Verge Of Discovery

Let's recap season one with the top 10 episodes of the very first season of Verge of Discovery Podcast.

Bob De Schutter is a Belgian video game designer and researcher.  He is best known for his work on the design of video games for players in middle through late adulthood.  We discuss video games designed for older adults and why it might be the next frontier for game development.

Dr. Stephen Cain is a research investigator in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. His research interests include: human/bicycle dynamics; the development and use of novel experimental methods and instrumentation to quantify changes in biomechanics that accompany learning, adaptation, or fatigue; human gait; human balance; sports biomechanics; and MEMS inertial sensor applications. He shares his passion for cycling with us and enlightens us in his field of biomechanics and how it relates to riding and balancing a bicycle.

Dr. Maverakis is an award-winning physician-scientist at the University of California, Davis.  He introduces his field of glycoimmunology and describes how this field is wide open to new discoveries.  Dr. Maverakis goes in further detail regarding characterization of immune glycome and glycan signature considerations in future treatments.  He concludes our interview by sharing some of his advice and resources.

Dr. Sarkar is Professor of Integrative Biology and of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin where he has taught since 1998. His laboratory focuses on spatial ecological planning and neglected tropical diseases including Chagas, Dengue, and Zika.  Dr. Sarkar discusses his work on the modification of transmission models for dengue to perform risk analyses for the emerging threat of Zika.  He also discusses Zika virus with its implications and transmission patterns in added detail.

Dr. Christopher Clack is a mathematician and research scientist for the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at Colorado University at Boulder.  He joins us to talk about his latest work of building an energy, well more specifically electric, simulator. Dr. Clack discusses how it allows us to seek out the most cost effective approach to rebuild the future energy system in a methodical calculated way. It is a model, so you can investigate almost infinite possibilities and display them for decision makers.

Dr. Nicolas Rougier is a full-time research scientist at the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control.  During the past decades he’s been working extensively on visual attention in order to understand how we visually explore a scene.  Dr. Rougier discusses his work and  visual attention and computation neuroscience in particular.  He also dives deeper into how seeing is mostly an illusion and that we do not process all visual information that passed through our eyes and we're making deliberate (consciously or not) choices on what we concentrate.

Dr. Jeff Tollaksen joins us to discuss his groups’ latest discovery of the quantum violation of the pigeonhole principle.  Dr. Tollaksen expands on how the field of physics has transformed from classical physics to quantum physics over the years.  He explains how the culture has shifted from a deterministic view to a more capricious view with the acceptance of the quantum theory.  We then discuss the quantum violation of the pigenhole principle and it's implications in more detail.

Dr. Tollaksen details the discovery of the quantum pigenhole principle and describes the physics leading up to this discovery.  Part one of a two part series.

Professor Haas received the PhD degree from the University of Edinburgh in 2001. He currently holds the Chair of Mobile Communications at the University of Edinburgh, and is co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of pureLiFi Ltd as well as the Director of the LiFi Research and Development Center at the University of Edinburgh. He first introduced and coined LiFi. LiFi was listed among the 50 best inventions in TIME Magazine 2011.

Dr. Leon Vanstone is an aerodynamic engineer and a real life rocket scientist.  Travelling really fast through the atmosphere generates a lot of heat due to friction from the air. Leon’s work looks at how to stop things that do this from melting. It’s pretty hard to travel fast enough to melt something unless you drop the object from space and so this problem usually only applies to rockets and re-entry vehicles.  Leon discusses some of these challenges and tells us a bit more about orbital travel.

Dr. Jungwoo Ryoo is the interim head of the division of business, engineering, and information sciences and technology (BEIST) and an associate professor of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) at the Pennsylvania State University-Altoona.  He discusses his field of expertise in big data, cloud computing and machine learning.  Dr. Ryoo dives deeper into the state of big data field and how we need more and more qualified interdisciplinary experts in the field to advance this industry into the future.

Dr. Jyutika Mehta is an associate professor at Texas Woman’s University and directs Neurophysiology lab in the department of Communication Science & Disorders.  Her primary research interests are to study speech and language representation in normal and disordered brains.

Monica Rosenberg is a graduate student in the Department of Psychology at Yale University.  Monica discusses how applying cognitive neuroscience research can help identify and treat disorders like ADHD.  She expands on how ability to sustain attention varies widely across individuals and researchers lack a standardized way to measure it. Monica dives deeper into her groups recent work introducing a new fMRI measure of sustained attention based on patterns of functional connectivity, or correlated activity across the brain.

Dr. Nicole Starosielski is the author of "The Undersea Network," a book on the undersea cable systems that carry almost all transoceanic internet traffic today.  She discusses the history of the network and how it was started and how it developed into what it is today.  Dr. Starosielski discusses the technology behind the network and why it is being used today.  She also dives deeper into other factors such as security, longevity and reliability of the network and its future.

Dr. Brian McKay is an associate professor at the Department of Ophthalmology and Vision Science at the University of Arizona.  Dr. McKay joins the show to discuss age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and its potential causes.  He dives deeper into the relationship between certain pigments and persons susceptibility to AMD or glaucoma and how they are related.  Dr. McKay also shares with us his most recent results in which Alzheimer’s drug can potentially help us treat and even prevent future cases of AMD.

Dr. Sidney Perkowitz is Emeritus professor of physics at Emory University.  He is a scientist and a writer.  Dr. Perkowitz discusses some of his interests in science and technology and dives deeper in his most recent articles including predictive policing, the internet of things and space travel.

Dr. Daniele Struppa introduces his work as a mathematician working primarily in the area of Fourier Analysis and it’s applications.  He has recently become interested in some aspects of social media and how he can use mathematics to judge the “impact” of certain content in various networks and in scientific publications in particular.  He expands on his findings and tell us a bit more about the best ways to diffuse knowledge and ideas through social media.

What will be the greatest scientific discovery in the next ten years? Is extending the human life the next big discovery?

Dr. Christopher Bader is one of the principal investigators of the Chapman University Survey of American Fears.  Dr. Bader starts our interview by discussing satanic panic back in the 80s/90s and how it peaked his interest in the overall study of fear.  He then introduces his group’s work with the Chapman University Survey of American Fears.  Dr. Bader dives deeper into finding of the study and how it affects our lives.  Stay tuned for top 10 fears of 2015.