Graphene: A single-layer magic material

Posted on September 16, 2023 by Guest Contributor

This post was written by Isaac Delgass.

What is Graphene?

You’re likely familiar with graphite: the chalky gray material we often refer to as pencil lead. In recent years, graphite has been making headlines due to increased interest in its younger sibling: graphene, lauded as a supermaterial of the new age for properties that hold out the promise of novel technological feats. Graphene has the potential to replace silicon-based computer chips, improve the performance of touchscreens, realize ultra-sensitive biometric sensor devices, and even faster charging and increased storage capacity in batteries and capacitors. An early example of such technology is a cellphone case that extends the life of the phone’s battery by bleeding heat more efficiently. But more on this “nanocase” to come.

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Love math, but don’t care too much

Posted on September 2, 2023 by Tongyao Zhang

As part of my job as a researcher and graduate student in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, I invite parents and children to play math games in our lab. As I lead parents and children through studies about how children learn, I’ve seen very different attitudes in parents towards math. Some parents would happily talk about numbers and inferences in their daily interactions, and they make a lot of attempts to start a conversation about math. They are not upset when children run away from those conversations. Other parents “care too much” about how their children respond. They eagerly ask me whether their children are competitive in math and get upset when their children are reluctant to engage. Although this kind of attitude is different from what we call “math anxiety,” these emotional responses, we believe, play a big role in children’s “math life.”

Two children writing and talking about math in front of a blackboard with a smile on their faces. — As early as preschool, the initial exposure to math is critical.

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Demystifying Artificial Intelligence: A crash course in machine learning

Posted on August 11, 2023 by sciutern

This post was written by ScIU Undergraduate Intern Komal Kumar.

Image of the front CD cover of the film, The Terminator. The cover features an image of actor Arnold Schwarzenegger as the titular character. *Image credit:* Computerspielemuseum Berlin

Artificial intelligence continues to make the news, especially with technologies like ChatGPT – an AI Chatbot – and DALL-E – an image-generating software – becoming increasingly accessible to the public. Reports of modified syllabi in colleges and universities and sentient chatbots may have piqued your interest recently, and for a good reason! AI has gradually become embedded in our daily lives as an influential tool for COVID-19 contact tracing, national security, healthcare, and much more. Of course, that’s not even touching on AI’s impact on popular culture, from The Terminator (1984) to the more recent M3GAN (2022). Depictions of AI as sentient, self-aware, and, more often than not, evil, undoubtedly affect our attitude toward AI. With its increased prevalence in our daily lives, it’s worth taking a look at exactly what AI is and how it works. (more…)

#PrimatesAreNotPets: A social media animal welfare campaign

Posted on July 29, 2023 by Chloe Holden

Have you ever seen “#PrimatesAreNotPets” floating around Twitter and other social media platforms? There’s a good reason this hashtag is becoming more prominent on the internet; primatologists, animal welfare activists, and conservationists are pushing to bring attention to the illegal pet trade and the devastation that it wrecks on the animals and their natural habitats. Primates aren’t the only exotic animals affected by the illegal pet trade, but they provide an excellent example of what removing a species from an ecosystem can do both at home and in the wild. Putting a primate in your home most likely will result in a grumpy, aggressive, lonely pet, and their absence in the wild can actually topple entire ecosystems. (more…)

Switching it up: Using sneaker culture to teach chemistry to PEERs

Posted on July 15, 2023 by Jakyra Simpson

When you look at the statistics of the amount of underrepresented, underserved, and marginalized students pursuing Chemistry degrees. As it’s been said, “The Math ain’t Mathin’,” and there is, therefore, a need to incorporate new teaching styles (pedagogies) that are inclusive and culturally relevant. (more…)

Back to the Stone Age: Monkey see monkey do

Posted on June 3, 2023 by Chloe Holden

Primate archaeology is a fast growing field. While archaeology usually refers to the study of the human past through the excavation of past tools, remains, and civilizations, primate archaeology unearths the technological (tool use) past of our primate relatives as well as observes tool use by primates in real time (Click here to learn more). Each year, scientists make new discoveries about primates and their behaviors that prompt questions about the full extent of our primate relatives’ cognition and how it relates back to our own cognitive evolution. (more…)

How computer science aids psychology: Cognitive modeling of natural objects

Posted on May 27, 2023 by Mingjia Hu

Could you imagine that a computer program can infer the nutritional content of some food item from reading articles on related topics? How about an algorithm that can give medical diagnoses based on radiological images? Although these abilities sound like science fiction, they are becoming closer to reality thanks to the recent integration of computer science and cognitive science. In cognitive science, plenty of cognitive models have been established and developed over decades to explain and describe human cognitive processes in a computational language. However, despite their exceptional explanatory power, cognitive-process models suffer from a major limitation: almost all cognitive experiments are done in a lab setting where participants are asked to interact with visually simplified stimuli on a computer screen. For example, they could be asked to categorize a bunch of shaded squares varying in size and darkness. However, limiting cognitive research to only artificial stimuli raises the question of whether the same findings about human cognition still hold true for real-life situations. Thanks to the advancement of computer science, there is now a potential solution to this problem. (more…)

People get “brain drain” when smartphones merely exist in room

Posted on May 20, 2023 by Tongyao Zhang

This post was written by Tongyao Zhang.

Have you – at least for a moment – ever imagined throwing your smartphone out the window, especially when you are trying to focus on your work? Now you might have a justification for your impulse. Behavioral scientists recently found that if your smartphone is merely present in your room, and even if you are not consciously thinking of it, you may still be distracted and lose access to part of your intelligence. (more…)

The cognitive process behind categorizing objects

Posted on May 13, 2023 by Mingjia Hu

Conscious or not, we are faced with countless categorization decisions during our everyday lives. When organizing kids’ rooms, parents need to decide if various items are tools or toys, to know in which drawer to place them. On a visit to the pet store, visitors can take pleasure in the activity of identifying various pets they see as cats or dogs. In geometry classes, students are taught how to tell squares apart from rectangles. No matter how fast and intuitive some categorizations may feel, the process of making any classification decision involves a chain of cognitive steps. Although the exact cognitive processes are different for everyone, the decision to categorize something ultimately comes down to comparing a handful of features or characteristics of different categories to find the one in which the object fits. For example, when asked how to distinguish between cats and dogs, some people may say that cats tend to have longer, fluffy tails whereas dogs have shorter, stiff tails. Psychologists believe that features as such, whether quantitative (e.g., tail length) or qualitative (e.g., presence of dense fur on the tail), underlines how the human mind categorizes various natural objects. (more…)

Who makes the longest sperm on Earth?

Posted on May 6, 2023 by Brooke Peckenpaugh

The drive to reproduce has led to many of the flashiest traits observed in nature. For instance, male deer use antlers to fight one another for access to female mates, while male peacocks display their extravagant tails to impress peahens. These are examples of sexually selected traits, or traits that increase reproductive success. Sexually selected traits evolve because they increase “fitness”. In other words, specific traits cause organisms to produce more offspring in the next generation–these offspring inherit the sexually selected traits from their parents, causing the traits to continue rising in frequency with each subsequent generation. While the traits themselves are often flashy, perhaps the most extreme example of a sexually selected trait comes from an inconspicuous source. Drosophila, a class of insects colloquially referred to as fruit flies, appear unassuming on the outside, but produce the largest sperm in the animal kingdom. For context, human sperm is roughly 60 micrometers long, which is close to 1000th of a centimeter (obviously, a very small fraction of a human’s body size). Drosophila melanogaster, the fly species famous for its frequent use in biological research, has roughly 2,000 micrometer long sperm—1/5 of a centimeter, and approximately half the fly’s body size. Finally, and most incredibly, the species Drosophila bifurca produces the longest sperm cells of any known organism at nearly 6 centimeters long—over 20 times the length of their body! (more…)