. We had the chance to join one of the most important scientific event in Europe. But the most enthusiastic experience has been our relation with our people and city: it was great being in one of the most ancient and famous place of Naples, sharing physics! Thanks to all our partners.

Public outreach – ‘Blue Night’

Posted on 14/01/201814/01/2018 by ggunaratnam

“Blue Night” is an annual cultural event in the city of Nuremberg, during which local representatives from science and art present their work to the broad public. The hbar omega Young Minds section in Erlangen supported by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) hosted a presentation space at this event in the inner city of Nuremberg. The topic of this year’s event was “Odyssey”, which allowed the presenting scientists to tell about the long journey that optics has undertaken from the first observations centuries ago up until today’s age of modern and quantum optics.

The section presented a number of tutorial experiments to the visitors covering physical effects such as diffraction, polarization effects, total internal reflection, coupled oscillations, quantum noise, holography, and acoustics. Additionally, researchers from the MPL and members of the Young Minds section gave short presentations on optical forces, high resolution microscopy, acoustics, and quantum optics giving insights in current research topics at the MPL.

There was a continuous stream of over 1000 excited visitors of all ages and educational levels during the whole evening, revealing a huge interest of people in modern optical science. All this made this event a great success making both fundamental optical phenomena as well as current research accessible to the broad public.

7th Leadership Meeting

Posted on 20/12/201710/12/2018 by ggunaratnam

All the information of the meeting can be found extensively at the webpage: http://lm.youngminds.cz/index.php?lang=en

Presentations

Poster presentations are mandatory for each section. Each section poster must report a single activity, which will be the activity considered by the Action Committee for the Best Activity Award. You can find a possible poster template here. Sections are strongly encouraged to customize the template, making it unique and attractive.

Section oral presentation are 12+3 minutes (presentation+question time) and can include all or several activities, alongside with other information regarding your section you wish to share.

Scientific oral presentation schedule will be announced soon.

Best Activity Award

The Best Activity Award is sponsored by EPL (European Physics Letters). The Best Activity will be evaluated by a specific committee during the Leadership Meeting, which will choose one of the activities presented during the Friday poster session. The award will be given on Saturday and the winning section will receive an extra 500€ award.

[hmapspro id=3]

Venue

The meeting will take place at Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering at Czech Technical University in Prague, Břehová 7, 115 19 Praha 1.

Accommodation

YM Section representatives will be accommodated at Hostel Dakura, Národní obrany 544/7, 160 00 Praha 6.

Transportation

From Hostel Dakura to the meeting venue

Take the Metro A from Hradčanská or Dejvická Metro station to Staroměstská station. Then one station by tram 17 to Právnická fakulta or walk (5 min).

You can also take a walk on foot if you like it (30 min).

From Airport to Hostel Dakura

By public transport (recommended), allow approximately 30 minutes. The fare is 24 CZK for ride up to 30 minutes and 32 CZK for 90 minutes rides. We recommend you buy the 90 minutes ticket or the 3 day ticket. You can buy a ticket from Public Transport counters in Arrival Halls of Terminals 1 & 2 (from 7 am to 10 pm), ticket machines placed at bus stops or from a bus driver (cash required). The Bus stations are located in front of terminal halls. Take the bus number 119 to the Nádraží Veleslavín final stop and change to the Metro “A” (green line) to continue your journey to the Dejvická metro station.

By taxi the fare is not more than 480 CZK. Contact counters of taxi operators are located at the arriving hall of Terminal 1 and 2. Departure points are displayed in front of arriving halls. Be sure to take only authorized Taxi providers (either AAA Radiotaxi or 1.1.1. RadioCAB taxi), and request receipt from the driver.
Hostel shuttle service for 20 Euro (more information on www.hosteldakura.com)

In case of need (of information, maps, short-term tickets) you can use the Tourist Information Centres located both in terminal 1 and 2.