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.