Science – CUNY Podcasts

Nobel Laureate and City College alum John O’Keefe traces historic findings on the hippocampus and human memory to his recent research on the brain’s cognitive map. O’Keefe, along with two other scientists, won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering an inner GPS in the brain that helps navigate surroundings. His engaging, and often humorous, discussion marked the inaugural Professor Sharon Cosloy-Edward Blank Family Distinguished Scientist Lecture at City College.

By the end of the century, Michio Kaku sees a world in which humans will have x-ray vision, and micromachines — smaller than the period at the end of this sentence — will perform surgery. “Your computerized toilet will be able to analyze proteins emitted from a colony of cancer cells from excretions,” says Kaku, co-founder of string field theory and professor of physics at City College. Kaku’s latest book, “Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100,” predicts a future in which nearly everything we touch, including our eyeglasses, will be connected to the Internet. “You’ll blink and you’ll go online — it’s coming faster than you think.”

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In a White House ceremony earlier this year, Anthony Carpi, professor of Environmental Toxicology at John Jay College, was recognized with the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring — the most prestigious honor in his field. “It was an absolute thrill to see the program that we had initiated become so effective and to be recognized on a national level,” says Carpi, who was nominated by the college and selected by the National Science Foundation for his work in creating PRISM. The undergraduate research initiative creates opportunities for forensic science students to engage in faculty-mentored research projects. It was also gratifying, Capri says, “to meet the president, who has been so involved with science and education.”

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Human population growth has long been linked to global warming, but according to Deborah Balk its impact may be overemphasized. “Future population growth does have a role,” says Balk, the associate director of the CUNY Institute for Demographic Research and professor at Baruch College School of Public Affairs. “But climate change is mainly driven by economic productivity.” In her lecture entitled “The Rising Tide and Climate Change in Our Increasingly Urban World,” part of the Serving Science Cafe Series, Balk explains that the fertility rate actually decreases as an area industrializes and continues to develop. “And it’s that development that will, in fact, keep emissions rising.”

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Is Evolution Over? William Bialek, the Graduate Center’s Visiting Presidential Professor of Physics, argues that evolution has pushed living systems to operate at the limits of what the laws of physics allow. “There are many places,” Bialek says, “where organisms have been pushed to, basically, an endpoint of evolution.” In a lecture at the Graduate Center, Bialek said that “as long as the world you live in doesn’t change, you can’t do better than to count every photon or every molecule, but when it comes to vital functions it seems that things have been pushed as far as they can go.” Bialek, the John Archibald Wheeler/Battelle Professor in Physics at Princeton, leads the Initiative for the Theoretical Sciences at CUNY Graduate Center.

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The ability to learn and mimic vocal sounds is rare in nature but found in certain birds and in dolphins says Diana Reiss, professor of psychology at Hunter College. “There’s been a lot of anecdotal reporting over the years that dolphins are highly mimetic,” says Reiss, an expert on dolphin cognition. City College associate professor of biology, Ofer Tchernichovski, who studies brains and vocal learning in birds, says birds, which are capable of vocal learning, even “dedicate” part of their brain to produce and learn bird songs. In a lecture, “Bird Culture and Dolphin Intelligence: How we learn from animal behavior,” part of the Serving Science Cafe Series, Reiss and Tchernichovski discuss their own research, and their collaborative study at the Baltimore National Aquarium to decode dolphin vocalization.

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Since 1980, when Phase 1 drug tests were banned in the United States, the pharmaceutical industry has relied on medical volunteers to participate in safety trials of new drugs. In his recently published book, “The Professional Guinea Pig: Big Pharma and the Risky World of Human Subjects,” Robert Abadie, an anthropologist and a visiting scholar in the health sciences program at the Graduate Center, examines this subculture of paid “volunteers.” “Most of these guys have 50 to 100 trials over the course of five to ten years,” says Abadie, who spent 18 months living among some of them in youth hostels and group houses in Philadelphia. “My worry is that 20 to 30 years from now these drugs, which are toxic, may interact with each other to create serious health problems.”

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Instead of debating why science and technology remain male-dominated fields, Julie Des Jardins chose to explore the personal and professional lives of female scientists to reveal how they were able to make enormous scientific contributions. "The reason she discovered radium was because she was wanted to find a cure for cancer -- for humanity," said Des Jardins, referring to physicist Marie Curie, the first person to win two Nobel Prizes. "It was her maternal sense that made her such a good scientist," said Des Jardins, author of "The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science," which views the lives of Curie, primatologist/anthropologist Jane Goodall and marine biologist Rachel Carson, among others. An assistant professor of history at Baruch College, Prof. Des Jardins took part in a lecture entitled, "The Madame Curie Complex," co-sponsored by The Feminist Press and the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, at the CUNY Graduate Center.

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