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…
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…
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…
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,…
By Nora Lowe On September 8, the Science Center was cleared of furniture and filled instead with student researchers. This year’s cohort of Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) participants presented more than 80 posters as the culmination of their multiweek experience of rigorous scientific inquiry across nine departments, as well as in collaboration with parties…
Finishing Wednesday on Netflix felt kind of like losing a friend. After watching an episode per day for eight days, I had spent almost eight hours with the titular character, getting to know her macabre sense of humor. How is it possible that I can feel so close to someone that I’ve never even met,…
Science and art, commonly considered distant disciplines, actually go hand in hand. In fact, they complement each other and propel one another forward. Science illustrators, therefore, play a very valuable role in bridging the gap between these subject areas. A recent New York Times article explains an environmental science-related example of this phenomenon: “Pairing illustrations…