By Fernanda Sophia Morais Laroca On January 19, twelve Amherst College students (including myself!) hopped in a car to Boston for the American Physical Society Conferences for Undergraduate Women in Physics (APS CUWiP). CUWiPs are three-day regional conferences for undergraduate physics majors who identify as women or a gender minority, with the goal of helping them…
By Ryogo Katahira Klara Matuszewska ’26 won a Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Student Award for 2024. The award is to “recognize exemplary research by undergraduate and graduate students” and is selected by the American Astronomical Society (AAS). Matuszekska is a physics and astronomy double major from Warsaw, Poland and works in Professor Daniella Bardalez Gagliuffi’s research…
On Friday, April 5, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner Moungi Bawendi lectured at Amherst College. The lecture was held in Lipton lecture hall and was titled “Quantum magic and quantum dots: a synthesis unlocks a nano-world of opportunities.” Bawendi opened his talk by explaining how electrons have different properties at the quantum level. “So…
Photo by Maria Stenzel Article by Olivia Fann As prospective math majors may have noticed, a certain department was notably absent from 2024 SURF opportunities. This year’s lineup of nine disciplines and 36 total labs participating in Amherst’s Summer Science Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURF) did not include any members of the math faculty, raising some…
By Bibi Hanselman a2 + b2 = c2. Whether it’s a distant high school memory or it has found its way into your physics homework somehow, there’s no denying that the Pythagorean theorem — timeless and profound, seared into all our memories — is practically a cultural touchstone in addition to a mathematical one. On…
By Nora Lowe You’re wiping rainwater from your brow. The damp darkness is only interrupted by the occasional dull, red light, moving to and fro. No, this spooky scene isn’t an alien abduction, but it is still a big night. In fact, it is the Big Night, when spotted salamanders migrate to reproduce, and Amherst…
Cover image courtesy of ESA: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2007/07/The_Bullet_Cluster2 Article by Olivia Fann and Fernanda Sophia Morais Laroca On October 17, 2023, the bottom floor of the Science Center was filled with professors and students enjoying refreshments and conversation. It was time for the weekly Physics Colloquium, a public talk given by a visiting scholar on a topic…
By Ryogo Katahira On October 6, a man in his thirties wearing a hoodie and jeans entered a mechanics course classroom in the Science Center. He glanced at the blackboard with its simple energy diagrams while students and professors filed in. His demeanor was entirely casual, but he was the subject of the highly anticipated…
Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a prime topic for research due to its vast impact on memory and cognitive decline. In recent years, there has been a surge of information regarding AD research, including reports of fraud from highly cited studies and a new potential treatment. The following article will break down these aspects and offer…
Cover image: Berghia stephanieae. Point of Fort Jeudy, Grenada. 14 feet deep, 24 August 1986. Photo by Hans Bertsch. Reprinted with permission from The Slug Site. Article by Nora Lowe This year’s finals had me feeling especially sluggish, so when I heard that there would be a Biology Seminar on sea slug brains, I thought,…